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We study self-modeling: an LLM's ability to answer questions about its own behavior. We focus on verifiable behavioral questions, such as whether a prompt edit would change the model's final answer. To measure this capability, we introduce a benchmark that tests diverse types of self-modeling questions. Current models show non-trivial but limited self-modeling skill, and make systematic mistakes on simple counterfactual questions about their own behavior. To improve self-modeling skill, we develop a scalable synthetic-data pipeline that produces self-modeling training data, and show that reinforcement-learning can improve aggregate self-modeling skill across three open-source model families with some transfer to held-out tasks. These gains, however, do not seem to constitute introspection consistently: improved self-modeling may not arise from privileged access to the model's internal decision process.

This paper addresses the problem of translating natural-language routing rules written by business administrators into executable workflow graphs for enterprise contact centers. Each target is a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of conditional actions with parallel branches, hit-first fallback chains, and per-branch Boolean predicates, encoded in the JSON dialect of a commercial routing platform. We show that neuro-symbolic decomposition enables lower-cost, non-reasoning large language models to generate complex workflow DAGs at production-relevant quality without expensive extended-reasoning models. Our central diagnostic is an emission-density bottleneck: on a 635-rule benchmark of manufactured synthetic data, models select the correct graph nodes with high accuracy but increasingly misconfigure attributes and Boolean grouping as the number of interdependent nodes emitted in one pass grows. We therefore move combinatorial graph construction from the model into a deterministic compiler driven by a compact intermediate representation, with a learned registry-selection front end that focuses generation on relevant vocabulary. Across four models, the full system reaches approximately 89% LLM-judge validity, approximately 90% exact-match condition accuracy, and 99-100% valid JSON while using roughly half the per-rule prompt tokens of a monolithic prompt. On GPT-5.3-chat, the method improves judge validity by 24 percentage points and achieves statistical equivalence to a reasoning model's out-of-the-box quality, although an approximately 8-point frontier gap remains. We also present a deployment path and transferable lessons for structured-generation applications.

Controllable image relighting is an important problem in image editing, and hand-drawn scribbles provide an intuitive interface for specifying the desired illumination. However, existing methods do not establish a consistent and effective mapping between scribble inputs and relighting results, limiting their ability to control illumination intensity, chromaticity, and complex spatial distributions. We address this limitation by introducing a material-decoupled illumination representation, termed the Lumi Map, which establishes an explicit mapping between user scribbles and the resulting illumination, thereby improving both relighting accuracy and controllability. Specifically, we use a renderer to synthesize source image-Lumi Map-relit image triplets and train the model to predict the target relighting result conditioned on the Lumi Map. To mitigate the domain gap introduced by synthetic data, we further perform reconstruction training on real relighting pairs, improving the model's generalization to real-world images. Finally, we present Dior-Light, an image relighting method controlled by hand-drawn strokes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in relighting accuracy and enables effective control over illumination intensity and chromaticity on in-the-wild images.

Safety guardrails serve as the last line of defense against harmful inputs and outputs of large language models (LLMs), yet they are trained and evaluated almost exclusively on short text. We present LongGuard, a framework that evaluates, mechanistically analyzes, and mitigates long-context guardrail failure. We formulate the task as Safety Needle-in-a-Haystack (SafetyNIAH) over a 0.25k-32k length grid; across 15 mainstream guardrails, unsafe recall drops monotonically by more than 50% on average, and a paired Benign-Fill vs. Needle-Repeat design attributes the failure to proportional dilution of the unsafe needle rather than to absolute length. A three-layer attention-logit-behavior analysis on six guardrails locates the mechanism: attention mass on the unsafe needle is diluted, the unsafe-over-safe logit margin is compressed in lockstep, and the detection decision collapses accordingly, with this attention->logit->behavior chain remaining consistent after partialling out length. We further isolate a sparse set of guard-specialized retrieval heads that exhibit partial specificity relative to their base models. Building on the analysis, we propose two training-free mitigations - Chunked Detection (CD) and Attention-Head Sharpening (AHS) - and a deployment protocol, Context-Aware Hyperparameter Routing (CAHR), that selects configurations by context length and audit side. Across five benchmarks spanning synthetic data, long-context attacks, and reasoning-model outputs, CAHR-CD and CAHR-AHS improve the six-guardrail average by 22% and 13%, respectively. Code and data are available online.

