Robots increasingly run large vision-language-action policies on remote servers, making the camera uplink the bottleneck. Existing video codecs spend bits on content the receiver could predict: the robot's own motion. We introduce the kinematic hypothesis context, a zero-rate conditioning signal that both ends build from joint states, the robot model and the camera calibration. Ego-motion homographies, per-link robot reprojections, an end-effector plane and a background memory warp the previous reconstruction into hypotheses that condition a learned video codec. We prove that history-only and global-pose conditioning with a limited receptive field cannot access this information under large motion, and that coding gains become task gains at the policy's success cliff. On LIBERO, the context saves 23.9% bit rate over a capacity-matched history-conditioned codec and 40-56% over x264, x265 and SVT-AV1, and needs 23.2% fewer bits than DCVC-RT at equal policy action deviation; trained to lower rates, it matches DCVC-RT in PSNR. In closed loop at equal rate, OpenVLA-OFT success nearly doubles from 22.8% to 43.1% at 6 kbps (72.6% with lower-rate training, 23.6 points above DCVC-RT), pi_0.5 success rises from 55.5% to 77.4%, and the gain grows under packet loss. The context transfers across three codec hosts and to real robot data.
Jiacheng Cen, Anyi Li, Ning Lin, Zihe Wang, Ji-Rong Wen, Wenbing Huang
Symmetry governs the organization of physical structures, while symmetry breaking reveals their transformations. In geometric deep learning, symmetry imposes rank constraints on equivariant representations, limiting the expressive capacity of equivariant graph neural networks (GNNs). Here we show that these constraints can instead be exploited: the singular-value spectra of equivariant representations provide a unified fingerprint of structural symmetry. We introduce spectral symmetry fingerprints (SymFP), which enable discrete point-group identification through rank-template matching and continuous symmetry analysis by quantifying spectral energy beyond target rank constraints. SymFP is orientation invariant and architecture agnostic, enabling a parameter-free GNN implementation. Its spectra can be reused across multiple target groups, and the resulting leakage scores satisfy subgroup monotonicity. Across synthetic structures, molecules, coordination complexes and large biological assemblies, SymFP accurately identifies point groups, tracks controlled symmetry breaking and reveals local and degree-resolved symmetry changes that can be obscured by global geometric measures. These results establish the spectral structure of equivariant representations as a general framework for characterizing symmetry across physical systems.
Qingyun Liu, Yuankun Liu, Jiaye Feng, Jie Huang, Zonghong Dai, Haochen Li, Jingkun Wang, Weiping Li 等 9 位作者
Panoptic Scene Graph generation (PSG) requires holistic yet fine-grained reasoning over complex relations among objects. However, current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) applied to PSG suffer from a perception bottleneck: they function as static observers limited by fixed-resolution views. As a result, models often overlook critical relations involving small or peripheral objects and struggle to differentiate ambiguous predicates in complex scenes. To address these limitations, we propose PSGAgent, an agentic framework that enhances visual perception for PSG through a think-act-observe loop. PSGAgent allows MLLMs to dynamically refine their visual perception using two tools: a Region Zoom-In Tool for local exploration of small or boundary relations and a Visual Highlight Tool for relation-focused segmentation that filters out irrelevant contextual noise. To optimize decision-making, we construct a two-stage training pipeline. First, we create a high-quality, error-aware Multimodal Chain-of-Thought (M-CoT) dataset that provides robust supervision for cold-start learning. Then, we design a novel hierarchical reward mechanism integrated with Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO) to enable strategic and adaptive tool usage. Extensive experiments on the PSG benchmark show that PSGAgent achieves SOTA performance, demonstrating strong capability in both holistic and fine-grained scene understanding.
Aditya Parameshwaran, Navid Aftabi, Abhishek Hanchate, Satish T. S. Bukkapatnam, Dan Li, Yue Wang
Replay attacks are difficult to detect in vision-based control systems because previously recorded observations can remain plausible while the physical system follows a different trajectory. This paper develops an adaptive dynamic-watermarking framework for detecting replay attacks against vision-based controllers. A private Gaussian watermark is added to the nominal control input, and a control input-conditioned latent dynamics network (LDN) predicts the corresponding evolution in a compact latent space learned from image observations. Attack evidence is obtained from the discrepancy between the predicted latent response and the latent representation of the received image observation. A reinforcement learning policy adjusts the watermark covariance using the latent state and detector confidence, thereby balancing attack detectability, watermark energy, and control distortion. A Lagrangian penalty on task-specific safety costs is included during training to limit the adverse effect of the excitation. The framework is evaluated on a vision-guided UR5 manipulation task in which the robot reaches a target while avoiding a moving human arm under nominal and replay-attacked observations.
