SSL has been adopted for encrypted traffic classification to learn representations from unlabeled traces and reduce reliance on manual feature engineering. However, recent studies show that data leakage can inflate reported performance and that pretrained models can underperform shallow classifiers once leakage is controlled. These findings raise questions about what information SSL can learn from encrypted traffic and how different pretraining mechanisms exploit this information. In this paper, we systematically investigate these questions by examining the sources of learnable information, the effectiveness of contextual pretraining, alternative self-supervision mechanisms, and the limits of representation learning. We first find that visible protocol fields retain contextual dependencies that are strongest between adjacent bytes, while payload interventions establish the classification value of retained plaintext structure. Guided by these insights, we investigate byte-level contextual learning through ByteBERT and TrafficDCNet, showing that aligning prediction granularity with local dependencies produces more discriminative representations. We further examine cross-view contrastive learning through AlignTraffic and find that complementary supervision improves representation quality beyond contextual prediction alone. Across four public classification tasks, AlignTraffic outperforms shallow learning by 5.97% to 30.70%, with additional evaluations on industrial traffic demonstrating its effectiveness in broader settings. Finally, evaluations on Tor traffic and individual packets reveal limitations when application information is concealed or unevenly distributed. These findings provide a systematic understanding of how observable information and self-supervision mechanisms shape the effectiveness and scope of representation learning for encrypted traffic.
This paper proposes a novel solution concept, called the w-value, for cooperative pollution-control games. The w-value is axiomatically founded on three principles: Pareto Optimality (PO), Market Equilibrium (ME), and Fiscal Balance (FB), which together yield an efficient and implementable welfare distribution. We establish its existence and uniqueness under standard concavity and convexity assumptions, and provide a market mechanism that implements it through price constraints and an initial permit allocation. A key theoretical advantage is its strong stability: the w-value belongs to the gamma-core, which makes it resistant to coalitional deviations. Moreover, the w-value can be obtained through a simple step-by-step procedure, which facilitates its application to complex real-world problems. A numerical illustration demonstrates the step-by-step calculation process and confirms the gamma-core membership numerically. Finally, we apply the concept to international climate negotiations, showing how it provides a theoretical rationale for the shift from rigid mandatory emission reduction systems toward the flexible structure of Nationally Determined Contributions.
Jacob Ede Levine, Mario Hidalgo-Soria, Chen Yun Wen, Yun Lyna Luo, Sai Chandra Kosaraju
Predicting the long-time diffusion of membrane proteins is challenging because molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are computationally expensive, while experimental single-particle tracking is often limited by finite observation times. Here, we introduce a neural stochastic (NS) model for forecasting the collective diffusion of membrane proteins from coarse-grained MD trajectories. The model combines a transformer-based representation of protein configurations, recurrent networks operating at multiple temporal scales, and a stochastic latent process with learned memory. A cross-attention decoder then generates correlated protein displacements while accounting for the instantaneous system geometry and periodic boundary conditions. We evaluate the model in two membrane systems: seven interacting PIEZO channels and a mixed system containing seven PIEZO and ten TREK channels. For the seven PIEZO system, the NS model reproduces the anomalous diffusion exponent measured in MD simulations $α\sim 1$, substantially improving on a previously developed variational autoregressive model that exhibits superdiffusive behavior. The model also generates trajectories extending to 40,000 frames and captures the distinct diffusion characteristics of PIEZO and TREK populations in the mixed system. Comparisons of time-averaged mean-square displacements, Van Hove displacement distributions, and non-Gaussian parameters show that the model preserves key statistical features of the simulated dynamics. These results establish neural stochastic modeling as a promising approach for generating long trajectories of multi-protein membrane diffusion and extending the statistical analysis of molecular dynamics simulations.
Diffusion language models predict many masked positions at each denoising step, but their efficiency and output quality depend on which predictions enter the evolving context. Confidence is informative but incomplete for this decision: at matched confidence, proposals with different identity and support histories exhibit different one-step revision rates. We propose Trajectory-Aware Commit Gating (TACG), a training-free decoder that separates the current token proposal from the decision to commit it. TACG scores temporal support for the current proposal by contrasting its logits with an exponential moving average of earlier logits, requires the proposal identity to persist through a History Gate, and promotes a capped number of additional positions per step. The gate decides which positions to commit and when; every written token remains the contemporaneous base proposal. On complete four-task LLaDA evaluations under the stated single-seed protocol, measured task-specific operating points reach 51.02\% mean accuracy with 67.82 mean model evaluations, compared with 48.00\% and 76.59 for Native Confidence. Under a matched per-event commit-count replay, history-guided selection exceeds confidence ranking by 8.3 accuracy points at identical per-sample NFE. History-reference interventions alter commitment timing while preserving the base-proposal write rule. Experiments on Dream and LLaDA2-Mini characterize quality--cost behavior across backbones and generation lengths. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Clarence-CV/TACG-DLLM.