Driven by the availability of large-scale datasets, Human Pose Estimation (HPE) plays a critical role in numerous downstream tasks. However, mainstream benchmarks exhibit severe representation bias, predominantly featuring able-bodied individuals. While a few pioneering datasets have attempted to address limb differences, their annotation protocols fail to generalize, struggling to represent specialized mechanical structures like running blades or unprosthetized residual limbs. To bridge this gap, we introduce ProPose, a large-scale benchmark featuring a novel annotation protocol that unifies the topological representation of biological limbs, diverse prostheses, and physical absences within a single framework. Because real-world prosthetic images are inherently scarce and exhibit extreme long-tail distributions, we design a Real-to-Synthetic data expansion pipeline to explicitly synthesize and expand the underrepresented cases. However, simply training existing models on this enriched dataset often leads to suboptimal solutions, as they estimate each keypoint independently and might hallucinate non-existent joints on mechanical structures. To resolve this, we propose ProLoss, a structure-aware objective that enforces keypoint dependencies within a single limb to prevent unrealistic limb predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach improves the classification accuracy of long-tail prosthetic joints by 2% to 6% without compromising spatial coordinate localization performance. This work sets a foundation for inclusive pose estimation, unlocking new possibilities for understanding the interactions between human bodies and assistive devices.

LLM-based simulated clients are increasingly used to train novice counselors, evaluate LLM therapists, and generate synthetic data. However, current simulators produce overly cooperative clients that disclose too readily, accept therapeutic reframes without resistance, and resolve core issues within a single session. We trace these issues to profiles that lack causal depth and behavioral mechanisms that treat all content as equally accessible. We present PatientAct, a framework for client simulation grounded in established clinical theories. Our profiles integrate the 5Ps clinical case formulation, providing causal depth without tying the design to any single therapeutic modality. During simulation, profiles include a dynamic memory layer in which items carry trust thresholds (e.g., symptoms are available early, whereas formative memories require a sustained therapeutic alliance). At each turn, the client's emotional reaction and behavior are modeled before generating a response. If the therapist approaches gated content, PatientAct expresses resistance in terms of quantity, content, and style rather than defaulting to cooperation or a single resistance pattern. We evaluate our framework on 40 clinical situations and demonstrate that it generates diverse profiles with high clinical plausibility. Moreover, PatientAct significantly outperforms the baselines, yielding substantial gains in resistance quality and behavioral realism. Our code and data will be publicly available via github.com/Sahandfer/PatientHub.

Inferring the ground-truth from noisy crowdsourced labels is an important theoretical and practical problem. Neural network-based methods offer an alternative to classical Bayesian models which require specifying a family of generative models used for inference. However, current models either still rely on fairly simple generative models for inference or require pseudo-labels or synthetic data to train the aggregate classifier. We propose a graph VAE architecture in which the decoder and encoder use GAT-based message passing on the adjacency graph of a crowdsourced dataset and its dual, respectively. The ground-truth labels are treated as latent variables, enabling unsupervised representation learning without needing to train a separate classifier. We show our model achieves state of the art performance on crowdsourcing benchmarks. We then demonstrate the generality of our approach by showing how the original crowdsourcing graph can be augmented to incorporate side information such as representations from neural network classifiers trained on the noisy labels to substantially boost their classification performance at test time.

Can AI systems be aligned to human values? The popularization of large language models (LLMs) and multi-modal foundation models has seen a rise in harms spanning from toxic speech and hallucinations to AI agents executing unauthorized actions. Within the field of AI safety, these harmful instances are often framed as the alignment problem, or of models being misaligned with human values. Researchers have responded by pursuing applied and theoretical AI value alignment efforts, often without specifying what they mean by human values. How does the field of AI value alignment conceive of human values? How are these conceptions of values technically operationalized and evaluated? What does the emergent theory of value from this field signify for the future of AI? We annotated 94 value alignment research papers to discern their implicit theory of values in AI. The majority do not define values, relying heavily on preferences as a stand in that runs the risk of reducing complex culturally situated concepts down to binary choices. As researchers dispense with using human annotators for model training and evaluation, turning instead to synthetic data and autorater approaches to aligning and evaluating models, we identify the potential to close off alternative methods for contesting and enacting values in foundation models. In making AI value alignments philosophical commitments explicit, we seek to bring great specificity and under explored perspectives in the debate on whether and how AI can address human values.

