Large-scale device-level load forecasting for distribution transformers is challenged by substantial cross-device heterogeneity and the deployment burden of maintaining device-specific forecasting models. Existing approaches typically rely either on device-specific models, which are difficult to scale to large transformer populations, or on global models, which reduce deployment complexity but may overlook heterogeneous load patterns across devices. To address this trade-off, this study develops a trend-clustered forecasting framework that enables model sharing among transformers with similar temporal behaviors. Representation Learning for Time Series using Time-Embeddings (T-Rep) is employed to learn compact temporal representations of transformer load series, which are subsequently grouped using a Gaussian mixture model (GMM). Representative transformers are sampled within each cluster to train cluster-specific Patch Time Series Transformer (PatchTST) models while retaining device-level predictions. The framework is evaluated using real-world 15-min operational data from nearly one thousand distribution transformers. The proposed framework reduces mean absolute error (MAE) by approximately 20% relative to the direct PatchTST baseline, achieves a high-load warning accuracy of 95.66%, while requiring only seven cluster-specific forecasting models. These results demonstrate that behavior-based device organization provides an effective balance between forecasting accuracy, deployment scalability, and risk-oriented operational support for distribution transformer management.
Streaming 3D foundation models (3DFMs) estimate camera poses and dense geometry online, but they fall short of SLAM: their predictions are fixed once emitted, so loop closures cannot correct accumulated drift. With such models already providing strong geometric capability, a central question for SLAM becomes how to schedule their inference and how to keep its results as revisable state. We present Map2SLAM, which keeps LingBot-Map frozen, trains only a lightweight retrieval head, and builds SLAM on the model's inference interface, turning its predictions into observations of an external persistent SLAM state. The front-end tracks every incoming frame with the model's causal streaming inference and decides which frames are written to the persistent state as keyframes. The back-end asynchronously decides when and which past frames to re-observe, re-running the model's joint inference over them with fresh context; verified loop observations correct the trajectory online, and segment observations refine dense geometry after the sequence. All invocations share a single frame encoder pass per image, whose cached features also drive loop retrieval, so frequent re-invocation incurs no additional encoding cost. Map2SLAM achieves state-of-the-art performance on KITTI, VBR, and Oxford Spires, reducing mean ATE by over 40% compared with the best uncalibrated baselines, while maintaining real-time tracking at over 28 FPS at a resolution of $518\times154$ on an NVIDIA RTX 5090D GPU. Please visit our project page at https://robbyant-research.github.io/Map2SLAM/.
Test-time reinforcement learning with majority-vote rewards trains a language model on unlabeled questions by rewarding the samples that agree with its most frequent answer. During training, each question locks into one answer, on hard questions often a wrong one, but which answer it locks into is known only after training. In this paper, we show that this outcome is decided early, in a short race driven by sampling noise between the answers that are close at the start, and we derive the probability of each outcome. With a separate logit for each answer, the runner-up wins with a normal tail probability of the initial gap, scaled by an explicit noise constant. In a network, however, the answer logits depend on shared parameters, and through the kernel of these parameters the updates of the trailing answers also change the gap of the two leaders. This spillover shifts the boundary between the starts won by each leader, and a closed form computes the shifted probability from a kernel probe and the start logits. In LoRA experiments with three models from two families, predictions made before training with the kernel frozen at its start value forecast which answer each question locks into better than a logistic model refitted on the outcomes, although they use no fitted constants. The closed form matches these predictions on the runs in which a check before training finds that the two leaders stay above the other answers, and it explains why a law that ignores the spillover needs a strongly inflated step.