Navigation world models predict future observations conditioned on navigation actions to support planning, but their generalization across real-world environments remains constrained by the limited coverage of action-labeled data. Action-free navigation videos provide diverse visual experience, yet lack the recorded actions required for action-conditioned training. We introduce OpenNWM, a generalist navigation world model with latent action pretraining. It learns universal latent actions from large-scale action-free videos through visual prediction pretraining, and further aligns them with physical motions via action-conditioned post-training. To support video pretraining, we curate NavAnywhere, a large-scale action-free navigation video dataset comprising 17.5 million visual observations from 15 heterogeneous sources. It captures navigation by ground robots, humans, and drones, with diverse viewpoints and motion patterns across five broad scene types: residential areas, public and commercial spaces, urban settings, parks, and natural landscapes. Experiments demonstrate improved visual prediction on in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks, together with improved navigation performance. These results show that latent-action pretraining enables diverse, action-free videos to improve dynamics learning and generalization for open-world navigation.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies translate language and visual inputs into robot actions, where their hidden representations directly shape closed-loop behavior. However, mechanistic interpretability tools from language and vision-language models do not transfer cleanly to VLAs: outputs are robot actions rather than human-readable tokens, and validating internal changes requires expensive closed-loop rollouts. We propose an event-grounded interpretability pipeline that anchors SAE feature analysis to behavioral events rather than text contexts. We extract keyframes from end-effector trajectories and cluster them within each task using visual, robot-state, and temporal cues. The resulting events guide SAE feature ranking, with optional VLM annotations providing descriptions of the events. To our knowledge, our pipeline is among the first to ground SAE-based VLA analysis in closed-loop behavioral events. Across two simulation architectures and a real-robot study, event-grounded ranking yields the strongest causal effects on OpenVLA and transfers to the continuous action chunks of $π_{0.5}$. SAE is a sparse but imperfect intervention basis: usability varies with architecture and intervention site, and aggressive intervention reveals safety and interpretability limits. Overall, event-grounded SAE analysis emerges as a practical starting point for behavior-anchored VLA interpretability, motivating future work on SAE analysis beyond end-effector motion, finer-grained closed-loop evaluation, and safe interventions for high-stakes VLA deployments.
Short-horizon model predictive control (MPC) is fast but myopic. ZipMPC compensates by learning a context-dependent correction of the short-horizon cost that imitates a long-horizon expert. We observe that the optimal correction is often multimodal: when a slower opponent can be passed on either side, good corrections of opposite sign coexist, and the expert's choice between them hinges on tiny cost differences. Deterministic regression then averages modes or inherits inconsistent expert tie-breaking. We propose ZipDrift, which trains a one-step drifting generator over MPC cost corrections, tilted toward low closed-loop cost and learned only from cost evaluations of candidate corrections, without differentiating through the optimiser. A few generated candidates are ranked by a learned critic, and the model-based MPC then enforces dynamics and constraints. In a kinematic overtaking benchmark derived from ZipMPC, more than half of the contexts are bimodal and the manual short-horizon MPC crashes in 28% of them. With an eight-dimensional stagewise correction, evaluated on 1000 fresh contexts and five training seeds, ZipDrift with eight candidates crashes in 0.74% of episodes, compared with 3.4% for an idealised ZipMPC-style regressor and 2.1% for critic-ranked random candidates with the same budget. A mixture density network (MDN) with the same selection is equally good (0.76%). The benefit of drifting lies in sample quality: in a pre-specified test on further unseen contexts, a single drifting sample crashes in 8.7% of episodes against 13.2% for the MDN, and ZipDrift needs four candidates instead of eight to fall below 1%. With many candidates, all methods degrade as selection exploits errors of the critic.
RR Flanagan, E Kasha, PW Talbot, AS Epiny, MR Deinert
Accurate forecasting of renewable generation requires not only point predictions but also reliable estimates of the uncertainty attached to them, particularly at extended horizons. Machine learning models are increasingly used to predict solar output, but they typically report a single value and capture the associated uncertainty poorly. The standard remedy is to train a model to predict the parameters of an assumed probability distribution directly. Here we develop an alternative two-stage method, motivated by synthetic solar signal generation, in which the forecast error is modeled separately from the expected irradiance. A first long short-term memory (LSTM) network predicts the expected global horizontal irradiance, and a second network models the distribution of the forecast error, which is added back to the mean to give both the forecast and its uncertainty. Using historical weather data from the National Solar Radiation Database and a probability integral transform evaluation, we show that explicitly modeling the error brings the predicted standard deviation markedly closer to the historical value, reducing the deviation between the two by 34.6 percent for a standalone LSTM and by 56.5 percent when the LSTM is coupled to Gaussian process regression, the most reliable of the configurations tested. Because the method models the total forecast error directly, it captures the full predictive uncertainty that matters for decisions, rather than only the model contribution that dropout-based approaches estimate.
