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In semiconductor manufacturing, defect analysis is essential, but manual inspection cannot scale. However, existing automated inspection methods remain insufficient for root-cause analysis and process optimization. To this end, we present SePArate, a weakly supervised wafer defect segmentation method. SePArate enables pixel-level separation of patterns by leveraging only image-level annotations. It consists of a three-phase training: encoder pretraining, knowledge transfer to learn spatial cues, and training on synthetic mixed-defect data for accurate segmentation. Experiments demonstrate that SePArate outperforms the baselines.

Autoencoders are widely used for nonlinear dimensionality reduction and manifold learning. While most common implementations rely on both nonlinear encoders and decoders, we investigate the specific role of the encoder and the extent to which it can be constrained to be linear without reducing accuracy. We conduct a comparative study on four autoencoder architectures: standard fully nonlinear autoencoders (AE), linear-encoder autoencoders (Lenc-AE), linear-decoder autoencoders (Ldec-AE), and fully linear autoencoders (LAE), evaluated on synthetic manifolds, computational mechanics data sets, and real-world image data sets including MNIST. We demonstrate that imposing a linear encoder preserves most of the representational capacity of the autoencoder, provided the decoder remains nonlinear. In particular, Lenc-AE consistently outperforms both Ldec-AE and LAE, and achieves reconstruction quality comparable to fully nonlinear AE, while offering advantages in terms of parsimony and interpretability of the latent representation. These results suggest that the nonlinear decoder is the critical component for manifold learning, rather than the encoder. A geometric interpretation of this finding is developed, which identifies the precise conditions under which a linear encoder is sufficient, and the specific manifold configurations that expose its limitations.

Foundation models for time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) are trained on large and diverse collections of physical systems and can generalize effectively to new downstream tasks. After fine-tuning on only a few trajectories from a target domain, they can achieve strong accuracy in low-data regimes. However, these models are typically large and computationally intensive, limiting their usefulness as fast surrogates for numerical solvers. We propose Teacher Rollout Extension (TREX), a knowledge distillation framework that transfers the predictive capability of a pretrained foundation model into a compact and efficient student. Starting from a fine-tuned teacher, TREX augments limited downstream data by generating long synthetic trajectories through teacher rollouts, optionally with periodic noise injection. This procedure samples from the teacher-induced rollout distribution without requiring explicit knowledge of the initial-condition distribution, while exposing the student to long-horizon states and local recovery behavior around states encountered during autoregressive prediction. The student can further incorporate task-specific inductive biases, such as equivariance, that the teacher does not necessarily enforce. We evaluate TREX on multiple PDE benchmarks. The resulting students can match or surpass the teacher's accuracy while reducing the number of parameters by several orders of magnitude and achieving more than an order-of-magnitude speedup in inference.

The state evolution of a complex system arises jointly from object laws, relational propagation, domain conservation, and unmodeled error. Forcing all sources into one black box makes mechanism attribution and constraint preservation unauditable; forcing every mechanism into one equation family discards mature domain solvers. We propose SD-GWM, a Structural Dynamics Graph World Model as an executable structural contract: nodes declare self-dynamics S, edges declare neighbor graph-coupled dynamics N---both fixed-form mechanism assets (rules, ODEs, solvers) calibrating only authorized parameters. An optional bounded residual R concentrates learnability, while a global projection maps states to feasibility, enforcing constraints without guaranteeing accuracy gains. On eight pre-registered research questions, SD-GWM delivers (i) heterogeneous integration: rules and solvers plug in natively; (ii) semantic fidelity: disabling R preserves source semantics bit-for-bit, with four theory properties under explicit proof/empirical boundaries; (iii) auditable governance: stepwise traces enable counterfactual fault localization (top-1 = 1.0) without post-hoc approximations. On a semi-synthetic flood testbed and USGS streamflow, SD-GWM reduces constraint violations to floating-point tolerance in analytical tests and to zero in semi-synthetic and real-data cases. Persistence matches SD-GWM in calm periods, but during a 254-day extreme-flood shift persistence and all neural baselines collapse (90-min RMSE 892-3007 cfs) while SD-GWM holds at 108 cfs (8-28x gain). The bounded residual cuts RMSE ~50% only under backbone bias. We position SD-GWM not as a universally superior forecaster, but as a verifiable substrate for auditable, constraint-safe spatiotemporal mining.

