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The synthesis of safety-critical scenarios (SCS) and their evaluation through closed-loop simulations are crucial for developing robust autonomous driving systems. A key aspect of this process involves editing agent states in both appearance and trajectory levels within existing scenes. However, current methods struggle to preserve data fidelity after scene editing and fail to efficiently generate high-quality SCS through such modifications. To overcome these limitations, we propose OmniSCS, an innovative system that generates photorealistic SCS with high physical fidelity while enabling closed-loop testing in synthetic environments. OmniSCS comprises two key modules: 1) A Fully Editable Driving World Construction module that maintains high-fidelity agent appearance and background during scene editing via dual-strategy agent reconstruction and depth-refinement background reconstruction methods. 2) A SCS Synthesis module that facilitates object insertion and agent trajectory editing to synthesize diverse SCS while preserving data fidelity. Experiments on nuScenes, Waymo, and KITTI datasets show that OmniSCS outperforms state-of-the-art methods in edited scene fidelity. We further validate its ability to enhance autonomous driving algorithms and support real-time (13Hz) closed-loop testing. Overall, OmniSCS provides a safer, more effective, and cost-efficient solution for SCS optimization and testing in autonomous driving.

Scientific data annotation, such as tracking animals in video or proofreading neural reconstructions, remains bottlenecked by the "last mile" problem: even with strong automation, verification and correction consume substantial human effort. Standard approaches train models to directly predict annotations, discarding the rich supervision in how experts navigate, click, verify, and correct. We introduce a framework for studying behavioral cloning on scientific annotation: 9 synthetic tasks paired with synthetic annotations that simulate realistic human strategies including exploration, mistake correction, and strategic decision-making. Our experiments reveal several findings. First, skills emerge hierarchically: models learn GUI mechanics before task-critical decisions, and commit fewer mistakes than the training data while retaining the ability to correct errors when they occur. Second, scaling models on multi-task behavioral cloning shows that larger models are more data efficient within our scale range. Third, multi-task pretraining enables efficient fine-tuning to new tasks, while training from scratch fails entirely. Fourth, linear probes reveal that models internally represent latent variables of the annotation process such as task phase and data position; interestingly, we find a shared mistake representation that generalizes across different annotation tasks. Overall, our framework establishes systematic benchmarks and identifies key bottlenecks, providing a foundation for scaling behavioral cloning to real-world scientific data annotation.

Estimating physical parameters from scientific images is a common inverse problem in materials characterization that often relies on expensive physics-based simulations. In electron microscopy, specimen thickness and crystal mistilt are critical parameters that govern how electrons scatter through the sample, and therefore the accuracy of any atomic-scale structure recovered from it. They are commonly inferred by matching experimental position-averaged convergent-beam electron diffraction (PACBED) patterns to simulated ones, but grid searches scale poorly and neural-network methods require extensive pretraining that may not transfer to new conditions. Here, we propose scalable Bayesian optimization of composite functions (SBOCF), a simulation-efficient method that exploits the known composite structure of the image-matching objective and the intermediate information contained in simulated images. By representing PACBED images with patch-level summaries and two correction terms, SBOCF preserves the original pixel-wise objective while reducing the number of modeled outputs from 24,649 to 11. Under a budget of 50 simulator evaluations, SBOCF outperformed standard Bayesian optimization with expected improvement on synthetic SrTiO3 benchmarks with thick and thin specimens, reducing the median final SSE by up to 290x in the thick-sample case. On experimental data, SBOCF produced parameter estimates consistent with previously reported values without task-specific pretraining. For a simulated mistilted specimen, using the SBOCF estimates in a downstream ptychographic reconstruction recovered sharp atoms that were otherwise blurred. These results establish SBOCF as a promising approach for inverse problems involving expensive simulators and high-dimensional structured outputs.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are widely used for time-series classification, but their deployment in critical domains requires understanding the temporal and spectral patterns that drive their predictions. Concept extraction (CE) methods identify such patterns by analyzing representations within the models' latent space. However, existing time-series CE methods have three limitations: they operate only in the time domain and overlook frequency features, predefine the number of concepts, and produce localizations misaligned with the regions the model uses. We address these limitations by proposing CENDRe, a concept extraction method for CNNs. It first discovers concepts by clustering per-timestep latent representations in two stages, where silhouette-guided aggregation selects the number of concepts automatically. Then, it localizes each concept through gradients of a presence score that contrasts the latent representations with their prototypes, producing masks that concentrate on the regions driving the concept. These gradients, propagated through a differentiable invertible mapping of the input such as a Fourier transform, yield localizations for the same concepts in the frequency domain. Finally, each concept receives a relevance score that quantifies its contribution to each class. On synthetic benchmarks, CENDRe achieves representation correctness comparable to state-of-the-art CE methods and significantly higher importance correctness. On real bearing-fault data, CENDRe extracts the frequency bands driving the model's predictions, located in regions commonly inspected for fault diagnosis, producing evidence to assess the model that time-domain CE methods cannot.