Dongdong Wang, Alina Hagen, Isabelle Gatmaitan, Hao Zhou, Yiwen Dong, Shabboo Valipoor, Vivian W. H. Wong, Lingyao Li
Assessing built-environment interaction, such as wheelchair accessibility, is challenging because real-world mobility is shaped by context-dependent and temporary barriers that are difficult to capture at scale. This paper examines whether vision-language models (VLMs) can identify potential accessibility barriers from Google Street View (GSV) imagery. We propose an expert-guided retrieval-augmented framework that combines GSV imagery, ADA-informed guidance, and expert-derived rubrics to evaluate multiple accessibility dimensions. We collect a campus-scale dataset at the University of Florida, linking 407 unique GSV locations with GPS-derived wheelchair dwell behavior as a proxy for potential mobility friction. Results show that VLM ratings are negatively correlated with dwell time and exhibit distributional similarity, with the expert-guided configuration strengthening the correlation from $r=-0.40$ to $r=-0.54$ for the strongest model. Visual cue analysis further shows that features such as curb ramps and crosswalks are associated with higher VLM accessibility scores, while correspondence remains limited for subtle surface conditions, transient obstructions, and viewpoint-dependent barriers. Overall, our findings demonstrate the potential of expert-guided VLMs for scalable preliminary accessibility screening and prioritizing locations for further investigation.
Diffusion models achieve strong performance in text-to-image generation, but they can still produce unsafe content. Training-free safety guidance offers a practical inference-time alternative that intervenes during sampling without modifying model weights. However, many existing safeguards still rely on a coupled safety-control chain. In this chain, the same unsafe condition simultaneously specifies what should be avoided, indicates the current unsafe signal, constructs the intervention, and determines when that intervention remains active. This coupling can work when unsafe factors are explicit, but becomes less reliable once harmful and benign semantics are entangled in the current generation state, often leaving residual unsafe content or unnecessarily degrading benign-generation quality or prompt fidelity. We address this problem with Decoupled Safety Control (DSC), a plug-in safety-control algorithm for training-free safety guidance. DSC reformulates training-free safety guidance as an explicit state-dependent control process, so the executed intervention is determined from the current generation state rather than inherited directly from a single unsafe condition. Experiments on standard safety benchmarks show that DSC improves representative latent- and text-space safeguards, achieving stronger unsafe-content suppression while preserving benign-generation quality and maintaining efficient inference.
Single image dehazing requires recovering scene radiance from visual responses that are weakened and veiled by participating media. Existing methods either invert explicit scattering variables, which can be unstable under complex scenes, or learn direct restoration mappings, which often discard the physical organization of haze formation. We present \emph{FreePath}, a neural mean free path framework for image dehazing. Instead of estimating atmospheric parameters, FreePath represents dehazing as feature space path state restoration, inspired by the expected distance a visual response can propagate before interacting with haze. Within a residual encoder and decoder, the Mean Free Path Residual Block learns path and collision fields to guide haze constrained correction, while FreePath State Conservation Integration preserves restored path states during deep feature aggregation. Experiments on paired CDD-11 haze images and real RTTS scenes show that FreePath consistently improves full reference fidelity, no reference perceptual quality, and visual faithfulness over representative dehazing baselines.
Solving visual puzzles requires both accurate interpretation of visual evidence and reliable computation under task-specific rules. Embedding visual assumptions and task constraints directly in solving code makes the represented problem difficult to inspect and revise independently. We introduce Vis2State, a training-free agentic framework that abstracts visual puzzles into explicit, revisable problem states linking visual inspection and execution. Visual inspection guides state construction and refinement, while generated programs solve the represented problem. The model constructs both the state and the program without predefined puzzle schemas or solving procedures. Inspection and execution feedback allow it to revise the problem representation and solving procedure independently. Vis2State achieves the state-of-the-art performance on four benchmarks. Cross-model evaluation further demonstrates consistent gains. Ablations, error analyses, and fixed-program state interventions further support the effectiveness of the state-centered design. The code will be made publicly available to facilitate future research.
