Computer vision offers a scalable, non-contact means of estimating livestock traits, but correlated images and video frames make reliable evaluation difficult. Image-random splitting can place views of the same animal in both training and test sets, while deployment further requires transfer to animals captured in future years. We introduce BoviShift, a corpus reconstructed from six consecutive annual cohorts of an operational cattle marketplace collected from 2021 to 2026. It contains 2{,}657 cattle, 10{,}610 still images, and 2{,}566 walk-around videos across nine recorded breed categories. We evaluate three splitting strategies through four configurations: image-random and pooled cattle-disjoint splits over the same development cohorts, followed by separate future-2025 and locked future-2026 evaluations. Using a fixed ResNet-50 multi-task baseline, we assess weight, age, height, breed, and coat color. Differences between image-random and cattle-disjoint splitting are task-dependent rather than a universal leakage penalty. Future-cohort behavior is also attribute- and cohort-specific: breed declines relative to pooled evaluation; mean weight and age performance fails to beat constant baselines in 2025; height remains above baseline; and color transfers well to 2025 but degrades in 2026. Multi-task training improves all five point estimates in a single-seed ablation, still-view aggregation helps selectively, and zero-shot video-frame aggregation exposes a still-to-video domain gap. To our knowledge, BoviShift is the longest-spanning cattle-vision resource combining consecutive annual cohorts with physical and visual attributes.
IoT-Edge-Cloud infrastructures are increasingly heterogeneous, and experimenting across the continuum is difficult and risks disrupting live systems. Network Digital Twins (NDT) are a pragmatic answer, yet practitioners lack a structured account of three things: how to build an NDT from open tools, how to model wireless impairments, and how to understand whether the twin is faithful to the physical network, or not. This tutorial introduces NDT through the IRTF reference model and walks through a lightweight open-source blueprint built on Containerlab, Open vSwitch, \textit{Open Network Operating System (ONOS)}, and Prometheus/Grafana. It then explains how to define wireless impairment profiles (static, model-based, trace-driven, AI-generated, and live), and what each approach can and cannot reproduce. Finally, it presents a workflow to validate the twin against the physical network. A proof-of-concept Edge case study illustrates the procedure, including the pitfalls encountered and the lessons learned. Directions for future research are outlined.
Collegiate cross country programs set race schedules without large comparable datasets across courses and conditions. Using the comprehensive-era National Running Club Database (NRCD; 23,360 results; 7,056 athletes; 2023-2025), where course and weather coverage exceed 99%, we ask what public results can identify about seasonal improvement, measurement, and racing opportunity. Hierarchical models of Standardized times recover pooled within-season improvement of about -5.7 s/week for men and -5.2 for women, but reading those slopes as fitness requires residual meet difficulty not to track the calendar: crossed meet effects can erase the week slope, while repeating-venue effects recover a clearer men's estimate under a weaker assumption. After the opener, race-1-only forecasts of who will improve are near noise (held-out R^2 ~ 0). Weather standardization remains a useful convention (Converted Only overstates first-to-last gains by about 15-21 s relative to Standardized), and prospectively trained venue factors modestly help where prior course data exist. Successful programs race more and place higher at nationals, but that may not be why they win: the schedule-placement link is between programs and is entangled with roster size, not evidence that changing one team's race count raises nationals place.
Saketh Vishnubhatla, Pingchuan Ma, Shu Wan, Alimohammad Beigi, Andre Harrison, Adrienne Raglin, Huan Liu
AI 速读 基于摘要
该研究探讨高维反事实推断中是否必须进行潜变量反演,并评估一种从图像编辑领域改造而来的无需求逆方法。
cs.LG
查看原文摘要
Counterfactual inference is the task of answering hypothetical "what-if" queries about a unit, given an observational dataset, modeling assumptions, and a causal graph. This enables a modeler to reason about hypothetical scenarios that cannot otherwise be answered without assumptions or a causal graph. The simpler case involves a causal graph with scalar 1-D variables that denote different attributes in the data-generation process. While the literature is clear in the 1-D case, extending this to settings with high-dimensional nodes (e.g., images) remains challenging. Conventionally, in the literature, methods recover the latent state from the factual image (inversion), generate counterfactual attributes from the graph, and render the counterfactual image from the latent state using the updated attributes. In our work, we investigate the necessity of the inversion step in computing high-dimensional counterfactuals. We first discuss moving from the scalar 1-D case to the higher-dimensional case. Secondly, we discuss the relevance of the inversion step and evaluate an inversion-free counterpart repurposed from the image-editing literature. Finally, on image datasets such as CelebA and ADNI, we benchmark our approach using two measures: namely, effectiveness and identity preservation. While effectiveness is a measure of how faithfully the counterfactual attribute is rendered, identity preservation measures whether the same unit (image) is being rendered, both of which are crucial for high-dimensional counterfactual inference. We present the tradeoffs of using inversion-based and inversion-free approaches in our work.
