Causal video generators must predict from the past, but they need not learn only from it. In streaming autoregressive video diffusion, each emitted segment becomes a commitment that future segments must preserve. Standard training, however, does not explicitly supervise causal states with future-informed representation targets. This creates what we call a representation-level planning gap: states that fit the current segment may discard identity, layout, and motion information needed for a consistent future. We introduce Video-Mirai, a training-only method that closes this gap without changing causal inference: the generator rolls out causally, a frozen foresight encoder reads the completed rollout non-causally, and a lightweight predictor distills the resulting stopped-gradient targets into causal states. Future frames supervise representations, never generator inputs. At inference, the encoder and predictor are discarded, leaving the original architecture, per-step FLOPs, and KV-cache behavior unchanged. Video-Mirai improves a strong Causal-Forcing baseline on 5-second VBench from 83.8 to 84.6 in terms of Total Score. On 30-second rollouts beyond the training horizon, subject consistency improves from 84.9 to 88.5 and background consistency from 90.2 to 91.9. Ablations identify future-conditioned targets as a key ingredient, and probes show that future frames become more decodable from current features. Causality should constrain inference, not representation supervision. Our study highlights that visual autoregressive models need foresight. Project Page: https://y0uroy.github.io/Video-Mirai.
Robust visual classification often depends on localizing the main foreground objects in an image while ignoring contextual distractors. Surprisingly, we find that the last layer attention maps of smaller self-supervised ViTs localize foreground objects better than those of larger ViTs. However, we still need large ViTs, because they extract richer representations from each patch. To get the best of both worlds, good localization and rich representations, we propose $A^2$, a simple method that leverages this inverse scaling finding by decoupling where to look (a small attention model) from what to extract (a large embedding model): we crop around the attention peaks of a small model and embed the crops with a larger model. $A^2$ uses entirely pretrained features, requires no group labels, and does not require per-dataset attention or backbone training. Across 5 benchmarks, $A^2$ is competitive with backbone-matched loss-level methods like DFR, and outperforms end-to-end attention training under stronger distribution shifts.
Tool-augmented multimodal agents show strong benchmark gains, often taken as evidence that agents have learned to use tools. We argue that this interpretation can be premature: a tool-call trace alone does not show whether the tool supplied answer-critical information. We study two representative ``thinking with images'' agents, Thyme and DeepEyesV2, across real-world understanding, OCR, chart understanding, and mathematical reasoning. Each agent is compared with its Tool-Free counterpart and with a Pure-Text Reasoner trained from the same source pool without tool-calling trajectories. Tool access yields little consistent aggregate improvement, does not reliably reduce generated-token cost, and leaves only a small tool-only solved set: 93% of DeepEyesV2's tool-solved problems and 96% of Thyme's are also solved by at least one non-tool setting. Mechanism ablations further show that the full tool-use loop does not consistently outperform either the tool-call format or the returned execution result alone. In the settings we study, the analyzed agents appear to learn tool-calling patterns more reliably than tool-contributed capabilities, suggesting that evaluation should distinguish tool availability from whether tools actually expand what agents can solve.
RNA sequencing produces rich and diverse datasets of gene expression, offering compelling insights into cellular state and function that have many applications in drug discovery. Modeling such data is challenging due to inherent technical noise and experimental batch effects, as evidenced by many existing transcriptomic foundation models (FMs) underperforming relative to linear baselines. Such results raise the question of whether deep representation learning provides a distinct advantage over the direct use of raw transcript counts. Our work explores this by developing a new self-supervised model, TxFM, with a focus on inductive representation learning evaluations. TxFM employs a masked autoencoding approach tailored to diverse RNA-seq count data, and our ablation study empirically identifies crucial architecture configurations required for strong transfer performance. Additionally, we curate a public training corpus, DiverseRNA-1.4M, and find that TxFM trained on this curated dataset yields high-fidelity gene representations that outperform FMs trained on atlas-scale corpora over 100x larger. Overall, our results indicate that inductive self-supervised learning is a viable modeling approach for transcriptomics representation, provided a careful synthesis of model architecture and training data curation.