Hengtong Shen, Li Yan, Hong Xie, Yaxuan Wei, Xinhao Li, Wenfei Shen, Peixian Lv, Fei Tan
Remote sensing (RS) change detection is essential for interpreting surface dynamics. Semantic change detection (SCD) further enables pixel-level understanding of multi-class transitions, yet remains sensitive to pseudo-changes induced by imaging conditions. Recent RS foundation models extract semantically consistent features across temporal and environmental variations, which is critical for mitigating pseudo-changes. However, existing SCD methods are often rigid and backbone-specific, lacking the flexibility to integrate diverse multi-scale features from emerging foundation models. To this end, we introduce a modular Cascaded Gated Decoder (CG-Decoder) that bridges various backbones and SCD tasks, processing multi-scale features in a coarse-to-fine manner while enabling adaptive change extraction. Building upon the RS foundation model PerA, we present PerASCD, a unified SCD framework. We further propose a Soft Semantic Consistency Loss (SSCLoss) to mitigate numerical instability in mixed-precision training. Extensive experiments on SECOND and LandsatSCD show that PerASCD achieves new state-of-the-art Sek scores (26.11% and 65.21%), surpassing the previous best by 0.61% and 4.95%, respectively. It also demonstrates exceptional data efficiency (outperforming the full-data baseline with 50% data), seamless cross-backbone generalization, and enhanced interpretability. Our approach maintains robust semantic consistency under radiometric variations, providing a reliable SCD solution. Code: https://github.com/SathShen/PerASCD.git.
We present a computational framework that combines machine-learning-based discovery with rigorous computer-assisted numerical certification and formal verification for strongly nonlinear partial differential equations. We demonstrate the approach for periodic gravity-capillary traveling water waves. Physics-informed neural networks are used as a search mechanism, with the wave profile, wave speed and, in continuation experiments, surface tension learned directly from the governing equations without training data. Through a staged training and refinement procedure, the neural networks achieve near-machine-precision residuals of the governing equations, even in strongly nonlinear regimes. A single formulation recovers high-amplitude Stokes waves, Crapper waves and Wilton ripples. Continuation from a high-amplitude Wilton ripple in surface tension reveals new high-amplitude candidate solutions. We freeze one candidate as an explicit finite representation and rigorously certify a uniform bound on its governing-equation residual using interval arithmetic, accounting for floating-point roundoff, Fourier truncation, aliasing and grid-to-continuum errors. This independently validates the neural-network accuracy. We formalize the certification argument in Lean, which machine-checks the deductions from certified numerical bounds to the residual theorem. Both the interval certification and formalization were developed with substantial assistance from a large language model, while the validity of the result remains independent of the language model: the numerical bounds are rigorously enclosed by interval arithmetic and the subsequent mathematical deductions are checked by the Lean kernel. Together, these steps provide a pipeline from neural discovery to rigorous numerical certification and machine-checked verification with auditable mathematical guarantees.
Vihan Lakshman, Peter Baile Chen, Zhuohan Gu, Michael Cafarella
Recent work in machine learning has demonstrated that transformer-based language model agents can communicate state not only through text, but also directly in latent space via key-value (KV) caches. In this paper, we argue that such cache-to-cache translation can provide utility beyond the original motivating application of real-time agent communication and can instead be utilized for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Building on the Cache-to-Cache (C2C) fusion framework, our proposed system CacheGraft encodes each corpus passage offline into a fused KV cache representation between a larger sharer model (4B parameters in our experiments) and a smaller receiver model (0.6B parameters) such that this cache can be injected into the receiver at query time with no need for the larger model. Across five QA benchmarks and two independent locally-run judges, CacheGraft improves answer quality over the text-only receiver baseline in 29 out of 30 comparisons, of which 17 of the 30 are statistically significant. Notably, these gains are zero-shot with respect to the fuser, which was never trained on retrieval data. These initial results suggest that latent-space document enrichment may be a promising avenue for enhancing the performance of RAG systems, particularly in compute-constrained settings where it is only feasible to deploy a small model at inference time.
Qiming Shi, Yikun Li, Beidi Luan, Rui Sun, Sinuo Wang, Delin Wang, Yan Ma, Jing Li 等 10 位作者
Large language model (LLM) agents are extending agent-mediated commerce on the Web from shopping for consumers to operating businesses for sellers. In online-to-offline (O2O) commerce, decisions are issued through Web-based platforms but realized through costly physical execution. Evaluating such agents requires going beyond individual transactions to ask whether decisions made online turn into sustained economic returns. We introduce AutoVend, a benchmark in which one LLM agent manages 20 vending machines across five site types through a Web-based operating interface for 180 simulated days. Its data-grounded simulator combines a shared warehouse, procurement lead times, paid replenishment, inventory expiration, and recurring operating costs. We evaluate five LLM agents against a rule-based inventory-control baseline and diagnose their site coordination, execution, and performance over time. Four of five evaluated LLM agents fall short of this baseline, and returns per dollar of inference cost rank models differently from returns alone. Operational analyses show that gains in individual metrics do not consistently yield stronger economic growth, as inventory and execution costs erode these gains. Trajectory analysis further reveals difficulties in grounding feasible actions, managing inventory commitments, and converting feedback into effective policy revisions.