Few-shot CLIP adaptation is often treated as a parameterization problem. Full fine-tuning is assumed to overfit, so parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods are preferred. In this paper, we show that this conclusion conflates parameterization with optimization. Across 11 datasets, 3 CLIP backbones, and 5 shot levels, dense full fine-tuning with plain SGD outperforms representative PEFT methods under the reported evaluation protocol, whereas Adam/AdamW collapses. We trace this collapse to unreliable support-set preconditioning. The few-shot second moment systematically underestimates the corresponding full-data statistic, already at initialization. Adam's inverse-square-root normalization converts this error into an oversized adaptive update. Matching Adam's first-step update budget to SGD resolves most of the collapse, whereas numerator-side alignment does not explain the failure. Shampoo and SOAP also fail, so richer preconditioning alone does not resolve the problem. Theory formalizes how few-shot estimation error is amplified into unsafe updates. SGD succeeds because it avoids unreliable preconditioners and stays close to pretrained CLIP. Interpolation probes show low-loss connections along tested directions, and curvature probes show favorable directional curvature. These results identify optimizer-induced preconditioning, not dense full fine-tuning itself, as the main source of failure in few-shot CLIP adaptation.
For two $d$-dimensional point sets $A, B$ of size $n$, the Chamfer distance from $A$ to $B$ is defined as $\text{CH}(A,B)=\sum_{a \in A} \min_{b \in B} \mathsf{dist}(a, b)$, where $\mathsf{dist}$ is some underlying distance measure. We present efficient algorithms for approximating the Chamfer distance under the $\ell_p$ norm for $1 < p \le 2$. For the general case $1 < p < 2$, we utilize lopsided $\ell_p$ to $\ell_1$ embeddings with weak guarantees. We show that they are sufficient for preserving the Chamfer distance. In the high-dimensional regime, we use Fast Matrix Multiplication techniques to speed up the lopsided embeddings. These lead to $O(nd\cdot \mathrm{poly}(\log \log n, \log(1/\varepsilon))/\varepsilon^2)$ total time. For the specific Euclidean case ($p=2$), we leverage the Fast Johnson-Lindenstrauss Transform based on Toeplitz matrices and re-analyze the previous $\ell_1$-specific Chamfer algorithm in $\ell_2$. These achieve a runtime matching the recent state-of-the-art $\ell_1$ result of $O(nd(\log \log n + \log (1/\varepsilon))/\varepsilon^2)$, improving upon the previous $O(nd \log n/\varepsilon^2)$ bound for $\ell_2$. We also give additional results for the angular distance and upper and lower bounds in the streaming setting.
Statistical models for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) increasingly require large, heterogeneous EEG corpora, yet existing datasets vary in sampling rates, channel layouts, window lengths, and storage formats, creating substantial preprocessing and I/O overhead. We propose ZarrFM, an execution-oriented representation that complements BIDS by storing a corpus as a single Zarr v3 hierarchy with indexed metadata, canonical channel spaces, explicit masks, hash-stable subject splits, verified event tables, and block-aligned sharding. On real PhysioNet recordings and synthetic corpora, we compare ZarrFM with EDF, FIF, NPY, HDF5, and Parquet. Across 200 recordings, its two-level index reduces metadata queries from 601 requests to 14. Preserving native signal codes reduces storage from 42.4 MB/hour in EDF to 22.7 MB/hour, while block-aligned sampling reaches 3,131 windows/s, up to 11 times faster than Parquet. Reads remain bit-identical across independent Zarr implementations, and concurrent failure-injected appends recover without data loss. These results show that ZarrFM can provide a compact, interoperable, and execution-efficient storage layer for large-scale EEG pretraining.
Parameter-efficient image-to-video transfer adapts frozen image foundation models to video via lightweight trainable adapters. Existing methods insert the same adapter at every transformer layer, implicitly assuming all layers require equal temporal modeling. A layer-wise sensitivity analysis across four video-native model families and two pretraining paradigms reveals that this assumption is wrong: temporal sensitivity increases with depth, and the pretraining paradigm determines its growth profile. Vision-only models exhibit a gradual rise, while vision-language models show early suppression followed by late recovery. This finding motivates STRAP, a training-free adapter placement rule that derives a spatial-to-temporal transition boundary from a paradigm-matched video model. Spatial adapters are assigned before this boundary and temporal adapters after it, without modifying the adapter architecture itself. On four fine-grained action recognition benchmarks, STRAP improves accuracy by up to 11.8% over uniform placement, reduces trainable parameters by 29 to 48%, and lowers inference time by up to 10%. On standard benchmarks, it matches accuracy with fewer parameters. Code is available at https://github.com/th-nesh/STRAP.