Foundation models are transforming business workflows and boosting productivity, yet they remain largely absent from engineering domains such as power system analysis, where strict physical consistency must be enforced. We present GENCO (GEometric Neural Corrective Optimizer), a unified neural solver for steady-state transmission grid analysis that handles power flow (PF), optimal power flow (OPF), and state estimation (SE) within a single architecture and shared network representation. To support advances in neural power system solvers, we introduce the open-source GridFM Development Framework, which standardizes synthetic data generation and training in a low-code environment. We also release large-scale datasets with millions of PF and OPF scenarios across diverse grid topologies to support reproducible benchmarking. We evaluate GENCO on the PFDelta and OPFData benchmarks against state-of-the-art neural solvers and classical solvers, including Newton-Raphson and IPOPT, as well as on real-world Hydro-Québec SCADA data. For large-scale PF, GENCO recovers the full AC operating state, including voltage magnitudes and reactive power that DC-PF cannot provide, while matching DC-PF-level active power-balance residuals. It achieves up to 30x speedups over Newton-Raphson at only 2x the runtime of DC-PF. For OPF, it achieves up to 85x speedups over IPOPT while improving feasibility, optimality, and runtime over DC-OPF. For SE, GENCO is more robust than classical weighted least squares to noisy measurements and network parameter errors, and always returns a high-quality estimate even when weighted least squares fails to converge. Together, the unified architecture and development framework provide a new approach to large-scale steady-state grid analysis, lowering the barrier to entry for power system engineers and marking a step toward Grid Foundation Models.

Text-based person anomaly search requires retrieving real-world pedestrian images from detailed natural-language descriptions using models trained primarily on synthetic data. This Sim2Real setting is particularly challenging because visually similar candidates may differ only in subtle actions, object interactions, or appearance attributes, while applying multimodal large language models to the entire gallery is computationally expensive. We propose an anchor-constrained coarse-to-fine retrieval framework that combines global semantic matching with fine-grained verification. First, each query is represented by its original caption, a structured concatenation, and several semantic facets. Heterogeneous vision-language retrievers are then integrated through robust per-query score calibration and soft claim-aware fusion. Full and concatenated captions serve as anchors to preserve candidate recall, whereas appearance, action, and object facets provide bounded corrective evidence. The resulting candidate pool is further refined by a discriminative Qwen3 reranker and two complementary semantic verification modules based on anomaly-aware cloze completion and multi-agent evidence reasoning. Finally, an uncertainty-gated consensus module adaptively reweights the three experts on ambiguous queries. Experiments on the PAB benchmark show that the proposed soft claim-aware retrieval achieves 86.44% mAP@10, substantially outperforming individual retrieval backbones. The complete framework further improves performance to 95.41% mAP@10, 94.44% R@1, and 99.09% R@5. These results demonstrate that preserving strong global retrieval while restricting expensive semantic reasoning to a small candidate pool is effective for fine-grained Sim2Real person anomaly search. Our code will be available on Github.

Deep learning-driven representations such as neural radiance fields (NeRFs) and 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) have revolutionized the field of dynamic 3D scene reconstruction with improved visual precision and scalability. However, the reconstruction of fast-moving objects remains a challenge; existing methods based on conventional frame-based videos often struggle in scenarios such as sports events and animal videography. We propose an event-RGB fusion Gaussian splatting (ERF-GS) framework that integrates event information into both optimization and densification stages of the Gaussian splatting pipeline, taking advantage of novel event sensors with high frame-rate. Unlike many other event-assisted scene reconstruction methods, ERF-GS was developed using realistic simulation settings and realizes event-based learning detached from RGB inputs. This design enables its application beyond straightforward synthetic data into the realm of natural video with complex layout, low frame rates and severe motion blur. Our experiments show that ERF-GS outperforms both the 4DGS baseline and the concurrent E-D3DGS on different variants of the Neu3D and Nvidia datasets which include blurry RGB frames and disjoint RGB-event viewpoints. Our code is available at https://github.com/andrewbxy/ERF-GS.