We present \textbf{WeLM-Image}, a unified image foundation model that integrates multimodal understanding into text-to-image generation, instruction-guided editing, and multi-reference synthesis. Designed for single-GPU deployment in WeChat's large-scale consumer applications, the model processes text, reference images, and target latents as one interleaved sequence. A Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) backbone combines shared attention with independent understanding and generation parameters to limit optimization interference. Equipping each path with Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) modules provides sparse capacity, with 31.7B stored parameters and approximately 5.4B generation parameters activated per target latent token. A generation-oriented data engine combines a knowledge-grounded visual vocabulary with large-scale visual clustering to balance semantic coverage and editing tasks, while training-time evaluation guides iterative data refinement. Bilingual annotations and verified editing supervision support progressive training up to native 1.5K resolution. We optimize generation and editing separately with rubric- and checklist-based rewards, then consolidate the specialized policies through noise-aware on-policy distillation. In the reported overall comparisons, the 1536-resolution model ranks first among the evaluated open-source models on PRISM-Bench, Qwen-Image-Bench, and UnicBench. MeanFlow-based few-step distillation yields WeLM-Image-Turbo, which generates a $1024\times1024$ image in 4.98\,s on a single NVIDIA H20 GPU using eight guidance-free steps.
Continuous prompt search offers a computationally efficient alternative to conventional parameter tuning in natural language processing tasks. Nevertheless, its practical effectiveness can be significantly hindered by the black-box nature and the inherent high-dimensionality of the objective landscapes. Existing methods typically mitigate these challenges by restricting the search to a randomly projected low-dimensional subspace. However, the effectiveness and underlying motivation of the projection mechanism remain ambiguous. In this paper, we first empirically demonstrate that despite the prompt space possessing a low-dimensional structure, random projections fail to adequately capture this essential structure. Motivated by this finding, we propose a projection-free prompt search method based on evolutionary strategies. By directly optimizing in the full prompt space with an adaptation mechanism calibrated to the intrinsic dimension, our method achieves competitive search capabilities without additional computational overhead. Furthermore, to bridge the generalization gap in few-shot scenarios, we introduce a confidence-based regularization mechanism that systematically enhances the model's confidence in the target verbalizers. Experimental results on seven natural language understanding tasks from the GLUE benchmark demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly outperforms existing baselines.
A major evolutionary goal and challenge for next-generation wireless systems is seamless multiple radio access technology (multi-RAT) mobility. In a multi-RAT environment, handover decisions must account for both user quality of service and network priorities, including signal quality, resource availability, energy consumption, latency, and security. Although WiFi/cellular mobility is well explored in research and standardization, many conventional handover mechanisms continue to rely primarily on received signal strength. Such decisions may overlook link delay, congestion, and the distinct operating characteristics of heterogeneous RATs. In this work, we present the Reinforced Flexible Multi-RAT Selection framework (ReFlexMRS), a configurable Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based approach for multi-criteria handover target selection. ReFlexMRS is evaluated using an SDN-enabled multi-RAT testbed. The decision problem is formulated as a Markov Decision Process with a finite action space and is addressed using a Deep Q-Network (DQN) with convolutional layers that extract relationships among network measurement features. The agent is trained offline from collected network observations using reward guided Q-value updates, then used to select handover targets during inference. A 5G-WiFi case study demonstrates that ReFlexMRS can trade a small amount of throughput for substantial improvements in link delay, handover stability, and WiFi offloading. Compared with RSSI-based selection, the proposed formulations retain approximately 90-95% of the baseline throughput while reducing total handovers by up to 18% and WiFi-to-5G handovers by up to 13%, while maintaining the required RSSI levels.