Drifting models are a recent class of one-step generative models that evolve the model distribution during training using a predefined sample-based drift field. Although they avoid iterative inference, their kernel-based drift fields induce frequency-dependent training dynamics: In the linearized regime, each Fourier mode of the density residual decays at a rate determined by the kernel spectrum, leading to slow recovery of fine-scale structure. We propose Second-Order Drifting Models, which lift drifting dynamics into phase space by augmenting generated samples with artificial velocity variables. We show that the resulting density perturbations obey accelerated second-order dynamics in Fourier space, connecting drifting models to the celebrated Nesterov acceleration from optimization theory. This provides a principled mechanism for mitigating the spectral stiffness of first-order drifting while preserving one-step inference. We derive a practical semi-implicit training algorithm and evaluate it on synthetic distribution matching, sequential data generation, and robotic control. Across these settings, the second-order drifting model improves convergence behavior and achieves competitive or superior performance over first-order drifting baselines.

Tensor cross-concentrated sampling (t-CCS) bridges entrywise sampling and t-CUR slice-wise sampling by observing entries only within selected horizontal and lateral slices. Existing t-CCS completion methods, however, assume that the observations are free of gross corruption. In this work, we study robust recovery of a third-order low-tubal-rank tensor from partial t-CCS observations contaminated by sparse, arbitrarily large outliers. We propose Robust Iterative t-CUR (R-ItCUR), a tensor-native algorithm that partitions the sampled tensor cross into two exterior blocks and an intersection block, applies adaptive blockwise Welsch correction for outlier suppression, and updates the low-rank component through projected blockwise gradient descent. By operating directly on the sampled cross, R-ItCUR avoids reconstructing the full tensor throughout the iterations, resulting in substantial memory and computational savings. Experiments on synthetic tensors, cardiac MRI data, and three-dimensional seismic data demonstrate accurate recovery and strong robustness to sparse gross corruptions. The results further highlight the importance of explicitly exploiting the cross-concentrated sampling structure in robust tensor completion.

For a trading desk, residual climate hedging valuation adjustment (HVA) is the climate cost left after its inherited hedge and any admissible overlay have been taken into account; it therefore cannot be inferred from a stand-alone stress loss. We obtain this residual by comparing paired climate-on and baseline worlds and reoptimizing the overlay for each hedge universe, which also turns hedge-instrument discovery into a valuation problem: an instrument is useful to the extent that it lowers the optimized residual cost. The linear-Gaussian case has an exact finite-horizon Riccati solution; Climate-Dyna starts from that hedge and learns the remaining nonlinear correction from paired world-model rollouts, with an independent gate deciding whether to deploy the update. In a public-data-calibrated semi-synthetic EU ETS study, crediting the inherited hedge lowers the mean climate charge from 1.517 to 0.906, and the learned overlay lowers it to 0.831 against a 0.821 exact floor; residual Dyna cuts regret by 93% relative to replay with one quarter as many trajectories, while adaptation from only 25 target transitions retains 60.7% of the exact-assisted gain.