Yanzhe Chen, Qifang Zhao, Xiaoxiao Xu, Fanghui Liu
Muon is increasingly used for language-model pretraining, yet its large-step dynamics are not captured by the classical edge-of-stability (EoS) picture of gradient descent (GD). In GD, loss neutrality, equal-magnitude update reversal, and marginal stability meet at a single learning-rate-dependent edge. We show that Muon breaks this coupling. For stochastic no-momentum Muon, we derive a coherence-corrected conditional loss-neutral boundary $2ρ_b/η$, while temporal alignment follows a separate geometry. Controlled experiments show that loss balance and temporal alignment respond differently to learning rate and batch size. Across our language model experiments, the 130M Llama-like LLM runs exhibit loss-boundary tracking with weak negative alignment, whereas the studied 1B LLM configuration shows stronger partial cancellation; in both settings, directions remain far from coherent reversal while training continues to improve. These results support a split EoS picture for Muon: a stochastic loss-neutral edge survives, but it is not accompanied by a universal temporal-direction signature. The source code for reproducing the experiments can be found in https://github.com/cyzebra/Muon-Sublates-the-Edge-of-Stability-in-LLM-Pretraining
Projector-based adversarial attack aims to physically manipulate real-world scenes by projecting adversarial patterns, thereby causing deep image classifiers to produce incorrect predictions. However, existing stealthy projector-based adversarial attack methods model the project-and-capture process in a single and static view, limiting their view-invariant capability and practical applicability in dynamic environments. In this paper, we introduce View-Invariant Projector-Based Adversarial Attack (VIPA), a novel method designed to overcome these limitations by achieving both view-invariant and classifier-agnostic adversarial attacks in the physical world. We first leverage a view-invariant projector-camera system simulation method to model the physical interactions between projected patterns and real-world surfaces. To ensure robustness and stealthiness of the attack across different views, VIPA optimizes adversarial projections by aggregating simulated attack losses from multiple views. This joint optimization across diverse views helps maintain robustness regardless of the viewpoints. Finally, the optimized patterns are physically projected into real-world scenes, where they successfully fool various classifiers from different viewpoints, thereby enabling robust and practical view-invariant adversarial attacks. Our experiments in both targeted and untargeted attacks demonstrate that VIPA consistently achieves higher attack success rates than existing methods, while also enhancing stealthiness and ensuring minimal perceptual degradation across all tested views.
The growing deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) has raised concerns about their misuse in generating harmful or deceptive content. To address this issue, watermarking methods have been proposed to embed identifiable multi-bit messages into generated text for misuse tracing. However, existing methods often suffer from a fundamental trade-off between text quality and decoding accuracy. In particular, they have to restrict the size of the preferred token set (i.e., green list) during encoding to maintain a detectable watermark signal for decoding, which inevitably degrades generation quality. To improve this trade-off, we propose a novel message encoding paradigm called \textit{majority bit-aware encoding}, which relaxes the watermark signal strength from the green list size. This strategy allows for a strong watermark signal to be preserved in generated texts even when using a large green list. We introduce two instantiations of this paradigm: MajorMark and MajorMark$^{+}$, where the latter is specifically optimized for long messages. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate that our methods achieve higher decoding accuracy and superior text quality compared to prior baselines. The code is at https://github.com/JiiahaoXU/MajorMark.
Shengbo Wang, Mingwei Liu, Yuwen Chen, Yanlin Wang
Memory-safety concerns make Rust an attractive target for modernizing legacy C/C++ systems, yet project-level C++ migration must balance semantic fidelity with Rust-oriented reconstruction. Source-structure-preserving migration can track low-level behavior, but it can also carry source-language organization, unsafe idioms, and project assumptions into Rust. Direct agent-based translation gives the model more freedom to construct a Rust project, but semantic coverage depends on the model identifying the source behaviors that must be preserved. This problem is especially acute for C++, where source behaviors are often hidden in object models, destructor-driven lifetime protocols, and other hard-to-localize C++ semantics. This paper presents Req2Rust, the first project-level LLM-based C++-to-Rust migration harness. Req2Rust first derives an evidence-grounded Migration Requirements Specification (MRS) that records the behaviors and constraints that must be preserved. It then synthesizes a Rust Design Specification (RDS) and realizes it as an initial Rust project. Because real projects contain implementation details and idioms that only become visible during build and validation, Req2Rust treats the initial Rust project as an executable refinement state. Compiler, semantic, and unsafe-reduction validators produce validation reports for improving buildability, behavioral alignment, and unsafe usage. We evaluate Req2Rust on general C++ projects and modules from the large-scale Openharmony codebase against a ClaudeCode baseline. Req2Rust produces buildable Rust crates in both settings and improves test pass rate from 69.5% to 91.9% on general projects and from 45.4% to 87.9% on Openharmony modules.