Multi-view video recordings are increasingly used to capture the 3D movements of animals in experimental settings, yet extracting rich 3D representations from these recordings remains challenging. Supervised pose estimation requires extensive manual annotation, while general-purpose 3D reconstruction models trained on generic scene datasets fail on the specialized imagery and sparse-view setting of laboratory experiments. We address these limitations with BEAST3D, a self-supervised pretraining framework that learns 3D visual representations from unlabeled, calibrated multi-view video. BEAST3D uses a vision transformer to predict 3D Gaussian splats that reconstruct held-out views through differentiable rendering, while simultaneously segmenting the animal from the background. BEAST3D reconstructs 3D structure with as few as four views by conditioning directly on known camera parameters--unlike general-purpose models, which must estimate camera geometry from dense overlapping viewpoints that are seldom available in lab settings. Through comprehensive evaluation across four species, we demonstrate that BEAST3D produces rich, viewpoint-invariant features that transfer effectively to three downstream tasks: novel view synthesis, which validates the quality of the learned 3D representations; multi-view pose estimation, which provides the sparse keypoint trajectories widely used in behavioral analysis; and neural encoding, which relates 3D behavioral features to simultaneously recorded neural activity. BEAST3D thus establishes a versatile framework for behavioral analysis that leverages 3D structure in modern multi-view laboratory recordings.
Cybersickness is a major barrier to comfortable VR use, and reliable prediction often requires multiple physiological and behavioral sensors. However, existing models typically assume a fixed set of modalities, making them vulnerable when sensors are unavailable and difficult to generalize across datasets with different sensor configurations. We adapt a transformer-based model that handles arbitrary sensor combinations without imputing missing data. Anchor-based contrastive learning maps heterogeneous sensor embeddings into a shared latent space using eye tracking as the anchor modality, while masked self-attention excludes unavailable sensors during fusion. We evaluate our approach on three publicly available cybersickness datasets: VR.net, SIM21, and Blur-Rollercoaster, collected using different VR systems and sensor configurations. Across single-sensor dropout conditions, prediction error changes by less than 0.09 MAE. Joint training across all datasets achieves 0.51 MAE and 0.63 Pearson correlation, substantially outperforming single-dataset models. These results demonstrate robust and generalizable cybersickness prediction across diverse VR systems.
Dance motion combines slowly varying body configurations with rapid local movements. We investigate how explicit temporal-frequency decomposition can guide the temporal resolution and codebook capacity of discrete motion representations. We introduce frequency-factorized motion tokenization (FFMT), which separates root-relative motion into a low-frequency choreographic scaffold and a complementary high-frequency residual. FFMT uses a lower token rate and a smaller codebook for the low-frequency component, and a higher token rate and a larger codebook for the high-frequency residual. This representation further induces a plan-then-articulate autoregressive factorization: low-frequency tokens establish coarse choreography, while high-frequency tokens realize local motion details conditioned on the generated plan and music. Experiments on AIST++ and FineDance show strong distributional fidelity while preserving realistic diversity and music--motion synchronization. Ablations consistently support frequency factorization, asymmetric temporal allocation, and low-to-high conditioning.
Kirtan Bhatt, Xiachong Lin, Matthew Amos, Flora D. Salim, Wen Hu
Multi-zone HVAC control is a spatial decision problem in which indoor thermal evolution and control decisions depend not only on outdoor conditions and internal heat gains but also on zone layout, physical adjacency, and delayed thermal interactions across the building. Recent LLM-based HVAC controllers have shown that prompt-based control is feasible. However, these methods produce inconsistent results, are difficult to generalize, and experience control-latency issues. Their performance also relies heavily on numeric reward values, textual feedback, or unstructured retrieval, which limits their ability to make control decisions that account for zone dynamics and thermodynamics. No existing LLM-based methods have used building semantics and dynamics, together with rolling history, as the centre of the LLM context while testing and comparing HVAC control performance with existing LLM-based HVAC approaches. This paper presents ThermoLLM, an LLM-based HVAC control framework tested in a multi-zone building environment. Spatiotemporal context grounding is a main component of ThermoLLM, which uses a spatial knowledge graph derived from Brick-style building semantics and linked with recent observations from a rolling history. We evaluate ThermoLLM against standard control methods and recent state-of-the-art baselines in a five-zone building environment across six climate-season scenarios. ThermoLLM consistently achieves the best energy-comfort trade-offs and outperforms all evaluated baselines in the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) rankings across all six scenarios.