Agentic systems must repeatedly decide whether to answer directly, decompose a task, invoke a tool, execute code, delegate to a specialist, verify an intermediate result, or recover from failure. These meta-decisions affect not only task success but also operating cost and latency, yet they are often embedded inside an orchestration framework and evaluated only through aggregate task accuracy. We present MetaRoute-Bench, an open, inspectable framework for comparing meta-decision policies under a shared execution model. The initial benchmark contains 180 synthetic task profiles spanning data analysis, research, and document processing, eight routing policies, and 30 paired random seeds. Across 43,200 traces, a task-aware compositional policy achieves 79.4% success compared with 76.7% for a strong workload-specific static policy, 67.4% for one-shot task routing, and 52.9% for direct answering. Relative to the static policy, this is a 2.7 percentage-point improvement with paired 95% CI of plus or minus 2.0 points, at 4.7% higher mean cost and 6.4% higher latency. Ablations show the largest losses when route composition is restricted to one operation and when verification is removed. These results are generated by a seeded offline execution model rather than a live deployment; accordingly, the primary contribution is a reproducible evaluation method and an analysis of routing-policy tradeoffs, not evidence of production effectiveness. We release task generation, policies, traces, tests, and analysis artifacts to support live-system validation.

Standard model comparison is global, aggregating losses across the covariate space to declare a single winner. This can obscure heterogeneous performance, where different models are preferable in different regions. We introduce conformalized local model comparison, a split-sample framework for constructing calibrated local best-model maps. Given a model comparison score, such as the difference between two squared losses, the method uses three disjoint splits to fit competing models, estimate local centers and scales from out-of-sample scores, and conformally calibrate residual uncertainty. At a target point, the procedure declares a local winner only when a one-sided conformal bound excludes a tie, with the score's sign determining the favored model. We prove finite-sample marginal control for one-sided erroneous declarations on the realized future comparison score, establish pointwise consistency of the localized mean-score estimator away from tie boundaries, show that aggregate comparison can disagree sharply with the prevalence of local superiority, and derive a squared-loss bias--variance decomposition that clarifies how model structure affects local wins. Synthetic and real-data experiments show that the method recovers heterogeneous winner regions, abstains under uncertainty, and yields higher conditional gain than global selection.

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) has become an essential tool in modern cellular biology, and generating accurate synthetic scRNA-seq data is becoming increasingly important. Although diffusion models have achieved promising results in conditional scRNA-seq generation, existing guidance strategies, including classifier guidance and classifier-free guidance (CFG), rely on an unconditional branch trained to approximate the true marginal distribution, which may retain substantial gene-specific structure and limit guidance effectiveness. Inspired by recent work showing that diffusion models can be effectively guided using intentionally degraded references, we propose a sparsity-biased classifier-free guidance (SB-CFG) strategy for scRNA-seq generation. Rather than approximating the assumed "neutral" marginal distribution, SB-CFG introduces a deliberately under-informative sparse reference for the unconditional branch, removing gene identity while preserving only coarse sparsity statistics. This "bad" reference amplifies the contrast between conditional and unconditional predictions, leading to stronger and more effective guidance during sampling. We evaluated SB-CFG as a training-free sampling modification on five publicly available scRNA-seq datasets. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements over standard CFG-based sampling in terms of marker gene expression fidelity, cell-type consistency, and sparsity preservation, indicating that SB-CFG better captures biologically meaningful gene expression patterns.

We investigate a normalizing-flow approach for reconstructing parton distribution functions (PDFs) from synthetic matrix-element data. Our framework combines Gaussian Process priors with invertible neural networks to learn a posterior distribution over PDFs consistent with limited Ioffe-time data. We demonstrate that the architecture preserves physical constraints and extrapolation properties.

