Lens

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is sensitive to which problems a model trains on, yet existing selection criteria--difficulty filtering, hand-curation, reward-trajectory scoring--assess data value as an intrinsic property of problems, independent of the model that will learn from them. We introduce Circuit Reasoning Score (CRS), a selection signal derived from 46 reasoning-sensitive attention heads identified via contrastive ablation, computed in a single forward pass on the frozen base model without reward labels or rollouts. CRS runs against the intuitive hypothesis that stronger reasoning-circuit engagement produces better training data: on Qwen2.5-Math-7B, the lowest-engagement decile improves over random selection on three medium-difficulty benchmarks (GSM8K +2.0 pp, OlympiadBench +1.6 pp, Minerva +2.9 pp), while the highest-engagement decile gains less and is indistinguishable from the middle decile. The advantage has boundary conditions: on a domain-curated pool no selection method separates from the others; at 1.5B scale the useful direction differs; and the lowest-reward training condition produces the strongest downstream generalization. Within the Qwen2.5-Math settings tested, RLVR data selection appears regime-dependent rather than reducible to a static ranking of problem quality.

A language model's prediction of its next token develops across layers, and lens methods track this process by decoding intermediate hidden states into tokens. But a lens reading reflects both the hidden state and the readout (the unembedding matrix) used to decode it. Many lenses are fit on a corpus, and we show that two lenses differing only in their fitting corpus can report different tokens for the same hidden states. We call this dependence corpus conditionality. To examine readout structure independently of the fitting corpus, we introduce Sparse Readout Prism (SRP), which decomposes the readout using only its weights and expresses any token logit or logit difference as a sum of contributions from sparse readout features. This reveals readout features as a new unit of analysis for lens readings, exposing structure that token identities can obscure and enabling comparisons across tokens, contexts, layers, and lenses. Replacing the original readout with SRP's sparse approximation reconstructs 8.9-17.3 percentage points more of the tested logit differences than the strongest of six baselines built on geometric relations among readout rows. Ablating features shifts logit differences in proportion to their SRP contributions. Although token readings vary with the fitting corpus, the dominant readout feature remains stable. Because SRP uses no corpus in its construction, it provides a control independent of the fitting corpus for lens analyses.

Recent work identifies a mid-depth band of verbalisable, causally potent representations in a standard feedforward transformer --- a functional analogue of a global workspace. Whether the same workspace functionality emerges when depth is implemented through recurrence rather than a stack of distinct layers remains unknown. Looped and depth-recurrent transformers provide a direct test of this question because they reuse the same weights across depth. We extend the Jacobian lens to iterated architectures using a virtual-unrolling adapter. We apply the full workspace suite --- lens fitting, readout, and eleven causal experiment families --- to Ouro-2.6B (48 layers looped 4 times, deeply supervised) and Huginn-0125 (a 4-layer core recurred 16 times, trained for latent reasoning), using Qwen3.6-27B (64 untied layers) as the standard baseline. We find that a workspace forms in the iterated part of each architecture, but that recurrence changes how it can be accessed. Ouro reconstructs workspace content in every loop, and linear transport cannot carry that content across loop boundaries; writes and ablations must therefore span every remaining loop. Huginn carries content forward across all sixteen recurrences, while reads, writes, and ablations act only within a sliding window of roughly two recurrences. Whether newly injected content can be verbalised tracks explicit per-iteration supervision; whether existing content can be steered does not.

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to make decisions from visual inputs. We introduce FAIRLENS, a benchmark and evaluation framework for measuring both the fairness and the validity of VLM responses in three high-stakes domains: hiring, legal, and healthcare. FAIRLENS pairs real face images spanning gender, race, and age groups with closed- and open-ended questions, giving more than 100K image-question pairs per model, and evaluates responses from four complementary views: demographic parity over adverse outcome rates, soundness, demographic association over unsupported roles and statuses, and bias in free-text generation. Soundness is the central validity criterion: a response is sound when it follows the evidence stated in the question and abstains when the image cannot support an answer. Evaluating eight VLMs, we find that the primary failure is unwarranted inference rather than unequal treatment. Models routinely infer qualifications, threat, illness, or professional role from a face instead of abstaining, and the weakest model does so on 99% of the questions its input cannot answer. These failures are most severe in legal and healthcare, where recognizing insufficient evidence matters most, and disparity metrics alone would miss them: parity gaps are small in absolute terms, yet when baseline adverse rates are low the same gap means one demographic group receives adverse labels several times as often as another, and a small gap can equally reflect a model that treats every group unsafely. Bias in free-text responses is only loosely coupled to multiple-choice accuracy, so correct structured answers do not imply safe generation. FAIRLENS shows that fair high-stakes VLM behavior requires similar treatment across groups and refusal to infer high-stakes attributes from appearance, and its question suite transfers to any face corpus with demographic annotations.

The Jacobian Lens (J-lens) is a recent tool for interpreting LLMs. It reads a hidden state as a ranked list of vocabulary tokens, leaving multi-token concepts without a representation of their own. The original J-lens work addresses this limitation with Template Lens, which precomputes vectors for a fixed phrase vocabulary, and Oracle Lens, which fine-tunes components to propose phrases and reconstruct phrase vectors. We ask whether multi-token concepts and their vectors can instead be recovered directly from J-lens and the frozen model. We find that the first token of a multi-token concept is about as readable as a single-token concept. Given the correct first token and source prompt, the frozen model recovers the second token in 88.3% of two-token cases. We show that a vector for the complete concept can be recovered from subsequent hidden states in a single forward pass. We therefore use J-lens to propose first tokens and let the frozen model complete candidate concepts. We then recover a vector for each candidate and score it alongside the complete vocabulary. Across 496 multi-hop clozes on Gemma-3-12B-IT, Llama-3.1-8B, and Qwen3-14B, our method achieves an average $\mathrm{Rank@}10$ of 43.1%, compared with 27.6% for Template Lens. Without the J-lens clue, performance drops to 21.6%, showing that the first-token clue substantially improves readout. Causal concept swaps using the recovered vectors achieve an average $\mathrm{succ}@10$ of 61.4%, compared with 26.2% for Template Lens under the same intervention. These results show that first-token clues can guide multi-token concept recovery, while subsequent hidden states provide vectors for readout and intervention.

On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as a promising post-training technique for enhancing LLM reasoning. It is commonly believed to enable the student model to distill knowledge from a stronger teacher model, thereby expanding capabilities beyond the pre-OPD base model. In this study, we examine this view through the lens of test-time scaling by varying the sampling budget K and evaluating performance with pass@K and avg@K. Specifically, across several OPD variants, we observe that OPD-trained models maintain superior avg@K performance across sampling budgets, while the advantage in pass@K gradually shifts to the pre-OPD base models as K increases. These results suggest that OPD primarily improves sampling efficiency rather than consistently expanding the student's reasoning capability boundary. The pass@K dynamics throughout OPD training further reveal a progressive shift toward stronger small-K performance at the expense of the large-K capability boundary. Furthermore, a problem-level solvability analysis using pass@1024 as the criterion reveals an asymmetry: OPD causes more previously solvable problems to become unsolvable than previously unsolvable problems to become solvable. Together, these findings suggest that, from the perspective of capability expansion, OPD behaves more like an "illusory distillation": its apparent gains arise primarily from improved sampling efficiency rather than from acquiring genuinely new reasoning capabilities from the teacher.

Computer-using agents can perceive rich software interfaces, yet their decisions often lack visual procedural memory: they may recognize individual controls without identifying which familiar workflow is active, which control matters next, or what evidence would confirm progress. Raw interaction traces preserve such information but are long and noisy to condition on, whereas text-only skills often omit the visual state that makes a procedure applicable. We introduce Visual Skill Cards (VSCs), a state-conditioned memory representation that binds reusable procedures with applicability cues, visual evidence, and verification signals. SkillLens constructs VSCs from heterogeneous interaction experience through Trace-to-Visual-Skill-Card and, at inference time, retrieves relevant cards and selectively expands only the evidence needed by a fixed visual-language model executor for grounded GUI action prediction. The same representation also supports CardDistill, which uses VSC evidence as privileged teacher context to train a student that acts without runtime card retrieval. Across Multimodal-Mind2Web and WebLINX-BrowserGym, SkillLens improves the frozen GPT-5.4-mini executor by +11.6 points in Step SR and +2.9 points in Overall, respectively; CardDistill further improves the corresponding student-only Qwen3-VL-2B metrics by +12.0 and +3.2 points.