Running evaluations of contact-rich robotic manipulation at statistical scale has largely been possible only at well-resourced labs, highlighting the need for affordable and efficient options for broader audiences. We present a reproducible evaluation harness wrapper based on a previous study at 200-rollout scale on serverless commodity GPUs, at a cost of approximately $3.50 USD and 38 minutes of wall-clock per replication (4.4 L4-GPU-hours across eight parallel shards). Using the harness, we report a partially controlled negative result on action chunking with sparse data: three independently trained chunked checkpoints produce zero genuine successes across 780 rollouts, while three single-step checkpoints range from 2.6% to 11.8% success rate. A per-step-replanning control partially isolates chunk prediction, rather than open-loop chunk execution as the mechanism, with the failure localized to the training formulation and multi-step prediction. This work further democratizes physics-based policy development and evaluation through our reusable harness.
Tong Nie, Yihong Tang, Junlin He, Yuewen Mei, Jie Sun, Lijun Sun, Wei Ma, Jian Sun
Deploying autonomous driving systems requires robustness against long-tail scenarios that are rare but safety-critical. While adversarial training offers a promising solution, existing methods typically decouple scenario generation from policy optimization and rely on heuristic surrogates. This leads to objective misalignment and fails to capture the shifting failure modes of evolving policies. This paper presents ADV-0, a closed-loop min-max optimization framework that treats the interaction between driving policy (defender) and adversarial agent (attacker) as a zero-sum Markov game. By aligning the attacker's utility directly with the defender's objective, we reveal the optimal adversary distribution. To make this tractable, we cast dynamic adversary evolution as iterative preference learning, efficiently approximating this optimum and offering an algorithm-agnostic solution to the game. Theoretically, ADV-0 converges to a Nash Equilibrium and maximizes a certified lower bound on real-world performance. Experiments indicate that it effectively exposes diverse safety-critical failures and greatly enhances the generalizability of both learned policies and motion planners against unseen long-tail risks.
Zhoutong Ye, Chengwen Zhang, Zixuan Wang, Xufeng Jian, Zhe He, Qingyang Wan, Xutong Wang, Jiaqi Liu 等 12 位作者
We present IMUDINO, the first foundation model (FM) for inertial sensing to achieve competitive performance across diverse sensing tasks including human activity recognition (HAR), health, motion capture, and odometry. Prior inertial FMs often focus on one subfield of inertial sensing and sometimes underperform state-of-the-art supervised methods (e.g., in HAR), making their scope considerably narrower than FMs for vision and natural language. Moreover, they often require fixed input length and sampling rate, and generalize poorly to unseen sensor locations. To build a general-purpose foundation model for inertial sensing, we adapt the DINO self-supervised learning (SSL) paradigm to inertial data through a set of semantics-preserving motion transformations that simulate variations in motion pattern and sensor setup. For model architecture, we use a plain transformer encoder with frequency-aware positional encoding that natively supports varying input length and sampling rate. This simple setup proved remarkably effective for learning global and dense features generalizable across users, sensor setups, tasks, and, in the case of robot odometry, embodiments. We hope IMUDINO can serve as a backbone for inertial sensing and kickstart the development of general-purpose inertial FMs.
Tong Nie, Yuewen Mei, Junlin He, Yihong Tang, Jian Sun, Wei Ma
Robust motion planning in dense traffic requires autonomous vehicles to interact in rare and safety-critical scenarios that are underrepresented in naturalistic driving data. Although adversarial training offers a feasible solution, existing methods often rely on external scenario generators, heuristic perturbations, or simulator-heavy rollouts, which makes them difficult to integrate with modern autoregressive planners. Here, we cast adversarially robust planner learning as a constrained min-max game and propose Adversarial World Modeling (AWM), a theoretically grounded multi-agent self-play fine-tuning framework. Since solving the exact game is intractable, AWM introduces a principled decoupled solver. In the inner minimization, the planner's predictive world model is converted into a role-conditioned adversary that learns sparse, scene-adaptive attack coalitions via counterfactual credit assignment. In the outer maximization, the ego planner optimizes a regret-aware robust best response against the frozen AWM, utilizing tail-risk weighting and reference-anchored trust regions to improve hard-case recovery while preserving nominal driving behavior. Experiments on the nuPlan and InterPlan benchmarks demonstrate that our method generates transferable adversarial interactions and yields a robust planner that achieves competitive closed-loop performance in both nominal and highly interactive long-tail scenarios. Theoretical analysis justifies the decoupled solver and the main optimization components.
