Foundation Model

Recent advances in machine learning have enabled training of wireless foundation models, which aim to support tasks such as channel estimation, beam prediction, and localization based on wireless signals. Existing wireless foundation models typically pretrain on channel tensors using masked reconstruction over subcarriers, antennas, or time but ignore the physical characteristics of wireless propagation. In this work, we propose to instead use multipath propagation as the fundamental pretraining object. We present MultiPathFormer, an autoregressive foundation model that represents each transmitter-receiver link as an ordered sequence of continuous-valued path tokens and pretrains with next-path prediction. We introduce an Environmental RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) mechanism and a first-path codebook on top of the transformer backbone, leveraging environment knowledge to improve path statistics estimation like delay and power by up to 59%. MultiPathFormer pretrained on 27 environments transfers to unseen users and, after scenario-specific fine-tuning, outperforms training the corresponding models from scratch in new environments. Across downstream tasks, it outperforms SOTA channel-based foundation models, achieving 5.57 m mean localization error, 0.914 top-3 beam accuracy, 0.994 line-of-sight classification accuracy, and 0.561 channel estimation NMSE. These results show that path-level pretraining can learn reusable representations of wireless propagation.

Accurate estimation of Above-Ground Biomass (AGB) from satellite imagery is essential for the large-scale monitoring of carbon stocks, yet it remains a challenging regression task at global scale. Geospatial Foundation Models (GFMs) have recently emerged as a promising machine learning paradigm to derive general-purpose representations from Earth observation data, but their utility for quantitative regression tasks like biomass estimation remains largely unexplored, as most benchmarks emphasize classification and segmentation. Here, we present a comprehensive benchmark of GFMs for global-scale AGB estimation using the AGBD dataset, a machine learning-ready benchmark spanning diverse biomes and geographies. We distinguish two ways in which GFMs reach practitioners: (i) models distributed as weights to be run by the user, which we evaluate as frozen encoders within the PANGAEA benchmarking framework; and (ii) models distributed as ready-to-use, pre-computed embedding products, for which we evaluate AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF) and TESSERA. We compare 11 GFMs available on PANGAEA and both embedding products against a fully supervised state-of-the-art (SOTA) model, assess their geographical and temporal generalization abilities, as well as agreement with the ESA CCI biomass product on independent reference data. Our results show that GFMs run as frozen encoders substantially underperform with respect to the supervised SOTA model, whereas pre-computed embedding products prove highly effective. An MLP trained on AEF embeddings outperforms the supervised SOTA model trained on AGBD features, and the same SOTA model trained on AEF embeddings (optionally augmented with selected raw features) achieves the best overall result, while also generalizing better across space and time.

Dense image matching establishes pixel-wise correspondences and underpins broad applications in computer vision and photogrammetry. However, extending dense matching to global-scale remote sensing remains challenging because image pairs may differ in acquisition time, season, viewpoint, spatial resolution, and land-cover state. The resulting large geometric offsets, partial overlap, and intrinsically unmatchable regions make direct dense correspondence prediction unreliable and inefficient. We thus reformulate dense matching as localization-and-registration: first localizing the matchable overlap and affine geometry, then refining dense residuals within the aligned frame. Based on this formulation, we propose LoRetta, a foundation model coupling matchability-aware affine localization with guided dense registration. We also introduce LEVIR-GM, a global-scale multi-temporal optical matching benchmark with dataset-native matchability labels (103K aligned, 827K augmented pairs, six continents, five years, 0.5-1024 m resolution). We further establish a unified evaluation protocol for sparse, semi-dense, and dense matchers. On LEVIR-GM, LoRetta achieves an area under the curve (AUC) of 83.3%, outperforming the strongest baseline RoMa v2 by 1.6 points, with larger percentage of correct keypoints (PCK) gains of 6.5 and 8.2 points at 1 and 2 pixels, while reducing inference latency by 47.8%. Astronaut-to-satellite and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-to-satellite geolocalization experiments further demonstrate its transferability as a reusable geometric aligner.

As autonomous agents powered by foundation models are increasingly integrated into social and economic systems, understanding the principles governing their collective behavior is essential for ensuring safety and cooperation. Classical game theory, the dominant framework for modeling rational interaction, is built upon the assumption of decoupled agency,' where agents treat their own decision-making as independent of the environment and other actors. Modern AI agents, however, jointly predict their own future actions alongside external observations. Here, we report a striking finding: when interacting in stylized social dilemmas, foundation model agents engaging in optimal planning consistently converge to stable cooperation, directly contradicting classical game-theoretic predictions of mutual defection. To understand this phenomenon, we introduce the embedded Bayesian agent,' a theoretical model for foundation model agents. By shifting from decoupled to embedded agency, these agents model themselves as part of the universe they inhabit, maintaining epistemic uncertainty about their own decision-making algorithms. We show that by inferring whether others are behaviorally similar, an embedded agent treats its own deliberation during planning as evidence: a decision to cooperate predicts a similar decision by a similar partner. We formalize this mechanism of similarity inference through the `embedded equilibrium,' a novel solution concept replacing the Nash equilibrium to provide a foundational game theory for the social behavior of modern AI agents.

As time-series foundation models have emerged, the need for benchmarks that can evaluate their forecasting ability in meaningful ways has become increasingly important. Existing time-series forecasting benchmarks provide useful standardized comparisons, but they often evaluate heterogeneous series with uniform error-based metrics. Strong performance under such metrics does not necessarily imply that a model's forecasts will support the best real-world decisions across domains. For example, in stock forecasting, correctly predicting whether a price will rise or fall can be more directly relevant to realized returns than minimizing point-wise forecast error alone. To this end, we introduce FinVerse, a finance-domain time-series forecasting benchmark that takes a first step toward more realistic evaluation. The released FinVerse data artifact contains 116,897 financial time series with 171.1M observations, of which 60,232 series with 17.4M observations are selected as evaluated targets based on their economic relevance to financial decisions. Unlike generic forecasting benchmarks that primarily emphasize uniform point-forecast or probabilistic accuracy, FinVerse defines 11 metric families comprising 78 evaluation metrics and assigns the most appropriate evaluation metrics to each individual time series based on its underlying economic meaning. Our analysis of 43 public time-series forecasting foundation models shows that strong performance under generic forecasting criteria does not necessarily translate into useful financial forecasts. This finding highlights the need for domain-aware benchmarks that evaluate models under objectives closer to real-world decision making.

Self-supervised Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) have become essential backbones for downstream tasks due to their strong and transferable visual representations. However, their patch-token-level features are often too coarse for dense prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation and depth estimation when accurate fine-grained predictions are required. Feature upsampling methods have been developed to recover pixel-level detail but still face limitations. Learnable upsamplers are often designed for a specific encoders and must be retrained for different encoders. Image-guided methods that use shallow pixel encoders often introduce textural artifacts and lack the semantic guidance needed for accurate downstream predictions. We introduce PixelUp, a zero-shot VFM-agnostic upsampler achieving semantic awareness through a coarse-to-fine chain of windowed cross-attention architecture guided by multi-scale semantic features. We demonstrate that PixelUp outperforms both VFM-specific and VFM-agnostic upsamplers, achieving state-of-the-art performance on dense prediction tasks with an average improvement of +1.2 mIoU on semantic segmentation and +0.25 $δ_1$, on NYUv2 depth estimation across VFMs. PixelUp further improves training-free open-vocabulary and unsupervised semantic segmentation by an average of +1.3 mIoU and +0.5 mIoU, respectively. Code available at https://pixelup-project.vercel.app/

Vulnerability localization is a fundamental step in software security, requiring models to reason over large codebases and iteratively identify vulnerable implementations. We present Antares, a family of compact language models (350M, 1B, and 3B parameters) for agentic vulnerability localization. Based on IBM Granite base models, Antares is trained through a two-stage pipeline that combines supervised fine-tuning on cybersecurity reasoning and repository exploration data with reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards over vulnerable repositories. Across extensive evaluations, Antares-3B approaches GPT-5.5 while outperforming open-weight models over 200x larger in size. The Antares family further enables fast, low-cost local inference, completing a full 500-task evaluation sweep in approximately 15 minutes on a single H100 GPU, corresponding to an amortized evaluation time of under 2 seconds and less than $0.002 per task.