Referring multi-object tracking (RMOT) extends tracking from category-driven perception to language-guided understanding by grounding object trajectories in natural-language expressions. Despite recent progress, existing RMOT studies are largely conducted under in-domain settings, leaving the robustness of language-conditioned tracking under inevitable visual domain shifts unexplored. In this paper, we study Cross-Domain Referring Multi-Object Tracking (CD-RMOT), a new and challenging problem that evaluates whether an RMOT model trained on a labeled source domain can reliably follow natural-language expressions in an unlabeled target domain with different visual conditions. To support systematic study, we construct CD-RMOT-Bench, a unified benchmark that combines real clear-domain referring tracking data, aligned digital-twin variants, and real adverse-domain videos. CD-RMOT-Bench enables both controlled weather/viewpoint shift analysis and realistic synthetic-real transfer evaluation under a shared RMOT protocol. Further, we provide a Query-Centric Adaptation (QCA) framework, designed to stabilize the query space that bridges visual trajectories and referring expressions. Extensive experiments reveal that domain shifts severely degrade RMOT performance, where the failure is not merely caused by object detection errors but more critically by unstable expression-conditioned temporal association and target selection. QCA establishes a strong baseline, while CD-RMOT-Bench opens a new direction for robust language-guided tracking across visual domains.

Recent research expands beyond binary anti-spoofing with the emergence of Source Tracing, the task of identifying the specific generative origins of synthetic speech. However, current research often equates a "source" with its generative architecture. We propose redefining a source as a compositional tuple of Architecture, Training Data, and other training factors affecting the generated speech. We propose a framework using Structured Orthonormal Prototypes to minimize class overlap and intra-class variance. Our Subspace Partitioning strategy splits the embedding into architecture and data subspaces, while a residual subspace captures stochastic variability, enabling "compositional generalization" for novel factor combinations. This approach improves performance for partially seen sources and maintains robustness in fully open-set scenarios. MLAAD evaluations for Few-Shot open-set Identification show our approach significantly outperforms angular-margin baselines.

Synthetic aperture radar automatic target recognition (SAR ATR) is critical for Earth observation and defense, but its practical deployment is constrained by scarce annotated training data. Self-supervised pre-training alleviates this label bottleneck, yet prevailing Transformer architectures incur prohibitive quadratic computational complexity, and conventional universal masking neglects the unique electromagnetic scattering properties intrinsic to SAR imagery. To address these limitations, we propose SAMBA (Scattering-Guided Bidirectional Mamba), an efficient self-supervised pre-training foundation model for SAR target interpretation. Our framework features three core innovations: (i) a linear-complexity Mamba encoder with a mid-sequence class token to mitigate computational bottlenecks; (ii) a three-level hierarchical Scattering-Guided Masked Autoencoder (SG-MAE) masking strategy guided by SAR physical priors, aligning the pretext task with SAR's intrinsic imaging mechanism; (iii) a lightweight SpatialMix feature interaction module to enhance cross-region feature fusion. We also design a two-stage cross-domain pre-training pipeline to optimize the overall pre-training process. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that SAMBA consistently delivers superior performance across all pre-training configurations, with substantially fewer parameters than both CNN and Transformer baselines. Compared with the default masking strategy in standard MAE, the proposed SG-MAE strategy further boosts the model's few-shot transfer capability. Benchmarking on seven downstream datasets covering classification and detection tasks shows SAMBA achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on most metrics, fully validating its robust generalizability across diverse SAR interpretation tasks. Source code and pre-trained weights are publicly available at https://github.com/mynswkk/SAMBA.

