As embodied agents perform object-goal navigation across residential environments, they accumulate successful experiences whose semantic structure recurs across scenes even when geometric trajectories do not. Reusing such experience is challenging because differences in region naming and observation granularity produce distinct graph representations of similar approaches, while meaningful differences in anchors, branches, and endpoints must stay distinguishable. We introduce HTCE, a homeomorphism-inspired topological framework that canonicalizes and reuses navigation experience. Feature and topology subdivisions characterize representational variations, and their semantically constrained reductions produce comparable semantic sequences and structural signatures while preserving semantic anchors, branching relations, and navigation endpoints. HTCE then retrieves historical successful approaches through subdivision-aware matching as guidance for a frozen vision-language policy. Canonicalization compresses the experience index losslessly, merging 17.7--23.6\% of distinct stored route descriptions while retaining full task performance. Under a single frozen vision-language backbone shared by all compared systems, HTCE attains the best SR and SPL in every setting---59.9\%/31.8\% on HM3D v0.1, 71.0\%/31.5\% on HM3D v0.2, and 46.6\%/16.6\% on MP3D---with SR gains of up to 4.9 points and structured retrieval contributing up to 2.8 SPL points. The code is available in https://github.com/startracker0/htce.git
We propose VT-MUSE, a Multimodal Unified SEquential representation learning framework for visuotactilemanipulation. Existing approaches often encode visual and tactile observations independently before fusion, limiting their ability to capture fine-grained cross-modal dependencies. Moreover, most methods focus on observations at the current time step and overlook the temporal evolution of contact. VT-MUSE addresses both limitations through a two-stage representation learning framework. In Stage I, modality specific encoders are jointly adapted via cross-modal temporal alignment and masked-view consistency. In Stage II, a conditional variational latent model processes masked visual sequences together with full tactile histories. Auxiliary decoders reconstruct the masked recent visual observations and predict tactile depth changes, encouraging the latent representation to retain both global visual context and local contact dynamics. The learned representation is subsequently integrated into a lightweight Transformer policy through gated cross-attention. On the simulation benchmark, VT-MUSE outperforms the strongest baseline evaluated on all tasks by 11 percentage points and also achieves substantial improvements in real-world experiments.
Zilu Zhang, Jing Bao, Lifeng Qiao, Sheng Xu, Qiantai Feng, Siqi Sun, Yang Yang
Protein-complex structure prediction with AlphaFold 3 depends on MSA content, depth, and cross-chain pairing. Current pipelines apply uniform recipes, typically maximizing depth and pairing by species, yet even whether cross-chain pairing helps AF3 remains contested. We show that the value of both depth and pairing is strongly target-dependent, so no single recipe is optimal across interfaces. We introduce an autonomous agent that treats a frozen AF3 as a black-box experimental instrument. For each target, the agent formulates biological hypotheses, analyzes and reorganizes the MSA, and iteratively refines sequence selection and pairing using predictor label-free signals alone. On 1{,}015 protein--protein interfaces from three benchmarks released after AF3's training cutoff, the agent improves overall interface DockQ over AF3's default pipeline and fixed MSA recipes on every benchmark, while using on average 60\% fewer MSA sequences than the default. Gains are largest for inter-species heteromers, where species-based pairing is unreliable: mean DockQ increases from 0.465 to 0.612 on FoldBench and from 0.482 to 0.562 on HD439. The improvements arise from both sequence construction and pairing policy, including deliberate non-pairing. These results recast MSA design as a target-specific problem and show that an autonomous agent can adapt it at test time through biological reasoning and self-directed, confidence-guided experimentation.