Learning a shared representation between spoken text and gesture is central to co-speech gesture retrieval, synthesis, and understanding, but remains challenging for semantically meaningful gestures whose communicative intent is not captured by motion alone. Direct contrastive alignment between transcripts and continuous motion embeddings often overemphasizes low-level kinematics and misses the symbolic content of semantic gestures. We propose semantic motion anchors, natural-language abstractions of gesture motion capturing physical form and communicative intent. Our method discretizes 3D gestures into body-hand motion primitives, verbalizes them into structured descriptions, and grounds them in the transcript to provide auxiliary contrastive supervision. On BEAT2, our method improves text-to-gesture R@1 by 8.2% over a direct text-motion baseline and outperforms prior retrieval approaches on text to gesture and gesture to text retrieval directions. Beyond aggregate retrieval metrics, semantic motion anchor supervision helps retrieve gestures that are semantically meaningful for the spoken query, rather than defaulting to generic motion patterns. A downstream retrieval-augmented gesture generation study showed that users significantly preferred gestures retrieved by our approach over a retrieval-augmented generation baseline, demonstrating that semantically grounded retrieval translates to gestures that better convey communicative intent in downstream generation.
We introduce TriSearch, a reinforcement learning framework for optimizing objectives over triangulations of a polytope via bistellar flips. The key idea is a circuit-supported subtriangulation action representation: feasible flips are encoded by their supporting circuit and realized local subtriangulation, enabling a learned policy to rank them using local geometric and combinatorial features. This yields a dimension-agnostic interface and enables efficient traversal of the flip graph without explicit enumeration of the full triangulation space. Instantiated in 3D and 4D, TriSearch generalizes zero-shot from small training instances to larger polytopes with exponentially larger search spaces. It achieves top performance on metric objectives in 3D and, in 4D, discovers more distinct Fine, Regular, Star triangulations of reflexive polytopes, corresponding to Calabi-Yau threefolds, than existing samplers under a fixed budget.
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is now the dominant architecture for frontier language models, yet it requires all expert parameters to be loaded in memory, making it less preferable for memory-constrained deployment. Existing compression methods reduce the number of experts but the output remains an MoE model with the same fundamental limitation. We present the first systematic framework for converting a trained MoE into a standard fully dense architecture: experts are scored, selected, and grouped, then concatenated into a dense FFN and refined by knowledge distillation from the MoE teacher. We evaluate 7 scoring, 5 grouping, and 2 magnitude scaling methods across a range of selected expert counts on Qwen3-30B-A3B, yielding 350 configurations. We find that the choice of scoring method is the most impactful, with our novel diversity-aware scoring consistently outperforming prior methods on Qwen3-30B-A3B, DeepSeek-V2-Lite, and GPT-OSS-20B. Under a controlled comparison at matched parameter count, MoE-to-dense outperforms dense-to-dense pruning by +6.3 pp in average downstream accuracy after ~4B-token distillation at 1.6x faster training wall-clock speed.
Generating unified audio that naturally integrates speech and sounds from free-form text prompts remains challenging. For example, the prompt ``A fast drum roll ends with a cymbal crash, after which a man shouts: `Come on!'.'' describes several events that should appear in order and form a coherent recording rather than independent tracks that lack coherent temporal and semantic interactions. Current methods broadly follow two paradigms: pipeline methods couple separate text-to-sound and text-to-speech models, while unified models rely on a single generator that still requires structured, multi-field prompt inputs. Both paradigms require upstream prompt decomposition or rewriting, limiting free-form flexibility and risking cascading errors. To enable direct generation from free-form prompts within a single model, we introduce PlanAudio, an end-to-end framework that maps unconstrained free-form text to unified audio without intermediate prompt preprocessing. To address the challenges of direct free-form generation, PlanAudio integrates latent planning into a single autoregressive framework, predicting continuous audio layout before acoustic token synthesis. We construct a large-scale training corpus and introduce Free-Form Unified Audio Generation Benchmark (FUAG) for evaluation, both spanning speech, sound, and joint speech-and-sound generation. Experiments show that a single PlanAudio outperforms existing pipeline and unified baselines on speech-and-sound generation, while remaining competitive with specialist models on speech and sound generation. Further analysis validates the effectiveness of audio layout planning over textual planning, acoustic planning, and direct generation. Sample Available: https://planaudio.github.io/PlanAudio2026/.