Xiaona Zhou, Muntasir Wahed, Tianjiao Yu, Constantin Brif, Ismini Lourentzou
Recent advances in Vision--Language Models (VLMs) have achieved impressive performance across many tasks, yet prior studies report unsatisfactory performance when applying large language or multimodal models to finding abnormal patterns in sequential data. Public anomaly detection benchmarks typically provide interval annotations but not natural-language rationales, making it difficult to fine-tune VLMs to produce grounded, interpretable decisions. To address this gap, we construct VisAnomBench, a curated benchmark built from public time-series datasets and augmented with high-quality anomaly explanations selected from multiple large VLMs using fine-grained, task-specific rewards. Through fine-tuning on this benchmark, we develop VisAnomReasoner, a parameter-efficient VLM for time-series anomaly detection. Results on VisAnomBench show that VisAnomReasoner achieves more accurate anomaly localization and consistently outperforms all baselines, with improvements of at least 21.23 and 23.87 percentage points in precision and F1, respectively. Additional experiments on the TSB-AD-U benchmark demonstrate strong cross-benchmark generalization, with VisAnomReasoner improving precision and F1 by 9.57 and 13.39 percentage points, respectively.
Cassandra C. Chou, Benjamin Q. Huynh, Allison Koenecke, Elizabeth T. Chin
Predictive multiplicity -- where similarly accurate models disagree on individual predictions -- can be leveraged to optimize secondary metrics (e.g., fairness) without loss in predictive performance. However, exploiting multiplicity opens the opportunity for motivated parties (or coding agents gaming their objectives) to steer predictions toward their own ends, such as in litigation or consumer disputes with automated decision-making tools. In these adversarial multiplicity settings, we distinguish soft manipulation, where parties optimize over innocuous model choices (e.g., hyperparameter tuning, feature engineering), from hard manipulation, where parties directly perturb model parameters. We find a sufficiently flexible model can be manipulated to reverse any individual prediction with minimal change in predictive performance while passing black-box audits, making hard manipulation viable in most regulatory settings. Soft manipulation has smaller effects but can pass white-box audits requiring full access to code and data. Even aggregate estimates can be manipulated: a model's estimated effect of climate change on wildfires can be fully reversed by hard edits and soft search. We find the Reconcile algorithm typically resolves most disagreements between models, but more often in favor of the manipulator when the opposing model is chosen adversarially compared to at random. We map which manipulations can plausibly pass existing regulations and disclosure policies, and recommend mitigations such as pre-registration, proof of model training, sensitivity analyses, multi-metric evaluations, and committing to versioned public models.
Yi He, Zhengxi Yu, Feilin Han, Chuer Chen, Shengqi Dang, Nan Cao
Generative video models have made video creation more accessible, yet creators still struggle to translate high-level narrative intentions into coherent cinematic expressions. Existing systems primarily rely on prompt refinement or expose isolated camera controls, leaving a gap between what to express and how to film it. We present CineAssist, a human-AI co-creation system that treats cinematic language as an interactive design medium connecting creative intentions with executable video controls. We construct a Cinematic Language Design Space and an annotated dataset from 107 filmmaking sources and 1,436 film clips, linking communicative intentions to cinematic parameter values. CineAssist combines a multi-agent workflow for intent alignment and strategy recommendation with an interactive cinematic editor and a context-sensitive preference learner for user-controlled personalization. We evaluate the system through three studies examining end-to-end usability, cinematic quality, and preference evolution. Results show that CineAssist facilitates efficient, controllable, and personalized intent-driven cinematic video creation.
In recent years, AIGC technologies are capable of generating hyper-realistic forged facial images, posing severe threats to facial security safety. To tackle these challenges, early Deepfake research primarily centered on real-fake classification. Recently, growing efforts have been devoted to the Deepfake Attribution (DFA) of generated content. Nevertheless, existing research on Deepfake detection and attribution faces saturated performance in binary classification, limited diversity in datasets and algorithms, and imperfect evaluation protocols, which severely impede practical application. To address these limitations, we propose a comprehensive deepfake detection and attribution benchmark named DeepfakeGenome (DFG). It contains 100 facial forgery algorithms and 2M images in total, achieving 4x to 100x larger than prior DFA benchmarks. We further design 4 protocols for practical evaluation, including a novel retrieval-based attribution paradigm. Unlike previous open-set evaluation metrics, the proposed retrieval metrics are more aligned with the real-world active defense situation of blacklist registration mechanisms. Based on these elaborate designs, we investigate the performance ceiling of deepfake attribution task. Over 2k experimental evaluations are conducted, and 10 insightful findings are derived. We believe this work can provide new insights into the DFA research field. The Code and Benchmark of DFG are avaliable on https://huggingface.co/spaces/DeepfakeGenome/DFG_Page.