Extending the context length of large language models (LLMs) is critical for many real-world applications, yet standard transformers remain constrained by quadratic compute and linear memory scaling. In this work, we investigate the Associative Recurrent Memory Transformer (ARMT) as a practical approach for enabling long-context processing in LLMs, constant memory scaling, and better efficiency. We make three main contributions. First, we construct two domain-specific long-context datasets designed to evaluate realistic workloads, focusing on narrow-domain fine-tuning scenarios. Second, we propose a comprehensive training recipe for ARMT-based context extension, combining continued pre-training, synthetic long-context data generation, curriculum learning, and selective integration of associative memory into chosen model layers. Third, we present an extensive experimental study demonstrating that ARMT-augmented models: (i) process inputs well beyond their original context limits without degrading performance relative to in-limit baselines; (ii) generalize more effectively to out-of-distribution context lengths; and (iii) need 30% less FLOPs while preserving baseline performance within the original context window.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is widely used to capture and render real scenes. Compositing objects from one capture into another has applications in many domains, such as VFX, architecture and interior design, or marketing. However, extracting an object from a source scene and naively pasting it into a target scene will fail to produce realistic results due to the different lighting conditions between the two scenes. To address this problem, we introduce a diffusion model that harmonizes naively composited images with inconsistent lighting. The model is trained with a heterogeneous dataset of image pairs (inconsistent composite input, consistent output), combining synthetic, generated, and real data. Our complete 3D solution allows a user to extract an object from the source scene and composite it into the target scene. From this, the (inconsistent) views of the target scene with the composite object are rendered. Our diffusion model harmonizes each one of these views, which are finally consolidated in a 3DGS representation with a post-optimization step. Our method provides visually compelling results, making object transfer between 3DGS easy to use and significantly improving quality compared to previous methods.

The paper introduces an efficient algebraic solver for the 4-sender/6-receiver (4s/6r) Time-of-Arrival (ToA) self-localization problem, which involves determining the relative positions of all receivers and senders given their pairwise distance measurements. The problem is addressed through a new parametrization combining Cayley--Menger determinants with an implicitization technique. The proposed algorithm proceeds in three steps. First, a 148 x 211 Macaulay matrix is constructed from the coefficients of the original polynomial system. Second, PLU decomposition of this matrix yields a 63 x 63 matrix pair. Finally, up to 38 real solutions are obtained via generalized eigendecomposition followed by a validation step. Experiments on synthetic noise-free data demonstrate that the proposed solver outperforms existing methods by approximately three orders of magnitude in numerical accuracy while achieving an average runtime of 1.3x faster than the fastest alternative. Experiments on a real-world acoustic dataset confirm that, when integrated within a RANSAC framework, the solver provides a reliable initial guess for bundle adjustment refinement.

We propose triangular consistency as a first-principled constraint for optical flow, which is agnostic to network architecture, supervision type, and dataset, and applies to both image-pair and multi-frame settings. This simple but powerful constraint is to compose two flows to induce a third flow and enforce consistency among the three. The composed flows may arise from (i) image pairs, yielding cycle consistency; (ii) multiple video frames, producing longer-range motion through temporal chaining; or (iii) image pairs combined with controlled synthetic transformations, which becomes data augmentation. This triangular consistency introduces negligible computational overhead and requires no additional annotations. Since it is derived directly from the geometry of optical flow, it does not rely on model-specific assumptions and serves as a ``universal'' plug-and-play component for optical flow training. Experiments show consistent improvement across supervised, unsupervised, and transfer learning settings.

Computer-use agents extend language models from text generation to sustained interaction with files, terminals, browsers, and external tools. This shift creates safety risks that are difficult to detect from isolated prompts or final responses, because harm often emerges only through multi-step execution traces whose individual actions appear locally benign. We introduce BraveGuard, a self-evolving defense framework for training guard models from open-world threat signals and realistic agent trajectories. BraveGuard mines recent research sources to identify emerging risks and attack patterns, instantiates them as executable computer-use tasks, collects agent rollouts, and derives trajectory-level supervision for guard model training. As new threats and validation failures appear, the pipeline can be repeated, yielding an adaptive defense loop rather than a static, benchmark-driven training process. We instantiate BraveGuard by training multiple guard backbones, including Qwen3-Guard and Llama-Guard variants, and evaluate the resulting guards on trajectory-level agent-safety benchmarks. BraveGuard consistently improves safety detection across computer-use trajectories. On AgentHazard, it substantially improves detection accuracy over off-the-shelf guard models, with accuracy increasing from 38.79% to 82.38% under the averaged guard-model setting. These results show that guard supervision grounded in open-world threat discovery and realistic agent execution can improve safety monitoring beyond fixed taxonomies and synthetic prompt-level data. BraveGuard offers a scalable path toward adaptive defenses for computer-use agents facing evolving real-world risks.