Neural Controlled Differential Equations (NCDE) provide a powerful continuous-time framework for forecasting time series, but standard graph-based extensions typically learn spatial structure purely from data, even in settings where a directed graph structure is known a priori. We introduce Informed Neural controlled Differential EQuationS (INDEQS), a graph-based NCDE forecasting method that incorporates prior knowledge of a directed graph at distinct architectural positions. INDEQS separates inner mixing of hidden states across graph nodes from outer mixing between vector field and control, and offers both a lightweight graph-constrained variant and a more expressive variant, learning additional graph connections from data via adaptive graph convolutions. To systematically study when graph informedness is beneficial in forecasting, we devise a continuous advection simulation on directed graphs, yielding synthetic spatio-temporal datasets with known ground-truth flow structure. We then evaluate INDEQS on two real-world tasks: river discharge forecasting on a hydrological network and traffic flow prediction on PeMS08. Across these synthetic and real-world benchmarks, outer informedness consistently improves mean absolute error over an uninformed NCDE with comparable parameter count, particularly on larger graphs, while inner informedness offers a more parameter-efficient alternative when strict adherence to a known adjacency is desired. A comparison of discrete convolutional and continuous-time decoders further shows that continuous decoders yield better accuracy and greater temporal flexibility on real-world tasks. An implementation of INDEQS and the advection simulation is available at https://github.com/Mitchi1/indeqs.

Human mobility data is important for transportation, urban planning, and epidemic control, but large-scale trajectory collection is often costly and privacy-constrained, motivating realistic synthetic trajectory generation. Existing LLM-based generators typically rely on either prompt engineering, which preserves zero-shot reasoning but lacks fine-grained spatiotemporal grounding, or trajectory-level fine-tuning, which improves statistical precision but incurs substantial computational cost and may weaken general reasoning. We propose TrajGenAgent, a semantic-aware hierarchical LLM-agent framework for human mobility trajectory generation without model fine-tuning. TrajGenAgent uses a two-stage orchestrator-worker design: an LLM first synthesizes an individual- and weekday-conditioned activity chain from historical evidence via in-context learning, and a deterministic workflow then grounds each activity into a complete visit using personalized POI retrieval, distance-aware location selection, kinematics-aware travel-time propagation, and LLM-based duration estimation. To evaluate realism beyond aggregate spatiotemporal statistics, we introduce an anomaly-detection-based evaluation framework using two complementary detectors to assess behavioral and semantic plausibility. Experiments on benchmark and large-scale simulation datasets show that TrajGenAgent improves spatiotemporal fidelity, semantic coherence, and individual-specific behavioral realism over representative neural and LLM-based baselines, while avoiding parameter updates.

Threat detection in Natural Language Processing lacks consistent definitions and standardized benchmarks, and is often conflated with broader phenomena such as toxicity, hate speech, or offensive language. In this work, we introduce ThreatCore, a public available benchmark dataset for fine-grained threat detection that distinguishes between explicit threats, implicit threats, and non-threats. The dataset is constructed by aggregating multiple publicly available resources and systematically re-annotating them under a unified operational definition of threat, revealing substantial inconsistencies across existing labels. To improve the coverage of underrepresented cases, particularly implicit threats, we further augment the dataset with synthetic examples, which are manually validated using the same annotation protocol adopted for the re-annotation of the public datasets, ensuring consistency across all data sources. We evaluate Perspective API, zero-shot classifiers, and recent language models on ThreatCore, showing that implicit threats remain substantially harder to detect than explicit ones. Our results also indicate that incorporating Semantic Role Labeling as an intermediate representation can improve performance by making the structure of harmful intent more explicit. Overall, ThreatCore provides a more consistent benchmark for studying fine-grained threat detection and highlights the challenges that current models still face in identifying indirect expressions of harmful intent.

Every major data modality now has a foundation model that understands it natively: text has language models, images have vision models, audio has audio models. Tabular data, the modality on which many consequential real-world AI decisions are made, does not. Every approach to tabular AI today, from gradient-boosted trees to the latest tabular foundation models, requires a preprocessing pipeline before any model can consume the data. None of them understand tabular data as a modality. We introduce the Data Language Model (DLM), the missing foundation model for tabular data. A DLM understands tables the way a language model understands sentences: natively, without serialization or preprocessing, directly from raw cell values. It is the tabular data layer on which AI models, agents, and vertical AI applications can be built, eliminating the preprocessing pipelines that currently stand between raw data and every AI system that consumes it. We present Schema-1, the first DLM: a 140M parameter model trained on more than 2.3M synthetic and real-world tabular datasets. Schema-1 outperforms gradient-boosted ensembles, AutoML stacks, and the tabular foundation models we evaluate on established row-level prediction benchmarks. On missing value reconstruction it achieves lower reconstruction error than all classical statistical methods and frontier large language models on mean performance across conditions, establishing that structural understanding of a dataset's own distributional geometry is more useful for imputation than world knowledge encoded in language. It identifies the industry sector of any unseen dataset from raw cell values alone, reliably across any domain, a task no prior tabular model can perform. It is the native tabular understanding layer that has been missing from the AI stack.