Stochastic simulators need suitable parameter values to reproduce observed behaviour in complex systems. Searching for these values through repeated simulations makes frequent recalibration computationally expensive. We develop an amortized optimizer that uses simulations collected in advance to learn how to choose parameters that make simulated outcomes agree with observations. Once fitted, it maps new observations to feasible parameters without further simulator calls. The method retains alternative parameter settings that can explain similar observations and compares their responses, avoiding the conflicting labels that arise when training a single parameter regressor. Historical observations also provide supervision by showing which simulated responses agree with the data, even when the underlying parameters are unknown. Experiments across four simulators compare calibration accuracy and query time. Dedicated cost analyses quantify traffic preparation and the recorded financial reuse costs. On new traffic targets, local correction more than halves query time relative to empirical and surrogate selection; a learned inverse is faster still, with similar mean error. In a retrospective comparison on real financial data, our method returns parameters about $1.07\times10^{7}$ times faster than a 10-minute Gaussian-process Bayesian optimization search, with mean calibration error 3.06% higher. Reusing simulation work across observations supports repeated parameter updates when the available time is too short for a new search.
Rehan Khan, Muhammad Ashraf, Sikandar Ali, Asad Ali Khan, Muhammad Junaid Asif, Nabeel Ahmad
Parkinson disease PD is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that can have a significant impact on motor performance resulting in the appearance of symptoms such as tremors rigidity postural instabilities and bradykinesia. Timely clinical treatment disease management and quality life of the patients are closely linked to early and appropriate identification of PD. Over the past few years the growth of wearable sensor technology and artificial intelligence AI have made it possible to create noninvasive and data driven disease detection methods. This paper proposes a comparative system using artificial intelligence to detect Parkinsons disease by analyzing the motion and tremor data captured by an inertial measurement unit IMU. The data comprises the signals of the acceleration and gyroscope sensors measuring movement in three directions X Y and Z. The signs and symptoms provide helpful information about subtle motor deficits associated with PD. Several classification models like Support Vector Machine SVM Logistic Regression LR KNearest Neighbors KNN Decision Tree DT Extreme Gradient Boosting XGBoost and Light Gradient Boosting Machine LightGBM were used to compare their effectiveness. The Logistic Regression model had a performance around 75 percent in all evaluation metrics and KNearest Neighbours KNN around 90 percent. The support vector machine SVM performed almost 94 percent whereas the performance of classifiers such as Decision Tree and XGBoost was close to 96 percent and overall classification efficacy respectively. LightGBM model performs consistently at the best rank among all of the evaluated methods having Accuracy, Precision, Recall and F1score of around 97 percent. The results show that the proposed machine learning approach offers an accurate and effective predictive capability in the classification of PD severity.
Type theories designed for mathematics or program verification need only that a proposition holds; proof irrelevance in conversion erases, at the kernel level, how a claim was established. A persistent knowledge store, by contrast, must retain that record: who established a claim, by which derivation or external tool, and under which assumptions. This volume presents the theory of Eigenius---a store of typed knowledge over constructive institutions---and develops its metatheory from that requirement. The kernel theory is a dependent type theory with cumulative universes, an impredicative universe of propositions, inductive families, and an intensional identity type. Proof irrelevance is an axiom with an explicit witness rather than a conversion rule, so proofs of a proposition are provably equal yet remain distinct terms. Definitional equality is joinability under an orthogonal rewriting system---confluent, injective on type formers, and decidable by a type-free test---while a separate subsumption judgment covers universe cumulativity, codomain-covariant function types, and declared class inclusions. We prove consistency via a set-theoretic model; develop a justification logic over the kernel's propositions to track evidence and support; organize environments as an institution so that store extensions are signature morphisms and external verdicts enter via comorphisms; formulate a typed knowledge-graph theory with records, classes, and refinements; and prove the correctness of conversion, normalization by evaluation, and bidirectional type checking relative to termination. A Lean 4 formalization accompanies the volume.