Event-based vision is becoming an increasingly important sensing paradigm for robotics, yet its adoption remains limited by sensor availability and the lack of integrated simulation tools for modern robotics platforms. This paper presents EsaacSim, a multimodal event camera add-on for NVIDIA Isaac Sim that enables online simulation of configurable event cameras with grayscale and Bayer RGGB event generation. The framework supports multiple event camera resolutions and provides synchronized RGB, APS, event, depth, and IMU outputs through native ROS2 interfaces. A motion-guided frame-gap synthesis strategy further increases the effective temporal resolution while preserving compatibility with the Isaac Sim rendering pipeline. Experimental evaluation demonstrates synchronized multimodal simulation across representative robotic scenes and efficient online performance over five event camera resolutions at effective event rates from 240 to 960Hz. Event stream generation requires 6.98--27.28ms for grayscale events and 7.58--29.16ms for Bayer RGGB events while using less than 400MB of additional GPU memory on an NVIDIA RTX~4060 GPU. These results show that EsaacSim enables supports online multimodal event-camera simulation for robotics research and synthetic data generation. We release an early version of the simulator and report its current architecture and performance.

Longitudinal MRI enables sensitive measurement of structural brain change for studying aging and neurodegenerative disease. Deformable image registration is a key tool for estimating such change by computing a dense deformation that captures geometric differences between longitudinal scans. However, MRI scanners introduce geometric distortions that vary across acquisition systems and protocols, such as gradient non-linearity (GNL) distortion. Existing registration methods estimate a single field that conflates biological and technical effects, potentially biasing downstream morphometric measurements if distortions remain (partially) uncorrected. We propose $\texttt{DisMorph}$, a registration framework trained entirely on synthetic data that explicitly decomposes longitudinal deformation into technical and anatomical transforms. It predicts two dense deformations, each encoding one effect. During training, a novel generative model synthesizes both effects separately to provide disentanglement supervision, while domain randomization promotes generalization across imaging protocols. We evaluate our method in three complementary settings. On simulated data with known ground truth, our method detects anatomical change more accurately and consistently than conventional registration. On real image pairs that differ only by GNL distortion, our method assigns most geometric change to the distortion field, demonstrating specificity in the absence of anatomical change. On longitudinal Alzheimer's disease (AD) pairs, our method detects anatomical change in AD-related brain structures while identifying residual distortion left after standard correction. By disentangling MRI-induced distortion from biological change in the longitudinal deformation, our method paves the way for more accurate longitudinal morphometry in clinical settings where maintaining acquisition consistency is challenging.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) models predicting mental health outcomes rarely specify what they measure: contextual knowledge, emotional content, or syntactic structure. NLP Psychometrics treats psychological prediction from text as a psychometric problem, linking scores to interpretable linguistic evidence and testing beyond the training text format. Nine LLMs, conditioned on controlled personas (cognitive digital shadows), completed psychometric questionnaires with textual explanations per item. We extracted emotional profiles and syntactic-semantic structure via textual forma mentis networks, combined with personality and sociodemographic variables in ablated random forest (RF) regressors, using SHAP to identify which features drove performance and in which direction. Full RF models explained up to 70.8% of variance in life satisfaction (SWLS), 55.7% in depression (PHQ-9), and, for DASS-21, 68.5% depression, 76.0% anxiety, 72.4% stress. Sociodemographics alone explained no meaningful variance in depression, anxiety, or stress, but did so for life satisfaction, where emotion features and income were the strongest predictors; neuroticism and network topology instead dominated depression and anxiety, reversing direction between them. Without retraining, RF models separated diaries from low- and high-score personas ($r$ up to 0.91) and, using only network/emotion features, classified clinical from control participants in real transcripts with up to 68% accuracy. These results show the promise and limits of synthetic data: LLM personas can expose model biases, recover patterns consistent with clinical rumination, and support psychometric prediction from human text without a matched questionnaire, but cannot substitute for human validation. NLP Psychometrics makes these distinctions explicit, measurable, and testable through interpretable AI and network/emotional features.

In 3D reconstruction, camera calibration is an essential element for achieving high fidelity and accuracy of the reconstructed geometry. While existing approaches rely upon 2D planar calibration, this work proposes a framework tailored for 3D reconstruction that is based on predicting scene rays, which adds flexibility to the reconstruction pipeline and enables the use of recent advances in camera models. Novel metrics, reconstruction and intersection error, derived from predicted scene rays are employed in combination with a bootstrapping procedure that statistically evaluates different calibration objects and calibration pipelines for both intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters. The results show that the generalized distortion model more faithfully captures physical camera effects and yields an improvement in calibration accuracy. Reprojection error is shown to be a potentially misleading indicator of 3D accuracy, and the proposed ray-based metrics provide a more holistic assessment. An icosahedron calibration target is designed to enrich calibration information for 3D reconstruction together with a ring-feature-based detector. The icosahedral target yields approximately 40% lower mean intersection and more stable calibration across bootstrap trials on synthetic data, while real-data performance demands very tight fabrication tolerances.