As LLMs occupy an increasingly important role in society, they are more and more confronted with questions that require them not only to draw on their general knowledge but also to align with certain human value systems. Therefore, studying the alignment of LLMs with human values has become a crucial field of inquiry. Prior work, however, mostly focuses on evaluating the alignment of fully trained models, overlooking the training dynamics by which models learn to express human values. In this work, we investigate how and at which stage value alignment arises during the course of a model's post-training. Our analysis disentangles the effects of post-training algorithms and datasets, measuring both the magnitude and time of value drifts during training. Experimenting with Llama-3 and Qwen-3 models of different sizes and popular supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and preference optimization datasets and algorithms, we find that the SFT phase generally establishes a model's values, and subsequent preference optimization rarely re-aligns these values. Furthermore, using a synthetic preference dataset that enables controlled manipulation of values, we find that different preference optimization algorithms lead to different value alignment outcomes, even when preference data is held constant. Our findings provide actionable insights into how values are learned during post-training and help to inform data curation, as well as the selection of models and algorithms for preference optimization to improve model alignment to human values.

We study the extent to which rotary position encodings (RoPE), a recent transformer position encoding algorithm broadly adopted in large language models (LLMs) and vision transformers (ViTs), can be applied to graph-structured data. We find that rotating tokens depending on the spectrum of the graph Laplacian efficiently injects structural information into the attention mechanism, boosting performance in synthetic and real-world graph learning tasks. This approach, coined Wave-Induced Rotary Encodings (WIRE), enjoys intriguing theoretical properties: it recovers regular RoPE on grids, and depends asymptotically on the graph effective resistance. Unlike bias-based relative position encodings, WIRE is compatible with linear attention.

The Helmholtz equation governs time-harmonic wave propagation, and in dissipative media a complex modulus renders its squared wavenumber $κ^2$ complex. Inferring such fields from sparse, noisy data calls for solvers that also quantify their own uncertainty. Physics-informed Gaussian-process (GP) regression supplies this by returning a posterior over the solution, yet operator-conditioned formulations have been developed almost exclusively for real-valued fields. We extend operator-informed GP regression to complex-valued Helmholtz problems by realifying the complex operator into an equivalent coupled real block, which enables inference with standard real-valued GP conditioning. The construction admits a family of priors, from a proper diagonal prior to coregionalized and multiscale variants, and conditions on PDE residuals and boundary traces. On benchmark problems in one to three dimensions, the solver is competitive with finite-difference and neural-network baselines at a far smaller interior-constraint budget. Unlike those deterministic baselines, it returns a posterior over the complex wavefield rather than a point estimate. Applied to \textit{in vivo} brain magnetic resonance elastography, a proper multiscale prior reconstructs the shear curl field to a correlation of $0.77$ with measurement, above a $0.75$ target. The gain arises from the multiscale kernel rather than from real--imaginary coupling. We further identify a low-frequency accuracy ceiling set by model mismatch and a posterior uncertainty that is not yet calibrated. Calibrated uncertainty therefore emerges as the central next step for probabilistic wavefield inference in dissipative media.

Small-object detection under long-tailed data distributions is a fundamental yet challenging problem in multimedia. Railway Foreign Object Detection (RFOD) epitomizes this challenge with easily confused small intrusions and scarce samples. To address these issues, we propose a generative-augmented detection paradigm that leverages multimodal image generation to enrich the feature space of rare and small objects. We first construct RailGen, a multimodal image generation agent based on large models. Under semantic constraints, RailGen automatically invokes tools to generate railway scenes, calibrate intrusion positions, extract foreign objects, and fuse them into realistic intrusion effects. This process produces high-quality synthetic samples that effectively densify the feature representations of tail classes and complete the small-object feature space. Within this paradigm, we further propose FocalDEIM, a detection framework designed to enhance training with generated data. FocalDEIM improves dense matching with Focal Modulation for better small-object discrimination and adopts Focal Loss to emphasize hard samples, thereby alleviating blurred inter-class boundaries in complex railway scenes. Experimental results demonstrate that RailGen can generate high-quality small-scale foreign objects, reducing the object pixel area by up to 58x and 13.85x on average. Equipped with these challenging samples, our paradigm surpasses the baseline DEIM by 5.6% and 7.5% in mAP@50 and mAP@(50-95), respectively, and outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Ablation studies verify RailGen's feature-space enrichment and FocalDEIM's boundary discrimination. The paradigm provides an effective multimodal generative solution for long-tailed small-object detection in safety-critical applications.