Existing generative models for earth observation (EO) predominantly rely on fine-tuning natural image priors, which limits their scalability and introduces perspective biases that conflict with geospatial constraints. To address this, we introduce GeoCore-9B, a 9-billion-parameter generative foundation model, which is the first of its scale to be trained from scratch exclusively on EO data. Unlike previous EO foundation models, GeoCore-9B is built upon a Flow Matching-based Diffusion Transformer (DiT) and natively conditions generation on text descriptions and continuous geospatial metadata, including ground sample distances, latitudes, and longitudes. To overcome the convergence and spatial disorientation challenges of training at this scale, we propose a Geospatial Semantic Alignment loss. This objective distills structural Earth surface priors (e.g., terrain and urban areas) from a frozen specialist teacher network, constraining the diffusion latent trajectory during training without adding inference overhead. Pre-trained on the global-scale Git-10M dataset, GeoCore-9B demonstrates strong downstream versatility. Beyond standard proxy generative tasks, we show that GeoCore-9B can be effectively adapted for practical EO applications, including highly challenging tasks such as cloud removal and SAR-to-optical cross-modal translation. Extensive evaluations confirm that GeoCore-9B establishes new state-of-the-art performance in both visual fidelity and geographic structural accuracy.

In recent years, generative AI has attracted significant public attention, and its use has been rapidly expanding across a wide range of domains. From creative tasks such as text summarization, idea generation, and source code generation, to the streamlining of medical support tasks like diagnostic report generation and summarization, AI is now deeply involved in many areas. Today's breadth of AI applications is clearly distinct from what was seen before generative AI gained widespread recognition. Representative generative AI services include DALL-E 3 (OpenAI, California, USA) and Stable Diffusion (Stability AI, London, England, UK) for image generation, ChatGPT (OpenAI, California, USA), and Gemini (Google, California, USA) for text generation. The rise of generative AI has been influenced by advances in deep learning models and the scaling up of data, models, and computational resources based on the scaling laws. Moreover, the emergence of foundation models, which are trained on large-scale datasets and possess general-purpose knowledge applicable to various downstream tasks, is creating a new paradigm in AI development. These shifts brought about by generative AI and foundation models also profoundly impact medical image processing, fundamentally changing the framework for AI development in healthcare. This paper provides an overview of diffusion models used in image generation AI and large language models (LLMs) used in text generation AI, and introduces their applications in medical support. This paper also discusses foundation models, which are gaining attention alongside generative AI, including their construction methods and applications in the medical field. Finally, the paper explores how to develop foundation models and high-performance AI for medical support by fully utilizing national data and computational resources.

Pathology foundation models (PFMs) provide strong tile-level representations via self-supervised pre-training on large-scale pathology images. Yet, PFMs are developed under diverse and often opaque data, architecture, and objective choices, inducing latent representational biases that limit robustness and obscure what each model specialises in. We present AdaFusion, a lightweight adaptive fusion framework that integrates complementary signals from multiple frozen PFMs through (1) low-dimensional feature compression and (2) a sample-conditioned gating module that reweights model-wise (and optionally channel-wise) contributions. Beyond improving predictive accuracy, AdaFusion provides contribution-driven interpretation that offers evidence consistent with model-specific preferences and synergistic interactions across tissue phenotypes. We evaluate AdaFusion on three public benchmarks spanning treatment response prediction, prostate cancer grading, and spatial gene expression inference. AdaFusion consistently outperforms individual PFMs and other fusion baselines, while providing interpretable tissue visualisation which aligns model preferences with morphological patterns. Code is available at: https://github.com/xyx-98/PathoOracle.

Flow Matching trains continuous-time generative models by regressing the velocity field of a probability path between a simple source distribution and a target data distribution. The coupling that pairs source and target samples strongly affects optimization and sample quality, but structured couplings typically rely on mini-batch transport or assignment procedures whose cost grows at least quadratically in batch size. We propose Quantile Coupling Flow Matching (QC-FM), a lightweight one-sided coupling: rather than matching two pre-sampled batches, it samples only the data batch and constructs each paired source directly. Data ranks projected along a small number of random orthogonal directions are mapped to Gaussian quantiles, and the latent code is completed in the orthogonal complement by conditional Gaussian sampling. The construction is one-dimensional per slice, so the coupling requires no pairwise cost matrix and no assignment to solve. We show that, for each drawn frame, this coupling eliminates the irreducible regression variance along every selected slice and makes the ideal flow exactly straight there, while leaving the sampling prior unchanged: generation still starts from the standard Gaussian, and the training source deviates from it only through the copula of the slice codes, whose transport cost we bound. For training, we apply QC to an anchor subset and complete the remaining source slots with exact Gaussian samples, retaining the QC bias while preserving an explicit signal from the Baseline coupling. Across CIFAR-10, CelebA, FFHQ, and ImageNet-64, QC-FM improves over the Baseline under matched training budgets, reducing FID by up to 12.9%, and outperforms OT-CFM on all four datasets. These results suggest that preserving projected rank structure is a simple and scalable way to inject useful geometric bias into FM couplings without solving a mini-batch transport problem.

Fine-grained visual representations are essential for medical image analysis, particularly when diagnostically relevant evidence is subtle and spatially localized. Modern transformer-based medical vision encoders must therefore learn patch-level representations that are both clinically meaningful and spatially consistent. Without these properties, large vision-language models (LVLMs) operate on an ambiguous visual foundation, limiting their ability to generate clinically reliable and spatially grounded responses. However, existing training strategies for medical vision encoders rarely achieve both objectives. Image-text alignment provides clinically meaningful supervision primarily at the image level, leaving the spatial localization of diagnostic evidence weakly constrained. In contrast, self-supervised learning promotes spatial consistency but lacks the semantic supervision needed to distinguish visually similar yet clinically distinct regions. To address this gap, we present LoFi, a medical vision foundation model built on location-aware fine-grained representation learning. LoFi trains a vision encoder with a lightweight large language model under grounding and grounded captioning objectives. Because these objectives require predicting location from clinical text and vice versa, spatial consistency emerges without any explicit patch-level regularization. To enable training at scale, we construct MedG, a large-scale medical grounding dataset of 4.48M image-text-box triplets curated from 84 datasets spanning 7 modalities. Across phrase grounding, visual question answering, and region-based organ classification under perturbations, LoFi consistently outperforms general-purpose and medical vision foundation models as well as state-of-the-art LVLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/myeongkyunkang/lofi-medg.

Visible and near-infrared (vis-NIR) and mid-infrared (MIR) spectroscopy enable rapid, cost-effective prediction of soil properties. Yet, translating high-dimensional, highly collinear spectra into accurate soil property predictions remains challenging, particularly when employing machine learning. We systematically investigated regression models and dimensionality reduction approaches for spectroscopic modeling across 85 regression tasks from open benchmark datasets in pedometrics spanning field-scale digital soil mapping and a global soil spectral library. We compared an in-context learning tabular foundation model (TabPFN), a convolutional neural network (CNN), rule-based regression (Cubist), Random Forest, and partial least squares regression (PLSR) using full spectra as well as features derived from principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least squares (PLS) latent variables. TabPFN consistently delivered the best overall performance across scales, including large spectral library tasks with tens of thousands of soil samples. Notably, TabPFN applied directly to full spectra already surpassed all classical baselines, showing that explicit dimensionality reduction is not strictly required for strong performance. Further improvements were achieved through PLS, which proved to be an effective dimensionality reduction strategy for all models. Combining PLS latent variables with TabPFN yielded the best predictions overall. Our findings provide evidence-based guidance for spectroscopic calibration model selection across operational scales, demonstrating that the long-standing advantages of PLSR and modern tabular foundation models complement each other in chemometrics.

Despite the widespread adoption of foundation models as feature extractors for medical imaging, relatively little is understood about how different pretraining strategies influence the transferability of learned representations to weakly supervised ophthalmic imaging tasks. We investigate this question in ultra-widefield (UWF) retinal imaging by evaluating foundation model representations within a patch-based multiple instance learning (MIL) framework for disease classification on UWF images. We compare Vision Transformer encoders pretrained with supervised, Masked Autoencoder (MAE), and self-distillation objectives, while keeping the downstream aggregation architecture unchanged. Within a controlled comparison of ViT-B encoders pretrained on ImageNet-1k, the choice of pretraining objective substantially influenced frozen representation transfer, with supervised and self-distillation-based models outperforming MAE. A contemporary DINOv3 model pretrained at a larger scale achieved the strongest overall performance, with a quadratic weighted kappa of 0.863 for five-class diabetic retinopathy grading, comparable with DINOv1. Attention analysis further revealed distinct patch-aggregation behaviours associated with the different pretrained representations, while partial fine-tuning substantially reduced the performance gap for MAE. These findings suggest that pretraining strategy influences both representation transferability and the subsequent aggregation of patch-level evidence within MIL, resulting in differences in downstream classification performance.