Flow Matching is a powerful framework for learning transport maps between probability distributions. Yet its standard single-parameter formulation is not designed to capture multi-parameter variations where the resulting transport should be path-independent. Path independence is crucial because it ensures that transformations depend only on the initial and target distributions, not on the specific path. In this work, we introduce Path-independent Flow Matching (PiFM), a method for learning vector fields whose induced flows yield path-independent transport between distributions. We show that PiFM generalizes Flow Matching to higher-dimensional parameter domains while enforcing structural conditions that ensure consistency of composed transformations. In addition, we show that, under suitable assumptions, PiFM approximates the Wasserstein barycenter, linking the framework to a notion of distributional interpolation. To enable practical training, we propose a tractable, simulation-free objective that regresses onto multi-parameter conditional probability paths. We showcase empirically that PiFM outperforms other approaches on both synthetic and real world data in interpolating path-independent trajectories and generating desired out of distribution samples.

Low-light images suffer from poor visibility, noise, and color distortion. Existing Retinex-based enhancement methods rely on manually tuned parameters that do not generalize across different lighting conditions. This paper proposes BFORE (Butterfly-Firefly Optimized Retinex Enhancement), a framework that automatically finds the best enhancement parameters for each image. BFORE works in two phases: (1) a Butterfly Optimization Algorithm (BOA) searches for optimal Multi-Scale Retinex with Color Restoration (MSRCR) parameters, then (2) a Firefly Algorithm (FA) fine-tunes gamma correction, denoising, and color parameters. Both phases maximize a Gaussian Naturalness Score (GNS), a no-reference metric that measures how natural the enhanced image looks. Standard quality metrics (PSNR, SSIM, NIQE) are computed only after optimization, ensuring zero data leakage. On 30 synthetic image pairs, BFORE achieves GNS = 0.971, outperforming the next-best method MSRCR (0.894) by 8.6%. On 115 real images from the LOL dataset, BFORE achieves GNS = 0.887, outperforming MSRCR (0.808) by 9.8%. A controlled comparison with three deep learning baselines (Zero-DCE, SCI, IAT) trained under identical conditions shows BFORE surpasses the best DL method by 14.7% in GNS. An ablation study confirms that the hybrid BOA+FA strategy significantly outperforms each optimizer in isolation, and a scalability analysis at three evaluation budgets shows that the structured optimizer significantly outperforms uniform random sampling once compute is available (p = 0.009 at 128 evaluations, p = 0.021 at 300 evaluations). All improvements are statistically significant (p < 0.0001, Wilcoxon signed-rank test). Processing time is 3-6 minutes per image on CPU, suitable for offline applications.

Identifying species in biology among tens of thousands of visually similar taxa while discovering unknown species in open-world environments remains a fundamental challenge in biodiversity research. Current methods treat identification and discovery as separate problems, with classification models assuming closed sets and discovery relying on threshold-based rejection. Here we present DeepTaxon, a retrieval-augmented multimodal framework that unifies species identification and discovery through interpretable reasoning over retrieved visual evidence. Given a query image, DeepTaxon retrieves the top-$k$ candidate species with $n$ exemplar images each from a retrieval index and performs chain-of-thought comparative reasoning. Critically, we redefine discovery as an explicit, retrieval-based decision problem rather than an implicit parametric memory problem. A sample is novel if and only if the retrieval index lacks sufficient evidence for identification, so each retrieval naturally yields a classification or discovery label without manual annotation, thereby providing automatic supervision for both tasks. We train the framework via supervised fine-tuning on synthetic retrieval-augmented data, followed by reinforcement learning on hard samples, converting high-recall retrieval into high-precision decisions that scale to massive taxonomic vocabularies. Extensive experiments on a large-scale in-distribution benchmark and six out-of-distribution datasets demonstrate consistent improvements in both identification and discovery. Ablation studies further reveal effective test-time scaling with candidate count $k$ and exemplar count $n$, strong zero-shot transfer to unseen domains, and consistent performance across retrieval encoders, establishing an interpretable solution for biodiversity research.