Against the backdrop of violence in police interactions with the U.S. public, we explore how deferentially police officers speak to virtual characters depicted as Black adult males in vir- tual reality (VR) simulations. We evaluate the effect of seeing and communicating with these characters through a causal in- ference lens, where the assignment of the Black man character to a police officer and simulation is the treatment variable. Our (marginal) average treatment effect AT E measures the social impact of the character on the deference of officer statements with each turn of the conversation. Soberingly, we find that most officers speak less deferentially to Black man characters, except for White, biracial, and multiracial female officers, es- pecially in settings where the VR character was known to be a suspect. Across a full conversation of a typical VR scene, these marginal AT Es can result in notable changes in def- erence of tone (two to several points difference on a scale of 0-10), above and beyond that due to the initial effect of per- ceiving a Black male character. Even more disconcerting is that this can contribute to conversation breakdowns that po- tentially result in violence or danger to both the public and the police. We also explored the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for ATE estimation. From our methods com- parison analysis, including model validation against synthetic data, we provide unique scientific insights on LLM-assisted methodologies for ATE estimation. As such, for ATE esti- mation with multilevel data with text, we recommend mixed effects models with the inverse propensity treatment weighted (iptw) approach, which utilized an LLM for text feature cre- ation. While we also tested LLMs for finetuning prediction models ultimately for ATE estimation, we conclude they are an area for further development and refinement.

Large language model agents need to perceive human behavior in physical environments. Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar provides a privacy-friendly and contactless sensing modality, but radar observations are difficult to align with language. Existing radar-language methods often rely on synthetic data or lack explicit supervision for human body structure and motion. We present mmMind, a radar-language model that uses synchronized 3D pose as training-only supervision. A spatio-temporal radar encoder is pretrained to capture body configuration and motion dynamics, after which the pose head is removed so that inference requires radar alone. The learned radar representations are then aligned with an LLM for behavior captioning and spatio-temporal question answering. We also introduce mmMind-Bench, a real-world mmWave-language benchmark containing 17.9 hours of recordings from 23 participants across seven indoor environments. Experiments on captioning, question answering, and unseen-action generalization show that mmMind consistently outperforms existing radar-language baselines, while ablations confirm the importance of pose-guided pretraining.

Realistic weather translation is valuable for developing and evaluating autonomous driving systems, yet collecting paired videos of the same scenes under different weather conditions at scale is impractical. Existing methods therefore rely on synthetic data, 3D weather editing, or geometry-conditioned generation, often compromising weather realism or scene fidelity. We propose RealWeather, a driving world model for both realistic and scene-faithful weather translation. Our key idea is to learn authentic weather dynamics directly from real-world videos. Specifically, RealWeather employs Progressive Realism Bootstrapping, an iterative data-refinement strategy. Assisted by an auxiliary Pseudo-Clear Generation pipeline, training initially starts with pseudo-style conditioning videos. As training proceeds, these inputs are progressively replaced with increasingly realistic videos generated by the model itself. This strategy bridges the pseudo-to-real domain gap, allowing the model to adapt seamlessly to real-world input distributions and naturally support bidirectional clear adverse translation. Furthermore, to strictly enforce structural integrity and suppress hallucinations, we introduce Scene-Fidelity RL Optimization, a reward-driven policy optimization strategy that explicitly penalizes alterations to safety-critical driving elements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RealWeather significantly outperforms existing methods in visual realism and structural preservation, while enabling robust long-tail weather scenario generation and strong zero-shot out-of-distribution generalization. Our video demos can be found at https://hust-umi.github.io/RealWeather/.