This work focuses on the impact and detection of clear contact lenses in the context of iris recognition. While the detection of cosmetic or patterned contact lenses has been extensively studied under the presentation attack detection (PAD) paradigm, clear prescription contact lenses, that are typically transparent, have received comparatively less attention despite their widespread use. Unlike patterned lenses, clear lenses introduce no salient texture artifact, making them difficult to detect and are often assumed to have no impact on iris recognition. We first examine this assumption using the commercial VeriEye matcher on four benchmark datasets and show that clear lenses marginally degrade genuine match scores and increase verification error. We then propose a two-stage contact-lens detection framework. Stage1 uses an existing PAD model to identify patterned lenses, while Stage2 focuses on the more challenging clear-lens versus no-lens distinction using a ConvNeXt-Base model equipped with Mask-Guided Spatial Attention (MGSA). The proposed MGSA module incorporates a Hough-derived anatomical ROI mask together with learned spatial attention and Squeeze-and-Excitation channel recalibration, allowing the network to focus on subtle limbal cues associated with clear lens wear. Across four datasets, the full pipeline consisting of both patterned and clear contact lens detection achieves between 90.0%--98.8% accuracy. Finally, we introduce a z-score calibration method that adjusts VeriEye match scores when a clear lens is detected in the input images. This calibration reduces EER by 4.1%--28.3% across datasets, demonstrating that reliable clear contact lens detection can directly improve iris verification performance.

Despite the remarkable progress of large vision language models (LVLMs), object hallucination remains a fundamental challenge that hinders their trustworthy deployment. A key finding motivates our work: real and hallucinated object tokens are clearly separable in hidden representations, yet this separability is largely lost at the language-modeling (LM) head. We propose TruthLens, a self-evaluation framework that teaches the LM head to expose a per-object truthfulness signal without any auxiliary model or additional inference cost. Concretely, a rarely-used special token is repurposed as a reference token. For each object-token position, we extract the log-probability assigned to this special token by the LM head, and define its difference from a predefined constant as the truthfulness score. The model is then fine-tuned with an MSE objective that drives scores toward 1 for real objects and 0 for hallucinated ones, while a divergence constraint preserves the original generation capability. Despite being trained on only a limited set of object categories, TruthLens generalizes effectively to benchmarks with substantially larger label spaces. Extensive experiments across multiple LVLMs demonstrate state-of-the-art performance; notably, on Qwen2.5-VL-7B, TruthLens outperforms the previous best method on MS-COCO by over 17% in AUROC. Our code is available at https://github.com/wyqstan/TruthLens.

Vision-language models (VLMs) process an image as a sequence of visual tokens, which creates a substantial computational bottleneck during inference. Recent visual token pruning methods address this issue by removing seemingly redundant tokens, yet it remains unclear how these pruning decisions relate to the functional roles of visual tokens. In this work, we analyze visual token pruning through the lens of token roles identified by EmbedLens. We first show that representative pruning methods exhibit distinct token-role biases, but these biases do not directly correlate with downstream performance. To better understand this behavior, we refine the token-role assignment procedure and evaluate role-protected pruning variants. Our results show that preserving non-alive tokens can sometimes maintain or improve performance, suggesting that tokens with weak direct semantic alignment may still affect model behavior under pruning. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jaykim9870/Not_All_Redundant_Tokens_Are_Alike.

GUI grounding maps natural-language instructions to click locations and is essential for reliable GUI agents. The task remains difficult on high-resolution, densely populated interfaces because a vision-language model (VLM) may recognize a requested control without locating it precisely enough for interaction. Most existing methods provide various forms of localization assistance, but still rely on a direct click prediction, allowing visual ambiguity or an inaccurate initial estimate to propagate to the final result. In this paper, we introduce GUI-Lens, a coarse-to-fine grounding framework that allows a general-purpose VLM to determine the target through active visual observations. Specifically, GUI-Lens extracts OCR text and detected UI components from the screenshot and presents their positions as coordinate references. Using the instruction, the current view, and these references, the VLM selects the region and scale of the next view, which is cropped and enlarged to provide finer visual details. This process continues over successively focused views until the target is determined. Proposed crops and clicks are checked against the instruction throughout the process, and the final local position is mapped back to the original screen coordinates. Experiments on four GUI grounding benchmarks and three general-purpose VLM backends show that GUI-Lens improves overall grounding accuracy by up to 24.9 percentage points and achieves state-of-the-art performance with GPT-5.5.

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) aim to integrate understanding and generation within a single architecture, yet it remains unclear whether these capabilities share a unified and transferable semantic space. This question is fundamentally challenging, as the two branches operate over heterogeneous representations (text tokens vs.\ visual latents) and distinct training objectives, making direct comparison difficult. To address this, we introduce \emph{cross-branch semantic steering}, an intervention-based framework that extracts semantic directions from one branch and applies them to the other. We show that steering vectors learned from the understanding branch can transfer to generation, enabling controllable image synthesis and improved semantic faithfulness. In contrast, the reverse direction consistently shows limited effectiveness. Our analysis suggests that this asymmetry may be related to a practical representational mismatch: understanding-derived vectors capture transferable, object-centric semantics, while generation-derived vectors primarily encode low-level appearance features. Our results reveal that architectural unification does not guarantee semantic alignment, and establish cross-branch steering as a practical tool for probing multimodal representations.

Clinical data-science agents must transform heterogeneous longitudinal records into auditable analyses, yet existing benchmarks largely isolate medical question answering, structured-table reasoning, or generic scientific repositories. We introduce CLINLENS, a benchmark of 200 executable tasks over five linked MIMIC resources spanning structured electronic health records, notes, electrocardiograms, chest radiographs, and echocardiograms. A 4 x 5 taxonomy crosses four patient-time scopes with five analysis capabilities. Program-first reverse synthesis pairs each bounded semi-raw package with an evaluator-private reference workflow and checks required artifacts, cohort and temporal semantics, and the final answer. On a fixed 126-task suite, the strongest of 24 standardized model-scaffold configurations achieves 56.3% scope-macro STRICTPASS despite 100% EXECSUCCESS. For reference, a separately configured coding agent solves 83 of 126 tasks, while five biomedical systems adapted to GPT-4o-mini reach at most 2.9% scope-macro STRICTPASS. These results expose a substantial gap between runnable submissions and correct clinical analyses.

Recently, memory management has become a key infrastructure for LLM-based agents, as it directly affects long-horizon reasoning, personalized responses, and knowledge reuse. However, existing LLM memory systems typically adopt a coarse-grained (utility-agnostic) manner that treats heterogeneous user-LLM interaction records uniformly, leading to redundant and low-impact records persisting in the memory repository. To address this challenge, we present MemLens, a value-aware memory management system that takes memory records as first-class data objects. MemLens provides an end-to-end interactive analytics dashboard that exposes the complete memory lifecycle, including Shapley-style memory evaluation, value-aware storage, and memory-assisted response. Through a study-copilot application, the system enables users to inspect memory values, visualize hierarchical memory structures, and compare various memory management strategies in terms of response quality, retrieval latency, and token consumption. Therefore, our MemLens can serve as an efficient, interpretable, and personalized long-term memory management system for LLM-based agents.