Logical rule induction seeks interpretable rules that transfer across propositional schemas. This requires respecting symmetries: atom naming, example order, polarity flips, and label swap. Enforcing exact symmetry by construction lets one trained inducer scale beyond its training schemas. Our central contribution is a canonical export that decodes a discrete rule from literal scores. It needs no retraining and is exactly equivariant whenever those scores respect the symmetries. We instantiate it on the Neural Rule Inducer, a disjunctive-normal-form (DNF) foundation model that natively respects only example order. We restore the remaining symmetries through architecture, inference, and training. On synthetic stress tests, accuracy on the support labels stays stable at much larger schemas, and rule fidelity on fresh inputs remains above the unmodified model. On real data, accuracy improves most on larger schemas. The exported rule is exact on synthetic full-group tests and on schema-valid real-data tests. This is a mathematical property of the export rather than of a specific model, and we validate it empirically only on the NRI. Enforcing symmetry by construction turns this small-data pretrained model into a reusable, interpretable inducer that transfers to larger schemas.

A defining problem of the Anthropocene is to model the physical Earth and human societies as one coupled system, yet no learned representation spans their observational breadth. We argue the obstacle is geometric: the physical Earth is measured as continuous fields that ignore political borders, whereas societies are reported for administrative units. Earth-system foundation models serve the first geometry; coupling it to the second has required lossy averaging over borders. We introduce TerraNova, a foundation model trained on 1,024 physical and societal records in their native geometries: 512 gridded Earth-system fields and 512 national indicators. Dedicated encoders represent location, country, time and task, cross-modal transformers fuse them into a shared spatiotemporal state, and a hypernetwork generates a per-query decoder whose evidential head returns a predictive distribution. Two contrastive objectives couple the representation: a population-weighted alignment between each country and coordinates in its territory, and one to pretrained geospatial embeddings carrying image-derived semantics. Read out through that decoder, the representation is competitive with purpose-built geospatial encoders while spanning axes they do not represent (time, oceans and uncertainty) and supporting country-level capabilities. The frozen backbone reconstructs dense fields from sparse observations and adapts to unseen variables in minutes on consumer hardware.

This study analyzes the intermediate representations of music foundation models (MFMs) and reports the geometric structures used to represent pitch information. By inputting isolated musical notes into trained MFMs and analyzing their principal components, we reveal that the representations form a helical structure reflecting the octave periodicity of pitch. Furthermore, we show that the clarity and geometry of this helical structure vary not only across models but also with the acoustic properties of the input signals. Our analysis provides a novel approach for clarifying the internal mechanisms of MFMs.

Federated learning of foundation models faces a fundamental resource-asymmetry challenge: the institutions holding the most valuable domain-specific data cannot host billion-parameter models. Existing heterogeneous federated approaches attempt to bridge this gap through parameter-efficient tuning, model pruning, or knowledge distillation, yet each trades away a critical property, whether full-model memory reduction, architectural self-containedness, or representational fidelity, leaving the core tension unresolved. We propose FedSLM, a parameter-centric framework for federated fine-tuning with heterogeneous compressed clients. FedSLM uses SVD-based decomposition to produce self-contained client models, whose low-rank subspaces form nested manifolds that are structurally compatible for aggregation. It then applies a two-stage protocol that synchronizes lightweight adapters within compression groups and fuses full-rank reconstructions across groups via structural alignment. Finally, a weak-to-strong elicitation step with auxiliary confidence loss transfers the aggregated knowledge to the full-scale server, while an explicit bias--variance trade-off mitigates compression artifacts. We provide theoretical guarantees for adapter-level aggregation, subspace-alignment bounds for cross-group fusion, and a characterization of how the confidence loss mitigates weak-supervision noise. Experiments on natural language and vision--language benchmarks show that FedSLM outperforms existing federated baselines under both IID and non-IID partitions, while client models operate at roughly 50% of the GPU memory required by the full model.

Existing methods for adapting 2D foundation models such as SAM to 3D volumes either process slices independently---ignoring inter-slice context---or require substantial architectural changes and retraining. In this paper, we present \textbf{SAM+D}, a parameter-efficient framework that lifts SAM-family models by one spatial dimension---enabling 3D volumetric segmentation from 2D SAM and, for the first time via parameter-efficient fine-tuning, end-to-end 4D (3D+T) spatiotemporal segmentation from video-based SAM2---while keeping the vast majority of pre-trained parameters frozen. SAM+D introduces two lightweight, model-agnostic modules into frozen transformer blocks: (1)\textbf{Depth-Routed LoRA (DRLoRA)} experts with learned routing for spatially adaptive low-rank updates, and (2)\textbf{Depth Shift Modules (DSM)} for cross-slice feature exchange at zero additional parameter cost. Together, they provide volume-level context while tuning only ${\sim}$2.8% of parameters for SAM and ${\sim}$3.7% for SAM2. We evaluate SAM+D in two distinct settings, each lifting the base model by one spatial dimension: 3D segmentation, where SAM(2D$\,\to\,$3D) is evaluated on four CT benchmarks (KiTS, Pancreas, LiTS, Colon), and 4D segmentation, where SAM2 (2D+T$\,\to\,$3D+T) is evaluated on a cell tracking challenge (CTC) dataset (Fluo-N3DH-SIM+). In both settings SAM+D achieves competitive or superior results under the single-point prompt setting while using fewer trainable parameters than existing methods, demonstrating that SAM+D generalizes across SAM-family architectures, target dimensionalities (3D, 4D), and domains spanning medical imaging and bio-scene understanding. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/JerrySongCST/SAM-Plus-D.

High-fidelity radio fields are typically simulated for every scene--transmitter configuration or fitted separately to each scene, failing to exploit propagation structures shared across environments. We present Point2Radio, a foundation model that learns a transferable propagation prior from multiple environments. Given a material-aware point cloud and a transmitter (TX) setting, a common encoder produces a TX-conditioned scene representation that can be queried at arbitrary receiver (RX) locations. Task-specific query decoders map this representation to different radio quantities, e.g., three-dimensional (3D) path-gain (PG) fields and power angular spectra (PAS). At inference for a new scene, the model uses only a material-aware point cloud and transceiver queries, running in milliseconds on a single GPU without meshes or explicit path tracing. We evaluate PG prediction on a scene-disjoint split of a 337-scene corpus containing 86,272 TX-conditioned fields. Point2Radio achieves 0.871 dB mean absolute error (MAE), reducing error by 76.7% relative to a same-split UNet-style baseline. The same encoder also supports PAS prediction via a task-specific decoder. Experiments further show that light target-scene fine-tuning improves adaptation to a specific environment.

Medical foundation models (FMs) are increasingly used for brain MRI analysis. However, their evaluation remains dominated by high-resource datasets, leaving generalization to African cohorts underexplored. We assess whether FMs generalize equally to African and non-African brain MRI data across two tasks: dementia classification using a Nigerian dataset and brain tumor segmentation using BraTS-Africa. We evaluate two generalist FMs (BrainIAC, 3DINO) and two segmentation-specific FMs (MedSAM2, Medical-SAM2) against a from-scratch baseline. For classification, FMs provide limited gains (highest ROC-AUC of 0.86 with BrainIAC), whereas for segmentation they consistently improve performance, reaching up to 0.86 Dice with MedSAM2. Performance differences between African and non-African cohorts are inconsistent and appear more related to dataset size than data origin. These results suggest that FMs do not exhibit an inherent bias against African cohorts, and highlight the limited availability and diversity of African neuroimaging datasets as the main barrier to robust evaluation and deployment.

Intelligence is commonly understood as the ability to acquire and apply knowledge, adapt to unfamiliar situations and solve new problems. Large language models exhibit this capacity by inferring task-relevant knowledge from textual context and applying it to new tasks. Yet intelligence need not be confined to language. For scientific and social systems, we need models that acquire and apply knowledge from numerical context-an ability we call numerical intelligence. Here we introduce UNified In-Context Operator Networks (UNICON), a foundation model that exhibits numerical intelligence across disciplines. Using graph-based examples from a system as context, UNICON infers the predictive relation shared across them and applies it to queries from the same system. Across scientific and social systems, including those from disciplines absent from training, the same model approaches specialist performance without retraining. Combining UNICON with language-model agents to perform contextual ensemble learning (CEL) yields further gains, enabling it to surpass state-of-the-art specialists in a discipline unseen during training. We further show that training-corpus diversity improves generalization to unseen disciplines. Together, these results establish UNICON as a foundation model of numerical intelligence and position it as a building block for a broader ecosystem of artificial intelligence.