Vision-language models (VLMs) are emerging as a key component of embodied intelligence, with growing applications in auto-labeling and end-to-end autonomous driving. However, existing approaches for improving spatiotemporal reasoning in VLMs often rely on complex preprocessing pipelines, expensive human annotations, or synthetic data, which limit scalability and introduce potential sim-to-real gaps. Moreover, although these methods have improved spatiotemporal understanding, they still lack strong metric reasoning capabilities for dynamic scenes, such as estimating object motion in real-world units. Prior work has explored LiDAR-based metric depth supervision to enhance spatial perception, but it does not directly address temporal reasoning. We introduce STAR-VLM, an automotive radar-supervised framework that enhances spatiotemporal VLMs with motion reasoning and metric velocity estimation for autonomous driving. Automotive radar is a low-cost and widely deployed sensor that provides complementary spatiotemporal supervision through range and Doppler measurements. By leveraging these measurements as label-free ground truth during training, STAR-VLM improves the metric spatiotemporal reasoning ability of VLMs. Through experiments on driving scenarios, we show that STAR-VLM achieves state-of-the-art performance on both motion classification and metric velocity estimation, outperforming even task-specific methods designed for each task. These results highlight automotive radar as a scalable and cost-effective source of supervision for building metric-aware spatiotemporal VLMs for real-world autonomous driving.

Large language models (LLMs) generate text by auto-regressively sampling the next token. This inherently leads to a many-to-many mapping between prompts and responses, complicating the task of inferring prompts from observed outputs. Prior work on LLM inversion frames prompt recovery as a semantic reconstruction task. They rely on fine-tuning pretrained sequence-to-sequence models on large external datasets--and requiring access to model weights or logits--to generate semantically plausible prompts. In contrast, we present a functional approach to inverting a given LLM in a black-box setting, without auxiliary aids. We train an explicit inverse language model entirely from scratch on data synthetically generated from the target LLM itself. Analogous to forward next-token prediction, our inverse model is trained using previous-token prediction, establishing a generative link between the forward and inverse processes that enables faithful prompt reconstruction. Moreover, it naturally supports diverse prompt reconstructions through sampling, whereby all such prompts induce similar responses under the forward, target LLM. Our approach generalises across datasets and exhibits transferability in reconstructing prompts from responses generated by different LLMs. Further, across the set of token based evaluation metrics for prompt and response reconstructions, our approach outperforms prior work.

Representation engineering reads and steers capability directions in large language models, yet methods are typically evaluated on paper-specific synthetic data. The resulting measurements are difficult to compare or reproduce and may reflect surface patterns rather than capabilities. We present RepBench, a benchmark-grounded data layer for capability-aligned representation probing. Crawling 13,427 benchmark papers yields a taxonomy of 182 capability clusters in 13 families; harvesting 353 public benchmark datasets yields 46,149 audited probe texts covering 94 capabilities, each supported by at least two independent benchmarks. This multi-benchmark design reduces dependence on any single source: raw per-text vectors exhibit no natural cluster granularity, whereas benchmark-pooled capability vectors show an interior clustering optimum at a small number of clusters on all 12 evaluated models, with low agreement to the human taxonomy. Under cross-benchmark transfer evaluation across twelve models completed by all four readouts, difference-in-means attains the highest model-level mean on ten models, while logistic regression wins the most capability-model cells. This disagreement shows that the readout method and aggregation criterion are meaningful evaluation dimensions. The pipeline, corpus, and evaluation code are released as a reusable closed-loop workflow.

Modern telecommunication, cloud, and microservice systems emit correlated alarm cascades when components fail. Root cause analysis (RCA) aims to identify the small set of alarms that initiate each cascade. A common approach learns a causal graph from observational logs and predicts all zero-in-degree alarms in each incident-induced subgraph. However, the learned graph remains fixed and cannot benefit from expert diagnoses of historical incidents. We close this loop with EvoCause. Expert labels constrain which alarms should be source nodes but do not specify the edge edits needed to satisfy those constraints. EvoCause uses a large language model (LLM) to propose semantically plausible graph edits, while deterministic code validates node identities and acyclicity and retains the best graph on a labeled alignment set. At test time, the refined graph alone produces transparent predictions without an LLM call. We also release TeleRCA, an expert-annotated benchmark from a production telecommunication network containing $485{,}681$ alarm events spanning $194$ alarm types over $5{,}621$ resources. On synthetic data, EvoCause initialized with the PC causal discovery algorithm outperforms the unrefined PC baseline, raising Node F1, Case EM, and Graph F1 by $11.59$, $9.40$, and $4.59$ percentage points, respectively, while reducing nSHD by $0.2379$. On TeleRCA, replacing human-readable alarm titles with anonymous identifiers lowers Node F1 and Case EM by $6.12$ and $8.04$ percentage points, respectively, indicating that alarm-name information contributes to graph refinement.