A CT examination captures multiple organs, but many biomedical questions concern abnormalities, prognosis, or longitudinal change in a specific organ. These questions require a separate representation for each organ within the same CT volume. Existing CT foundation models commonly produce a single volume-level representation, while recent anatomy-aware methods either encode pre-separated organ volumes or explicitly disentangle images into organ token groups. The former may remove clinically relevant surrounding context, while the latter does not condition a shared encoder on a selected organ before its features are formed. We introduce OrganLens for organ-specific representation learning through self-supervision. An organ identity conditions a shared CT encoder, while organ-specific distillation and anatomy-mask supervision shape features for anatomy-weighted pooling into organ-specific representations. At inference, the shared model produces 11 organ-specific representations without external segmentation masks. We evaluate OrganLens on CT-RATE, RAD-ChestCT, INSPECT, and NLST across diverse acquisitions and downstream evaluations. Relative to CT-pretrained DINOv2, heart representations raise CT-RATE cardiomegaly AUROC from 0.910 to 0.953, while lung representations improve the Harrell C-index for NLST lung-cancer mortality by 14.2%. The global representation reaches INSPECT Recall@10 of 33.09% and 32.04% for text-to-image and image-to-text retrieval, respectively. Across organ-related tasks, anatomically matched representations provide stronger task-relevant signal, while the global representation retains broad utility. OrganLens offers a scalable approach to organ-specific CT representation learning with a shared encoder. More broadly, it provides the medical research community with a reusable framework for studying organ-specific disease across cohorts and clinical endpoints.

Despite rapid progress in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), understanding long-form videos is still bottlenecked by limited context windows. While recent keyframe sampling methods attempt to mitigate this by distilling video inputs into a compact set of query-relevant frames, navigating the vast spatio-temporal search space remains challenging, as spatial detail and temporal coverage often conflict. To address this, we introduce LENS, a training-free keyframe sampling framework that dynamically decides when to zoom in for fine-grained details and when to zoom out for broader context based on the text query. Concretely, LENS adaptively allocates a limited frame budget between spatial zoom-ins, which highlight query-relevant regions within individual frames, and temporal zoom-outs, which expand the temporal scope through multi-frame aggregation, enabling the model to reason across multiple granularities while capturing both high-fidelity details and long-range context. Across diverse long-form video benchmarks, LENS consistently outperforms prior state-of-the-art keyframe sampling methods and delivers substantial gains over uniform sampling, improving Video-MME accuracy from 53.3% to 60.7% with Qwen2.5-VL.Code is available at https://github.com/zhangce01/LENS.

Rare diseases represent one of the most challenging settings for clinical decision-making, where heterogeneous presentations, sparse evidence and limited expertise create persistent uncertainty throughout the care pathway. Although artificial intelligence could help, existing systems largely address isolated tasks, particularly diagnosis, and usually rely on downstream investigations rather than information available at initial presentation. Here we show that clinical AI performance under uncertainty can be improved not by scaling a single model, but by exploiting the diversity of multiple imperfect reasoning systems. Across heterogeneous large language models, we identify divergent reasoning trajectories with complementary error patterns and develop RareLens, which learns to reconcile these perspectives into actionable decisions across four stages of rare disease care: risk screening, diagnosis, treatment planning and prognosis prediction. Built on RarelensBench, a real-world dataset of 157,525 cases spanning all 33 Orphanet categories and more than 7,000 conditions, RareLens outperformed every frontier model tested, including GPT-5, DeepSeek-R1, Claude-3.7-Sonnet and Gemini-2.5-Pro, across all stages. It achieved an area under the curve of 0.917 for screening and top-1 accuracies of 65.5% and 89.8% for diagnosis and treatment. In an external evaluation involving 1,287 cases and 23 physicians, autonomous RareLens and physicians assisted by RareLens both outperformed unaided physicians, while demonstrating that effective human-AI collaboration requires more than simply providing model outputs. These findings establish divergent model reasoning as an exploitable source of information and suggest a general strategy for building AI systems that operate reliably under high clinical uncertainty.

Detecting UAVs in air spaces has become increasingly important due to UAVs widespread availability and easy usage. However, due to their small size, they are typically difficult to detect at a sufficient range. For the training of optimized detection algorithms, datasets have been published, covering optical sensing methods ranging from infrared to regular RGB to event-sensor-based. However, these datasets often fail to reflect realistic counter-UAV scenarios, lacking critical factors such as camera ego-motion, extremely small target scales, and diverse lens configurations, and introduce compression artefacts on the frame images. To address this gap, we introduce SkyEV, an open-source dataset featuring highly synchronized uncompressed RGB and event-based data. SkyEV distinguishes itself by capturing complex real-world conditions, including significant camera motion and varied optical setups, which are essential for testing the fundamental trade-off between Field of View and detection range. Furthermore, we provide a unified data loader and establish an experimental baseline using a multi-modal architecture, demonstrating the dataset's efficacy in detecting challenging, small-scale targets.

We present X-lens, a compact feed-forward model for metric depth estimation from a variable number of calibrated fisheye and pinhole views. To support real-time downstream perception, X-lens is built around a geometry-aware heterogeneous camera formulation with two key components. Learnable calibration tokens provide a coarse alignment between fisheye and pinhole projective spaces, while a Jacobian-parameterized distortion bias injected into cross-attention models local projection changes and promotes cross-camera consistency, enabling robust generalization with only 0.04B parameters and up to 41 FPS. The model predicts dense depth together with a global metric scale, avoiding auxiliary reconstruction targets that increase computation and optimization complexity. To learn such cross-camera generalization at scale and depth, X-lens is trained on multiple public datasets and OmniScene, our newly released large-scale synthetic dataset containing approximately 266K synchronized six-view frames, 1.7M individual images, and 103 indoor and outdoor scenes. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic indoor and outdoor datasets demonstrate superior heterogeneous-camera metric depth accuracy, reducing AbsRel by 25.4% on OmniScene-Full over the strongest baseline while using 88.9% fewer parameters, with competitive performance on conventional fisheye-only and pinhole-only settings.

Adversarial vulnerability in deep neural networks (DNNs) has been studied from the perspectives of decision-boundary geometry, feature robustness, input-output Jacobians, and the instability of inverse problems. Here, we focus on the spectral structure of intermediate linear transformations that propagate information through modern DNNs, an unexplored mechanism of adversarial vulnerability. Specifically, we investigate transformer-based vision-language models, whose linear layers admit interpretable spectral decompositions and whose widespread adoption makes understanding their robustness increasingly important. We propose a white-box spectral-subspace-guided attack (SSGRA) that aligns intermediate representations with the subspace spanned by the bottom right singular vectors. Our experiments show improved attack effectiveness over existing baselines. In addition, SSGRA offers a spectral interpretation of adversarial vulnerability in VLMs, providing insights for improving their robustness.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes inroads into different parts of the Indian subcontinent, there is significant interest in studying how AI impacts the linguistic and cultural foundations of this civilization. AI is seen as a ''double-edged sword'' where on the one hand, it can enable access and inclusion for a large population, on the other, it can homogenize worldviews and exclude underrepresented languages and worldviews. In this paper, we try to characterize this problem by addressing the extensive characteristic nature of Indian linguistics and the way they closely connect to cultural practices and worldview. We then perform a longitudinal survey of how Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques have evolved in this space, tracing the historical development of Indic NLP, covering key milestones, methodological shifts, and resource creation efforts. In addition, the paper also examines the structural and sociolinguistic characteristics of Indian languages, such as rich morphology, complex scripts and grammar rules, diglossia, and large dialectal variation, and explains how these create unique challenges for building AI foundation models. We then discuss the growing role of Indic foundation models and analyze how these models address these long-standing resource and representation gaps. Finally, we propose a research direction called 'Culture Sensing', which re-imagines AI based on hermeneutic reasoning. Culture Sensing aims to address open problems such as ensuring equitable performance across low-resource languages and producing outputs that are culturally meaningful. By bringing together past work, current techniques, and emerging trends, this paper outlines research directions that can guide the next phase of Indic NLP and contribute to the development of more robust and inclusive Indic foundation models.

We present AgentLens, a production-assessed benchmark for interactive code agents. Most code-agent benchmarks reduce a run to a single bit -- did the task pass? -- but the people who actually use these agents experience the entire trajectory: how the agent follows instructions, uses its tools, verifies its own work, recovers from mistakes, and talks to them along the way. AgentLens evaluates that whole trajectory. It pairs formal verification, where an objective check exists, with LLM-written trajectory reviews and side-by-side comparisons, so that each run yields a readable explanation of why the score is what it is. This makes AgentLens useful for more than ranking models: we use it to diagnose model behavior, compare successive versions of our own agent, and catch product regressions in a nightly evaluation pipeline. We release the benchmark as open source at https://github.com/agent-lens/agent-lens-bench.