Recent advances in reinforcement learning have made verifiable rewards a central post-training paradigm for improving multimodal reasoning. However, methods such as GRPO remain data- and compute-inefficient, spending rollout and annotation budget on prompts that provide little learning signal. We propose DISCOVER, an online data-discovery framework for budgeted multimodal GRPO that enables vision-language models to dynamically identify prompts that are most useful for the current policy. DISCOVER first organizes the multimodal sample pool into semantic clusters and queries a small set of density-diverse representative samples to obtain initial reward observations. During training, it estimates the utility of unannotated samples by transferring sparse reward feedback from queried samples. Since sample utility changes as the policy evolves, DISCOVER dynamically updates these estimates with recency-weighted rollout observations. It then selects only high-utility prompts for annotation using a policy-conditioned score that accounts for reward variance and difficulty. Once the discovery budget is exhausted, DISCOVER continues with utility-based replay. Experiments on ViRL39K and VLAA-Thinking with Qwen3-VL-2B show that DISCOVER substantially improves multimodal mathematical reasoning under a strict 10% unique-sample budget, outperforming budget-matched random selection, hard-example sampling, full-pool GRPO under the same training-step budget, and online selection baselines. Ablations further validate the importance of semantic coverage, online reward transfer, and stable discovery cadence, establishing DISCOVER as a practical framework for data-efficient multimodal RL post-training.
Protein variant effect prediction is central to understanding protein function and guiding protein engineering, yet experimental labels remain costly. In many protein experiments, the variants that can be assayed are dictated by protocol constraints, while the variants that need accurate prediction may lie in a different or broader region of the landscape. This assay-prediction mismatch makes candidate-local criteria such as predicted function, uncertainty, or exploration value insufficient for measurement design. Given a protocol-defined accessible space and a limited budget, we ask which variants should be assayed so that the resulting data best improves landscape prediction. We propose TALK, which estimates each candidate's contribution through posterior coupling between accessible and target variants and reduces redundant information within the batch. Across retrospective ProteinGym and FLIP protocols, TALK generally improves target-space prediction under limited measurement budgets. These results point to a practical two-stage workflow: first, spend a limited assay budget on variants selected to be informative for the target landscape and train a predictive model from the measured labels; then use this model to score and prioritize high-potential variants. Code is available at https://github.com/joehuang618/TALK.
Surgical procedures are inherently partially observable, requiring surgeons to continuously infer evolving anatomical dynamics and future surgical states beyond the current observation. However, existing self-supervised learning methods primarily learn from observed surgical videos through masked reconstruction or predicting representations within the camera's current field of view, lacking the capability to explicitly model the out-of-sight surgical dynamics. Inspired by latent predictive world models, we introduce SurgWorld, a video-native, self-supervised framework for surgical representation learning, which treats a specified spatial or temporal shift as a pseudo-action and learns to predict the target latent representation from a partial observation. Specifically, we propose Out-of-Sight Dynamics Modeling (OSDM) as the pretraining objective for predicting representations conditioned on relative spatio-temporal shifts. We further regularize the learned latent dynamics from OSDM with a Geometric Visual Similarity (GVS) objective by aligning patch-level relational structures between predicted and target representations, preserving spatial geometry and local visual coherence for dense perception. These two objectives are integrated through an agglomerative training framework that consolidates complementary supervisory signals from multiple teachers to learn a unified latent representation of surgical dynamics and visual geometry. Extensive transfer learning experiments on 17 surgical benchmarks show that SurgWorld consistently outperforms existing vision foundation models across surgical workflow recognition, fine-grained action understanding, and dense visual perception. We further conduct tailored qualitative and quantitative analyses, demonstrating that SurgWorld effectively captures surgical dynamics beyond the directly observed context through latent prediction.