We describe Causal-TS, an open-source Python library for causal discovery in high-dimensional and nonstationary multivariate time series. Causal-TS provides four specialized algorithms-CDNOTS, CDNOTS+, CEDAR, and GRACE-along with wrappers for GES, Granger, LASSO-VAR, and LGES, all sharing a unified conditional independence (CI) test layer with GPU acceleration via PyTorch. A regime discovery pipeline detects structural breaks via pluggable changepoint detectors and runs discovery per regime with regime-specific parameters. A command-line interface, synthetic data generators, and optional DoWhy integration provide an end-to-end pipeline from raw time series to causal effect estimates. The library is pip-installable, tested on Python 3.10--3.12, and available at https://github.com/bloomberg/causal-ts.

Evaluating camera image signal processing (ISP) pipelines requires measuring low-level artifacts introduced by operations such as denoising, demosaicing, tone mapping, and compression. Blind image quality assessment (IQA) techniques can grade visual quality without a reference, but they typically focus on semantic and high-level visual cues or human perceptual scores rather than the low-level image-processing artifacts introduced by camera pipelines. In contrast, full-reference metrics such as PSNR and SSIM measure pixel-level differences and structural similarity, while LPIPS measures perceptual similarity in deep feature space. However, these metrics require perfectly aligned image pairs, which are difficult to collect in practical settings. We propose a reference-free learning framework that estimates full-reference image quality metrics from a processed sRGB image and its ISO metadata. Our method predicts a proxy sRGB reference, which is then compared with the processed image to compute PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS in their standard full-reference form. Our experiments show that the proxy-reference model can be learned from synthetic data and applied to real camera data. We further show that lightweight LoRA fine-tuning enables efficient adaptation when ISP components or pipeline configurations are changed. The proposed method outperforms direct metric regression in estimating metric values and achieves higher agreement with full-reference rankings than conventional blind IQA methods. These results demonstrate the feasibility of reference-free estimation of full-reference metrics for practical camera-pipeline evaluation.

Algebraic statistics characterizes statistical models through polynomial constraints, but it has mainly been used for analytically specified model classes. This paper studies the inverse problem: identifying probabilistic structure from vanishing binomials observed in empirical probability tensors. We treat the vanishing binomials of a toric model as its algebraic signature, and turn the ideal-variety correspondence of algebraic statistics into an operational procedure for structural learning that identifies a model by signature matching without parameter estimation. By restricting attention to a computationally tractable class of configuration matrices, which we call {\it the Kronecker-stack class}, we make these signatures explicitly enumerable. Within this class we define minimum invariant constraint (MIC) as the atomic unit characterizing each signature and generalizing the notion of independence. We tested this approach employing MICs on synthetic data as well as on corpus-scale real language data. The results suggested the utility of the method, revealing that the identified rank-one structures correspond to interpretable sets of words. These results open up a new avenue for applying algebraic statistics to computational linguistics.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems increasingly power enterprise LLM applications, yet the vector retrieval layer introduces two underexplored challenges: (1) trained codebook quantizers may expose corpus statistics during index construction, creating a leakage channel in multi-tenant deployments, and (2) post-hoc filtering for tenant isolation degrades recall on selective queries. We study TurboVec, an open-source vector index built on TurboQuant - a codebook-oblivious scalar quantizer requiring no corpus-dependent training. On the DBpedia OpenAI embeddings benchmark (d=1536, 100K-999K vectors), TurboQuant 4-bit outperforms trained FAISS Product Quantization at the same memory budget by 8.5-8.9 percentage points in Recall@5 across all scales. Compared to HNSW (R@5=0.991) and IVF-PQ (R@5=0.840), TurboQuant occupies a distinct design point: higher recall than IVF-PQ without training, at 4-8x less memory than HNSW. Deployed on Snowpark Container Services, TurboVec achieves 11ms median query latency at 100K vectors versus 707ms for warehouse brute-force scan. Kernel-level allowlist filtering maintains 0.86-0.93 Recall@10 across 10-1000 tenant workloads versus 0.09-0.19 for post-filter baselines. Codebook-oblivious design reduces membership inference accuracy to near-random (50.0%) versus 57.3% for PQ codebooks. Limitations include single dataset evaluation, uncompressed HNSW comparison, and privacy evaluation on synthetic data only.