Predictive process monitoring (PPM) leverages event logs to forecast the future of running process instances, for instance, predicting the next activity, the remaining time until case completion, or the time to the next event. While PPM research in recent years has been dominated by deep sequence models trained from scratch, such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models, foundation-model approaches---particularly large language models (LLMs)---are increasingly explored for PPM. At the same time, tabular foundation models with in-context learning capabilities offer a promising alternative but have not yet been systematically benchmarked for PPM. Thus, it remains unclear whether classical sequence-based models remain competitive in this evolving landscape. This paper compares the three modeling paradigms both conceptually and empirically through a controlled benchmark across multiple datasets and prediction tasks. The results show that sequence models consistently perform best for next activity prediction, whereas tabular foundation models are competitive on temporal tasks, with LLMs usually lagging behind despite higher cost.

Tabular Foundation Models, such as TabPFN, have received a large amount of recent attention due to their performance on in-context tabular machine learning tasks, which often exceeds classical baselines. However, practical deployment considerations of these models has received less attention. In this paper we investigate the memory requirements for these models. We demonstrate that employing model compression approaches can enable memory reductions of up to 7.6 with similar levels of performance, reducing deployment requirements by nearly 87%. Our work provides insight to practitioners seeking efficient deployment of these models in practical settings.

We present a lightweight approach to foundation modeling (\textbf{NEXUS}) that leverages pre-trained learning from collider physics data towards out-of-domain tasks in other scientific datasets, using a fully connected autoencoder model with approximately 3 million parameters. The model pre-trains with no supervision over a large-scale collision dataset from the Large Hadron Collider modeled by charged particle track features. Downstream tasks for collider analyses, such as kinematic regression and event classification, are developed on pre-trained model weights and achieve improved accuracy with only small labeled datasets when compared to equivalent architectures trained from scratch. The benefits of pre-training are additionally investigated through latent space interpretation and application to other domains, including gravitational waves, flood forecasting, and neural activity. Furthermore, the relative computational simplicity of NEXUS is demonstrated compared to transformer approaches at comparable scale, opening the door to power-efficient inference and real-time or edge applications of foundation models in scientific experiments.

CT vision-language foundation models have demonstrated promising performance across downstream tasks, but are typically trained with whole-volume representations that dilute fine-grained anatomical signals. Fine-grained vision-language pre-training addresses this by aligning anatomy-level visual features with anatomy-specific text, but in doing so discards the global context that whole-volume models provide. Furthermore, existing fine-grained approaches train from scratch, making them computationally expensive. We introduce Anatomy Contextualized Adaptation (ACA), a lightweight framework that adapts frozen CT foundation model representations for anatomy-level vision-language alignment while enhancing global contextualization. ACA uses TotalSegmentator to decompose CT volumes into anatomy-level embeddings, which are refined via a transformer that captures cross-anatomy relationships, and aligned to both per-anatomy and scan-level text extracted from radiology reports. Evaluated on Merlin and CT-RATE, ACA consistently outperforms both the frozen foundation model baselines and existing fine-grained methods in zero-shot finding classification, while requiring less than one hour of training once embeddings are cached. The attention weights learned by ACA's inter-anatomy transformer additionally indicate plausible cross-anatomy context routing. Altogether, these results support ACA as a lightweight approach for adapting CT foundation models to anatomically grounded vision-language alignment while preserving and enhancing global anatomical context.

Anterior eye segment (AES) segmentation is a key component of both ocular biometrics and emerging clinical image analysis applications. However, heterogeneous acquisition conditions and limited annotations in medical settings hinder the robustness and generalization of existing methods. Foundation models (FMs) such as DINOv3 offer strong transfer capabilities, but efficiently adapting their representations to dense prediction tasks remains challenging. In this study, we investigate robust AES segmentation in clinical settings, and propose a lightweight architecture built upon a distilled DINOv3 ViT-Small backbone. We introduce a step-attention feature refinement module that progressively adapts multi-level transformer representations before convolutional decoding, enabling efficient exploitation of pretrained features with few parameters. We evaluate the proposed approach on a private dataset of 333 clinically acquired AES images spanning eight ophthalmic acquisition protocols and annotated for seven anatomical classes. Compared with convolutional and transformer-based baselines, including DINOv3-based methods, our approach achieves the best overall performance, reaching 85.55% mIoU when fully fine-tuned. It also demonstrates the strongest robustness to domain shift across four unseen public AES segmentation datasets. These results establish a strong baseline for robust AES segmentation in clinical settings and highlight the importance of decoder design for effectively adapting FMs representations to medical segmentation tasks.

Face presentation attack detection (PAD) remains challenging under cross-dataset evaluation, where domain shift degrades models trained on a single dataset. The scarcity of large-scale labeled data motivates adapting pretrained vision models rather than training task-specific architectures from scratch, raising a fundamental question: do general-purpose vision foundation models encode PAD-relevant information accessible with minimal task-specific training? To investigate, we systematically evaluate 24 frozen encoders, including self-supervised vision transformers, vision-language encoders, and supervised CNNs, using a unified linear-probing protocol on the MCIO benchmark (MSU-MFSD, CASIA-FASD, Replay-Attack, OULU-NPU). The backbone remains fixed, and only a lightweight linear head is trained to isolate the PAD information already present in the pretrained representation. Results show that frozen foundation-model representations can support strong intra-dataset PAD performance with only a linear classifier, but this performance does not reliably transfer across datasets. Model scale is beneficial within several families, although the effect is not monotonic and is strongly mediated by architecture and pretraining. InternViT-6B achieves the lowest mean intra-dataset error, whereas CLIP ViT-B/32 offers the most favorable cross-dataset transfer-compute trade-off among the evaluated probes. These findings suggest that while pretrained representations contain PAD-relevant information, explicit adaptation remains necessary to address domain shift.

Recent advances in AI agents have increasingly internalized native capabilities into their underlying foundation models, giving rise to multimodal foundation models and large reasoning models. However, agent memory is still primarily implemented through external modules, leaving the native memory capability largely unexplored. In this paper, we take a first step toward this direction by introducing memory foundation models, which empower foundation models with native memory capabilities. We formalize native memory from two perspectives: a persistent and dynamically evolving memory state within the backbone, and native memory procedures that autonomously store and utilize information through model computation. We show that native memory offers advantages in architecture, end-to-end optimization, and efficiency. Based on this formulation, we propose Metis, the first prototype of memory foundation models. Metis introduces a new architecture that equips a foundation model with a native memory state, allowing historical information to be compressed into the model and accessed through memory attention. We construct large-scale memory-specific training data and introduce multiple optimization objectives to acquire these native memory procedures through mid-training. The online memory maintenance of Metis is gradient-free, and the memory update requires only a forward pass. At inference time, all learned model weights remain frozen, while the native memory states are autonomously transformed through standard forward computation. Through extensive experiments, we show that Metis exhibits native memory capabilities and further provide a detailed analysis of its strengths, limitations, and behaviors. To facilitate future research on memory foundation models, we release our project and model checkpoints.

Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) aim to learn transferable knowledge from multi-domain graphs and adapt to unseen scenarios. As a fundamental source of relational semantics in graphs, the transferability of topological patterns has long been central to GFM research. However, local structural patterns may vary across graphs and even among nodes within the same graph. Despite such structural variation, most existing GFMs rely on manually designed propagation schemes and apply them to new graphs largely unchanged. Such fixed schemes may not suit the diverse structural patterns of different nodes. This raises a key question: can each node autonomously determine how information should be propagated through the graph? We refer to this capability as information-flow control. Inspired by recent advances in agent technology, we formulate this problem as agent-based decision making and treat each node as an agent. Accordingly, we propose AgentGFM, in which all node agents follow a shared end-to-end trainable policy rather than using independent models. For adaptive information-flow control, each node interacts with the graph through a predict-act-observe-correct process. During the act stage, the node makes three decisions: source reception, signal-channel selection and gain-aware node-wise halting. The resulting observation is compared with the prediction and their discrepancy is used to correct the node state and guide subsequent interactions. Extensive experiments across node-level, graph-level and large-scale transfer scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of AgentGFM across diverse graph topologies.

