Cuts

Streaming video generators allow users to dynamically modulate video synthesis via mid-stream prompt switching. Existing streaming methods can respond to the updated instruction while still cutting corners, prematurely realizing goals or taking heuristic shortcuts that bypass necessary intermediate state changes needed for a plausible transition. In this study, we present SEGUE, a novel framework that makes this process explicit and trains the generator to execute these transitions faithfully. At each switch, a training-free planner parses the latest frame and prompts, writes a few segue prompts with roles and durations, and then hands control back to the user's prompt. Furthermore, to address the inherent difficulty of training causal models on short-lived temporal schedules without corrupting preparatory supervision, we introduce SPANDMD, which evaluates each active prompt using the full rollout as temporal context while retaining its DMD residual only within the prompt's assigned span. On OpenTrans-360, a benchmark of 1,800 switches that scores how the old state exits and the new one begins, SEGUE ranks first on all eight transition metrics and raises the overall score over the strongest baseline from 0.866 to 0.887. It also ranks first on four of six instruction-response metrics of StreamAV-Bench, while the planner transfers to frozen autoregressive generators without retraining.

Dropout regularization is commonly used to reduce overfitting by removing parts of a neural network during training. For Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), cutouts serve a somewhat analogous purpose. Cutouts can be implemented as data augmentation: the original training image is retained, and additional copies are created with regions removed. In this chapter, we test whether cutout placement can be improved by using High-Resolution Class Activation Mapping (HiResCAM). We compare four controlled training conditions: no cutout, standard random cutout, low-saliency cutout, and high-saliency cutout. We experiment using grayscale malware images from the RawMal-TF dataset (17 families with1,000 samples per family), and for comparison to natural images, we experiment with the well-known CIFAR-100 dataset. All experiments are based on ResNet18 with100 training epochs. For the cutout experiments, we test cutout areas of5%, 10%, 20%, and30%, and we consider~M\in\{4,8} augmented copies per original training image. The RawMal-TF results are slightly worse for all three cutout cases (random, high and low saliency) as compared to no cutouts. In contrast, our CIFAR-100 experimental results improve slightly under low-saliency cutout. These results suggest that the value of saliency-guided cutout is domain dependent, and that malware images should not be treated as equivalent to natural images.

Zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) now supports interactive assistants, personalized media, and accessibility tools. All TTS systems require faithful linguistic rendering, consistent speaker identity, and low-latency response. Yet compact streaming systems must preserve sufficient acoustic detail in a predictable low-rate latent sequence, while iterative diffusion sampling and classifier-free guidance multiply inference cost at every autoregressive step. To strike a balance between high-fidelity synthesis and low-latency inference, we present CuteTTS, a compact continuous-autoregressive TTS system. It combines semantically aligned causal VAE latents with patch-level autoregression, explicit speaker conditioning, and a bidirectional flow-matching head. We further introduce guidance-step distillation, which absorbs classifier-free guidance and multiple solver steps into a single interval-conditioned student. Evaluations on LibriSpeech and Seed-TTS-Eval demonstrate competitive intelligibility and speaker similarity in zero-shot voice cloning, while distillation lowers first-audio latency by 23.3% and real-time factor by 40.8% relative to the base model with comparable objective and subjective quality. These results provide a practical path toward continuous-autoregressive TTS that reconciles high-fidelity generation with the latency demands of real-time interaction.

State-of-the-art neural network verifiers use the branch-and-bound procedure as their core solving mechanism. We introduce an inprocessing framework for neural network verification driven by the lookahead procedure. Under this framework, lookahead derives new lemmas over the phases of unstable ReLUs, which are collected into an implication graph that is used to prune the search space and vivify boolean cuts. We instantiate the framework in two state-of-the-art verifiers, Marabou and $α$-$β$-CROWN, and demonstrate that it improves performance in both, proving up to 34% more instances unsatisfiable.

Jigsaw puzzle solving requires jointly reasoning about visual content and geometric constraints, yet existing benchmarks use rectangular cuts that create ambiguous ground truth in texture-repeated regions. We introduce \textit{\ours{}}, a benchmark with tab-and-blank interlocking pieces where geometric constraints provide strong local compatibility requirements that, combined with visual content, yield unambiguous ground truth. Across 95K instances at four grid densities (4$\times$4 to 16$\times$16), we find that \textbf{zero-shot VLMs largely lack geometric reasoning}: only one of five frontier models (GPT-5.5) exceeds random baseline on 4$\times$4 puzzles, while all others perform at chance level. While supervised fine-tuning achieves $>$97% on 4$\times$4, \textbf{all models collapse on larger grids}: GPT-5.5 drops from 70% to near-random on 8$\times$8, and even fine-tuned models fall below 5% on 12$\times$12. This ``scaling cliff'' suggests current architectures cannot maintain consistent constraint satisfaction as the number of pieces increases. \ours{} establishes scalable geometric reasoning as an open challenge for vision-language models.