Recent research in educational data mining, especially knowledge tracing, has focused on predicting learners' future knowledge states to support adaptive instruction. However, in many real-world educational settings, learning data are often available only as single-time-point assessments without temporal information, making existing time-series-based approaches difficult to apply. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for predicting future skill acquisition using only snapshot data. Specifically, we address the problem of predicting the next skill to be acquired from skill mastery patterns estimated by cognitive diagnostic models (CDMs). In the absence of temporal information, we exploit inclusion relations among learners' skill sets to induce a pseudo-temporal ordering, interpreting expanding skill sets as a proxy for learning progression. To efficiently approximate unobserved acquisition paths, we introduce a neural model that captures latent skill acquisition dynamics through expected skill increments. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms baseline approaches, with particularly strong advantages as the skill space becomes larger. These results indicate that meaningful skill acquisition patterns can be inferred from snapshot data alone, providing a practical framework for adaptive learning support in data-constrained educational environments.

Video world models should maintain evolving states when evidence is unobserved, yet current generators often freeze hidden states upon interruption. This is not simply a capacity problem: pretrained video diffusion transformers already possess KV-cache mechanisms capable of non-local retrieval, but they are rarely trained to use them as dynamic memory. We introduce ReMind, a framework eliciting dynamic memory behavior via memory-oriented data, event-aware training, and cache adaptation. Organized around a taxonomy of 100+ dynamic events, we build a camera-annotated training mixture combining VLM-filtered real videos, generated hard dynamics, synthetic camera loops, and memory-interruption augmentations. Each clip is converted into a frame graph with protected anchors, degraded intervals, and explicit temporal gaps. A node-structured curriculum, including node-drop, noisy memory, frontier continuation, and reference-cache training, forces the model to retrieve relevant past states across interruptions rather than relying solely on local continuity. PM-RoPE, an elegant camera-phase RoPE extension, unlocks spatiotemporal retrieval at a single-attention cost while preserving pretrained pathways. ReMind achieves the best overall scores on STEVO-Bench and recovery tasks. Furthermore, general image-to-video evaluations confirm this curriculum avoids catastrophic forgetting. We will open-source our code, data, and models.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models require large-scale video-action pairs, yet real teleoperation remains scarce. While generated robot videos offer a scalable alternative, existing methods treat them as real robot data by recovering pseudo-actions from synthesized pixels. We argue that deriving low-level control from generated visuals is a mismatched abstraction. A video captures only \emph{geometry}: the spatial trajectory representing the \emph{where} of a task. A real demonstration captures \emph{control}: the exact motor commands representing the \emph{how}. Human-to-robot video generation preserves these unequally: the visible geometry survives the generation process, while the underlying control signals are lost. This \textbf{Asymmetric Preservation Principle} dictates a clean rule: this surviving geometry should solely supervise visual perception, leaving control to real demonstrations. Following this principle, we propose \textbf{GRA} (\textbf{G}eometry-guided \textbf{R}epresentation \textbf{A}lignment), which extracts the geometric content as future 2D end-effector waypoints, computed from the source human video through pose estimation, retargeting, simulation, and calibrated projection, and routes them to the VLA vision backbone via an auxiliary 2D head. The action head is trained on real demonstrations only. During fine-tuning, the waypoint loss persists as a \textbf{spatial representation anchor} that prevents the backbone from losing its geometric grounding. On real-robot tasks, GRA outperforms pseudo-action baselines under matched data budgets and narrows the gap to policies trained with substantially more real demonstrations, suggesting that correctly routed geometry bridges generated videos to robot policies more reliably than recovered actions.