This paper presents a black-box evaluation framework to systematically assess the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate Design Structure Matrices (DSMs) from structured technical documentation. Motivated by the closed-source nature of current Auto-DSM pipelines, the framework introduces a reproducible methodology that benchmarks generated DSMs (GEN-DSMs) against manually validated ground-truth matrices (GT-DSMs). The evaluation integrates both single-run and multi-run perspectives, combining structural metrics (Completeness, Correctness, Coupling Density), classification metrics (Selective Accuracy, Abstention Coverage), and stability measures (Entropy, Fleiss' $κ$). To synthesize these aspects, a Composite Quality Score (Q) is proposed. Controlled experiments are conducted on two datasets: a fictive abstract system and a real-world refrigerator decomposition, covering variations in phrasing, parameter-dataset alignment, and system complexity. Results show that LLMs can produce structurally plausible DSMs and achieve high reproducibility under well-structured inputs, but remain sensitive to ambiguity, inconsistent dependency definitions, and prompt formulation. The findings highlight systematic sources of hallucination and abstention failure, demonstrating both the potential and current limitations of LLM-driven DSM automation. The proposed framework provides a transparent benchmark for auditing Auto-DSM pipelines and establishes foundations for integrating LLM-based decomposition methods into model-based systems engineering (MBSE) workflows.

Defocus blur degrades fine image structures and limits visual perception, which can adversely affect downstream vision tasks. Although recent deep learning deblurring methods have achieved strong performance, their effectiveness depends on training data and often degrades across cameras and lenses due to limited optical diversity and realism in existing datasets. In this paper, we propose a pipeline for synthesizing realistic defocus deblurring datasets for diverse compound lenses. It integrates efficient wave-optics PSF computation via Debye CZT propagation, depth-aware defocus rendering with occlusion handling, and blur synthesis in the radiometrically linear space with camera ISP simulation. This unified pipeline enables the scalable generation of photorealistic defocus datasets with diverse lens characteristics. Using our pipeline, we generate CLDefocus, a large-scale synthetic dataset containing lens-diverse defocus image pairs. We further analyze the limitations of real-captured defocus datasets and show that such imperfections can bias full-reference evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that models trained on CLDefocus achieve improved cross-device generalization compared to models trained on existing real and synthetic datasets.

Lensless imaging enables compact and versatile computational cameras by replacing bulky optics with thin coded elements. However, reconstruction from the resulting measurements is challenging: large-footprint point-spread functions (PSFs) produce highly multiplexed observations, making inversion severely ill-conditioned and sensitive to calibration errors and model mismatch. While deep learning approaches, including hybrid models that incorporate physics priors, have shown promise, explicitly maintaining data fidelity throughout the network hierarchy remains difficult. Here, we propose the Integrated Forward-Inverse Network (IFIN), a physics-guided architecture that interleaves differentiable forward projections with learnable inverse updates at every scale, enabling complementary cues to be exploited jointly in the measurement and image domains. This bidirectional coupling supports progressive, physics-consistent refinement and permits system-constrained PSF kernel adaptation under model uncertainty. On challenging lensless benchmarks, including a newly introduced dataset, IFIN achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality. We further observe competitive performance on Gaussian deblurring and simulated inline holography reconstruction, suggesting that the same interleaving principle can extend beyond lensless cameras.

Personalization changes what a model says to a user; we show that it can also change the reasoning trajectory used to justify the response. Modern LLMs personalize interactions by storing user attributes, preferences, and prior context, then injecting this information into future prompts. We study whether such memory reshapes reasoning on open-ended questions where no single ground-truth answer exists. To quantify this effect, we introduce DRIFTLENS, a ground-truth-free framework that maps each expressed reasoning step to a value category and measures divergence between a question's no-memory trajectory and its trajectory under injected user-attribute memory. We first validate that DRIFTLENS distinguishes content-free pragmatic noise from substantive reasoning changes. Across four LLMs and 10 user-attribute categories, including age, occupation, and disability, user-attribute memory induces medium-to-large reasoning drift above each model's pragmatic-noise floor, even when final answers remain fluent, on-topic, and plausible. We then evaluate GRPO- and DPO-based post-training methods for reducing drift. Both reduce drift, but neither uniformly dominates; effects on downstream capability, helpfulness, and instruction following are model-and reward-dependent. These results suggest that memory-induced reasoning drift is a measurable and only partly mitigated failure mode of personalized language models.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) exhibit strong reasoning ability but suffer from visual forgetting during long-horizon decoding, where attention progressively drifts away from visual evidence. Existing methods largely treat this issue as a late-stage attention decay problem or attempt to mitigate it through heuristic reminders or post-hoc attention lifting. Through systematic empirical analysis, we find that performance degradation under visual forgetting is largely driven by two overlooked factors: early-stage attention decay disrupts evidence acquisition, and attention concentration on a subset of task-irrelevant visual sink tokens. Motivated by these insights, we propose LASER, a post-training framework that regulates both the visual attention trajectory and intra-visual token attention distribution during reasoning. Technically, LASER introduces two complementary rewards: a Visual Grounding Reward, which encourages the model to maintain attention on semantically salient visual tokens throughout decoding, and a Sink Suppression Reward, which penalizes excessive attention concentration on visual sink tokens. Together, these rewards preserve early-stage grounding while preventing attention collapse onto uninformative regions. Extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that LASER consistently outperforms strong baselines, validating attention-aware training as an effective remedy for visual forgetting.

Mounted butterflies are among the most striking objects in natural history collections. However, their beauty is notoriously hard to digitize in 3D: they are small and fragile, with microscopic hairs and vein structures. Capturing them in sufficient detail, therefore, requires a macro lens, which has a very limited Depth of Field (DoF). Moreover, a camera body cannot be maneuvered beneath a pinned specimen to photograph its ventral surface (the underside of the wings). We introduce an end-to-end pipeline that resolves these challenges to turn such specimens into photo-realistic 3D models viewable from every direction. It combines three ingredients: handheld focus stacking for all-in-focus macro capture without a tripod, a non-contact first-surface mirror system that exposes the ventral surface without touching the specimen, and a segmentation-free, mirror-aware 3D Gaussian Splatting extension. We validate the reconstructions on four diverse specimens.

Claw-like AI agents (e.g., OpenClaw) are always-on processes with persistent access to credentials, files, tools, and external services. They take on system-level responsibilities -- installing packages, maintaining state, scheduling subtasks, and mediating I/O -- making security failures far more severe than in other agents. Yet existing benchmarks focus on model responses and tool calls, leaving cross-component failure modes largely unmeasured. We adopt a computer-system analogy: treating a Claw-like agent as an agentic computer system whose gateway runtime plays an OS-like mediation role, whose Skills resemble user-installed applications, and whose Plugins resemble loadable extensions with runtime privileges. Each component has a classical counterpart whose protection mechanisms -- refined over decades of cybersecurity research -- are absent on the agent side. From this perspective, we develop SafeClawArena, a benchmark of 406 adversarial tasks across four attack surfaces (Skill Supply-Chain Integrity, Persistent State Exploitation, Cross-Boundary Data Flow, and Indirect Prompt Injection), executed in containerized replicas of real agent platforms with canary-marked credentials and evaluated via automated taint tracking across nine output channels. We evaluate three platforms (OpenClaw, NemoClaw, SeClaw) and five frontier LLMs. The highest attack success rate reaches 70%; malicious Plugins succeed in 100% of cases regardless of the LLM. SeClaw cuts GPT-5.4's attack success rate from 70% to 22%, partly through utility-security tradeoffs rather than active defenses, while Claude-Opus-4.6 already sits near a 22% floor on every platform. These results expose the inadequacy of current defenses and suggest directions for future hardening. Code and data: https://github.com/sunblaze-ucb/SafeClawArena.