This paper proposes Graphene, a lightweight image super-resolution architecture with two complementary feature refinement mechanisms: Ising-model-inspired local feature refinement using an Ising Refinement Block (IRB) and stage-history-based feature refinement using a History Attention (HistAttn) module. The IRB reuses attention output features and pre-softmax attention logits to construct signed pairwise token couplings within each local window, applies unrolled mean-field updates, and refines features through a gated residual correction. These signed couplings allow alignment and opposition between latent spins to modulate local feature refinement. HistAttn attends over the current stage output and earlier representations at the same token position and adaptively blends the current stage output with a history-weighted feature aggregate without adding spatial pairwise attention. On Urban100 at $\times4$, Graphene and Graphene-light improve over IET and IET-light by 0.24 dB and 0.38 dB, respectively, with 34.3%/13.7% fewer parameters, 44.8%/44.4% fewer FLOPs, 78.4%/71.5% lower latency, and 76.0%/85.5% lower peak memory. Real-world SR comparisons further show that Graphene recovers fine details and preserves textures across diverse degradations. Code and reference checkpoints are available at https://github.com/skethz/Graphene
Training vision-language-action (VLA) models to follow gameplay instructions across diverse games is limited by the cost of collecting demonstrations. We introduce a framework that automatically generates game environments and expert demonstrations. An LLM-powered agent uses game-building tools to construct executable environments and tasks targeting specified skills. Programmatic experts then use privileged simulator state to generate aligned instructions, rendered observations, and keyboard and mouse actions. We train our game policy, Script2Play, by post-training a 4B vision-language model with behavior cloning on 150.3 hours of synthetic Minecraft and Roblox gameplay, without human gameplay demonstrations or reinforcement learning. Evaluation on multiple public game benchmarks demonstrates that Script2Play follows gameplay instructions effectively and generalizes across game engines, highlighting the effectiveness of targeted synthetic supervision.
Image-based remote monitoring over wireless networks faces a trade-off between communication cost and classification reliability. Transmitting complete images is communication-intensive, whereas relying solely on lightweight edge classifiers may compromise accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose Confidence-Driven Adaptation (CDA) for image transmission and classification. An edge device (ED) captures images and applies a lightweight classifier before transmission to a remote server. Based on its classification confidence, the ED selects among three transmission modes with varying levels of information: a short text string reporting its predicted class when confidence is high, a compressed Region of Interest (ROI) at intermediate confidence levels, or an uncompressed ROI when confidence is low. The server accepts the predicted class directly in the first case and performs classification using a more powerful classifier in the other two cases. Numerical evaluations under bandwidth-limited, lossy links and latency-constrained settings demonstrate that CDA achieves high task accuracy at the receiver compared with non-adaptive baselines that transmit only the edge-classifier outcome or the uncompressed ROI.
High-fidelity LiDAR simulation remains a bottleneck for scalable development and validation of autonomous systems. Existing generators can synthesize realistic scans, but they are typically constrained to a single sensor configuration, offer limited control over structure and geometry, and drift in long-horizon 4D generation. We present CrossLiDAR, a unified transformer-based framework capable of generating controllable and spatio-temporally consistent multi-sensor LiDAR sequences. Our approach leverages a rectified flow objective with a Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer (MM-DiT) backbone, within a compact latent space of range images. To support multiple LiDAR sensors, an Inter-sensor Module enables interaction across sensors, while a ControlNet-style branch provides structural conditioning (e.g., BEV priors or 3D bounding boxes). For modeling the temporal consistency, CrossLiDAR generates short $N$-frame sequences and extends them autoregressively to improve long-horizon coherence. Our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average improvement of 29.56\% in JSD and 15.36\% in MMD evaluated on nuScenes and the Waymo Dataset. CrossLiDAR bridges the gap to modern autonomous-driving simulation by enabling calibration-consistent multi-sensor LiDAR rollouts over long horizons for controllable, scenario-based testing.