Spectroscopic diagnostics provide rich information for characterizing plasma states in tokamak fusion experiments, while existing learning-based approaches are often designed for individual tasks and rely heavily on labeled data. In this work, we propose SpectralTF-MAE, a self-supervised spectral foundation model for tokamak plasma diagnostics. The model is pretrained on paired charge-exchange recombination spectroscopy (CXRS) and X-ray crystal spectroscopy (XCS) measurements through masked spectral reconstruction. To better capture diagnostically important spectral structures, we introduce a peak-aware masking strategy together with a peak-enhanced reconstruction objective, encouraging the model to focus on characteristic spectral regions. A shared Transformer encoder is employed to learn transferable representations across different diagnostic modalities. The pretrained model is further adapted to several downstream tasks, including plasma-parameter prediction, cross-diagnostic spectral generation, and spectral peak analysis. Experiments on EAST diagnostic data demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves competitive performance across different tasks and consistently benefits from self-supervised spectral pretraining. These results indicate the potential of SpectralTF-MAE as a general and transferable representation learning framework for plasma spectroscopic diagnostics. The source code and pre-trained models will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/OpenFusion/tree/main/SpectralTF-MAE.
Current medical artificial intelligence (AI) systems are often task-specific, poorly integrated, and difficult to interpret, limiting support for multimodal clinical workflows. We developed and evaluated EyeAgent for ophthalmic decision support. EyeAgent comprises three layers including 54 task-specific EyeTools, 32 clinical skills, and a modular large language model reasoning core with interchangeable backbones. A multi-level evaluation distinguished this scope from empirical system-level validation. Component-level evaluation assessed newly developed models on held-out splits of datasets totaling 871,862 samples. System-level evaluation included illustrative cases of workflow breadth, a 200-case expert-rating study of output quality, and an exploratory multicenter reader study comparing unassisted and EyeAgent-assisted performance among 27 ophthalmologists from 11 centers. Skill-level and backbone ablations further assessed orchestration and robustness. In illustrative cases, EyeAgent showed task-specific advantages over GPT-5.5 in lesion quantitation, cross-modality synthesis, and uncertainty-aware reporting. In the expert-rating study, EyeAgent achieved an F1 score of 0.84 for skill selection, with 82.7%-92.0% of outputs rated acceptable or better across six clinical dimensions. In the exploratory multicenter reader study, diagnostic accuracy increased from 72.8% unassisted to 91.9% assisted (difference, 19.1 percentage points (pp); 95% CI, 13.6-24.7; Holm-adjusted P<0.001). Report completeness increased from 55.8% to 75.6% (difference, 19.8 pp; 95% CI, 14.8-24.7; Holm-adjusted P<0.001). Across the evaluated settings, EyeAgent supported interpretable, evidence-guided reasoning and showed potential for human-AI collaboration. Broader real-world effectiveness and generalizability require prospective and cross-population validation.
Medical Image Quality Assessment (IQA) serves as a critical safety gate for clinical AI, yet existing approaches rely on scalar metrics that fail to capture the descriptive, expert-like evaluation process central to clinical practice. We introduce MedQ-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for language-based medical IQA evaluation with MLLMs, establishing a perception--description paradigm across 5 imaging modalities and over 40 quality attributes. The benchmark comprises two complementary tasks: MedQ-Perception probes low-level visual attribute discrimination via 2,600 expert-annotated perceptual queries; MedQ-Description covers both no-reference and comparison description sub-tasks with 708 expert-annotated samples, evaluated through a four-dimensional judging protocol. Comprehensive evaluation of 23 state-of-the-art MLLMs reveals that current models exhibit only preliminary and unstable capabilities, and highlights the urgent need for targeted optimization of MLLMs in medical IQA. Project & Dataset: https://github.com/liujiyaoFDU/MedQ-Bench
We study multigrade deep learning (MGDL) as a principled framework for structured error refinement in deep neural networks. While the approximation power of neural networks is now relatively well understood, training very deep architectures remains challenging due to highly nonconvex and often ill-conditioned optimization landscapes. In contrast, for relatively shallow networks, most notably certain one-hidden-layer ReLU models, training admits convex reformulations with global guarantees under appropriate settings, motivating learning paradigms that improve stability while scaling to depth. MGDL builds on this insight by training deep networks grade by grade: previously learned grades are frozen, and each newly added grade-wise subnetwork is composed on top of the previously learned grades and trained to fit the residual left by the current approximation, yielding a structured and interpretable hierarchical refinement process. We develop an operator-theoretic foundation for MGDL and prove that, for any continuous target function defined on a hypercube, there exists a fixed-width multigrade ReLU scheme whose residuals are pointwise nonincreasing in magnitude and converge uniformly to zero, with strict $L^p$-norm decay at every nontrivial grade for $p\in [1,\infty)$. To the best of our knowledge, this work provides the first rigorous constructive approximation guarantee showing that a grade-wise residual refinement scheme can achieve vanishing error in a fixed-width multigrade ReLU architecture.