We ask a simple question about decoder-only transformers: between which two layers is the probability of a predicted token actually produced? Existing layer-wise readout tools answer only approximately. The logit lens and its trained variant report a per-layer level of probability but give no additive decomposition; their estimates are biased and non-monotone across depth. Direct Logit Attribution and related residual-stream methods are additive, but only in logit space, the softmax nonlinearity breaks additivity in probability space, precisely the quantity one usually cares about. Layer Conductance integrates gradients per layer, but attributes each to its own baseline and so does not sum to the total change in prediction. We introduce IG-Lens, a telescoping application of Integrated Gradients along a single path through the hidden states from a baseline to the final layer. Crediting each segment to the layer it terminates at yields a layer-wise attribution whose sum is exactly the change in target probability, with the softmax inside the integration path rather than linearized away. Our default estimator credits each integration step its observed change in target probability (a prediction-aware reweighting in the spirit of IDGI) rather than its raw gradient. Because the readout is a one-dimensional probability, this collapses each segment to a telescoping sum of endpoint values, so completeness holds exactly (to floating point) at any step count, removing Riemann discretization error while suppressing steps that show gradient sensitivity without a change in output. We give the telescoping identity and its proof, verify completeness to floating point, and describe a single-pass batched implementation computing the full token-by-layer map without any backward call. Code: https://github.com/anhnda/IGLens.

We give a single compositional setting in which gradient-based learning and Hamiltonian-style mechanics appear as functorial semantics. The syntax is an operad Arr whose objects are input-output interfaces (pairs of manifolds) and whose morphisms are smooth adaptive arrangements, which consist of a reactive parameter space, a lens given by smooth output and input maps, and a real-valued potential. The main technical result of the paper is what we call lens internalization, a lax symmetric monoidal functor Lens(C) $\to$ C associated to any symmetric monoidal closed category C. Using it, we provide two functors $Φ_\text{phase}$, $Φ_\text{conf}$: Arr $\to$ PC into the 2-category of polynomial coalgebras -- input-output discrete dynamical systems -- which we take as the semantics category. $Φ_\text{phase}$ stores both position and momentum, whereas $Φ_\text{conf}$ stores only position. When applied to a parameterized function, $Φ_\text{conf}$ recovers the gradient descent training algorithm, with backpropagation as the lens' backward pass. When applied to harmonic particles wired together -- in series, or according to any finite directed graph -- one diagram yields two different regimes, both of which are governed by the graph Laplacian: $Φ_\text{phase}$ gives the discrete wave equation, which is conservative and second-order, and $Φ_\text{conf}$ gives the discrete heat equation, which is dissipative and first-order. They are two semantics of one adaptive arrangement, e.g. with the same potential in each case. And because Arr is an operad, such diagrams nest -- larger systems wired from smaller ones -- and each semantics assembles a system's dynamics functorially from its parts. These dynamics are moreover executable: a parameterized neural network and a graph of particles both compile, by the same construction, to explicit state machines one can run.

Dyslexic learners increasingly use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support reading, writing, organisation, and study-related tasks. However, their lived experiences with these tools remain largely underexamined. This paper proposes DysLexLens, a low-resource LLM framework, designed to analyse dyslexic learners experience with AI through online forum discussions. DysLexLens is designed as an end-to-end, evidence-traceable architecture which transforms noisy social media posts into a dictionary-driven corpora, provides knowledge-graph (KG)-based question reasoning, generates verifiable query responses, and enables response evaluation through quantitative and human-grounded assessment. DysLexLens has four key features. First, it employs a dictionary-driven filtering method to construct a more focused Reddit corpus on dyslexia and AI, filtering out noisy and weakly related posts to improve the relevance of data collected from low-resource forum contexts. Second, it integrates LLM-assisted semantic analysis with KG-based query reasoning to uncover meaningful patterns. Third, it has quantitative evaluation metrics (RAGAS and Query Robustness) to measure LLM-generated response performance. Fourth, it provides structured qualitative validation guidelines for assessing response quality, with a specific focus on hallucination and evidence alignment. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DysLexLens using dyslexia-related Reddit forum data and 30 questions. The results show its potential generalisability to other low-resource forum data contexts. DysLexLens, sample data, questions and evaluation results are available at Github to support reproducibility.

The emergence of Large Reasoning Models has introduced exceptionally long Chain-of-Thought traces, creating a transparency burden where critical logic is often buried under massive procedural text. To address this, we present ReasoningLens, an open-source framework designed for the hierarchical visualization and diagnostic auditing of complex reasoning chains. ReasoningLens addresses information necropsy by: (1) structuring traces into interactive hierarchies that separate high-level strategy from low-level execution; (2) leveraging an agentic auditor for automated error detection and tool-augmented verification; and (3) synthesizing systemic reasoning profiles to reveal model-specific blind spots. By transforming unstructured walls of text into actionable insights, ReasoningLens provides a modular foundation for interpreting, debugging, and optimizing the next generation of reasoning-centric AI.

Coding agents based on large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable autonomous capabilities, but they also introduce significant safety and misuse risks during multi-turn interactions with external environments. Existing safety mechanisms mainly rely on external guardrails, which have a limited ability to perform fine-grained behavioral control during execution. Meanwhile, recent mechanistic interpretability methods for LLM safety are mostly confined to single-turn or jailbreak-style QA settings, limiting their ability to capture the evolving risk dynamics of multi-turn agent execution. In this paper, we investigate the safety of multi-turn coding agents from an internal perspective. We propose AgentLens (Mechanistic Subspace Intervention and Steering), a white-box defense framework that performs runtime safety detection and representation-level mitigation for coding agents. Unlike conventional agent guardrails, AgentLens detect harmful execution states from step-level hidden representations and mitigate unsafe behavior by intervening in a 10-dimensional subspace within a single layer. To support this research, we introduce the Mechanistic Agent Safety (MAS) benchmark, comprising comprehensively annotated multi-turn execution trajectories across 194 tasks using LLaMA-3.1-8B, Qwen-2.5-7B, and Gemma-2-9B. Extensive experiments show that AgentLens achieves strong safety detection performance, provides preliminary evidence for lookahead risk anticipation, and substantially reduces harmful actions of the coding agent, establishing a foundation for applying mechanistic interpretability to dynamic LLM agent safety. The code is available at: https://github.com/EddyLuo1232/AgentLens

Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable performance across medical imaging tasks, yet their tendency to overgeneralize under distributional shifts poses a major obstacle to safe clinical deployment. Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection methods aim to mitigate this risk, but most existing approaches rely on opaque internal signals with poorly understood semantic meaning, limiting trust in safety-critical settings. In this work, we propose an interpretable OOD detection framework that probes the stability of model predictions under class-conditioned semantic perturbations. Leveraging sparse autoencoders (SAEs), we learn class-specific concept vectors from in-distribution data that disentangle dense intermediate representations into sparse, semantically meaningful components. At inference, we perturb deeper-layer representations using the concept vectors associated with the model's predicted class and measure the class logits stability. We hypothesize that in-distribution samples exhibit low sensitivity to such perturbations, as their representations align with class-specific semantic directions, whereas OOD samples show amplified deviations due to representational misalignment. By framing OOD detection as a concept conditioned stability analysis, our approach provides both a discriminative OOD signal and an interpretable lens into the internal mechanisms driving model uncertainty, making it particularly suitable for high stakes medical applications.