Local heatwave hazard depends on fine-scale air temperature, but ground stations are sparse and reanalysis products such as ERA5 cannot resolve the terrain and land-surface contrasts that shape real heat exposure. We present a conditional diffusion emulator for high-resolution 2-m temperature downscaling, conditioned on static geography, a training climatology, exact-time ERA5 temperature, and solar and temporal features, guided at inference by score-based data assimilation (SDA): a differentiable Gaussian observation likelihood steers the diffusion score toward sparse revealed temperature observations without any retraining. On a controlled 32-case synthetic-grid protocol over AORC, guidance improves hidden-cell reconstruction over both ERA5 and a strong observation-proximal nearest-neighbor baseline once observation density reaches 1% (RMSE 0.318 vs.\ 0.431~K, winning all 32 cases), while sparser regimes still favor direct interpolation. We further map the full guidance-strength landscape across three observation densities, showing that the optimal strength shifts systematically with density and that over-guiding causes sharp, predictable degradation -- giving a concrete operating recipe rather than a single untuned setting. The resulting fields are intended as a temperature layer for downstream heatwave-hazard products such as threshold exceedance and cumulative heat-burden. The present evidence is a controlled synthetic-grid validation; station-network and held-out-year evaluations are the next steps toward deployment.

Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) replace the fixed activation functions and linear weights of Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) with learnable univariate functions on network edges, offering improved interpretability and, in some settings, competitive parameter efficiency. While the approximation properties of KANs have received considerable attention, their behavior under distributed, multi-GPU training has not been systematically characterized. This paper presents an empirical scalability study of data-parallel KAN training on multi-node, multi-GPU high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure, evaluated along four dimensions: strong scaling, weak scaling, communication overhead, and model-size scaling. Experiments were conducted on the FinisTerrae III supercomputer using up to 8 NVIDIA A100 GPUs across 4 nodes with PyTorch Distributed Data Parallel (DDP). KAN training reaches 74.7% parallel efficiency at 8 GPUs with a 5.97x speedup, consistent with conventional deep learning workloads. Weak scaling shows an initial single-to-multi-GPU throughput drop followed by strong stability. Communication overhead follows a non-monotonic pattern (1.3%-6.1%), driven primarily by All-Reduce algorithm selection and inter-node latency rather than KAN's edge-wise gradient structure. The parameter-to-memory ratio improves with model size even as training time scales unfavorably. These results indicate that operator-level and data-parallel optimizations for KAN are complementary. We provide deployment guidelines for GPU topology and model-size selection, and discuss the limitations of a synthetic-regression evaluation.

Prompt optimization can improve multi-agent LLM systems, but the prompts being optimized often serve two entangled roles: generating task-relevant content and specifying execution-critical protocols, such as message routing, output formatting, and termination signals, on which the underlying code relies. As a result, a prompt edit intended to improve content generation can inadvertently corrupt the protocol and cause the entire agent pipeline to fail. Our key observation is that these two roles have different representations: execution protocols are typically structured, while task-relevant content is usually expressed in unstructured language. Based on this, we propose control-data flow separation, where execution-critical control is represented as typed, validated program objects, while task-relevant language remains the optimizable data flow for agent communication. This design allows optimizers to improve multi-agent behavior without exposing the routing or formatting interface to prompt drift. Across synthetic reasoning, collaborative review generation, and insurance rating workflows, our framework empirically achieves 100% eventual protocol validity while consistently improving task performance.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems synergize retrieval mechanisms with generative language models to enhance the accuracy and relevance of responses. However, bridging the style gap between user queries and relevant information in document text remains a persistent challenge in retrieval-augmented systems, often addressed by runtime solutions (e.g., Hypothetical Document Embeddings (HyDE)) that attempt to improve alignment but introduce extra computational overhead at query time. To address these challenges, we propose Hypothetical Prompt Embeddings (HyPE), a framework that shifts the generation of hypothetical content from query time to the indexing phase. By precomputing multiple hypothetical prompts for each data chunk and embedding the chunk in place of the prompt, HyPE transforms retrieval into a question-question matching task, bypassing the need for runtime synthetic answer generation. This approach does not introduce latency but also strengthens the alignment between queries and relevant context. Our experimental results on six common datasets show that HyPE can improve retrieval context precision by up to 42 percentage points and claim recall by up to 45 percentage points, compared to standard approaches, while remaining compatible with re-ranking, multi-vector retrieval, query decomposition, and other RAG advancements