Geometry estimation from perspective images has greatly advanced, maturing to the point where off-the-shelf foundation models are able to reconstruct 3D scene structure not only from multi-view imagery, but even from a single view. A natural extension is 3D reconstruction from panoramas, with the exciting prospect of recovering a full 360-degree scene from a single panoramic image. In this work, we introduce PaGeR (Panoramic Geometry Reconstruction), a framework to lift powerful 3D foundation models designed for perspective imagery to the panorama domain. Our strategy is to start from a pre-trained transformer for 3D reconstruction and turn it into a unified high-performance model that predicts scale-invariant depth, metric depth, surface normals, and sky masks from both perspective and omnidirectional images, in a single forward pass. By keeping architectural changes to a minimum and mixing perspective and panoramic images during training, PaGeR retains the rich 3D prior of the underlying foundation model while learning to also estimate geometrically consistent 360-degree scenes from single panoramas. We extensively test our method in both indoor and outdoor environments and find that it delivers state-of-the-art performance and excellent zero-shot performance across a wide range of scenes. Code, data and models are available $\href{https://github.com/prs-eth/PaGeR}{\text{here}}$.
Existing financial NLP benchmarks often rely on labels supplied by outside observers, measuring how language is perceived rather than what speakers have committed to in the market. We introduce StakeBench, an evaluation framework for language understanding grounded in market commitment. StakeBench links 560,876 comments from 2,261 resolved markets to verified position, action, and market-odds records across Polymarket and Manifold. Supervision is derived from observable market behavior. Position sides, post-comment trading actions, and market-odds trajectories replace human annotation. Four diagnostic tasks test whether models detect market commitment, identify the revealed side, anticipate future action, and perform collective odds projection. Three commitment-aware metrics measure alignment with revealed preferences rather than perceived sentiment. Validity audits and explicit interpretation boundaries help distinguish observable commitment signals from latent belief and causal market-odds impact. Across 15 LLMs and 18 topics and platform settings, models partially recover position-side signals, with Directed Accuracy from 0.506 to 0.599, but show structural failures on later tasks. Ten of the fifteen models collapse to one or two action labels in future action anticipation, and no model consistently improves on the naive odds-direction baseline in collective odds projection. Model scale is not correlated with performance, finance-domain tuning does not improve revealed-side identification, and platform incentives strongly shape higher-order results. StakeBench is packaged with evaluation code and dataset under CC-BY 4.0.
Objective: Survival analysis is central to medical prediction, yet large language models (LLMs) are rarely used as end-to-end survival models because censoring prevents straightforward supervised fine-tuning. Here we present LLMSurvival, a framework that enables censoring-aware survival analysis with unmodified LLMs operating directly on tabular clinical data. Materials and Methods: LLMSurvival reformulates time-to-event prediction as pairwise ranking among comparable subjects, and derives test-time risk by aggregating comparisons against anchor individuals from the training cohort. Results: Across two clinical tasks (ICU mortality prediction in MIMIC-IV and fragility fracture prediction in a NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medicine cohort), LLMSurvival improves overall concordance over Cox proportional hazards modeling by 3.1% for ICU mortality and 0.5% for fracture risk, 2.1% on average for ICU mortality and 2.8% for fracture risk over three established deep learning survival models. Discussion: The results show that survival modeling with censoring can be made compatible with LLM fine-tuning through comparison-based reformulation. The framework demonstrates high portability and superior performance over expert curated scores like SAPS-II and FRAX scores across diverse clinical context. Furthermore, the framework supports local deployment, as compact, publicly available base models provide sufficient performance. Conclusion: The LLMSurvival framework serves as a proof of concept for an integrated, censoring-conscious approach to survival analysis via LLMs.
Multi-step retrieval-augmented generation requires tracking evolving information needs, selected evidence, and unresolved gaps. However, free-form trajectories conflate this history, forcing each step to implicitly reconstruct the current state, while existing explicit-state methods remain vulnerable to inconsistent state overwrites. To address these limitations, we introduce StateRAG, a framework that coordinates a Planner, Navigator, Retriever, and Verifier through an explicit retrieval state with checked updates. These roles propose updates across four state fields: the plan, retrieval trace, evidence, and sufficiency assessment. A dedicated controller validates each proposal against the accepted state, rejecting inconsistent updates and guiding revisions within the query budget. A final Reader then answers strictly from the validated evidence. Ablation experiments on a shared graph backend show that StateRAG outperforms free-form trajectory and unverified explicit-state baselines on LongBench by 7.7 and 4.1 Macro F1 points, respectively. These gains consistently extend to document QA and flat passage retrieval. Furthermore, StateRAG surpasses the strongest external baselines by 5.3, 5.0, and 4.3 points on LongBench, QASPER, and DocVQA.