In the age of foundation models, a model is only as good as its prompt. For this reason, prompt engineering has become an essential technique for improving language model performance. Since video models are currently becoming foundation models for visual tasks (e.g., visual reasoning), we here ask whether they similarly benefit from visual prompt engineering: automatically modifying the task image to improve model performance. For example, for a visual physics reasoning task ("Where does the ball land, after passing a set of obstacles?"), an abstract sketch-like scene can be turned into a photorealistic version with a simple call to an image editing model. We find that visual prompt engineering, or VIPE for short, improves video reasoning performance across tasks. In fact, for video models, visual prompt engineering can be even more effective than classic text-based prompt engineering or test-time scaling. Ultimately, just as text-based prompt engineering systematically improves language model performance, visual prompt engineering can serve as a simple, compute-efficient approach to elicit better visual reasoning performance from video models. Example videos on our project page at https://visual-prompt-engineering.github.io/.

Pathology foundation models encode non-biological variation introduced by tissue preparation, staining and scanning, enabling shortcut learning that undermines generalisation across institutions. The Robustness Index (RI} was proposed to assess whether local representation geometry is dominated by biological or non-biological variation. However, its construction suffers from structural limitations that make cross-model comparison unreliable and call for a more principled metric. We introduce the Cross-confounder Robustness Margin (CRoMa), which measures, for each sample, whether biologically matched samples differing in the confounder lie closer in representation space than confounder-matched samples differing in biology. By design, CRoMa recasts robustness as a cohort-wide distribution of sample-level margins. We evaluated frozen representations from 20 tile-level encoders across three benchmarks and 4 slide-level encoders on a fourth. Median CRoMa rankings were broadly consistent across cohorts, yet all encoders contained confounder-dominated subsets whose prevalence and severity varied substantially across models and cohorts. Higher CRoMa margins were associated with smaller shortcut-induced performance drops after supervised adaptation, indicating that CRoMa can be a valuable tool for assessing model robustness on downstream tasks.

Modern predictive systems are expected to adapt their behavior to the specific situation they are facing. A clinical model should not treat every patient the same; a retrieval-augmented model should change its answer when given different evidence; a mixture-of-experts model should route different inputs to different experts. We call this capability context-adaptive inference: before predicting, the system uses information about the current context to specialize its parameters or computation for that instance. This article provides a unified view of context-adaptive inference across three traditions that are usually treated separately: (i) explicit adaptation in statistics (e.g. varying-coefficient models, local regression, hierarchical sharing), (ii) rapid task-specific adaptation in meta-learning and transfer, and (iii) implicit adaptation in large foundation models via prompting, retrieval, and expert routing. We formalize these approaches under a common objective: to map context $c$ to adapted parameters $θ(c)$, then to predict via $f(x; θ(c))$. Under squared loss, linear prediction heads, and fixed features, we prove that explicit parameter adaptation and implicit routing are mathematically equivalent to kernel ridge regression on joint features of inputs and context. Building on this bridge, we propose practical design principles and evaluation metrics including adaptation-efficiency, routing stability, and context-specific robustness to guide when to specialize, how to constrain that specialization, and how to audit context-adaptive models in deployment. Finally, we identify open problems in identifiability, robustness under distribution shift, and efficient large-scale adaptation, outlining design principles for methods that are scalable, reliable, and transparent in real-world settings.

Inspired by recent breakthroughs in large language models for natural language processing, foundation models have emerged as a promising paradigm for zero-shot time series forecasting, enabling accurate predictions on datasets never seen during pre-training. Ranging from tens to hundreds of millions of parameters, these models are pre-trained on vast and diverse collections of time series, learning generalizable representations that support both point and probabilistic forecasting. This approach alleviates the need for dataset-specific model design and manual tuning, offering a unified solution across forecasting problems. In this work, we review the main architectures, pre-training strategies, and optimization methods underpinning these models. We further investigate post-pre-training fine-tuning of selected foundation models to enhance their performance on specific datasets. Our empirical results demonstrate that this step consistently improves forecasting accuracy over the zero-shot baseline.

Frozen EEG encoders proliferate; per-model fine-tune defaults do not scale. We present Nimbus Personalizer: one contract encode to Bayesian head to BrainState (optional affine mid-tier) that sits on heterogeneous frozen trunks without a new personalization stack per architecture. Thesis (systems): the contribution is the trunk-agnostic API - not LDA-on-embeddings as an ML novelty - so OEMs integrate once and swap trunks. Evidence: the same surface runs on five classical trunks EEGNet, Shallow, Deep, Conformer, ATCNet x four MI datasets (18 cells) and on a foundation encoder (REVE) under the same Personalizer. Where embedding capacity exists, the head is a cheap default mid-point versus warm-start fine-tune or PEFT, costing orders of magnitude less adaptation wall time while recovering much of the fine-tune accuracy gain; calibration-only-when-clean holds in 12/18 cells. Head gains are supporting evidence that the API is useful where capacity exists. Subject-level confidence intervals identify the clearest dataset and span zero elsewhere. All results are exploratory (subject-level bootstrap, no confirmatory tests); the decision logic for when to escalate adaptation is addressed in our companion work on the control layer.

Multi-branch architectures and CNN-Transformer fusion are widely believed to improve vehicle re-identification (Re-ID) by combining complementary representations. We revisit this for a DINOv3-pretrained backbone. A single DINOv3-pretrained ConvNeXt with a tuned recipe reaches 88.19 mAP on VeRi-Wild Small and 77.47 on Large from visual cues alone, within the combined evaluation and optimization noise of the strongest protocol-verified metadata-dependent multi-branch baseline, and 92.38/83.68 with training-free re-ranking. Using this baseline and retrieval-level branch diagnostics, we ask whether representational diversity still pays at this scale. In our runs, it does not. Across both benchmarks and every converged configuration, concatenating multiple heads over a shared backbone moves the best single head by under one mAP point in either direction while costing four times the embedding dimension; 99.7% of the concatenation's variance lies in 512 principal components, so the heads not only duplicate one another but each occupies a quarter of its nominal 2048 dimensions. Pushing diversity to its architectural limit, CNN versus Transformer, we grant fusion every advantage through an asymmetric frozen-anchor scheme. Every Transformer configuration still lands at least 13 mAP below the ConvNeXt backbone (13-15 for the two strongest, up to 46 for the weakest), and a paired per-query bootstrap bounds the fusion gain at +0.11 mAP (95% CI) even for the most favourable snapshot we obtained. One strong backbone with the right recipe and re-ranking is the efficiency frontier. All results use single-seed training and one foundation-model family; differences of this size are therefore reported as bounds rather than orderings, and we list falsifiers.

A graph foundation model generalizes across graph domains by mapping every input into one shared representation before any task reasoning. We call this map the alignment layer, the component that separates a graph foundation model from a graph neural network, and we show it is a distinct attack surface that prior work has not studied. We attack it at inference time, with no access to training, on six public models spanning spectral tokenizers, text embedding spaces, and a discrete codebook. A directed representation-space perturbation collapses every model, but at a budget comparable to the representation norm a plain graph network also needs, with one exception: OpenGraph, whose spectral tokenizer collapses at a fifth of that budget, an alignment-specific fragility a plain network does not share and which a same-representation control traces to the tokenizer rather than the decoder. A realizable input-space attack that edits edges, features, or text removes at least half the correct predictions on three of the six models at peak. How much of this fragility an input-access attacker realizes tracks how directly the decoder reads the representation, and not the clean accuracy a task leaves; we measure this carrier gain structurally from the decoder's local Lipschitz sensitivity, and report clean-accuracy headroom as a within-model ordering heuristic that does not survive on realizable attacks.

Spatial understanding is crucial for foundation models (FMs), and maps have long helped humans organize and reason about geographic information. This study examines whether choropleth maps remain useful for machine spatial understanding when models can directly process structured geodata. We introduce ChoroplethMap-Bench, a controlled benchmark containing 2,400 synthetic choropleth maps, corresponding GeoJSON data, and 12,000 questions across five cognitive dimensions: Identify, Spatial Recognition, Compare, Rank, and Delineate. We evaluate 22 open-source and proprietary models under three input conditions: Data Only, Map Only, and Data + Map. The results show that maps substantially improve spatial reasoning, especially when combined with symbolic data and for tasks requiring higher-level understanding of spatial patterns. We further analyze the effects of map type, color hue, and spatial structure, as well as prompting strategies, language, geographic context, decoding settings, classification methods, and response stability. Overall, the Data + Map condition achieves the strongest performance, demonstrating that maps remain valuable external representations for foundation model spatial reasoning.

