This paper introduces Cascading Circle Loss (CasCL), a contrastive learning framework for legal retrieval tasks with graded relevance. CasCL combines an InfoNCE objective for positive-negative separation with a cascade of ranking boundaries that model ordered relevance levels between queries and legal clauses. The framework also includes a negative-aware self-paced optimization mechanism and a relevance gain weighting strategy to improve ranking quality. Experiments on legal passage retrieval benchmarks show that CasCL consistently outperforms existing methods, including InfoNCE, Circle Loss, MNRL and Margin MSE, across both binary retrieval and graded ranking metrics.
Medical foundation models (Med-FMs) are increasingly adapted to clinical tasks through prompt learning, which tunes a small set of prompt tokens while the backbone remains frozen. Recent work has shown that this efficiency introduces a vulnerability: jointly optimizing learnable prompts and an imperceptible noise trigger during few-shot adaptation implants a backdoor that leaves clean performance intact but steers triggered inputs to an attacker-chosen class. Since prompts are compact and readily shared, this raises two questions: whether a backdoored prompt remains effective on a different Med-FM, and whether it can be repaired without retraining the backbone. We address both in BAPLe++. First, we present the first study of cross-model transferability of prompt-based backdoors, quantified by two proposed metrics, Clean Accuracy Difference (CAD) and Backdoor Accuracy Difference (BAD). Second, we propose DePLe (Defense via Prompt Learning), which uses the infected prompt as a fixed anchor and learns a new prompt on a small clean set that preserves the clean task while diverging from the compromised embedding region. Experiments on four Med-FMs and six chest X-ray and histopathology datasets show that backdoors transfer across models, but asymmetrically and in a dataset-dependent manner. Compared with four training-free input transformations, DePLe reduces backdoor accuracy more consistently while preserving, and in several settings improving, clean accuracy. Our code can be accessed on https://github.com/Ufaqkhan/Baple-Plus-Plus
Deep neural networks achieve universal function approximation by stacking interconnected nonlinearities, but as a consequence they are sensitive to noise and resist mechanistic interpretation. In contrast, the local update rules of cellular automata, such as Conway's Game of Life, give rise to not merely interpretable but programmable dynamics. We explore a bridge between these worlds: a lateral inhibition in neural networks based on continuous Game-of-Life rules that derives inhibitory and excitatory responses from the layer input and blends them into the activation map in a state-conditioned way. The mechanism is differentiable and architecture-agnostic, and its regulation is imposed rather than learned: the rule's parameters are fixed and are not optimised, while the rule's values and derivatives shape training throughout the network. Wired into fully connected, convolutional, wide-residual and graph convolutional networks, it gives rise to several properties. Activation maps become coherent across space, depth and seeds, with coarse structure persisting through depth while fine detail is renewed at every layer. The co-activation graph of the hidden units departs from an Erd\H{o}s--R\'enyi random graph: it is laid out on the image and its giant component grows in steps, as in a spatial graph. Networks started from nearly identical initialisations, under label noise, disagree on thirty times fewer test images. Saliency maps rest on the object rather than the background, and resilience to pixel noise not seen in training is substantially improved.
Skeleton-based rehabilitation assessment faces fundamental limitations of fixed topologies which cannot model compensatory patterns, uniform joint treatments overlook clinically important deviations, and lack of geometric understand- ing. We propose Concave-Convex Decomposition Sparse Topological Graph Convolutional Network (CC2-STG), a multi-stream model that combines geo- metric decomposition, sparse feature learning, and adaptive topology. Our framework decomposes joint relationships into complementary convex-concave distance functions to model both local and global movement characteristics, with sparse regularization with proximal optimization selecting clinically relevant geo- metric features, while multi-scale topological analysis captures non-anatomical joint dependencies in pathological movements. Experiments on the KiMoRe and UIPRMD datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art performance on clinical pathological movement assessment.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as shared multi-tenant services, relying on advanced optimizations like KV cache and prefix sharing to improve throughput and reduce latency. However, these optimizations introduce a critical vulnerability: attackers can exploit time-to-first-token (TTFT) variations between KV cache hits and misses to infer sensitive prompt tokens via prefix-matching side-channel attacks. Existing defenses indiscriminately restrict cross-tenant cache sharing, which incurs prohibitive performance overhead and negates the fundamental efficiency benefits of the KV cache. We propose Mirage, a topology-aware emission obfuscation framework that provably bounds timing leakage without sacrificing the performance gains of cache sharing. Instead of stalling the GPU or forcing redundant recomputations, Mirage delays token emission at the gateway so the attacker observes a natural cache miss distribution, while the GPU seamlessly continues serving other requests at full speed. Mirage uses a Privacy Odometer that persistently tracks the topological novelty of prefix fan-out expansions to distinguish aggressive probing from benign traffic. Once a prefix exceeds a safety threshold, Mirage engages a two-phase policy that uses a dynamic estimator to pad the TTFT to a calibrated cache-miss baseline. On a 500-sample public corpus across three models, Mirage suppresses the timing side-channel to near the random-guessing floor, while maintaining a significantly lower TTFT than defense baselines. We further show that Mirage withstands a strong adaptive adversary and the same principle carries over to semantic caching layers.