Multi-agent LLM decision systems for portfolio management still lack a principled way to assign credit across specialist agents, remain vulnerable to cold-start dominance under regime shifts, and offer limited transparency into how final allocations are formed. We propose Market Regime Council (MRC), an online credit-assignment mechanism over coalitions of specialist agents, with portfolio management as the downstream task. MRC computes exact Shapley credits across all single, pairwise, and Grand-coalition outputs for online agent weighting. Instantiated with N=3 specialist agents, at each trading period, MRC recomputes coalition-based Shapley weights from exponentially weighted performance histories, uses a Bayesian adaptive mixture to stabilize early periods, applies regime-dependent multipliers to adjust agent authority, and records each rebalance through a five-layer causal trace. Over 1,037 trading days across 13 crypto assets and five seeds, MRC achieves a Sharpe ratio of 1.51 and a cumulative return of 440.1%, ranking first on CR, SR, and IR among active baselines and attaining the lowest MDD among active methods. Ablation results show that the gains come from Shapley-weighted integration across coalition outputs rather than from any single stage in isolation. Code and demo data are available open source.
Recent advances in one-step text-to-image generation have enabled real-time synthesis with remarkable efficiency and quality. Previous reinforcement learning methods for one-step generators combine image-space reward optimization with diffusion noisy-space distribution matching. This paradigm brings challenges due to a mismatch between terminal reward optimization and the underlying generative dynamics. As a result, optimization tends to exploit stochastic degrees of freedom, often improving reward at the expense of image fidelity. To address this issue, we propose Diff-Instruct with Diffused Reward (DIDR), a data-free trajectory-level alignment framework derived from Integral KL minimization. DIDR propagates the RLHF-optimal reward-tilted clean-image distribution across all noise levels along the diffusion trajectory. We show that this objective admits the same minimizer as clean-image RLHF, while naturally inducing the Diffused Reward Score (DRS), which acts as a reward-driven correction to the reference score function. To make this practical, we further introduce the Diffused Reward Proxy (DRP), an efficient estimator of DRS based on differentiable short-step denoising. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DIDR consistently Pareto-dominates existing one-step SDXL baselines. Moreover, when transferred to a 6B DiT backbone (Z-Image), DIDR surpasses its 50-step teacher in preference alignment while requiring only a single generation step. Code: https://github.com/Junyi-W/DIDR
As wearable and mobile devices become increasingly embedded in daily life, they offer a practical way to continuously sense human motion in the wild. But inertial signals are highly dependent on the sensing setup, including body location, mounting position, sensor orientation, device hardware, and sampling protocol. This setup dependence makes it difficult to learn motion representations that transfer across devices and datasets, and limits the broader use of wearable IMUs beyond closed-set recognition. We introduce AnyMo, a geometry-aware framework for setup-agnostic human motion modeling. AnyMo uses physics-grounded IMU simulation over dense body-surface placements to generate diverse and plausible synthetic signals, pre-trains a graph encoder from paired synthetic placement views and masked partial observations, tokenizes multi-position IMU into full-body motion tokens, and aligns these tokens with an LLM for motion-language understanding. We evaluate AnyMo on three complementary tasks: zero-shot activity recognition across 14 unseen downstream datasets, cross-modal retrieval, and wearable IMU motion captioning, where it improves average Accuracy/F1/R@2 by 11.7\%/11.6\%/22.6\% on HAR, increases zero-shot IMU-to-text and text-to-IMU retrieval MRR by 15.9\% and 28.6\%, respectively, and improves zero-shot captioning BERT-F1 by 7.5\%. These results support AnyMo as a generalist model for wearable motion understanding in the wild. Project page: https://anymo-project.github.io.
Pretrained diffusion models serve as frozen teachers for pipelines such as text-to-3D, single-step distillation, and data attribution. The teacher gradients these pipelines consume are expectations over noise levels and Gaussian noise, estimated by Monte Carlo (MC). Each MC draw requires expensive upstream work (rendering, simulation, encoding), so estimator variance dominates compute cost. We introduce CARV, a compute-aware variance-accounting framework that casts these gradients as a classical two-stage sampling problem with asymmetric per-level costs. This motivates a hierarchical MC estimator that amortizes each expensive upstream computation by reusing it across cheap diffusion draws, with within-unit variance further reduced by timestep importance sampling (IS) and stratified inverse-CDF sampling. CARV delivers 2 to 3x effective compute multipliers on text-to-3D and data attribution without changing the objective. In text-to-3D, reuse provides most of the gain and IS with stratification adds about 25%. In single-step distillation, the same techniques cut gradient variance by an order of magnitude but do not improve downstream FID, marking the regime where MC variance is no longer the bottleneck.