Recent work on robot manipulation has focused on specialist policies trained on demonstrations. We show that generalist AI models can control manipulators more reliably than specialist policies such as vision-language-action models (VLAs) and world-action models (WAMs). We systematically analyze agentic manipulation policies (AMPs), in which a generalist AI model commands the manipulator directly, adapting its actions as the task unfolds. We present AMP1, a reference harness that runs unchanged across single-arm, bimanual, and mobile manipulation. AMP1 achieves state-of-the-art results on the RoboLab-120 and CaP-Gym benchmarks, with no demonstrations or task-specific training. On RoboLab-120, AMP1 reaches an 85.6\% success rate zero-shot, compared to 49.2\% and 42.9\% for leading VLA and WAM policies. The agent succeeds zero-shot in 104 of 108 real-world trials spanning twelve tasks and three robot instances, reducing failure rates by 20x and 15x relative to strong VLA and WAM baselines. The basic harness supplies no grasping, pushing, or placing skills; the agent develops its own strategies, such as searching for hidden objects, using objects as tools, and calibrating its cameras. With the addition of a persistent memory store, the agent can also learn from experience: an augmented harness with a memory representation that is carried across episodes lowers the failure rate on RoboDojo bimanual manipulation tasks by 4.6x relative to zero-shot deployment. Our analysis suggests that AMPs are substantially more general and robust than specialist manipulation policies, providing a promising foundation for robot manipulation.
Common methods for monitoring features in large language models (LLMs) such as linear probes and sparse autoencoders (SAEs) assume that features maintain a consistent representation across contexts. LLMs, however, can flexibly adopt different perspectives or "personas" that suggest different underlying systems of conceptual relations. In this paper, we examine whether prompting an LLM to adopt a persona alters the representational geometry of the model's latent space. We extract representations of over 9,000 common words and 33 semantic axes from models adopting liberal and conservative political personas and compare these against two neutral baselines. We find that persona conditioning systematically alters both the projections of words onto semantic axes and the alignments among the axes themselves in directions consistent with the specified ideology. We then test the implications of this reorganization for two safety-relevant features: truthfulness and morality. Linear probes, SAE-based classifiers, and classifiers built from manually selected word representations, all trained without a persona, produce divergent results when applied to models conditioned on political personas, producing politically slanted ratings of truth and morality on controversial statements. These findings suggest that internal representations, as they are conventionally extracted, can exhibit different geometric relations when the model adopts personas, potentially undermining monitoring efforts.
We present PhysInsert, a framework for physically plausible reference-based object insertion that jointly adapts objects and their surrounding scenes. Existing methods often rely on masked inputs, generation-based pairs, or training pairs with limited viewpoint variation, leaving pose and illumination adaptation and bidirectional object-scene interactions insufficiently constrained. We construct the Insert World dataset with strictly aligned Blender-rendered counterfactual pairs and object references across viewpoints and lighting conditions. Building on these data, Geometry-Guided Adaptation couples a VGGT geometry stream with image and text streams under target-scene feature supervision to guide spatially consistent insertion. Complementary 2D Object-Scene Spatial Supervision jointly supervises object occupancy and environmental changes while grounding spatial instructions in object regions through image-text attention. We introduce PhysInsert-Bench with dedicated cross-environment and cross-view cases requiring illumination and pose adaptation beyond appearance copying. Experiments on PhysInsert-Bench and DreamBooth demonstrate improved image fidelity; a user study further shows more accurate placement and improved lighting integration, perspective, and pose plausibility.
The last year has seen a shift in AI-assisted mathematics, with frontier language models producing proofs of and counterexamples to long-standing open conjectures. However, studying only the current set of major breakthroughs provides an incomplete picture of LLM capabilities and the computational resources needed to achieve reported results. To address this, we introduce a new dataset, OpenConjecture, which collects conjectures from mathematics papers published on the arXiv since February 2026. We use these conjectures as a source of open mathematical problems, and apply frontier GPT models to a random sample of 200 of these conjectures over three passes using a reproducible protocol without problem-specific mathematical guidance. Rather than attempt expert verification of these candidate solutions, we analyze the types of problems for which LLMs produce solutions and the characteristics of these solutions. The models we test produce candidate solutions for roughly 60% of the conjectures, with counterexamples about 1.3 times more common than proofs. We estimate solution novelty, assess how solutions cite and relate to existing literature, and analyze whether the proposed resolution relies on either an error in or underspecification of the conjecture. We find that models sometimes propose resolutions that are outside the authors' intent (e.g., proposing the trivial group as a counterexample) and that a number of proofs follow closely from existing results, but that some resolutions exhibit at least moderate novelty. Our findings underscore the need for evaluations that go beyond correctness to assess fidelity to the intended statement, attribution, and the nature of the mathematical contribution.
The attention mechanism in Transformers is an important primitive for accurate and scalable sequence modeling. Its quadratic-compute and linear-memory complexity however remain significant bottlenecks. Linear attention and state-space models enable linear-time, constant-memory sequence modeling and can moreover be trained efficiently through matmul-rich parallelization across sequence length. However, at their core these models are still RNNs, and thus their use of a fixed-size hidden state to model the context is a fundamental limitation. This paper develops log-linear attention, an attention mechanism that balances linear attention's efficiency and the expressiveness of softmax attention. Log-linear attention replaces the fixed-size hidden state with a logarithmically growing set of hidden states. We show that with a particular growth function, log-linear attention admits a similarly matmul-rich parallel form whose compute cost is log-linear in sequence length. Log-linear attention is a general framework and can be applied on top of existing linear attention variants. As case studies, we instantiate log-linear variants of two recent architectures -- Mamba-2 and Gated DeltaNet -- and find they perform well compared to their linear-time variants.