Yequan Bie, Dengyang Jiang, Zhixuan Chen, Xiaozhuan Liang, Haoxuan Che, Quande Liu, Xi Chen, Hao Chen
Generative video models are increasingly used as visual world simulators, yet their primary strength lies in rendering plausible pixels rather than reasoning about how a world should evolve. Coherent world evolution requires more than visual fidelity: when an event occurs, a model must infer its consequences for the entities in the world and then render the resulting state. For example, after a wild beast appears, the model should not only depict the wild beast, but also infer whether a nearby person should flee, take cover, or fight back based on the realized scene. Existing diffusion-based video models lack an explicit mechanism for maintaining world state and reasoning over such event-conditioned consequences, often producing visually plausible but behaviorally static or causally inconsistent outputs. To make this reasoning gap concrete and measurable, we propose a new problem, Out-of-Sight Causal Evolution, which requires a model to render an event, reason about its consequences for the evolving world state, and reveal a causally plausible outcome as the world continues to evolve, even out of sight. As a baseline reference solution, we introduce EvoWorld, a brain-renderer collaboration framework in which a vision-language model serves as the world brain: it observes generated segments, maintains an evolving account of the world, and reasons about plausible state transitions, while a segment-autoregressive video renderer realizes them visually. We further introduce EvoWorld-Data and EvoWorld-Bench for training and evaluating event realization, causal reactions, and revisit consistency. Experiments show that EvoWorld substantially improves event-conditioned causal evolution over recent models while preserving visual quality and consistency, establishing a reference point for reasoning-guided, autonomous world evolution beyond the current field of view.
Pengfei Gu, Huimin Li, Guangyu Meng, Hao Zheng, Haoteng Tang, Bin Fu, Danny Z. Chen
Medical images contain topological patterns, such as connected components and loops, at scales ranging from small lesions to organ boundaries. Although hierarchical Vision Transformers have advanced medical image analysis, they do not explicitly incorporate topology throughout their multiscale representations. We propose Topology-Reinforced Swin Transformer (TRiST), a framework that integrates topological information into feature construction, refinement, and attention. First, a Hierarchical Multi-Scale Topology Representation algorithm computes 2D persistent homology (H0 and H1) independently at four native Swin stages, producing descriptors aligned with each stage's token grid rather than downsampling fine-scale topology. Second, a Band-Aware H0/H1 Residual Refinement module uses gated residual networks to process short-, medium-, and long-persistence information separately. Third, a Persistence-Band Progressive Attention Bias converts stage-specific descriptors into learned key-saliency scores that directly modify shifted-window attention logits. We instantiate TRiST as Topo-SwinV2-B for classification and Topo-Swin-UNet for segmentation, preserving the underlying Swin-based backbones. Experiments on five medical image datasets show consistent improvements over Swin-based baselines and competitive performance relative to existing topology-augmented methods.
Generative recommendation retrieves items by autoregressively generating Semantic IDs(SIDs), where an RQ-VAE quantizes each item into a hierarchical SID sequence that the decoder generates level by level. We identify an overlooked bottleneck in this paradigm: the Semantic Quantization Gap(SQG). Quantization derives SIDs from rich continuous signals, including codebook centroids, local neighborhood geometry, and level-wise entropy. However, the decoder receives only discrete identifiers and loses the semantic structure that shaped them. This mismatch manifests in three ways: a grounding gap, where the decoder lacks semantic anchors when target-side information is limited; a neighborhood gap, where token-level supervision discards inter-item similarity and exacerbates exposure bias; and a difficulty gap, where computation is allocated uniformly despite generation difficulty diminishing with depth. To bridge the SQG, we propose BRIDGE. Codebook-grounded latent reasoning injects frozen quantizer centroids as semantic anchors before SID generation. Privileged EMA self-distillation transfers neighborhood-aware knowledge from a teacher to an on-policy student, preserving inter-item geometry while mitigating exposure bias. Effort-aware recurrence allocates more computation to the challenging early levels and progressively reduces it with depth. Across three Amazon benchmarks, BRIDGE improves Recall@10 and NDCG@10 by 10.9% and 9.7% on average over the strongest baseline (up to 12.6% and 10.7%). In a one-week online A/B experiment on a large-scale e-commerce advertising platform with 5% traffic, BRIDGE improves eCPM by 0.65%.