We present RynnBrain 1.1, a family of embodied foundation models spanning 2B, 9B, and 122B-A10B scales. Trained with a unified spatio-temporal and physically grounded framework, RynnBrain 1.1 supports embodied perception, spatial reasoning, localization, and planning. Compared with RynnBrain 1.0, it further introduces contact-point prediction across the model family and native 3D grounding for the 2B and 9B models, yielding representations and outputs that are more directly aligned with robot manipulation. We also develop RynnBrain-VLA with a unified cross-embodiment action space and embodiment-specific masking, and deploy it on Unitree G1, Astribot-S1, and Tianji-Wuji. RynnBrain 1.1 achieves strong results on embodied cognition, localization, and 3D grounding, with the 122B-A10B model outperforming all evaluated proprietary and open-source models on VSI-Bench, MMSI, and RefSpatial-Bench. Real-robot experiments show that RynnBrain-initialized policies outperform Qwen-based and representative generalist VLAs, while joint multi-task and multi-embodiment training improves process scores and success rates over per-task training.

Source-free universal domain adaptation (SF-UniDA) adapts a pre-trained source model to an unlabeled target domain under both covariate and label shifts, without access to source data. However, existing SF-UniDA methods rely on inefficient techniques such as threshold tuning and clustering. Foundation models (FMs), known for their generalization and zero-shot capabilities, remain underexplored in SF-UniDA. In this paper, we propose a framework that leverages foundation models (LFM) for SF-UniDA. We use a vision-language model (VLM) to compute similarities between target samples and text labels, including those for unknown classes generated by prompting a large language model. The label shift type is determined by analyzing the coefficient of variation of a similarity-based sample-level score. Unknown samples are identified using a binary Gaussian mixture model fitted to another similarity-based metric. Under a consensus strategy, the pseudo-labels generated by the VLM are refined by the target model initialized with the pre-trained source model, integrating knowledge from both the source domain and foundation models. Finally, these refined pseudo-labels are used to train the target model. Extensive experiments across all possible label shifts and multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed LFM framework. Our code is available at https://github.com/iamjingli/LFM.

Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a framework for sequential decision making under explicit objectives. In its classical form, RL studies how an agent should act to maximise long-term reward in a dynamic environment. In richer settings, the problem extends beyond a single agent and fixed environment: intelligent behavior may require strategic interaction, adaptation to uncertainty, and reasoning over high-dimensional worlds. This thesis studies RL from two perspectives: algorithms in games and RL in the era of foundation models. The first part focuses on multi-agent RL in games. It examines how incentives, policies, and equilibrium concepts interact in competitive and general-sum environments, spanning two-player zero-sum games, large-scale video games, and multi-player settings with general structure. These works investigate learning in multi-agent systems and the behavior of RL methods in interactive environments. The second part studies RL with generative and foundation models, motivated by the idea that prior knowledge can enrich sequential decision making. Pretrained generative models and learned world models serve as representation tools and structured priors for planning, control, and policy optimization. The thesis develops diffusion-based world models, investigates RL for efficient video generation, explores generative models as policy classes, and studies interactive video world models in which actions shape future observations. It also addresses long-horizon modeling through architectures with memory. Together, these contributions present a unified view of RL as objective-driven adaptation in complex sequential domains. From strategic games to generative world models, the thesis highlights how RL connects decision making, environment modeling, and emerging foundation-model capabilities, offering a broader perspective on the principles underlying intelligent behavior.

Multi-provider LLM gateways reverse proxies that route, load-balance, and rate-limit requests across foundation-model APIs have become critical production infrastructure. Yet the failure modes specific to this architectural layer remain undocumented, scattered across issue trackers and post-mortems with no unifying framework. We introduce \fa{}, a two-axis taxonomy that classifies failures by their \emph{origin layer} (Network/Transport, Streaming/Protocol, State/Session, ModelBehavior, Governance/Cost) and their \emph{detectability} (Loud vs.\ Silent). We populate this taxonomy with five verified catalog entries sourced from public bug reports and first-hand stress testing, each accompanied by a mechanistic root-cause analysis. Three entries include standalone reproduction scripts. Our principal finding is that the most operationally severe failures are \emph{silent}: they return HTTP200, pass every standard health check, and corrupt application state in ways that require semantic-level observability to detect. Two such silent failures a concurrency race condition causing history loss and a streaming index collision corrupting tool-call payloads were discovered first-hand during \cb{} evaluation campaigns.

Regional climate prediction presents unique challenges for time series foundation models, which typically process temporal patterns through single-pass inference. Expert climatologists, in contrast, employ multi-scale temporal analysis and iterative refinement based on systematic error diagnosis. We present RGMR (Residual-Guided Multi-Resolution Refinement), an inference-time framework that adapts pre-trained foundation models to perform structured coarse-to-fine refinement for climate forecasting without updating backbone parameters. Applied to drought forecasting using the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI), RGMR is architecture-agnostic across the three TSFM backbones evaluated per site (TimesFM, TimeGPT, TabPFN) and consistently lowers test-set MSE on three South Australian sites and three additional regions outside South Australia. Applied to TimesFM, the wrapper reduces one-month-ahead SPEI MSE by up to 18.9% across the three South Australian sites (mean reduction $\approx$18.7%). Overall, RGMR provides a practical route for deploying frozen TSFMs in regional climate forecasting workflows.

Test-time scaling improves foundation-model inference by spending additional computation, but robot control requires deciding whether extra compute is useful before executing an action. World Action Models (WAMs) make this decision natural: each rollout exposes both an action chunk and predicted future observations. We propose \methodgated, a training-free selective test-time scaling framework for WAMs. We first instantiate \method, a fixed-budget Best-of-$N$ selector that ranks sampled rollouts by cross-view depth reprojection consistency of their predicted futures, computed with a frozen geometry foundation model. \methodgated\ adds a lightweight action--future consistency gate that invokes \method\ only when the initial rollout appears internally inconsistent. Across five benchmark--backbone settings on RoboCasa, LIBERO Long, and RoboTwin~2.0, fixed-budget \method\ improves $N{=}8$ task success in every setting, e.g., raising the RoboCasa group average from $66.3\%$ to $68.4\%$ with Cosmos Policy and from $80.8\%$ to $82.5\%$ with X-WAM. With gating enabled, \methodgated\ recovers on average $74.8\%$ of the always-on success gain while triggering additional sampling on only $26.2\%$ of decision points. Offline diagnostics show that cross-view reprojection is a strong task-label-free selector, and we identify false low-score selections as a failure mode that helps explain why performance can saturate or degrade as $N$ increases.

Automated polyp segmentation in colonoscopy continues to pose challenges due to substantial appearance variations and indistinct polyp boundaries. Although emerging foundation models (FMs) such as DINOv2, SAM, and OneFormer, demonstrate remarkable generalization capabilities, their direct transfer to the polyp segmentation task and deployment in real-time clinical settings are difficult due to lack of large-scale labeled data and high computational demands. In addition, adopting multiple FMs together raises concerns, even though they encode complementary semantic and structural information. While lightweight models, including U-Net, PraNet and U-Net++, are computationally efficient, they often struggle to generalize across datasets due to limited representational capacity. To address this gap, we propose Lite-Polyp Inductor (Lite-Pi), a novel foundation model induction framework that significantly enhances lightweight polyp segmentation baselines. Our proposed framework generates FM-specific prototype representations and aligns them semantically with the corresponding foundation model priors through reconstruction-based supervision. Subsequently, transformer-based fusion is introduced to highlight the polyp relevant representations, including salient boundary information, while preserving complementary semantic cues. Extensive experiments across five polyp segmentation benchmark datasets demonstrate that Lite-π significantly improves lightweight baselines, achieving superior generalization performance with minimal computational overhead and thereby, offering a practical solution for generalized polyp segmentation. Our code is available at GitHub. https://github.com/lostinrepo/Lite-Pi

Data-driven pre-fault dynamic security assessment (DSA) rapidly evaluates the dynamic risk of credible contingencies on a power system using machine learning. Existing approaches face two limitations. First, they require a large labelled database for training, with a separate model trained, tuned, and maintained for each contingency in a potentially long list of credible contingencies. Second, the trained models generalize poorly to unseen contingencies. This work addresses the limitations by using a tabular foundation model (TFM) that assesses stability through in-context learning, requiring no retraining or hyperparameter optimization. A single TFM can assess many contingencies at once, removing the need for one model per classifier. We also characterize when the use of electrical distance coordinates (EDC) as continuous features enables generalization of TFM to unseen contingencies and when they do not, demonstrating how a few labelled samples can reliably improve generalization. Through comprehensive case studies on the IEEE 68-bus system, we show that a single TFM attains an average Macro F1 score of about 90% with only 120 labelled samples per contingency, roughly two orders of magnitude fewer than conventionally assumed, without any model retraining or hyperparameter tuning. For new/unseen contingencies, we show that using just 10 labelled samples of the new contingency with EDC encoding matches the best achievable transfer learning oracle model, which requires fully labelled data and is not deployable in practice. Overall, this initial study paves the way towards developing and deploying foundation models for power system operations, with possible applications across multiple operational tasks.