Latent variables pose a fundamental challenge to causal discovery and inference. Conventional local methods focus on direct neighbors but fail to provide macro level insights. Cluster level methods enable macro causal reasoning but either assume clusters are known a priori or require causal sufficiency. Moreover, directly applying single variable causal discovery methods to cluster level problems violates causal sufficiency and leads to incorrect results. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes L2C (Local to Cluster Causal Abstraction), a unified framework that bridges local structure learning and cluster level causal discovery. Unlike prior work that requires a complete manual assignment of micro variables to clusters, L2C discovers the partition automatically from local causal patterns. Our solution leverages a cluster reduction theorem to reduce any cluster to at most three nodes without loss of causal information, applies local causal discovery to identify direct causes, effects, and V structures in the presence of latent variables, and performs macro level causal inference via cluster level calculus on the learned cluster graph. L2C does not assume causal sufficiency, as latent variables are handled through local discovery. Theoretical analysis shows that L2C ensures soundness, atomic completeness, and computational efficiency. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real world data demonstrate that L2C accurately recovers ground truth clusters and achieves superior macro causal effect identification compared to existing baselines.

Supervised learning for image segmentation typically requires spatially aligned image and label sets. When images and labels originate from different sources, the pairing may be misaligned, which can significantly deteriorate the performance of the learned models. This is especially common in remote sensing, when aerial or satellite images are co-registered with labels from another source (e.g., OpenStreetMap). In this work, we propose a novel approach for training on misaligned labels, where we simultaneously learn the label alignment. Our align and segment (AnS) approach builds on the spatial transformer module to transform the misaligned labels using an affine transformation to provide a better learning target for a canonical semantic segmentation network. We prevent shortcut learning of misaligned labels in these semantic segmentation networks through a self-supervised regularization loss and show that it is complementary to data augmentation, especially for systematically misaligned training data. A decisive characteristic of our AnS approach is that it learns without requiring any golden labels. We experimentally show on both synthetic and real-world data from different cities that our approach enables high-quality building segmentation and precise label-image alignment at the same time. Code and derived datasets are available at https://github.com/venkanna37/align-and-segment

Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) provide transformers with a fixed grid of positional frequencies, yet trained models use these frequencies highly non-uniformly. We study what determines this frequency usage and propose a data-centered explanation: RoPE frequencies are selected to match the relative-distance structure of the training data. Viewing each frequency as a positional lens, we formalize a field-resolution tradeoff and show that, for a data-induced dependency profile of width $W$, the optimal frequency scales as $1/W$. This frequency-matching principle explains controlled observations on synthetic and text-based data, and suggests that the mid-low frequency bands observed in language models arise from the multi-scale dependency structure of natural language. We further connect frequency selection to position-interpolation-based length generalization: scaling frequencies down expands the effective field while reducing resolution. This helps when longer-context dependencies are approximate dilations of those seen during training, but can fail when relevant dependencies do not scale with context length. Empirically, we show that natural language exhibits approximate self-similarity across positional scales, explaining why test-time frequency scaling can support long-context generalization. Overall, our results identify a data-driven mechanism behind emergent RoPE frequency usage and show that long-context generalization depends on two forms of scale matching: between learned frequencies and training-time dependencies, and between frequency scaling and how those dependencies extend to longer contexts.