Yuan-Chiao Cheng, Yi-Hsuan Yang, Vincent K. M. Cheung
Music production typically involves multiple editing operations that each require specialized tools and expertise. Existing text-guided music editing systems support few operations or instruments, operate on short clips, or handle only one operation per instruction, unlike real workflows where several changes are requested at once. Here, we present ProCraft, a lightweight 0.5B-parameter autoregressive codec language model that edits 30s music excerpts end-to-end from free-form instructions, including compound requests. ProCraft supports seven operations across eight instruments, from tasks with a unique target (e.g., track removal) to creative ones (e.g., accompaniment generation). We align intermediate representations with pretrained music embeddings and pitch and instrument targets to preserve content outside the edit, and gated cross-attention in every decoder layer to keep generation tied to the instruction. To train on compound requests, we introduce On-the-fly Editing-pair Synthesis, which generates paired instructions and audio combining track-level operations with effect changes. ProCraft performs competitively against task-specific systems on single-task editing, and outperforms four free-text editors on compound instructions for track removal, extraction and denoising on real (MoisesDB) and synthetic (Slakh) recordings. In a user study (16 listeners), ProCraft was rated highest on removal and denoising and on-par with a 16-times larger model on extraction and instrument transfer. Ablations further show that representation alignment and cross-attention reduce leakage from unwanted tracks and raise editing success rates, especially on out-of-domain data.
Landon Dyken, Sharmistha Chakrabarti, Nathan Debardeleben, Steve Petruzza, Qi Wu, Will Usher, Sidharth Kumar
Recent work has shown that implicit neural representations (INRs) can be trained to effectively compress structured and unstructured volume data, allowing for direct data querying with a reduced memory footprint. However, as existing INRs for unstructured volumes do not encode geometry, they require partial mesh storage for later sampling, limiting achievable compression. At the same time, novel view synthesis methods have shown that explicit collections of 3D Gaussians can be used to accurately visualize volume data. In this work, we introduce an explicit model for volume data compression based on 3D Gaussian primitives. We reinterpret collections of 3D Gaussians as an explicit representation of a volume's scalar field and use a sampling strategy that reconstructs scalar values at spatial locations through weighted aggregation of intersecting Gaussians. We develop optimized CUDA-accelerated pipelines for structured and unstructured model sampling, loss functions that encourage accurate domain coverage of our models, and a novel sampling-error based densification strategy. Our explicit formulation naturally encodes domain geometry, eliminating the need for mesh storage in unstructured volumes and introducing significantly higher compression opportunities. Compared to existing INRs, we demonstrate that our explicit model achieves significant training speed and reconstruction quality improvements on both structured and unstructured volumes, while enabling compression ratios much higher than previous work for unstructured volumes.
Xinran Wang, Ning Chen, Yixin Luo, Hongqing Zhu, Li Tian
Accent conversion (AC) aims to transform accent-related acoustic characteristics of the source speech to a target accent while preserving linguistic content and speaker identity. Unlike conventional generative AC models, the retrieval-based ones, which employ k-nearest neighbors (kNN) to directly retrieve acoustic features from target-accent speech and so do not need source-accent speech during training, are more effective. However, existing retrieval-based AC frameworks face three issues: limited intelligibility due to incomplete phoneme coverage from sequential matching pool construction, limited adaptability to source speech variations, and low spectral continuity from coarse-grained style modulation. To address these limitations, we propose Anisotropy-Aware Adaptive k-Nearest Neighbor Accent Conversion (AA-kNN-AC), an enhanced retrieval-based AC model. First, we design a phoneme coverage-based matching pool construction strategy, employing greedy selection with diversity-aware scoring to achieve balanced and near-complete phonetic representation under limited target accent data. Second, we propose an anisotropy-aware adaptive kNN retrieval mechanism that dynamically determines the neighborhood size according to the singular value decomposition (SVD)-based anisotropy analysis, enhancing adaptability to source speech variations. Third, we present a progressive Adaptive Instance Normalization (AdaIN)-based fine-grained decoder by integrating temporal up-sampling within AdaIN blocks, enhancing spectral continuity of the converted speech. Experimental results on the L2-ARCTIC and VCTK datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing retrieval-based and generative baselines in both objective and subjective evaluations, achieving high intelligibility, speaker similarity, and naturalness. Demo page is available at https://aa-knn-ac.github.io/demo/.
Visual geo-localization requires complex reasoning to infer image locations without GPS metadata. Traditional retrieval methods are limited by database quality while Large Vision Language Models often struggle with diverse scenes. Although existing multi-agent systems improve collaboration, they treat interactions uniformly and lack effective conflict resolution. We propose GraphGeo, a multi-agent debate framework based on heterogeneous graph neural networks for visual geo-localization. The framework models diverse debate relationships through typed edges and separates supportive collaboration, competitive argumentation and knowledge transfer. We introduce a dual-level debate mechanism combining node-level refinement and edge-level argumentation modeling. A cross-level topology refinement strategy enables co-evolution between graph structure and agent representations. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate GraphGeo outperforms single model and multi-agent baselines. The framework converts cognitive conflicts between agents into higher geo-localization accuracy through structured debate.