Describing hours of audio requires accurate event timing and sustained descriptive detail throughout the recording. We present LongCap, a framework for timestamped audio captioning (TAC), with the human-annotated LongCapBench and three diarization-inspired metrics: Timeline Error Rate (TER), Granularity Error Rate (GER), and Caption Similarity (tcpCapSim). LongCap interleaves audio chunks with structured event captions, using relative timestamps and retained context to support length extrapolation within a 1M-token inference context window. Event-level reannotation restores caption detail, while systematic studies examine model scaling, dependency supervision, and self-distillation. LongCap-Diar achieves strong benchmark results and extrapolates to 16 hours of concatenated audio despite training on recordings no longer than 40 minutes. Our TAC models are competitive with Qwen3.5-Omni-Plus on short clips, outperform evaluated baselines in caption similarity and timeline accuracy in segment-level comparisons on LongCapBench-TAC-Long, and caption full recordings approaching two hours. On LongCapBench-TAC, 9B and 35B-A3B offer favorable size-performance tradeoffs, while 122B-A10B substantially improves event-dependency recovery. These findings support long-horizon general audio understanding and provide a foundation for always-on voice agents.
Elements arrive one at a time, and after each arrival an algorithm holds a set of at most $k$ arrived elements. Its goal is a held set whose value under a monotone submodular function is close to the best value that $k$ arrived elements can achieve. The recourse of an update is the number of elements inserted into or removed from the held set, and we require it to be bounded independently of $k$ and of the number $n$ of arrivals. With evaluations only on sets of arrived elements and polynomially many of them, the best ratio a randomized algorithm can achieve is $2-\sqrt{2}\approx0.5858$. We show that seeing future arrivals raises the best ratio for polynomially many evaluations to $1-1/e\approx0.6321$, for deterministic and for randomized algorithms; no algorithm with polynomially many evaluations exceeds $1-1/e$, even when all elements are available at once. For every $\varepsilon>0$, a deterministic algorithm that sees the next $\lceil\varepsilon k/3\rceil$ arrivals keeps a set of value at least $1-1/e-\varepsilon$ times the optimum at every time, changes $O(\varepsilon^{-3})$ elements per arrival and makes $(n+1)^{O(\varepsilon^{-2})}$ evaluations. With the whole arrival sequence known in advance, a deterministic algorithm attains the same ratio with $O(\varepsilon^{-2})$ changes per arrival. A randomized algorithm with the same short lookahead makes $O(n^2k)$ evaluations, changes $O(\varepsilon^{-2})$ elements per arrival, and attains the same ratio in expectation at each fixed time. The main tool is a greedy algorithm with an explicit guarantee for each of its partial solutions combined with each initial segment of the known future arrivals. A second tool moves between two such solutions one element at a time while keeping the value high, and the deterministic algorithm times each move using upper bounds on the optimum from failed searches.
Recent robot manipulation benchmarks have enabled systematic evaluation of general-purpose robot policies across diverse objects, scenes, instructions, and embodiments. However, most existing benchmarks still assume that the robot is the only active agent and that task semantics are determined primarily by the instruction and object state. This assumption overlooks a common source of real-world variation: humans actively sharing the workspace. In such settings, humans may reveal an implicit goal, complete part of the task, temporarily change object availability, or constrain safe robot motion while working nearby. We introduce HARP-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating robot manipulation policies in workspaces shared with active humans. HARP-Bench treats human activity as part of the manipulation problem, rather than as background scene variation. It organizes human-present manipulation into four conditions: Cueing, Contribution, Interruption, and Co-presence. These conditions are instantiated through everyday manipulation tasks, including paired human-present variants for controlled comparison with standard manipulation. HARP-Bench also provides a demonstration-generation pipeline for dynamic human-present settings. We evaluate VLA models, imitation-learning methods, and heuristic policies on HARP-Bench. Human-present variations challenge current policies, and higher task success does not consistently improve safety. Quantitative failure analysis identifies manipulation and recovery as the dominant remaining challenges. Training with HARP-Bench demonstrations improves human-present performance in simulation. A real-world study on one task family shows improved performance under human contribution, but not interruption, providing initial evidence of the data's utility and identifying limits of transfer. Code is available at https://github.com/UMass-Embodied-AGI/harp.