Medical knowledge is continuously evolving. This creates a need to update or selectively forget information encoded in already-trained medical LLMs. Machine unlearning aims to remove the influence of specific training data from a model without full retraining. Yet, existing unlearning benchmarks rely on synthetic or small-scale general data, leaving clinical unlearning understudied. We introduce AMNESIA, the first large-scale, open source benchmark for medical unlearning, with 70,560 question-answer pairs from 8,820 patient notes across 11 disease categories. AMNESIA includes both factual questions testing direct recall and reasoning questions testing clinical inference. We use it to evaluate four widely used unlearning methods at both random patient and disease-level, and introduce a new metric for detecting leakage of medical terminology. We show that unlearning individual patients erodes knowledge of others with the same condition, calling for methods that can better separate patients from shared clinical knowledge.

Petroleum-engineering search exposes a supervision gap for strong general retrievers: relevant evidence exists in public web text, but domain relevance labels are scarce. To address this gap, we propose PETRA, a large-scale Petroleum Engineering Text for Retrieval Adaptation dataset and pipeline that converts noisy public web data into a curated domain corpus and synthetic supervision for dense retrieval and reranking. PETRA contains 1.36M curated chunks, approximately 2B token equivalents, $\approx$859k, embedding training rows from $\approx$224k anchors, and roughly 400k teacher-scored reranker candidate rows. Its construction combines high-recall energy-domain curation, an energy-domain classifier with 98.4% test accuracy, chunk-grounded query generation, LLM-written hard negatives, and retrieval-mined candidate lists. PETRA improves first-stage in-domain Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (nDCG) from 0.703 to 0.763 through score fusion. Reranker adaptation improves the public Earth Science benchmark by 44% relative and a six-task reasoning-intensive panel by 23%. Failed training recipes show that high train-holdout accuracy on synthetic labels does not predict retrieval gains; retrieval-mined data helps only after being repackaged as teacher-scored candidate lists sampled from the inference-time candidate distribution.

Rising demand for mental health support has increased interest in using Large Language Models (LLMs) for counseling, but adapting them to this safety-critical domain is hindered by limited real-world data due to privacy constraints. Synthetic datasets provide a promising alternative, but existing approaches often rely on unstructured or semi-structured text inputs and overlook structural dependencies between a client's cognitive, emotional, and behavioral states, leading to psychologically inconsistent and less realistic interactions. We introduce Graph2Counsel, a framework for generating synthetic counseling sessions grounded in Client Psychological Graphs (CPGs) that encode relationships among clients' thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Graph2Counsel uses a structured prompting pipeline guided by counselor strategies and CPG, and explores prompting strategies including CoT and Multi-Agent Feedback. It produces 760 sessions from 76 CPGs across diverse client profiles. In expert evaluation, our dataset outperforms prior datasets on specificity, counselor competence, authenticity, conversational flow, and safety (Krippendorff's $α$ = 0.70). Fine-tuning an open-source model on this dataset improves performance on several metrics on CounselingBench and CounselBench, while matching baselines on others. We further introduce Therapy-Eval, a multi-turn evaluation framework, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our fine-tuned model in realistic therapeutic conversations. We make our code, data and fine-tuned model public.

Learning causal relationships between variables from data is a fundamental research area with many applications across disciplines. Most existing causal discovery algorithms rely on the assumptions that (i) the underlying system is acyclic, (ii) the exogenous noise variables are Gaussian, and (iii) the intervention targets for the data-generating experiments are known. While these assumptions simplify the analysis, they are violated in real-life systems. Most existing methods that address these issues either assume the underlying model is linear or are constrained to operate in limited interventional settings. To that end, we propose SCOUT, a novel causal discovery framework for learning nonlinear cyclic causal relationships from soft interventional data with unknown targets. Our approach maximizes the data log-likelihood to recover the graph structure, using two normalizing-flow architectures: contractive residual flows and neural spline flows. Through experiments on synthetic and real-world data, we show that SCOUT outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both causal graph recovery and unknown target recovery across various interventional and noise settings.