Model stealing attacks, where adversaries create high-fidelity surrogate models, are a significant threat to the intellectual property of machine learning services. Conventional wisdom suggests these surrogates could provide adversaries with economic leverage comparable to the original service providers. This paper challenges this assumption by evaluating model stealing attacks beyond mere fidelity to the target model. Because query-based extraction provides only partial supervision of the target's input-output behavior, the surrogate is not uniquely identified: many near-optimal surrogates can achieve comparable fidelity while differing in deployment-relevant properties. Instead of performing a classic learning-based model stealing attack, we compute the Rashomon Set (i.e., the set of almost-equally-accurate models) of surrogate models, and evaluate its diversity using multiplicity metrics (ambiguity, discrepancy, and Rashomon Capacity) and group fairness metrics. Across tabular, medical imaging, and NLP tasks, our experiments on real-world datasets reveal that despite exhibiting similar fidelity to the target model, surrogate models can display significant variances in other critical performance metrics. These findings cast doubt on the presumed equivalence between high-fidelity surrogates and the target model in practical deployment scenarios.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a key approach for enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models. However, RLVR often suffers from \emph{diversity collapse}: Pass@$1$ improves while high-$k$ Pass@$k$ degrades, which is viewed as a narrowing of the model's reasoning boundary. We formalize this diversity collapse through the lens of \emph{overtraining}: once a problem's contribution to the reference metric has effectively saturated, further updates no longer expand what the model can solve but still concentrate probability mass on the trajectories favored by on-policy sampling. Under a standard setup with few rollouts per problem, even a single observed success places a problem in a nearly saturated regime for high-$k$ Pass@$k$, so most updates in standard RLVR are overtraining from the boundary perspective. This perspective also suggests a reading of whether RLVR can expand the model's reasoning abilities beyond the base model: since RLVR is structurally biased against high-$k$ Pass@$k$, its aggregate decline does not by itself mean that no new reasoning gains occurred. Interventionally, restricting updates to problems with zero observed success lifts Pass@$256$ above the base model on difficult benchmarks; observationally, a non-trivial fraction of initially unsolvable problems become solvable during standard RLVR training. Building on these findings, we propose \emph{Bayesian Boundary Gating} (BBG), which redirects optimization away from overtraining by estimating each problem's marginal contribution to the reasoning boundary. Across multiple reasoning benchmarks, BBG improves average Pass@$k$ across a wide range of $k$.

Physical adversarial attacks on vision systems are typically studied through scene manipulation, such as adversarial patches or projections, where the adversary controls what the camera observes. Camera-side attacks using stickers or auxiliary optics have also been explored, but they treat attacks as image-space perturbations from designed patterns. This misses how physical imperfections interact with scene-dependent lighting and optics. We identify a threat: passive lens-side damage that is persistent yet trigger-conditioned, producing optical artifacts that bias geometric inference under particular visual conditions. We instantiate this threat through Scratch-induced Lens Adversarial Streak Hijacking SLASH, a physical-world attack caused by small scratches on a camera lens or protective cover. Scratches interact with bright light sources and specular reflections to create structured streak artifacts that distort depth cues. Since the perturbation is fixed in the optical path but triggered by the scene, it is both persistent and selective. We formulate the attack in optical space, model the scratch pattern as a trigger-conditioned optical channel, and optimize one fixed configuration across diverse viewing conditions. We evaluate SLASH on monocular depth estimation and monocular 3D object detection in digital and real-world settings. Under the fixed-scratch constraint, directional depth shifts reach up to 32% relative error for monocular depth estimation, with consistent effects on monocular 3D object detection. Physical experiments confirm transfer to real camera recordings, inducing depth shifts above the model's natural prediction baseline. These findings reveal an attack surface where benign-looking hardware imperfections act as latent, scene-triggered adversarial mechanisms, challenging assumptions about physical robustness and motivating defenses for secure vision systems.

Existing studies reveal that current backdoor defenses exhibit limited robustness and often fail against specific types of attacks. More concerningly, prevailing safety tuning strategies tend to provide only superficial safety protection, as they fall short of completely eliminating the backdoor effects. In this work, we present a novel formulation of backdoor learning and unlearning as a sequential, three-stage process from a continual learning perspective. Within this framework, we formally define complete backdoor unlearning and further derive the necessary conditions for achieving it based on the mechanism of catastrophic forgetting. Guided by these insights, we propose Blind Inversion-Backdoor Adversarial Unlearning (BI-BAU), which formulates the generation of adversarial examples satisfying the unlearning conditions as a blind inversion problem. We solve this by integrating the bi-level optimization process of adversarial training into an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm framework to optimize the maximum a posteriori (MAP) objective. Furthermore, BI-BAU is extended to untargeted adversarial scenarios with unknown target classes, as well as to multi-modal contrastive learning tasks, enhancing its applicability to real-world deployment scenarios where pre-trained models may be compromised. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method exhibits general applicability across a wide spectrum of backdoor attacks and can effectively and thoroughly eliminate the backdoor effects from a backdoor model.

TimeLens is an AI-powered bilingual mobile guide for the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM). Pointing a phone at an exhibit, a visitor sees the artifact recognized in real time and can ask follow-up questions answered in English or Arabic. The work addresses three problems specific to in-gallery deployment: fine-grained visual similarity among 51 catalogued artifacts (many near-identical Ramesside statues), the gap between curated training data and handheld camera conditions, and the risk of an AI guide stating unsupported historical facts. Two engineering contributions are reported. First, an on-device artifact detector was developed through a data-quality-driven iteration study -- from foundation-model auto-annotation (YOLO-World), through spatial label-cleaning rules, to a fully hand-annotated dataset -- isolating label quality as the decisive factor: the final YOLOv8n model resolves every previously failing class while remaining a 5.97 MB TensorFlow Lite asset that runs in real time on a mid-range phone (mAP@0.5 = 0.995, mAP@0.5:0.95 = 0.924). Second, a bilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) guide, grounded in a 108-record ChromaDB knowledge base, was benchmarked across seven candidate language models, with Gemma 4 E2B (Q4 K M) selected; ten targeted optimizations reduce end-to-end latency from over 30 s to approximately 10 s. Both subsystems are integrated in a production Flutter application with bilingual interface, museum location gating, and text-to-speech support.

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) typically maximizes the likelihood of every token in a demonstrated trajectory. However, an observed token can be non-unique, noisy, or misaligned with the model prior. Strictly fitting toward this one-hot target may be suboptimal, especially when the pretrained model encodes a rich knowledge prior. In this work, we reinterpret SFT as target distribution design: instead of studying only the loss objective, we analyze the token-level target that the loss drives the model to match. We introduce the Q-target framework, which decomposes SFT supervision into two explicit choices: (1) how strongly to rely on the observed token, and (2) how to allocate the remaining probability mass over alternatives. This perspective unifies many existing SFT variants as implicit choices of the target distribution Q. Building on this view, we propose Target-SFT which constructs the training objective directly from the desired target distribution. This method consistently outperforms across the ten reasoning dataset-model settings evaluated, showing the effectiveness of this target-based approach. Overall, our formulation reveals a more fundamental design principle for SFT training and opens a broader search space for SFT objectives.

AI compilers aggressively rewrite computation graphs through normalization, lowering, and optimization, making it difficult to track the provenance of tensors and operators across compilation. Reliable provenance is essential for attaching platform-specific postprocessing, debugging compiler behavior, and validating transformations, yet existing solutions are either invasive or ad hoc under non-injective graph rewrites. We present a lightweight, generative approach to provenance tracking based on observational semantics. Instead of propagating identifiers through compiler passes, we observe graph transformations and reason about provenance in terms of observable computational actions. We formalize this approach using a coalgebraic model and bisimulation, which preserves provenance even when intermediate nodes are eliminated. Furthermore, we implement this approach in a prototype AI compiler COVAN, demonstrating stable provenance across compilation pipelines with minimal engineering overhead.

We study models for human-AI teaming through the lens of statistical calibration. We assume the team consists of an AI model and human -- both of which are calibrated with respect to some partitioning of the feature space -- and expose how the calibration assumptions propagate into the teaming framework. In particular, we consider frameworks that either (i) combine human and model predictions or (ii) delegate prediction responsibility to either a human or model. We show via theoretical and empirical results that existing methods for combination do not preserve the human's degree of calibration. Methods for delegation (by the very act of delegation) preserve calibration of the downstream predictors but shift the burden onto the rejector meta-model that decides who predicts. The rejector must be calibrated finely enough to locate where each member is superior, a demand that grows with the human's expertise and becomes unattainable when the human relies on information the system cannot observe.