Real-world environments are messy, with paths often blocked by everyday objects like chairs and toys, requiring robots to perform interactive navigation by manipulating obstacles to clear a path. Existing methods rely on extensive simulation-based learning or per-scene instructions specifying which objects to avoid or manipulate. They struggle to generalize across novel objects, diverse environments, and varied contexts such as a cart of fragile glassware that should be avoided while an empty one can be pushed. We formalize this problem as open-world interactive navigation and present MessyNav, a zero-shot framework based on vision-language models (VLMs). At its core, MessyNav performs explicit VLM-based affordance reasoning before task planning to decide whether to swipe, pick up, or avoid an object and produce a high-level plan. Evaluated on a mobile manipulator across real-world indoor and outdoor environments, MessyNav improves success rate by 27 percentage points (pp) over the strongest baseline in real-robot trials and achieves statistically significant gains in a larger-scale offline evaluation, without task-specific training.
Truncated backpropagation through time reduces the computational burden of training recurrent models by restricting gradient computations to shorter temporal contexts. This induces two distinct boundary effects: missing past information perturbs the forward state evolution, while truncating the backward recursion omits future information. This motivates decoupling the interval over which gradient contributions are averaged for the parameter update from the surrounding temporal context over which they are computed. Under exponential decay of the state-transition Jacobians and mild regularity conditions, this leads to a two-sided gradient turnpike property: the error between truncated- and full-context gradient contributions decays exponentially with the distance from both context boundaries. We derive bounds for the averaged update gradient, yielding guarantees on gradient alignment and approximate full-context stationarity; under unbiased interval sampling and a Polyak-Lojasiewicz condition, these further imply a bound on the resulting optimality gap. Numerical experiments on the Wiener-Hammerstein benchmark illustrate the role of past and future context and the trade-off between predictive performance and computational cost.
Whether useful structured hardness can arise from unstructured assumptions is a fundamental question in complexity and cryptography. The longstanding Bennett-Gill question asks whether $\mathsf{NP}\cap\mathsf{coNP}$ remains hard relative to a random oracle; [GIKKLS, STOC 2023] recently gave a conditional affirmative answer in the classical setting. We establish the quantum analogue: if $\mathsf{UP}\not\subseteq\mathsf{BQP}$, then $\mathsf{NP}^{O}\cap\mathsf{coNP}^{O}\not\subseteq\mathsf{BQP}^{O}$ with probability $1$ over a random oracle $O$. Beyond extending the classical result, this separation has a distinctly quantum significance: Shor's algorithms defeat canonical number-theoretic hardness candidates, while lattice assumptions and other leading post-quantum cryptographic assumptions do not directly supply hard languages with two-sided classical certification on every input. Our conditional oracle separation provides evidence that such structured quantum hardness can nevertheless arise from unstructured sources. Complementing this result, we rule out fully black-box quantum reductions of worst-case quantum hardness in $\mathsf{NP}\cap\mathsf{coNP}$ to post-quantum injective one-way functions and indistinguishability obfuscation. This barrier excludes a broad class of black-box approaches to deriving structured quantum hardness from generic cryptographic primitives, providing partial evidence that the non-black-box techniques in our first result are essential.
Yara Bahram, Zahra Dehghani, Mélodie Desbos, Eric Granger, Pablo Piantanida, Mohammadhadi Shateri
Training fast generators on new domains with limited data remains challenging for two reasons. First, adapting a pretrained diffusion or flow model leaves its costly multi-step sampling intact, and existing acceleration methods are tied to the source parameterization (x, epsilon, v, or u), so heterogeneous pretrained models share no common acceleration target. Second, while adversarial post-training sharpens generation quality, existing criteria each cover only one end of the step range. Discrete criteria compare jump endpoints and lose their signal as the jump shrinks, while continuous criteria score the instantaneous velocity and misjudge the large jumps of few-step sampling. Neither fits MeanFlow (MF) models, which predict average velocities over intervals of any length. We propose MeanFlow-Transfer (MF-T), which adapts a source domain model of any parameterization and compresses it into a few-step MF generator through a common velocity map. We then introduce Continuous Adversarial MeanFlow (CAMF), which scores the change of a learned potential along each predicted interval jump of MF. CAMF needs no gradient penalty or Jacobian-vector product (JVP). We also prove it stays well-conditioned for every interval length and recovers the instantaneous criterion as the interval vanishes. Adapting four ImageNet-based source models (DiT, SiT, JiT, iMF) to five target domains, MF-T + CAMF approaches or exceeds the fine-tuned many-step teacher in FID and FDD at up to 125x fewer Neural Function Evaluations (NFEs). Further, CAMF improves MF-T's few-step FID by about 30% on average, outperforming prior adversarial post-training on iMF at every NFE.