Incorrect disposal can contaminate campus recycling streams, and a bin-mounted camera could provide feedback as an item is discarded. We evaluated whether synthetic and derived images improve a YOLOv8n detector for this view. The real dataset contained 148 campus photographs: 86 for training, 31 for validation, and 31 for testing. Twelve joint-training configurations varied the amount and source of added images. We repeated seven principal settings with four matched seeds and computed bootstrap percentile intervals over those seeds. The real-only model reached a mean mAP@0.5 of 0.691 [0.665, 0.722]. Background replacement reduced the mean to 0.560 [0.499, 0.619], isolated-object images gave 0.680 [0.644, 0.724], and the full augmentation pool gave 0.487 [0.438, 0.537]. We also tested hand-and-forearm composites because every real photo showed a held object. Two cutouts in the initial composite set came from test photographs, so we discarded that experiment, rebuilt the set with training-split cutouts, and reran all four seeds. The corrected paired difference was +0.034 [-0.063, 0.199], which does not support a reliable hand-composite effect. Single-seed transfer experiments produced source-dependent rankings between joint mixing and sequential pretraining. None of the evaluated configurations exceeded the real-only baseline. The reported intervals quantify seed variation; the 31-photo test set remains too small for strong class-specific conclusions.

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference without compromising output quality. Recent parallel drafting methods further improve single-request performance by decoupling draft length from drafting latency, enabling longer drafts and higher mean accepted tokens (MAT). However, under high request concurrency, long drafts waste substantial computation on rejected tokens, increasing verification cost and potentially making speculative decoding slower than autoregressive decoding. We present D-Cut, an adaptive pruning method that selects draft tokens jointly across the batch and concentrates the verification budget on tokens most likely to be accepted. D-Cut is motivated by two observations. First, acceptance lengths vary considerably across concurrent requests; D-Cut therefore performs cross-request pruning, allocating the verification budget adaptively according to draft confidence. Second, verification cost depends strongly on the deployment environment, including GPU architecture and parallelism strategy; D-Cut incorporates a runtime cost model to adapt its pruning depth to the target environment. Experiments on dense and mixture-of-experts (MoE) models show that, under high concurrency, D-Cut improves the average speedup from $1.26\times$ to $1.65\times$, restores acceleration in dense-model configurations where long-draft baselines are slower than autoregressive decoding, and achieves up to $3.0\times$ speedup over autoregressive decoding on MoE models.

In the development of cooking robots, mastering the task of cutting is crucial. A significant challenge lies in the diverse properties of food, which necessitate distinct cutting policies and even different knives for optimal processing. This paper presents a perception-manipulation framework for food-cutting tasks. Our system features a knife selection module that utilizes force data from a preliminary fixed trial cut to select the appropriate knife for the given food. This is followed by an adaptive cutting phase using reinforcement learning (RL) to balance cutting speed and energy efficiency. In our experiments, the knife selection module achieved 100% successful rate on unseen food, and we compared the performances of fixed policy, RL policy, with human operators. Our method not only achieves high performance but also demonstrates comparable results to those of human participants.

Block-sparse attention scales long-context language models by replacing the O(N^2) softmax with a per-query top-k selection over key blocks. This cutoff is myopic: when the k-th and (k+1)-th blocks are nearly tied in score, the selector commits without spending extra budget, and a dropped block carrying answer evidence is unrecoverable downstream. We propose a value-of-information router that measures, for each query, how decisively the top-k cut was made, and doubles the kept set for the queries where that gap is smallest; the rule is backbone-agnostic and stacks with existing block-scoring methods such as Quest. On LongBench-v2 medium at n=215 (the entire dataset subset), router-on-Quest reaches paired recall 0.75 vs. top-k 0.47 -- +28 pp over the SSA-style baseline (McNemar p<0.01) -- and lands within 2 pp of dense on RULER NIAH multikey at the same context. The lift reproduces on four models from three architectures (Qwen2.5, Mistral-Nemo, Qwen3.6). At 128K, the router preserves 0.81 and 0.89 of dense accuracy on Qwen2.5-7B-1M and Qwen3.6 (vs. SSA-style top-k at 0.09 on the former) while the fused selection-plus-kernel pipeline runs at 0.62x and 0.80x dense wall time.

Large language models are reshaping research practice while quietly eroding researchers epistemic accountability. This commentary introduces PEEL - Protocols for Epistemically Engaged Literacy in AI, a working scaffolding that combines deterministic distant reading via Voyant Tools with LLM interpretation via Claude, grounded in Peircean semiotics and abductive reasoning. Applied to AI-generated condensations of three source texts, PEEL reveals systematic distortions in quantity, term frequency, and epistemic voice that are invisible without non-AI measurement -- and yields three design implications: deterministic instruments must accompany AI tools; fluency is not fidelity; epistemic authority must be designed in, not assumed.