Uncovering the true informational architecture of real-world complex systems requires disentangling how their components uniquely store, redundantly share, and synergistically integrate information over time. Integrated Information Decomposition ($Φ$ID) is a framework for decomposing the information dynamics of multivariate systems into sixteen non-overlapping atoms that characterize redundant, unique, and synergistic modes of information storage, transfer, and integration. Existing methods to compute $Φ$ID are restricted to Gaussian or discrete systems, preventing its application to continuous non-Gaussian dynamical systems. We address this limitation by proposing DIPHINE (Diffusion-based $Φ$-ID Neural Estimator), the first neural estimator that leverages score-based diffusion models to jointly estimate all the mutual information terms required by $Φ$ID from a single amortized network, recovering the sixteen atoms through Möbius inversion. We provide a theoretical analysis of error propagation through the inversion, showing that the Jacobian of the mapping from mutual informations to atoms is integer-valued and that the synergy-to-synergy atom is provably the hardest to estimate. We demonstrate accurate recovery of ground-truth atoms on synthetic benchmarks, superior performance compared to established mutual information estimators, and the ability to extract physiologically interpretable information-dynamic structure on an application involving real data without any distributional assumptions.

Selecting efficient multi-step synthetic routes is a central challenge in organic synthesis, particularly in medicinal and process chemistry, where route choice directly impacts feasibility, cost, and development efficiency. Data-driven assessment systems often oversimplify the multi-objective nature of synthesis design and rely on proxy datasets, such as patent routes, rather than universally grounded criteria. To address this, we introduce an expert-augmented, data-driven scoring framework that integrates machine learning with chemists' domain knowledge for both numerical and explainable route assessment. A DeepSets-based model is trained using tree edit distance between reference and machine-generated routes, and then fine-tuned with expert evaluations to produce both quantitative scores and interpretable qualitative categories: Good, Plausible, and Bad. The resulting system achieves a Spearman correlation coefficient of 0.78 and a Pearson correlation of 0.77 for category assessment prediction, and 60.2% top-1 ranking accuracy for score prediction, substantially outperforming the previous baseline of 17.5%.

Purpose: To assess whether breast lesion segmentation can be learned directly from acquired MRI k-space, and whether doing so improves robustness when data are accelerated or noisy. Materials and Methods: This retrospective study used public breast dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) datasets with acquired and synthetic k-space, together with a within-dataset synthetic control. We compared four 3D U-Net variants: a hybrid k-space-to-image model, a native k-space model, and magnitude and complex image-space baselines. Models were evaluated under increasing undersampling and added complex Gaussian k-space noise. The primary outcome was patient-level Dice similarity coefficient under cross-validation, with the hybrid model prespecified as the main comparison against the magnitude image-space baseline. Results: At full sampling, the hybrid and image-space models performed similarly. As acceleration increased, the hybrid model retained substantially more segmentation accuracy and significantly outperformed the magnitude image-space baseline across moderate to high undersampling levels. The same pattern was observed when noise was added directly to k-space: the hybrid model degraded more slowly, whereas the image-space baseline failed under heavier noise. This advantage was reproduced in the within-dataset synthetic control. Feature analysis suggested that the k-space stage and image-space stage played complementary roles, with frequency-domain filtering concentrated before image-domain lesion localization. Conclusion: K-space-aware deep learning improves the robustness of breast lesion segmentation under MRI undersampling and k-space noise, while matching image-space methods at full sampling.

In-Context Learning (ICL) allows LLMs to adapt to new tasks from a few demonstrations, but its reliability remains a concern: predictions are highly sensitive to both prompt design and the model's ability to understand the context, obscuring whether failures arise from data properties or model limitations. Uncertainty decomposition-separating aleatoric from epistemic sources-is particularly crucial in this setting, yet existing methods, designed for standard generation tasks, fail to capture the unique dynamics of ICL. To address this, we introduce a concept of self-function vectors, built upon Bayesian views and the mechanistic interpretability of ICL. These vectors leverage internal model representations to model the latent concept learned during in-context prompting, thereby enabling a direct estimation of aleatoric uncertainty within a Bayesian framework and circumventing the reliance on brittle input or decoding manipulations. Given the lack of established benchmarks and suitable evaluation protocols, we also propose the first and rigorous evaluation protocol, in which data is manipulated in controlled ways so as to quantify aleatoric uncertainty precisely and separately from epistemic uncertainty. With this new evaluation framework, initially grounded in synthetic tasks for conceptual development and subsequently extended to real-world datasets, we show that our proposed methodology can measure uncertainty of LLM predictions made under ICL more reliably than existing alternative methods. Moreover, we show it can be used as a practical tool for trustworthy-related applications, such as hallucination detection. Our findings pave a new direction for connecting the quantitative view of uncertainty with the mechanistic understanding of model behavior.