In this report, we present our champion solution for the DataMFM Challenge Track 2: Chart Understanding. This track requires models to recover structured chart data and generate faithful natural-language summaries from chart images. To address the complementary requirements of accurate data extraction and factual narration, we propose ChartLens, a dual-branch framework for chart data correction and summary refinement. ChartLens consists of two key modules: Structure-Aware CSV Verification and Correction (SAVC) and Text-Retention-Guided Summary Refinement (TRSR). SAVC improves the reliability of structured data extraction through verification and correction, while TRSR enhances summary generation by preserving critical textual and numerical evidence from charts. By combining model adaptation, correction-based generation, and OCR-assisted evidence grounding, ChartLens improves both structured data recovery and summary factuality. On the test set, our final system achieves an overall score of 69.10 and ranks first in Track 2, demonstrating its effectiveness for accurate chart understanding. Our code will be released at: https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/CVPRW26-ChartLens.

End-to-end co-optimization of optical front-ends (e.g. metasurfaces) and neural network back-ends has been widely applied to imaging tasks, yet a formalism characterizing when and why such systems outperform conventional lens-based imaging is largely lacking. This paper focuses on object classification, a central imaging task, and asks when end-to-end optimization of a phase mask for incoherent imaging improves performance over a conventional focusing lens. We find that these gains arise primarily under constrained detector readout and are limited under full detector readout. In the latter setting, we prove that no incoherent phase mask exceeds the ideal-channel mutual information between detector measurements and class labels; a conventional focusing lens approaches this ceiling, and joint optimization yields no empirical gain. When detector readout is constrained -- by coarse spatial sampling or a limited number of measurements -- optimized optics can substantially improve classification by increasing class separability in the detector measurements. These gains are largest under low detector noise and shrink as noise grows, because the optics shape the signal before it reaches the detector but cannot remove noise added afterward. The advantage also depends on the spectral structure of the task: co-design helps most when class-discriminative content is concentrated at lower spatial frequencies than within-class variation. We develop a theoretical framework formalizing these distinctions and test its predictions on synthetic data and standard benchmarks (MNIST, FashionMNIST, SVHN).

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is bottlenecked by reward hacking, where the policy exploits errors in a proxy reward model (RM) and produces high RM scores without genuine quality gains. A natural mitigation is pessimism: lowering rewards in regions where the RM is uncertain. However, standard scalar RMs provide no principled notion of uncertainty. We argue that the right object is a distributional reward model $p(r\mid x,y)$. Under either a Bayesian inference or a KL-distributionally robust optimization (KL-DRO) lens, the KL-regularized RLHF objective admits a closed-form effective reward $\tilde r(x,y) = \pmβ\log\mathbb{E}_p[e^{\pm r/β}]$. The pessimistic branch unifies the prior heuristics for RM ensemble aggregation: mean aggregation, worst-case optimization (WCO), and uncertainty-weighted optimization (UWO) all emerge as limits or truncations of this single expression. This also clarifies the implicit assumptions of each existing rule.

World models are now built on substantially different computational substrates. Latent recurrent state-space models such as PlaNet and the Dreamer family compress observations into recurrent states; token-based models such as IRIS quantize observations into a learned codebook and predict autoregressively with a transformer; and joint-embedding predictive architectures such as I-JEPA predict in a learned latent space with no pixel decoder. The interpretability methods applied to these models, including probing, activation patching, sparse autoencoders, and surprise analysis, share a common set of primitives, yet they are re-implemented from scratch for each architecture because existing hook-and-cache tooling assumes a transformer language model with no notion of actions, environment steps, or imagined rollouts. We argue that this fragmentation reflects the tooling rather than the models, and that the shared structure of world models is captured by a small typed interface. We present WorldModelLens, an open-source interpretability substrate organized around a capability-typed adapter: every model implements four required methods (encode, transition, initial state, sample) and declares a set of optional heads (decode, reward, continue, actor, critic) through an explicit capability descriptor, so that reinforcement-learning and self-supervised world models are first-class without either imitating the other. A single hook and cache layer exposes time-indexed activations, imagination rollouts, and intervention replay over this interface, allowing each analysis to be written once.

Parametric retrieval augmentation encodes document information into lightweight, document-specific modules such as LoRA adapters, reducing the need to include all evidence as input context. However, it remains unclear how this parameter-side memory interacts with context-side memory stored in the KV cache. We study this interaction in document-level question answering by progressively evicting document key-value states and measuring when a document LoRA contributes beyond the retained context. We find that document LoRA adds little when the KV cache is largely intact, but becomes increasingly useful under aggressive compression, recovering 13-21 ROUGE-L points when no document context remains. The gain is largest when the base model encodes the document, and the adapter is applied only during answer generation, suggesting that document LoRA is better understood as decoding-time parametric memory than as a document encoder. Finally, QA-style supervision produces substantially stronger adapters than raw-context next-token-prediction. These results position document LoRA as a complementary memory channel whose value emerges precisely when context-side evidence is scarce.

In AI for Science, physics-informed losses are increasingly used to train learned compressors for scientific data, but their rate-distortion implications remain poorly understood. At fixed bitrate, these objectives often improve preservation of a target physical observable while degrading standard reconstruction fidelity. We develop a local geometric theory showing that this tradeoff is governed by the interaction of latent-space sensitivities induced by the entropy model, the physical observable, and the distortion metric. At each operating point, these induce preferred directions along which compression noise should be suppressed, yielding an anisotropic error-allocation mechanism. When these directions are misaligned, improving the observable at fixed rate necessarily worsens standard distortion, establishing a fundamental limit on simultaneous preservation. We formalise this through a local tangent-space rate-distortion law and introduce a practical alignment diagnostic based on dominant eigenspace overlap. Experiments across scientific domains test the theory and validate that the alignment diagnostic correlates with observed data- and physics-space trade-offs.

When a language model hallucinates, the final answer is wrong, but the mistake is not necessarily invisible inside the model. Different internal pathways may remain uncertain, disagree in how quickly they sharpen, or commit to competing continuations before the output is produced. We introduce TriLens, a white-box detector that turns this intuition into a compact representation: at every layer, it reads the multi-head self-attention output, the feed-forward output, and the residual stream through the model's own logit lens, then records only the entropy of each readout. The resulting 3L-dimensional trajectory describes how certainty forms across depth and across modules, without storing high-dimensional hidden states or sampling multiple generations. This simple signal yields a strong detector across instruction-tuned LLMs and QA benchmarks, and our analyses show that the three module-wise entropy trajectories provide complementary evidence. TriLens suggests that hallucination detection can benefit from tracking how internal computation settles, not only what the final layer predicts.

While sparse autoencoders provide features more interpretable than individual neurons, reliably characterizing them remains challenging. We propose Query Lens, which extends Logit Lens to enable more comprehensive and faithful interpretations of sparse features. By jointly considering encoder-side key features and decoder-side value features, we identify both the inputs that activate a feature and the outputs it promotes. We also account for indirect, module-mediated effects that arise when the feature is processed by downstream modules, going beyond the direct effect captured by Logit Lens. In experiments, we find that Query Lens yields coherent token signatures for features that remain uninterpretable under Logit Lens. Finally, we propose the Subspace Channel Hypothesis, suggesting that downstream modules read features through layer-specific subspaces.

The same arguments often need to be evaluated under different external regimes. An agent with influence over the regime has a strategic lever that standard formalisms do not directly capture. We introduce context-dependent argumentation frameworks (CDAFs), an extension of Dung's theory in which a defeat function determines, per context, which attacks succeed. A perspective-labeled specialisation derives the defeat function from a relevance set $ρ$ and a priority $π$. The relevance set is the agent's action space. In a small worked example, the agent's target argument is rejected under every full-relevance injective priority, yet accepted under partial activations, one of which no VAF audience can mirror. We define the corresponding decision problem, ACTIVATION-MANIPULATION, and record baseline complexity bounds. Tight bounds and multi-agent variants are left open.