Organic mixed ionic electronic conductors (OMIECs) are a promising class of polymer materials for applications spanning neuromorphic computation to energy efficient electronics and bioelectronics. Despite being highly tunable, the relationship between structural features and key performance properties such as charge carrier mobility is poorly understood. Scanning nanodiffraction in the transmission electron microscope (TEM) is a powerful probe for elucidating this structure-property relationship, but produces large, noisy datasets that are difficult to interpret because polymer reflections exhibit several distinct morphologies. To address the complexity, we trained a machine learning (ML) model to detect these polymer diffraction peaks and their intensities from synthetic data. Compared to correlative peak detection algorithms, the conventional method for analyzing nanobeam 4D scanning transmission electron microscopy (4DSTEM) data, we show that the ML model is significantly faster and outperforms correlative algorithms in almost all cases, opening up the possibility of near-live visualization of 4DSTEM experiments.

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the results from the Third International Competition on Document Forgery Detection on ID-Cards and Passports, which was held across two distinct tracks. Track 1 evaluates a synthetic-data-based ID-PAD system under controlled but diverse conditions, where the winning team, \textit{Incode}, achieves an $AV_{Rank}$ of 27.82%, confirming consistent performance across metrics and highlighting the importance of a balanced, generalizable design. In Track 2, the challenge intensifies with heterogeneous attack scenarios across different domains, where \textit{Incode} again achieved the top position with an $AV_{Rank}$ of 68.71% across thresholds, outperforming some baselines and established methods. These results demonstrate that PAD effectiveness requires not only high accuracy but also consistency across diverse attack types and imaging conditions. The success of this initiative across both tracks underscores the value of collaboration between companies and academic teams. This year, more than \textit{63 teams} were registered, and more than \textit{100 submission models} were evaluated. This competition has evolved into a leading benchmark state-of-the-art in PAD on ID documents, setting the standard for performance, reproducibility, and real-world applicability in secure identity verification.

We propose a novel measure of the discrepancy between two probability distributions $f$ and $g$ on a graph - which we call the diffusion distance - that measures the rate of convergence of $f$ to $g$ under a graph-constrained Markov chain with stationary distribution $g$. As a default choice for this Markov chain, we use the Metropolis-Hastings transition matrix targeting $g$ with proposals given by a random walk on the graph. Our primary case of interest is when the second distribution $g$ is uniform, in which case the diffusion distance becomes a measure of spatial clustering in $f$. Used in this way, (Metropolis-Hastings) diffusion distance to uniformity extends Moran's $I$-type measures of spatial autocorrelation by incorporating global graph geometry rather than just local patterns. Indeed, Moran's $I$, the most well-known measure of spatial autocorrelation, can be viewed as a one-step heuristic for diffusion distance, so long as specific spatial weights are used. We establish theoretical bounds and a stability result for our measure, connecting it to graph spectra and optimal transport. We then turn our attention to outlining a statistical test for spatial clustering using diffusion distance. Under permutation null models, we derive high-probability bounds on diffusion distance underpinned by exact spectral formulas for convergence of distributions, enabling an efficient statistical test for spatial clustering on large datasets. We empirically compare diffusion distance to Moran's $I$ both as a numerical measure and as a statistical test. We show that diffusion distance exhibits higher power on synthetic data using a stochastic block model. Empirical analysis of Black population distributions for 100 U.S. cities shows that diffusion distance detects subtle differences in urban segregation patterns that Moran's $I$ does not.

Learning representations that separate content and style is crucial for controllable generation and compositional generalization. However, diffusion and flow-based models trained primarily with generative objectives often produce entangled or misaligned factors. To address this gap, we introduce Contrastive Augmented Flow Matching (CAtFM), a framework that integrates contrastive regularization into an invertible flow matching formulation to promote structured content-style representations. Rather than constraining intermediate latents or velocity fields, we apply contrastive supervision to predicted endpoints during training, enforcing semantic consistency across transported distributions while allowing disentanglement to emerge implicitly, without assuming strictly pure or fully factorized content and style representations. Our main experiments operate in the CLIP embedding space, with additional validation using frozen DINO and ALIGN encoders. Across synthetic data, in-domain styles, and real-world benchmarks (ImageNet, WikiArt, DomainNet, and DTD), CAtFM improves content and style retrieval, enhances embedding cluster separation, and achieves stronger open-set robustness compared to generative and discriminative baselines. Overall, CAtFM provides a simple way to couple discriminative constraints with deterministic transport, improving disentanglement and robustness under distribution shift.