Visual in-context segmentation uses visual demonstrations to guide predictions for a new image. In SegGPT, we identify background color mapping deviation, where non-target regions sharing a background label receive different output colors, and part-to-parent expansion, where predictions extend beyond the requested part into its parent object. These deviations can occur even when the relevant regions remain distinguishable in internal features. Controlled changes to demonstration colors and requested targets support an account in which demonstrations guide role and color assignments over familiar semantic regions, influenced by learned semantic and color preferences. Building on these findings, we introduce Semantic Contrast Prompt Selection (SCPS). Its semantic contrast encoding assigns separate colors to the requested part and the rest of its object while keeping the remaining scene black. SCPS combines existing retrieval scores with quality estimates from labeled development images to select demonstrations and their binary or semantic contrast encodings. Averaged across seven retrieval methods on three benchmarks, SCPS improves target IoU by 0.054 and reduces leakage into the rest of the object by 22.7% relative to the original binary selectors. Our findings offer a new perspective on understanding and improving demonstration following in visual in-context segmentation.
Learning-based safety certification offers a promising route for verifying complex dynamical systems when explicit models are unavailable, but existing data-driven methods often scale poorly: they treat the system as a black box, rely on dense discretizations or Lipschitz bounds, and consequently suffer from sample complexity that grows exponentially with dimension. This paper shows that a common structural property of dynamical systems--monotonicity--can be used to break this curse of dimensionality. We develop a data-driven framework for robust safety verification and safe controller synthesis for unknown monotone systems using only simulator queries. Our main theoretical result proves that, for monotone systems with upper-closed unsafe sets, safety is completely characterized by the existence of monotone inductive barrier certificates. This structure reduces certificate verification over continuous state spaces to localized boundary checks over finitely many cells. To learn such certificates, we introduce Max-Monotone Networks, a monotone neural architecture with universal approximation guarantees for monotone functions. We then propose a training and refinement algorithm that, upon successful termination, returns formally valid neural barrier certificates and, under mild partition assumptions, requires only $O(n)$ simulator queries. Across high-dimensional benchmarks, including oscillator networks with up to $13{,}659$ states and traffic networks with $1{,}000$ states, our method certifies safety in regimes where prior approaches either do not converge or exceed memory limits. These results demonstrate that exploiting order structure can make neural safety certification both scalable and formally sound.
A gene summary can contain the very annotations used to evaluate an embedding of its text. The Alliance of Genome Resources converts Gene Ontology (GO) annotations into sentences, which NCBI Gene displays and GenePT includes in its input. These summaries covered 6,172 of 19,256 human protein-coding genes (32.1%), including 58% of genes with one to ten linked publications. We embedded the same corpus with and without the generated summaries and refitted a function-prediction probe on each version. Among genes with one to ten publications, removal reduced the reported per-gene area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) by 0.078 with a linear probe (95% bootstrap interval 0.072-0.084) and by 0.033 with a multilayer perceptron. These estimates use a historical GO scorer that mishandled ties. The original predictions are unavailable for rescoring. A simple TF-IDF encoder also benefited from the summaries, as did models evaluated only on experimental annotations. Replacing generated summaries with UniProt function descriptions recovered much of the lost performance despite little verbatim overlap. UniProt also curates many of the evaluation labels. In mouse and yeast, we found a similar dependence on the source of the description. We introduce GeneProv to compare encoders on matched text and to examine how representation rankings change across GO recovery, non-GO endpoints and co-essentiality.