Diffusion models have excellent capacity to model complex distributions of natural data, which has made them a popular and effective choice for posterior sampling in imaging inverse problems. Existing methods can incorporate any measurement model at inference time but must use an inexact approximation for the likelihood at intermediate timesteps for computational tractability. Although these approximations can often work well empirically, their downstream effect on the sampled posterior is poorly understood and can result in unexplained failures. To understand when, why, and how these likelihood approximations propagate to erroneous posterior distributions, we introduce a finite-sample perspective on posterior sampling that approximates the posterior to arbitrary precision as training set size tends towards infinity, for any forward model and prior distribution. Using this finite-sample lens, we observe that popular posterior sampling approximations tend to under- or over-estimate the spread of the posterior at intermediate timesteps, causing downstream consequences including sensitivity to early stopping time, inaccurate relative weighting of posterior modes, and hallucination, both of prior modes that are not in the posterior and likelihood modes that are not supported by the prior. Moreover, we find that the cause of these posterior errors requires neither a nonlinear measurement model nor a multimodal posterior, but can arise solely due to a multimodal prior and inaccurate posterior spread at intermediate sampling times. Our finite-sample posterior sampling approach is agnostic to the type of likelihood approximation and the type of (linear or nonlinear) forward model, and can thus serve as a drop-in diagnostic to evaluate the accuracy and failure modes of existing and future posterior samplers.

Image quality in modern imaging systems emerges from the coupled effects of the sensor, optics, and computational reconstruction. Ultra-thin metalenses offer a path toward substantial miniaturization of optical modules, but practical designs often exhibit pronounced chromatic and field-dependent aberrations that necessitate computational reconstruction. In current metalens pipelines, reconstruction models are commonly trained and selected using distortion-based fidelity objectives, such as PSNR, yet these proxies can be weakly correlated with human preference and downstream utility, reflecting the well-known perception--distortion trade-off. We introduce MetaRanker, a human-in-the-loop active ranking framework that formalizes metalens image quality in terms of semantic interpretability, defined as the degree to which humans can reliably recognize objects and structures in the presence of optical artifacts. MetaRanker combines a probabilistic preference model with uncertainty-aware query selection, and leverages vision--language models to provide lightweight semantic priors. Importantly, these priors are used only to guide the sampling of informative comparisons; human judgments remain the primary supervision signal throughout. Across real-world and synthetic metalens datasets with distinct degradation profiles, MetaRanker produces rankings that align most closely with human assessments, while reducing the number of pairwise annotations required by approximately 80% relative to exhaustive pairwise evaluation. Finally, we show that standard image quality assessment metrics exhibit limited alignment with human interpretability in the metalens domain, positioning MetaRanker as a practical step toward perceptually grounded metalens evaluation and co-design.

Reconstructing object geometry from radio frequency (RF) signals is fundamentally challenging due to the lensless imaging nature of RF sensing, which leads to low spatial resolution and high noise. Unlike light signals, RF signals can penetrate occlusions and thus capture information about hidden scenes. Existing Non-Line-of-Sight (NLoS) 3D neural reconstruction methods can recover coarse surfaces inside enclosed environments but often suffer from unstable optimization, noisy surface geometry, and surface ambiguity, failing to produce accurate zero-level sets from the signed distance field (SDF). These limitations largely stem from neglecting the role of Line-of-Sight (LoS) geometry outside the enclosed region, which provides valuable physical constraints for modeling signal propagation. In this paper, we introduce a Unified LoS and NLoS neural geometry reconstruction framework GeRaF 2.0 that leverages the outside LoS geometry to model and guide RF propagation from the LoS region into the NLoS region. By integrating visual LoS priors into the neural field formulation, GeRaF 2.0 achieves stable training and physically consistent reconstruction of both visible and hidden geometry, setting a new state-of-the-art in RF-based geometry reconstruction.

GeRaF is the first method to use neural implicit learning for near-range 3D geometry reconstruction from radio frequency (RF) signals. Unlike RGB or LiDAR-based methods, RF sensing can see through occlusion but suffers from low resolution and noise due to its lensless imaging nature. While lenses in RGB imaging constrain sampling to 1D rays, RF signals propagate through the entire space, introducing significant noise and leading to cubic complexity in volumetric rendering. Moreover, RF signals interact with surfaces via specular reflections, requiring fundamentally different modeling. To address these challenges, GeRaF (1) introduces filter-based rendering to suppress irrelevant signals, (2) implements a physics-based RF volumetric rendering pipeline, and (3) proposes a novel lensless sampling and lensless alpha blending strategy that makes full-space sampling feasible during training. By learning signed distance functions, reflectiveness, and signal power through MLPs and trainable parameters, GeRaF takes the first step towards reconstructing millimeter-level geometry from RF signals in real-world settings.

Story rewriting aims to adapt existing narratives to diverse reader preferences while preserving plot consistency and narrative coherence. Unlike conventional work on style transfer, we argue that effective story rewriting demands context-aware narrative enrichment beyond surface-level stylistic adaptation. Our pilot human study shows that style adaptation alone provides only marginal gains in reader satisfaction (2.3%), while context-enhanced rewriting substantially improves user preference alignment (24.5%). Motivated by this, we introduce STORYLENSBENCH, a large-scale benchmark for preference-aligned story rewriting, comprising structured story books, multi-dimensional reader preference profiles, and ranked context-aware rewritten stories. Building on this benchmark, we propose STORYLENSEVAL, a reward model for estimating reader satisfaction over rewritten stories, and STORYLENSWRITER, a two-stage rewriting model combining supervised fine-tuning with GRPO-based reinforcement learning. We further establish a comprehensive evaluation framework covering fidelity, coherence, and reader satisfaction. Experimental results demonstrate that STORYLENSWRITER consistently outperforms strong generation and personalization baselines, highlighting the importance of context-aware narrative enrichment for personalized story rewriting.

We introduce P1SCO, a dataset of social media comments collected from three distinct platforms, annotated according to ten social dimensions to capture the diversity of social interactions and perceptions. The dataset is carefully disaggregated to allow analysis at the level of individual comments, annotators, and platforms. In addition to the social dimension labels, we include rich metadata on the annotators, including demographics, Big Five personality profiles, and political affiliation. This combination of comment-level annotations and annotator-level features enables nuanced analyses of how social perception varies across platforms, individual differences, and demographic factors. By preserving the diversity of annotator perspectives, our dataset supports studies of inter- and intra-annotator agreement, the influence of personality and political orientation on social interpretation, and the cross-platform dynamics of social discourse.

Federated learning (FL) increasingly needs machine unlearning to comply with privacy regulations. However, existing federated unlearning approaches may overlook the overlapping information between the unlearning and remaining data, leading to ineffective unlearning and unfairness between clients. In this work, we revisit federated unlearning through the lens of memorization. We argue that unlearning should mainly remove the unique memorized information attributable to the data to be forgotten, while preserving overlapping patterns that are also supported by the remaining data. Specifically, we propose Grouped Memorization Evaluation, an example-level metric that separates memorized knowledge from overlapping knowledge. Building on this metric, we introduce Federated Memorization Pruning (FedMemPrune), a pruning-based unlearning approach that resets redundant parameters responsible for memorization. Extensive experiments show that FedMemPrune closely matches retraining-based unlearning baselines while more effectively eliminating memorization than existing federated unlearning algorithms, yielding strong unlearning performance without sacrificing the utility of retained knowledge.

Fashion image retrieval is a cornerstone of modern e-commerce systems. A unified framework that supports diverse query formats and search intentions is highly desired in practice. However, existing approaches focus on narrow retrieval tasks and do not fully capture such diversity. Therefore, in this work, we aim to develop a unified framework capable of handling diverse realistic fashion retrieval scenarios, achieving truly versatile fashion image retrieval. To establish a data foundation, we first introduce U-FIRE, a comprehensive benchmark that consolidates fragmented fashion datasets into a unified collection, supplemented by two manually curated datasets for testing generalization. Building upon this, we propose FashionLens, a unified framework based on Multimodal Large Language Models. To handle divergent matching objectives, we design a Proposal-Guided Spherical Query Calibrator that dynamically shifts query representations into task-aligned metric spaces via adaptive spherical linear interpolation. Additionally, to mitigate the optimization imbalance caused by varying task complexities and data scales, we develop a Gradient-Guided Adaptive Sampling strategy that automatically re-weights tasks based on realtime learning difficulty and the data scale prior. Experiments on U-FIRE show that FashionLens achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse retrieval scenarios and generalizes robustly to unseen tasks. The data and code are publicly released at https://github.com/haokunwen/FashionLens.