Mocheng Li, Xiao Yan, Baotong Lu, James Cheng, Chenhao Ma
Filtering approximate nearest neighbor search (Filtering ANNS) retrieves approximate nearest neighbors subject to attribute constraints in applications such as recommendation, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and LLM agent memory. However, predicate-specialized methods target either range or label filtering and can incur substantial index construction time, whereas predicate-agnostic methods support arbitrary predicates but struggle to sustain throughput and recall across a wide range of selectivities. In this paper, we propose EMA, a Filtering ANNS algorithm that supports multi-predicate queries over mixed numerical and categorical attributes as well as efficient dynamic updates. EMA attaches compact summaries, called Markers, to graph edges to record the attributes of candidates removed by geometric pruning. During query processing, EMA performs Marker-guided joint search with bounded edge recovery, enabling efficient filtering while preserving graph navigability. On multi-predicate workloads, EMA achieves 1.20x-28.18x the query throughput of the best competing baseline at comparable recall. In our complete-record replacement experiment, EMA retains approximately 98% of its initial query throughput without rebuilding the graph.
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is increasingly used in settings where pairwise preferences coexist with pointwise criteria such as response length, answer correctness, or safety scores. When the two disagree, standard DPO treats pairs whose preferred output scores worse on the pointwise criterion (conflict pairs) in the same way as the remaining (matching) pairs. We characterize a systematic failure mode, constraint drift: for sufficiently small updates, conflict pairs tend to increase constraint cost while matching pairs tend to repair it, and the net change depends on their balance. This balance yields a closed-form pre-alignment diagnostic, $ρ^{*}_{\mathrm{eq}}$, computable from dataset statistics, that indicates whether a dataset is self-correcting or requires intervention. Building on this diagnostic, we propose Conflict-aware DPO (CoDPO), which down-weights conflict pairs with a strength set from $ρ^{*}_{\mathrm{eq}}$ rather than tuned, and adds an adaptive margin shift that addresses residual drift during training. Empirically, drift grows monotonically with conflict exposure on the conflict-dominated domains, and the intervention decision given by $ρ^{*}_{\mathrm{eq}}$ matches the observed drift on every domain, including one that it identifies as self-correcting. On all four domains of the main comparison, CoDPO reduces drift while largely preserving the preference learning of vanilla DPO. Compared with hard filtering and recent constrained and multi-objective baselines, CoDPO also achieves a more favorable drift-preference trade-off.
Driven by the rapid development of the low-altitude economy, Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks have become increasingly important for executing tasks such as search, rescue, and monitoring. However, under bandwidth-constrained scenarios, UAV networks still face significant challenges in task execution efficiency and intelligent processing capabilities. To address these issues, we propose Multi-UAV Cooperative Deep Semantic Autoencoders (MC-DSA) for communication networks. The architecture comprises one Task UAV (T-UAV) and multiple Support UAVs (S-UAVs), which jointly enhance communication efficiency and data-processing capability via semantic communication and cooperation. Specifically, we introduce a semantic matching and source selection mechanism, enabling the proposed MC-DSA to handle low-quality images while ensuring effective utilization of high-quality images. The T-UAV broadcasts a task query, and each S-UAV computes the semantic similarity between its local image and the query. Communication links are established only when the similarity exceeds a predefined threshold. The training algorithm optimizes network parameters through gradient descent, improving semantic feature extraction accuracy. The testing algorithm evaluates UAV collaboration efficiency and communication quality. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with benchmarks, the proposed MC-DSA improves image semantic segmentation accuracy while maintaining task execution efficiency. As a result, it reduces redundant transmissions and offers an effective solution for multi-UAV communication networks.
Can deterministic information loss yield post-quantum pseudorandomness with $TC^0$ evaluation? We show that deterministic rounding achieves this under quantum worst-case lattice hardness, with fixed polynomial parameters and no predetermined sample bound. We introduce learning with algebraic rounding (LAR), which applies an explicit integer rounding map to blocks of secret-dependent linear measurements and encodes the result in a lattice quotient. For one fixed family with polynomially bounded modulus and dimensions, deterministic labels on exactly uniform, secret-independent public matrices are computationally indistinguishable from independent uniform labels for every polynomial number of classical random examples. Our classical reduction from Gaussian LWE, combined with the quantum worst-case reduction to LWE, bases LAR on GapSVP and SIVP over general lattices at approximation factor $\widetilde{O}(q)$, where $q$ is the modulus. The proof uses source-independent affine transport: public affine maps sampled independently of the hidden errors transport the Gaussian error law close to uniform on the rounding map's zero-label fiber while preserving exactly uniform public matrices. For every fixed inverse-polynomial accuracy, we give a polynomial-time sampler for the same public parameter family. This yields the first post-quantum weak pseudorandom function with joint key-and-input evaluation in $TC^0$, secure against uniform quantum polynomial-time distinguishers given any polynomial number of classical uniform random examples. We also prove hardness of learning polynomial-size two-hidden-layer ReLU networks from noiseless uniform random examples, even for quantum polynomial-time improper learners.