Neural operators have achieved strong performance in learning solution operators of partial differential equations (PDEs), but their inherently continuous representations struggle to capture discontinuities and sharp transitions. Existing approaches typically approximate such features within continuous function spaces, often requiring increased model capacity and high-resolution data. In this work, we propose Cut-DeepONet, a two-stage training framework that explicitly models discontinuities while reducing learning complexity. Our approach reformulates the problem via a lifting strategy, partitioning the domain into smooth subregions while representing discontinuities as boundaries in a higher-dimensional space. This separation aligns the operator learning task with the inductive bias of neural networks and avoids directly approximating discontinuities. An additional network predicts input-dependent discontinuity locations for unseen inputs, which are then used to guide the neural operator in generating smooth components within each region. Experiments on benchmark PDEs show that Cut-DeepONet outperforms state-of-the-art methods, even when trained on low-resolution datasets. The method excels on problems with discontinuities and sharp transitions, while using fewer trainable parameters. Our results highlight the benefits of changing the representation of operator learning rather than increasing model complexity.

Computing a minimum $s$-$t$ cut in a graph is a solution to a wide range of computer vision problems, and is often done using the Boykov-Kolmogorov (BK) algorithm. In this paper, we revisit the BK algorithm from both a theoretical and practical point of view. We improve the analysis of the time complexity of the BK algorithm to $O(mn|C|)$ and propose a new algorithm, the fast and compact BK (fcBK) algorithm, with a time complexity of $O(m|C|)$, where $m$, $n$, and $|C|$ are the number of edges, number of vertices, and the capacity of the cut, respectively. We additionally propose a compact graph representation that allows our implementation to find a minimum $s$-$t$ cut in a graph with upwards of $10^9$ vertices and $10^{10}$ edges on a machine with 128 GB of memory. We find our implementation of the BK algorithm to be the fastest available implementation of the BK algorithm when evaluating on a comprehensive set of benchmark datasets, highlighting the importance of memory-efficient implementations. We make our implementations publicly available for further research and implementation development within minimum $s$-$t$ cut algorithms.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have become standard in large language models, yet many of their core design choices - expert count, granularity, shared experts, load balancing, token dropping - have only been studied one or two at a time over narrow configuration ranges. It remains an open question whether these choices can be optimized independently, without considering interactions. We present the first systematic study of over 2,000 pretraining runs spanning models up to 6.6B total parameters, in which we exhaustively vary total experts, expert dimension, heterogeneous expert sizing within a single layer, shared expert size and load-balancing mechanisms. We find that at every active-parameter scale that we study, performance consistently improves with total MoE parameters even at extreme active expert parameter ratios like 128.Further, the optimal expert size is nearly invariant to total parameter count and depends only on active parameter count. Third, we see that other choices like shared experts, heterogeneous experts and load-balancing settings have small effects relative to expert count and granularity, although dropless routing yields a consistent gain. Overall, our results suggest a simpler recipe: focus on expert count and granularity, other choices have minimal effect on final quality.

Benders decomposition (BD) is a widely used solution approach for solving two-stage stochastic programs arising in real-world decision-making under uncertainty. However, it often suffers from slow convergence as the master problem grows with an increasing number of cuts. In this paper, we propose Reinforcement Learning for BD (RLBD), a framework that adaptively selects cuts using a neural network-based stochastic policy. The policy is trained using a policy gradient method via the REINFORCE algorithm. We evaluate the proposed approach on a two-stage stochastic electric vehicle charging station location problem and compare it with vanilla BD and LearnBD, a supervised learning approach that classifies cuts using a support vector machine. Numerical results demonstrate that RLBD achieves substantial improvements in computational efficiency and exhibits strong generalization to problems with similar structures but varying data inputs and decision variable dimensions.

We study query time bounds for the fundamental problem of estimating the kernel mean $\frac1{|X|}\sum_{x\in X}\mathbf{k}(x,y)$ of a query $y$ in a finite dataset $X\subset\mathbb{R}^d$ up to a prescribed additive error $\varepsilon$. The best known bounds for the Gaussian kernel are $O(d/\varepsilon^2)$, $\widetilde O(d+1/\varepsilon^4)$, and $\widetilde O(d+Δ^2/\varepsilon^2)$, where $Δ$ is the diameter of a region containing the points. We prove the new bound $\tilde O(d+\varepsilonΔ^2+1/\varepsilon^3)$, which improves over the previous ones in regimes with small error $\varepsilon$ and intermediate diameter $Δ$. At the center of our proof is a new fast spherical embedding theorem in the sense introduced by Bartal, Recht and Schulman (2011), which limits the embedded data diameter while preserving local Euclidean distances and avoiding ``distance collapse'' at larger scales. This fast embedding theorem may be of independent interest.

This paper proposes a novel algorithm for semisupervised learning. This algorithm learns graph cuts that maximize the margin with respect to the labels induced by the harmonic function solution. We motivate the approach, compare it to existing work, and prove a bound on its generalization error. The quality of our solutions is evaluated on a synthetic problem and three UCI ML repository datasets. In most cases, we outperform manifold regularization of support vector machines, which is a state-of-the-art approach to semi-supervised max-margin learning.