Anomaly detection methods often have uncertain behavior with respect to samples near the distribution boundary, limiting their ability to anticipate future anomalies. This work introduces the concept of near-anomalies that, while not yet anomalous, lie close to the boundary and are likely to transition into anomalies in the near future. To address this, we propose an unsupervised method, named Christoffel-based ANomaly Anticipation for eaRly dIscovery (CANARI), which leverages the strong theoretical foundations of the Christoffel function to detect near-anomalies. The method is validated on industrial in-circuit testing data from printed circuit boards, with synthetically generated near-anomaly samples due to the lack of real-world data labeling. Experimental results show that CANARI outperforms the compared baselines that generally use a dual-threshold mechanism (one for anomalies and one for near-anomalies). It therefore provides a proactive solution for anticipating anomalies before they occur, offering a promising approach for resilience, predictive maintenance, and quality control.

Small-scale language models (SLMs) are attractive for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in resource-constrained settings, but their limited capacity makes them highly sensitive to noisy or spurious retrieved evidence. Existing preference-based methods such as RoseRAG select only the hardest single preference pair via hard argmin/argmax, discarding the remaining signal; others treat multiple pairs as independent binary comparisons, resulting in low data utilization. We propose RIMS, a three-stage preference optimization framework comprising (1) synthetic chain-of-thought preference data generation via rejection sampling using the target SLM itself without relying on proprietary models, (2) a differentiable soft aggregation mechanism that replaces hard selection with a smooth operator, preserving gradient signal from all preference pairs while retaining the discriminative structure of margin-aware selection, and (3) preference optimization with the smoothed objective applied to multiple alignment algorithms. We theoretically show that the smoothed approximation admits a controllable error bound and that smooth aggregation yields provably tighter gradient alignment to the oracle objective than hard selection. Experiments on four multi-hop question answering benchmarks show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across multiple SLM backbones, achieving consistent gains in Exact Match and F1 under noisy retrieval conditions. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/tptrix29/RIMS.

The increasing adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) is expected to place significant additional demand on residential distribution networks, creating a need for realistic charging datasets for planning and simulation studies. However, access to real-world EV charging data is often limited due to privacy constraints, incomplete records, and restricted availability. This paper proposes a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) for the generation of synthetic EV charging sessions from real transaction-level charging data. The model is trained on engineered session features describing plug-in duration, charging duration, delivered energy, charging delay, and cyclical time-of-week, while conditioning on day of week and managed charging status. A Gaussian negative log-likelihood (NLL) reconstruction loss is employed to model feature-wise heteroscedastic uncertainty, and the latent space is regularised using a Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence term. The statistical fidelity of the generated data is evaluated using distributional metrics and downstream task performance through the Train-on-Synthetic-Test-on-Real (TSTR) protocol. Results demonstrate that the proposed approach produces synthetic EV charging sessions that preserve key statistical properties of the original dataset while supporting predictive modelling tasks.

Tabular data plays an important role in many fields and industries, including those with elevated privacy considerations and risks. As such, there is a rising interest in generating high-quality synthetic proxies for real tabular data as a means of reducing privacy risk and proprietary data exposure. With tabular diffusion models (TDMs) demonstrating leading performance in synthesizing such data, understanding and measuring the privacy risks associated with these models is imperative. Leveraging state-of-the-art membership inference attacks for TDMs in both black- and white-box settings, this work quantifies the impact of training setup, synthesis choices, and attacker knowledge on privacy leakage. Moreover, the results demonstrate that adversaries need not have perfect knowledge of the training setup, identical data distributions, or massive compute resources to construct successful attacks. Finally, the pitfalls associated with applying heuristic privacy metrics, such as distance-to-closest record, are revealed.