Mingxuan Li, Huanzhi Mao, Qiuyang Mang, Hanchen Li, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Alex Dimakis
An LLM agent's cost and success depend on its model, its harness, and its environment. In addition to the widely studied directions of parameter tuning and harness optimization, we propose the third direction: optimization over stationary environments. Agents are often deployed in rich environments shared by many tasks, such as a company's Slack workspace or a complex collection of data sources, documents or tickets. We call these environments stationary environments. We introduce EnvOpt, a method for automated end-to-end optimization of stationary environments for any given model and harness, using real or synthetic tasks without needing any graders or reference answers. On AutomationBench, EnvOpt reduces the cost of Claude Haiku 4.5 by 72.7% and raises its pass rate by 14.34%. The same environment transfers to Opus 5, cutting its cost by 68.1% with a 1.34% gain. Added on top of Meta-Harness's optimized harness for Haiku 4.5, it lowers cost by a further 83.4% and adds 11.17% accuracy over Meta-Harness alone. Across 5 benchmarks, EnvOpt significantly reduces the cost of agents while improving or maintaining pass rate, and is transferable to different models and different harnesses. We also discuss common successful and rejected environment optimization strategies during automated optimization. More broadly, our results show that how information is represented to an agent shapes both its cost and its success, making the environment worth optimizing in addition to the parameters and the harness.
Dense labels of the aorta in CT are slow to draw, and the public aortic CT datasets that could stand in for them each label different structures under their own conventions. Large language model (LLM) agents can now write code and read images. We asked whether such a model labels these scans better as a free-form agent that writes its own segmentation code, or inside a harness, where an automated pass labels the scan and the model reviews the result. We built a harness, Taurus, and compared it with free-form agents by blind label recovery: we withheld the human labels of six public datasets (939 volumes) and scored every approach against each dataset's own classes. In the first version of Taurus, the model's review raised the primary metric on only two of six datasets, by less than the noise between two reviews of the same case. A free-form agent running Claude Opus 5.5 scored higher on most datasets. Moving what the free-form agents did well into the automated pass then carried most of the gain on 38 held-out cases. The final version smooths the label surfaces with a fixed rule and checks for the large errors the automated pass tends to make, such as an aneurysm drawn to half its size. Each check that fires puts a multiple-choice question to the model, with candidate corrections drawn on the scan. It matched the surface smoothness of the human references, and in the primary metric we found no difference from the free-form Opus agent, at under half its cost, $1.22 against $2.71 per case. Most of what made Taurus competitive came from the harness and its automation rather than from the language model itself. Taurus shows that this kind of annotation can be automated, so that expert time can move from drawing labels to checking them.
Cryptanalytic model extraction poses a fundamental threat to deep learning model confidentiality by enabling precise parameter recovery with theoretical guarantees of functional equivalence. To counter this growing threat, $\mathsf{TraintoDefend}$ (NeurIPS 2025) was proposed as the first dedicated defense against cryptanalytic extraction and remains the only defense believed to be effective to date. It encourages neurons to learn similar weights so that they switch activation states together, making their individual contributions harder to distinguish. However, we notice that neurons with similar weights need not switch activation states together under small perturbations. Instead, weight similarity can cause the original clustering rule to merge signatures from distinct neurons when only a subset of their normalized weight coordinates agree. Motivated by this observation, we introduce $\mathsf{SimBreak}$, an adaptive clustering rule that breaks the weight-similarity defense of $\mathsf{TraintoDefend}$. $\mathsf{SimBreak}$ estimates a relative scale from all jointly observed weight coordinates and uses the same scale to test both weight direction and bias consistency. Across six protected fully connected networks trained on MNIST, $\mathsf{SimBreak}$ raises target layer signature recovery from $0\%$ to $100\%$, with a maximum relative recovery error of $2^{-22.27}$. Our work challenges the use of neuron weight similarity as a sufficient basis for protection and establishes adaptive evaluation as essential to assessing cryptanalytic extraction defenses.