Foundation models, including large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), are increasingly used for transportation management center (TMC) tasks such as anomaly detection, incident reporting, and traveler information. Deploying multiple such models across TMC functions raises a portfolio question: which model should serve each function, in which deployment mode, and under what shared hardware budget? We formulate this as the Foundation Model Deployment Portfolio (FMDP) problem, a mixed-integer program minimizing total cost of ownership (TCO) subject to per-function quality, latency, and safety constraints over shared GPU capacity. We prove the problem NP-hard by reduction from the 0-1 knapsack problem and propose a polynomial-time greedy heuristic. In an illustrative case study with five TMC functions and 19 candidate (model, mode) pairs, FMDP identifies a mixed portfolio costing $34/mo (97% below the cheapest feasible all-closed-API baseline) by routing four functions to open-source APIs and the one function whose quality floor no open-source model meets to a closed API. Break-even analysis shows that on-premise GPU investment becomes reasonable only above approximately 309 vision queries/hour or if API prices double.

Hyperspectral foundation models learn transferable spectral-spatial representations from large-scale unlabeled data. They provide an effective paradigm for adapting to downstream hyperspectral image (HSI) classification tasks with limited labeled samples. However, spectral band configurations vary substantially across sensors, which makes direct model transfer difficult. Existing adaptation strategies often compress, select, or reshape the original spectra to match model-specific input requirements. These operations may discard useful spectral information and weaken local spectral continuity. To address this problem, we propose MBTI, a Multi-Branch efficient fine-tuning framework for Hyperspectral Image classification. MBTI adapts hyperspectral foundation models to downstream classification tasks while preserving full-band spectral information. First, we introduce a spectral-continuity-preserving multi-branch preprocessing strategy. The original HSI is divided into multiple continuous spectral subsets, and a band reuse mechanism is used when the remaining bands cannot form a complete branch. This avoids invalid padding and unnecessary spectral loss. Second, independent Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules are inserted into each branch. They enable different spectral intervals to learn task-specific discriminative features while keeping most pre-trained parameters frozen. Finally, a multi-branch channel attention fusion module adaptively recalibrates and integrates features from all spectral branches. Experiments on three public hyperspectral datasets show that MBTI achieves competitive and superior performance compared with representative classification methods. Under the final rank-8 configuration, only about 2.33%--2.36% of the parameters are trainable. The code will be available at https://github.com/Azhenmiddleblock/MBTI/tree/main.

Coding agents must integrate external tool returns into ongoing reasoning - a capability that standard left-to-right pretraining on code exposes only in its forward direction. We observe that the action-observation-continuation loop of a coding agent is structurally isomorphic to a function call site, where a caller binds arguments, a callee returns a value computed elsewhere, and downstream code consumes that value. This conditioning structure exists at internet scale in ordinary code. We exploit it through function-aware fill-in-the-middle (FIM) mid-training: a self-supervised objective that masks functions selected via program dependency graph analysis and a complexity-inferability double criterion. We mid-train Qwen2.5-Coder-Instruct (7B/14B) and Qwen3-8B on a 2.6B-token decontaminated corpus drawn from 968 GitHub repositories, then apply existing agentic post-training pipelines. Mid-training improves SWE-Bench-Verified by +2.8/+3.0 at 7B/14B and by +3.2 on Qwen3-8B; SWE-Bench-Lite gains are +3.7/+4.0/+5.4 on the same models. The improvement holds across two post-training pipelines (R2E-Gym, SWE-Smith) and on a non-Qwen2.5 base (Qwen3-8B with SWE-Lego). Beyond in-domain gains, mid-training also mitigates the capability erosion that agentic post-training otherwise inflicts on non-agent coding (e.g., LiveCodeBench) and non-coding tool-use benchmarks (tau-bench, BFCL): although the mid-training corpus contains Python code only, the function-call inductive bias survives post-training and yields consistent gains.

The analysis of satellite and aerial imagery has entered a new era with the advent of foundation models. This paper describes the concept of Geospatial Foundation Models (GeoFMs), which are artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) models pre-trained on massive geospatial datasets through varied methodologies. We first articulate the core paradigm shift that GeoFMs enable: a separation of duties, where large-scale model providers perform the computationally intensive pretraining, allowing domain experts to rapidly fine-tune or prompt these models for specific, mission-critical tasks. This approach democratizes access to state-of-the-art AI/ML while maintaining the security and confidentiality of the downstream task. We then explore the novel capabilities unlocked by different types of GeoFMs, distinguishing between the finetunable vision models produced by self-supervised techniques like masked auto-encoding, and the vision-language models produced by contrastive learning which enable zero-shot tasks like open-vocabulary image analysis. Next, we discuss the practical considerations for operationalizing GeoFMs, from performance-cost analysis to the broader MLOps ecosystem. To that end, we introduce a taxonomy of model adaptation strategies and propose a framework for domain experts to select the most cost-effective adaptation approach for their particular mission set. Finally, we present a forward-looking vision of Agentic Geospatial Reasoning, where Large Language Models act as intelligent orchestrators, leveraging GeoFMs as tools to answer high-level user queries in natural language and automate complex analytical workflows, moving the field from perception to cognition.

We study the problem of optimal continual fine-tuning for a pre-trained Foundation Model deployed at a resource-limited device. At each time slot, a new batch of training data arrives, and the controller is faced with two options: either use the data to fine-tune the model and incur a compute cost, or do not fine-tune the model and discard the data. After the decision, the performance of the current model is measured in terms of an application-specific performance metric such as classification accuracy. Our objective is to learn an optimal policy that determines \emph{when to fine-tune the model} on a single task (e.g., sentiment analysis), under a finite compute budget. We formulate this online decision-making problem as a constrained Markov Decision Process, where the system state captures three essential aspects: (\textit{i}) model's performance, (\textit{ii}) computational budget, and (\textit{iii}) data distribution relevance to historic data encountered up to that point. The transition to the next state is stochastic and therefore, we propose a reinforcement learning-based method to solve this problem, namely the \emph{actor-critic} algorithm. We also consider the special case where the performance of fine-tuning for a given model can be predicted or estimated prior to decision; in this case the problem becomes a Dynamic Programming one. Experiments with a large pre-trained model on a widely-used text classification dataset demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms fine-tuning approaches with the same compute budget by more than $4\%$ in terms of accuracy and achieves $97\%$ of full-parameter fine-tuning accuracy while requiring only $25\%$ of the fine-tuning steps.

Despite recent scaling successes, multilingual ASR performance remains highly uneven, with long-tail languages suffering from severe data scarcity. This work addresses the challenge of building robust foundation models for underrepresented Central Asian languages (Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek). We present GigaAM Multilingual, a Conformer encoder pre-trained on 2M hours of audio using a HuBERT-style objective. Crucially, we introduce a cluster-level data balancing strategy during pre-training and a domain-aware sampling method during fine-tuning to mitigate head-language dominance. In controlled comparisons, our approach outperforms strong open pretrained encoders (Whisper Large v3, Omnilingual-1B) on target languages, achieving significant gains on spontaneous speech while maintaining efficiency. We release the foundation encoder and ASR model, offering a proven recipe for effective multilingual adaptation under realistic data imbalance.

Foundation models are increasingly used as image feature extractors for mammography, but their robustness under external domain shift remains unclear. We benchmark 15 foundation-model backbones across breast density, BI-RADS severity, and cancer status using a unified frozen-backbone linear-probe protocol, training on 3 source datasets and evaluating on 12 task-compatible out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets after label harmonization. Mammography-specific vision-language models (Mammo-FM and MaMA) provide the strongest mean OOD performance, but robustness is not explained by mammography exposure alone. DINOv3 remains a competitive vision-only baseline, and mammography-adapted pretraining does not consistently improve generalization. Dataset-level analysis further shows that even leading models show heterogeneous performance across datasets. Feature-space inspection reveals that useful representations can preserve clinical signal while retaining dataset and acquisition structure. These findings highlight dataset-level OOD evaluation as a central criterion for assessing mammography representations. Our code is publicly available: https://github.com/biomedia-mira/mammo-ood.