The aggregation of conflicting client updates remains a fundamental bottleneck in federated learning (FL) under heterogeneous data distributions. Naive averaging can produce a global update that improves the global objective while conflicting with specific clients, causing degradation for those clients. In this work, we propose CRAFT (Conflict-Resolved Aggregation for Federated Training), a new aggregation framework that treats the global update as a geometric correction problem. We formulate aggregation as finding the update closest to a reference direction while satisfying conflict-free alignment constraints. We derive a closed-form expression for the constrained optimization problem, avoiding the computational overhead of iterative solvers. Furthermore, we use a layer-wise adaptation to address conflicts at varying feature granularities. We provide a theoretical analysis showing that CRAFT promotes a common-descent structure and mitigates conflicts through its projection geometry. Extensive experiments on heterogeneous benchmarks demonstrate that CRAFT improves the accuracy of the global model while reducing performance disparity across clients compared with state-of-the-art baselines. The source code for CRAFT is available at https://github.com/tum-pbs/CRAFT.
Current end-to-end autonomous driving models are fundamentally constrained by the behavioral cloning ceiling of imitation learning. While reinforcement learning offers a path to smarter autonomy, it demands two missing pieces of infrastructure: (1) a cognitive foundation that understands traffic semantics and driving intent, and (2) a foresighted physical environment that can anticipate the consequences of candidate actions. To this end, we propose CoPhy, a CognitivePhysical reinforcement learning framework for autonomous driving. To distill to think, we distill VLM knowledge into the BEV encoder and then discard the VLM entirely, retaining cognitive ability at zero inference cost while releasing the cognitive channel as a pluggable interface for optional human language commands. To foresee to act, we build an auto-regressive BEV world model that explicitly predicts future semantic maps conditioned on candidate actions, serving as an interpretable physical sandbox from which safety metrics are directly derived. Built upon this dual infrastructure, we optimize the driving policy via GRPO with a novel dual-reward mechanism: a physical reward derived from BEV rollouts enforces hard safety constraints, while a cognitive reward from a language-aligned scorer ensures intent compliance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoPhy not only achieves state-of-the-art results on NAVSIM v1 and v2 benchmarks, but also enables safer driving via cognitively informed scene compliance and flexible intent control through user-defined language instructions. Project page: https://wuyang98.github.io/CoPhy/.
Foundation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) demonstrate impressive zero-shot generalization but frequently degrade under diverse real-world illumination, particularly for instance segmentation. In this work, we address this limitation by developing Lighting Convolutional-Attention (LCA), an adapter module that enhances segmentation robustness without fine-tuning the heavy backbone. LCA employs a dual-branch architecture to process RGB features alongside contrast maps, enabling physically motivated sensitivity to structural changes rather than illumination artifacts. We optimize LCA through a pairwise training strategy, introducing a targeted loss term that explicitly penalizes discrepancies between clean images and their corresponding illumination variants. To evaluate and support this architecture, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study across multiple existing benchmarks and present a novel Unity-based synthetic dataset specifically designed to accurately replicate complex real-world lighting conditions. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach successfully bridges the domain gap, delivering superior lighting-robust segmentation.
We study post-hoc Learning to Defer (L2D) through the lens of ideal distributions: divergence-regularized reweightings of the data distribution under which a model attains low task loss. We define deferral via the density-ratio between a model's and an expert's ideals. Using the reduction from density-ratio estimation to class-probability estimation, we derive the DR CPE losses for post-hoc L2D scorers. Deferral decisions are then made by thresholding the scorer. For KL-based ideal distributions, our deferral rule recovers Chow's rule under the original distribution and a connection to an expert-tilted Bayes posterior---which incorporates the expert's performance---depending on if the ideal distributions are marginal or joint distributions. This leads to two variants of the DR CPE losses, with the joint variant being computationally convenient in practice. We establish consistency properties of the joint DR CPE losses when considering the zero-one task loss and strongly proper composite CPE losses. Experimentally, our approach is competitive compared to common baselines and is more robust across dataset settings. More broadly, our results cast post-hoc L2D as density-ratio estimation between ideal distributions, bridging Chow-style rules, expert comparison, and elucidating connections to related learning settings including anomaly detection.