Financial asset recommendation for retail investors is typically optimized for relevance, that is, how well a recommendation matches what each user will buy. From the service provider's point of view, the value of a recommendation also depends on portfolio performance: the risk-adjusted return the recommended assets (the basket) deliver, which drives user engagement and fee revenue. The two goals are rarely achieved jointly, because the recommendations that best match user behavior concentrate on a few popular assets whose returns are highly correlated, which caps the risk-adjusted return a provider can offer. We propose Decorrelated-Satellite Expert Re-ranking (\textbf{DSER}), which retains the most relevant recommendations from an expert-following list and replaces the rest with return-decorrelated alternatives. The number of replaced slots is a single integer~$m$ (a knob) that the provider sets, so the relevance--performance trade-off becomes an explicit, auditable choice rather than a property hidden inside a learned model. In experiments on the public FAR-Trans retail-brokerage dataset, under the primary protocol, replacing a few slots improves risk-adjusted return at a small relevance cost, and the gain survives realistic trading costs at typical retail portfolio sizes. Minimizing correlation would lower basket volatility, but in our data the least-correlated assets are more volatile and higher-return, so their volatility offsets that reduction while their return drives the gain, not lower volatility. The resulting trade-off is asymmetric, with the relevance cost consistent across market phases while the gain is phase-dependent. The provider sets $m$ to read off exactly how much relevance each operating point costs.
As agents collaborate on longer tasks, responsibility may pass between models before the work is complete. The receiving model must build on prior decisions, observations, and actions while addressing the remaining requirements. Evaluating this transition requires connecting the information preserved at handoff to how the receiver continues the work, a relationship that task-success and memory-retention scores alone do not capture. We introduce the Handoff State Continuity Benchmark (HSC-Bench), comprising 1,039 tasks that evaluate two complementary aspects of task takeover: recovering relevant repository evidence and continuing from established conversational, tool, and file-work state. Comparisons across six receiving models show that structured handoff state improves repository evidence recovery for every model and continuation performance for most models. The strongest receivers differ between the two tracks, showing that evidence-recovery rankings alone do not characterize performance when continuing from inherited state. By combining these comparisons with checks of subsequent responses and actions, HSC-Bench evaluates both access to prior evidence and adherence to established commitments and completed work. This provides a basis for selecting receiving models and assessing handoff representations according to the work that must be carried forward.
In this paper, we propose a foreground-aware dataset distillation method that performs content-adaptive dual-path patch selection. With the rising computational cost of training large-scale deep models, dataset distillation has emerged as a promising approach for constructing compact synthetic datasets that retain knowledge from large original datasets. Although optimization-based methods can achieve strong performance, they often incur considerable computational and memory costs and may produce synthetic images that generalize poorly across architectures. Recent non-optimization-based methods alleviate these limitations by constructing distilled images from real-image patches. However, their inflexible patch-construction strategies may either retain redundant background content or discard important foreground structures. To address this issue, we propose a foreground-aware dataset distillation framework with content-adaptive dual-path patch selection. We first use Grounded SAM2 to estimate the foreground occupancy of each image and derive category-specific routing thresholds from the corresponding class-wise distributions. Each image is routed to one of two complementary paths: the candidate-crop selection path for images with relatively sparse foregrounds, or the direct transformation path for images with relatively dominant foregrounds. This dual-path mechanism balances foreground concentration and preservation, reducing redundant background content while retaining the structural integrity of foreground objects at the dataset level. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNette, and ImageWoof with two network architectures and three distillation budgets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the baseline method RDED in nearly all evaluated settings.