Automation in industries such as retail, warehousing and logistics presents opportunities for greater throughput, cost reduction and mitigation of disruptions from labour shortages. Previously, such efforts have focused on back-room operations involving packing and sorting in relatively structured environments. With advances in robotic mobile manipulation hardware and foundation models, automation can now be applied to more variable and human-centric environments such as retail store shelves. In this work, we present a task-planning approach using Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to address the restocking problem in retail scenarios such as supermarkets. We demonstrate this system on a custom omnidirectional mobile manipulation platform, with user-driven prompts and a feedback-based iterative re-planning approach for error correction. The end-to-end system is validated in a PyBullet simulation environment for pick-and-place tasks.

Predictive modeling is a core component of modern financial services, where a wide range of tasks are traditionally addressed using separate models trained on manually engineered tabular features. This task-specific approach limits reuse and makes it difficult to fully exploit heterogeneous data sources such as transaction histories and digital interaction signals. In this paper, we present an approach based on pretraining a foundation transformer model on multimodal sequences of user events. Events from multiple data sources are unified into a single chronological sequence, enabling early fusion of heterogeneous modalities and learning of general-purpose representations via a next-event prediction objective. These representations are combined with existing engineered user features, on top of which lightweight neural models are trained for multiple downstream tasks. The proposed system outperforms traditional task-specific models while reducing development overhead. The approach was deployed in production at one of the biggest banks in Eastern Europe, resulting in measurable improvements in business metrics.

Wildfire smoke events produce extreme PM$_{2.5}$ concentrations that pose severe public health risks, yet forecasting rare, hazardous-level spikes remains a fundamental challenge. Time series foundation models (TSFMs), pretrained models offering zero-shot inference and efficient adaptation, perform strongly on general benchmarks, but their behavior under extreme out-of-distribution conditions is poorly understood. We present the first systematic benchmark comparing six TSFM configurations (zero-shot TimesFM, Chronos-2, Moirai-2, and Time-MoE, plus LoRA fine-tuned Chronos-2 and Time-MoE) against fully-trained baselines (LSTM, BiLSTM, Transformer) and naive persistence on a 12-year (2013--2025) hourly PM$_{2.5}$ dataset covering 1,375 wildfire incidents across 79 California monitoring sites. A leave-one-incident-out (LOIO) protocol evaluates generalization to unseen fires, using MAE, RMSE, and exceedance F1 at EPA AQI thresholds across 6-, 12-, and 24-hour horizons. Results reveal a consistent hierarchy. The BiLSTM achieves the lowest MAE ($5.16\,μg/m^3$) and the highest exceedance F1 at every threshold, including the Hazardous band ($>225.5\,μg/m^3$), reaching 0.63 versus at most 0.54 for any foundation model. Zero-shot TSFMs improve on persistence only modestly, and zero-shot Chronos-2 exhibits severe RMSE tail instability ($23.4\,μg/m^3$, negative $R^2$) from sporadic large errors. LoRA fine-tuning substantially improves both adapted families and largely repairs this instability, yet no foundation model surpasses the trained recurrent baselines on any metric. These findings challenge the assumption that larger pretrained models universally dominate environmental forecasting and provide actionable deployment guidance for wildfire air quality prediction.

Foundation models (FMs) have transformed machine learning from isolated task-specific model development toward general-purpose models pretrained on broad data and adapted to multiple downstream tasks. Earth observation (EO) is an important domain for this paradigm because satellite and airborne archives are large, high-revisit, and increasingly multimodal, while reliable field labels are often sparse. Remote sensing foundation models (RSFMs) cannot be transferred reliably/optimally without domain-specific adaptation. This is because EO data are governed by measurement physics and operational decision constraints. This chapter reviews the design principles arising from these domain-specific constraints. It first defines the FMs paradigm in remote sensing (RS), then synthesizes the current model landscape, pretraining objectives, architecture designs, downstream adaptation and trustworthiness requirements. The chapter also incorporates recent benchmark evidence showing that no single geospatial foundation model is universally best and that inconsistent evaluation remains a major issue to fair comparison and reliable deployment. In addition, two brief environmental monitoring case studies; physics-informed spectral targeted masking for harmful algal bloom prediction and reinforcement learning for adaptive environmental monitoring station selection to illustrate the FMs domain-guided principles in practice. This chapter posits that next-generation RSFMs should be evaluated not only by benchmark accuracy, but also by modality-aware transfer and physically plausible representations for trustworthy EO decisions.

Wearable motion sensing provides a continuous and scalable window into human behavior and health, making it a natural fit for foundation models, yet its pretraining and scaling principles remain poorly understood. Prior work studies isolated design choices, such as sensor placement or sampling frequency, often under fixed settings and narrow downstream tasks that fail to capture real-world sensing diversity. We introduce Inertia-1, a fully open exploration of wearable motion foundation models. Using massive corpora of accelerometer data from global sources spanning more than 18.2M hours, we build a controlled framework for studying the full lifecycle of wearable motion foundation models, covering data choices such as sensor modality, device placement, sampling rate, window length; model choices such as architectures and model size; and training choices such as pretraining objective and data scale. Extensive evaluations across 15 datasets spanning human activity recognition, freezing-of-gait detection, and disease prediction reveal intriguing findings for building motion foundation models that generalize across tasks and sensing conditions. Collectively, Inertia-1 not only presents state-of-the-art recipes for diverse downstream tasks, but also serves as a comprehensive, practical, and open cookbook for wearable motion representation learning.

As foundation models grow in scale and diversity, coordinating multiple models into cooperative reasoning systems offers a path toward safer, more reliable AI. This chapter presents a multi-agent framework where solver models generate independent drafts, each undergoes structured critique and revision by a critic agent, and an aggregator agent synthesizes a final consensus solution. A scoring module provides semantic, numerical, and procedural evaluation across all agents. Through ablation studies on a benchmark spanning calculus, physics, chemistry, biology, economics, optimization, statistics, and mathematics, we isolate the contributions of framework architecture versus model diversity. We compare four configurations: (1) Individual Baseline, (2) Homogeneous Framework using one shared model, (3) Redundant Homogeneous Solvers using multiple instances of the same model, and (4) Heterogeneous Framework with diverse specialized models. Results show that while framework structure and redundant sampling yield modest gains, model heterogeneity is the critical factor driving substantial performance improvements. The heterogeneous configuration achieves superior step-wise accuracy (0.64 vs. 0.54 for individual models; 2.3x improvement over homogeneous configurations) with reduced variance across categories and difficulty levels. Step-wise reasoning quality (correctness of intermediate steps, not just final answers) improves dramatically only with model diversity, showing that heterogeneous agents provide complementary error detection and reasoning refinement essential for explainability and auditability. We discuss architectural principles, evaluation methodology, and implications for Global Applied AI, showing how heterogeneous multi-agent coordination supports transparent, auditable, high-confidence decision-making across scientific and industrial domains.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) enable the automatic generation of parametric 3D designs from natural-language specifications. This chapter presents an empirical study of foundation models for automatic Computer-Aided Design (CAD) generation of mechanical parts, using a unified evaluation pipeline and a curated benchmark of 97 engineering design problems. We introduce LLMForge, a multi-model text-to-CAD framework integrating JSON-schema validation, analytic feature scoring, mesh synthesis, and multi-round iterative refinement, studied under two critique regimes. IterTracer uses a Phong-shaded ray-trace renderer with analytic visual metrics (silhouette IoU, hole visibility, edge clearance, aspect-ratio conformance) for lightweight geometry-aware feedback across rounds. IterVision replaces the analytic scorer with a VLM semantic critic (Qwen2.5-VL-72B) that evaluates rendered views via chain-of-thought visual reasoning, assessing spatial coherence and design intent. On a benchmark spanning four canonical geometry families (plates with holes and bolt circles, multi-feature boxes, flanged cylinders, and L-brackets), we evaluate seven foundation models: DeepSeek-V3.2, Qwen3-235B-A22B, Llama-3.3-70B, Gemma-3-27B, GLM-4.5, MiniMax-M2.1, and INTELLECT. Under IterTracer, the four highest-ranked models form a tight cluster (overall mean in [0.885, 0.890]) with 98.97% mesh success, showing that compact instruction-tuned models can match substantially larger systems. VLM-based critique in IterVision yields 100% watertight mesh generation on the leading model while surfacing systematic difficulty on rotationally symmetric geometries such as cylinders, where visual and semantic scoring diverge most. We discuss benchmark design, failure modes, CAD-oriented prompting, and implications for industrial workflows and scalable automated mechanical design.