The rapid integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) has significantly enhanced their collaborative problem-solving capabilities, but it has also expanded their attack surfaces, exposing them to vulnerabilities such as prompt infection and compromised inter-agent communication. While emerging graph-based anomaly detection methods show promise in protecting these networks, the field currently lacks a standardized, reproducible environment to train these models and evaluate their efficacy. To address this gap, we introduce Gammaf (Graph-based Anomaly Monitoring for LLM Multi-Agent systems Framework), an open-source benchmarking platform. Gammaf is not a novel defense mechanism itself, but rather a comprehensive evaluation architecture designed to generate synthetic multi-agent interaction datasets and benchmark the performance of existing and future defense models. The proposed framework operates through two interdependent pipelines: a Training Data Generation stage, which simulates debates across varied network topologies to capture interactions as robust attributed graphs, and a Defense System Benchmarking stage, which actively evaluates defense models by dynamically isolating flagged adversarial nodes during live inference rounds. Through rigorous evaluation using established defense baselines (XG-Guard and BlindGuard) across multiple knowledge tasks (such as MMLU-Pro and GSM8K), we demonstrate Gammaf's high utility, topological scalability, and execution efficiency. Furthermore, our experimental results reveal that equipping an LLM-MAS with effective attack remediation not only recovers system integrity but also substantially reduces overall operational costs by facilitating early consensus and cutting off the extensive token generation typical of adversarial agents.

Wildfires are an escalating global concern due to the devastating impacts on the environment, economy, and human health, with notable incidents such as the 2019-2020 Australian bushfires and the 2025 California wildfires underscoring the severity of these events. AI-enabled camera-based smoke detection has emerged as a promising approach for the rapid detection of wildfires. However, existing wildfire smoke segmentation datasets that are used for training detection and segmentation models are limited in scale, geographically constrained, and often rely on synthetic imagery, which hinders effective training and generalization. To overcome these limitations, we present AusSmoke, a new smoke segmentation dataset collected from Australia to address the data scarcity in this region. Furthermore, we introduce a MultiNational geographically diverse and substantially larger fully-labelled benchmark, called MultiNatSmoke, that consolidates publicly available international datasets with the newly collected Australian imagery, expanding the scale by an order of magnitude over previous collections. Finally, we benchmark smoke segmentation models, demonstrating improved performance and enhanced generalization across diverse geographical contexts. The project is available at \href{https://github.com/henryzhao0615/MultiNatSmoke}{Github}.

Deformable scenes violate the rigidity assumptions underpinning classical visual--inertial odometry (VIO), often leading to over-fitting to local non-rigid motion or to severe camera pose drift when deformation dominates visual parallax. In this paper, we introduce DefVINS, the first visual-inertial odometry pipeline designed to operate in deformable environments. Our approach models the odometry state by decomposing it into a rigid, IMU-anchored component and a non-rigid scene warp represented by an embedded deformation graph. As a second contribution, we present VIMandala, the first benchmark containing real images and ground-truth camera poses for visual-inertial odometry in deformable scenes. In addition, we augment the synthetic Drunkard's benchmark with simulated inertial measurements to further evaluate our pipeline under controlled conditions. We also provide an observability analysis of the visual-inertial deformable odometry problem, characterizing how inertial measurements constrain camera motion and render otherwise unobservable modes identifiable in the presence of deformation. This analysis motivates the use of IMU anchoring and leads to a conditioning-based activation strategy that avoids ill-posed updates under poor excitation. Experimental results on both the synthetic Drunkard's and our real VIMandala benchmarks show that DefVINS outperforms rigid visual--inertial and non-rigid visual odometry baselines. Our source code and data will be released upon acceptance.

Despite the empirical success of Diffusion Models (DMs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), their generalization performance remains theoretically underexplored, especially lacking a full consideration of the shared encoder-generator structure. Leveraging recent information-theoretic tools, we propose a unified theoretical framework that provides guarantees for the generalization of both the encoder and generator by treating them as randomized mappings. This framework further enables (1) a refined analysis for VAEs, accounting for the generator's generalization, which was previously overlooked; (2) illustrating an explicit trade-off in generalization terms for DMs that depends on the diffusion time $T$; and (3) providing computable bounds for DMs based solely on the training data, allowing the selection of the optimal $T$ and the integration of such bounds into the optimization process to improve model performance. Empirical results on both synthetic and real datasets illustrate the validity of the proposed theory.