We study amplitude-only rescaling of feed-forward network (FFN) activations to repair tool calls and other structured outputs, using multiplicative coordinate masks rather than additive steering vectors. Amplitude Gating (AG) keeps pretrained weights fixed and applies magnitude/entropy-based masks at six SwiGLU sites, with a Newton-Schulz windowed ranking variant. Across three Qwen checkpoints and six text/tool endpoints, effects are task dependent. Under frozen local scorers, Qwen3.5-9B non-NS configurations improve two function-call endpoints by +2.61/+2.67 percentage points (pp) and static ToolBench in/out-domain by +1.64/+2.82 pp; JSON gains are small. These gains survive comparing the weaker of two observed AG runs with the stronger baseline, supporting observed-run robustness rather than population significance. Scores measure lexical or answer/action-name agreement, not executed-tool success. Under the current experimental conditions, the six-task random-forest refit improves native score by +0.46 pp with a positive conditional paired interval; transfer to other settings requires further evaluation. The results support task-specific interventions; causal mechanisms, equal-budget advantages, repeated-run uncertainty, and serving cost require further evaluation. Code and experimental data: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23654706.
Guoyi Zhang, Yanjin Du, Guangsheng Xu, Zhengyao Zhao, Siyang Chen, Jingjing Gao, Yuezheng Zhou, Yiyang Wu 等 19 位作者
Small uncrewed underwater vehicles are proliferating and threaten maritime security, yet evade sonar and magnetic sensors built for larger submarines. Infrared thermal wakes, generated by hydrodynamic displacement that modulates the cold-skin layer, offer a non-acoustic, non-magnetic alternative even without cooling-water discharge. Existing studies, however, rely on idealized simulations that fail to capture real-world backgrounds, offering limited guidance for target-background discrimination. We establish AVP-IR-Wake, the first large-scale, real-world, physically diverse benchmark of 161,485 frames collected over three years. We show that thermal wakes are extended structures of discrete vortices, violating the compactness assumption of conventional targets. We reveal local indistinguishability: individual wake vortices are statistically identical to wind-induced background vortices in temporal, frequency, and sparse domains, sharing low-frequency information and long-range correlations. This challenges the assumptions of compact, transient, high-frequency targets in conventional detection. Yet we establish global morphological separability: although locally inseparable, the wake as a whole is organized by vehicle trajectory, whereas background clutter is organized by wind-driven thermal fronts. This explains why representative detectors fail and shows that reliable detection must shift from local feature extraction to global trajectory-constrained physical modeling. Because the cold-skin layer varies globally and seasonally, forecasting wake observability will require integrating physical oceanography and atmospheric science, linking underwater surveillance to the changing ocean surface.
Hierarchical task knowledge enables efficient problem solving by allowing previously acquired skills to be reused across tasks and problem instances. In this paper, we investigate curriculum-guided acquisition of hierarchical task knowledge in an HTN learning framework. We compare three approaches: online learning during problem solving, human-designed curricula, and an automated curriculum generation procedure that derives learning experiences from verified LLM-generated solution traces. The proposed procedure solves small training problems with an LLM, extracts task accomplishment information, and transforms it into ordered sequences of state-task learning problems for HTN method acquisition. We evaluate the three approaches across multiple planning domains. The results demonstrate that automatically generated curricula recover much of the benefit of expert-designed curricula while substantially reducing the token cost of online hierarchical knowledge acquisition.