Diffusion and flow models enable powerful generative modeling, but controlled editing remains challenging due to the need to balance source fidelity and edit compliance along the generative trajectory. We propose a principled, inversion-free framework for flow-based image editing from a trajectory centric perspective. Rather than relying on inversion or heuristic guidance, we introduce a one-step look-ahead mechanism that evaluates the effect of candidate updates on both edit and fidelity rewards estimated via denoising, and adjusts the current update based on this evaluation. At each step, our method applies reward-driven corrections guided by the look-ahead evaluation under an explicit fidelity constraint, resulting in stable and coherent trajectory evolution. This look-ahead design mitigates gradient interference between edit and fidelity objectives by anticipating their interaction in future states, leading to improved trade-offs. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves stronger semantic edits while better preserving source content compared to existing strong baselines.
Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences via Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has driven substantial improvements across a wide range of tasks, but the cost of acquiring preference labels remains the dominant bottleneck in the alignment pipeline. While many recent alignment methods improve sample efficiency through active exploration over candidate responses, they typically query the oracle uniformly across contexts, even for contexts where the learned reward estimates are already reliable enough to provide synthetic labels. We propose Adaptive Ensemble-disagreement Routing for Oracle feedback (AERO), a fully online RLHF algorithm built on a Dyna-style model-based RL architecture, in which an ensemble-based Epistemic Reward Model (ERM) serves both as a reward posterior for exploration and as a learned preference-feedback model for synthetic labeling. AERO uses ensemble vote entropy, a Query-by-Committee disagreement measure, combined with an adaptive thresholding mechanism to decide which contexts require oracle feedback and which can instead receive ERM-based synthetic preference labels, concentrating expensive labels where they are most informative. Empirical results across different model families and scales show that AERO achieves highly competitive alignment performance while reducing the required oracle-query budget compared to online DPO and strong active-exploration baselines.
Agent harnesses -- runtime scaffolds that wrap an LLM's reasoning loop with tool dispatch, verification, and persistent memory -- have become the standard substrate for deploying LLMs as autonomous agents, as demonstrated by Claude Code and Codex in software engineering. In trajectory planning, however, this paradigm has not taken hold: existing LLM-based trajectory planning methods either keep the LLM in the decision loop, exceeding the millisecond-level control budget, or offload it to offline rules or training-time supervision -- leaving the runtime planner non-evolving. Intermediate hybrids still lack the verification-and-consolidation loop that makes harnesses reliable. We ask: what runtime harness would let an LLM planner meet real-time constraints while self-evolving into a deployable one? We propose REINS, a harness built on three LLM-planner couplings: LLM outputs are (i) grounded to a learned variable-level dynamics model, (ii) verified via calibrated predicates and forward rollout, and (iii) consolidated into an indexed rule memory that serves future scenes in O(log n) without re-invoking the LLM. The harness closes a self-evolution loop: familiar scenes resolve by memory lookup; novel scenes invoke the LLM, whose verified outputs enrich the memory. Without modifying LLM weights, REINS attains 98%+ compliance, nearly 50% collision reduction, and 1.9-4.6 ms latency on simulated and real-world benchmarks at the tactical decision layer, with LLM invocation rate monotonically declining as memory matures. Code: https://github.com/ZhihongCui/REINS
Lane-level map updating requires temporally consistent, physically valid, and auditable road-scene semantics despite occlusions, ambiguous lane markings, temporary obstacles, and viewpoint changes. We present RoadState, a production-deployed vision-language system that transforms sequential road-scene observations into structured lane-level semantics for Baidu Maps' map-updating pipeline. Its core model, RoadState-VLM, formulates road-scene understanding as autoregressive state estimation, predicting the current structured road state from the previous observation and symbolic state together with the current observation. We introduce Geometric Chain-of-Thought (Geo-CoT), which uses a directed acyclic graph of semantic dependencies as a domain prior to improve semantic consistency and reasoning fidelity across interdependent road-state dimensions. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset show that RoadState-VLM achieves 94.33% mean accuracy across six road-state dimensions, outperforming the strongest fine-tuned VLM baseline. Ablation studies further demonstrate the complementary effectiveness of Geo-CoT and temporal transition context. A cascaded routing pipeline directs routine cases to lightweight models while reserving complex cases for RoadState-VLM. Since its deployment in March 2025, RoadState has supported lane-level map updating across more than 360 cities and reduced overall production costs by 30%. Together with human-in-the-loop auditing, the system maintains robust performance under stress-test conditions. These results demonstrate how domain-prior-enhanced reasoning, structured state interfaces, selective routing, and human quality control can bridge the gap between VLM-based road-scene understanding and large-scale lane-level map updating.
Handedness is a soft-biometric cue for forensic document examination and writer profiling, yet reported accuracies from offline handwriting rarely keep writers, texts and image acquisition apart, so models may recognise the writer or capture conditions rather than the writing hand. Such controlled evidence is missing for Bangla. Using our BanglaHand dataset of 42 writers (21 left- and 21 right-handed), who each wrote six shared prompts and two own texts under controlled collection and photography, we evaluate handedness identification with all images of each test writer held out, whole-writer permutation tests and photometric controls. An ink-gradient descriptor identified the handedness of unseen writers with 77.4% balanced accuracy (95% writer-bootstrap interval 67.7-86.5%; p=0.001) and frozen ImageNet embeddings with 69.5-72.0%. Part of this signal is stroke darkness: in a post hoc analysis, right-handed writers' strokes were darker at their centres for equal stroke width, consistent with higher pen pressure and not explained by lighting drift. With ink density and brightness regressed out, the descriptor still reached 64.5% (p=0.027), whereas writing-only shape features were weaker (60.8%; p=0.090). Handedness is thus identifiable from offline Bangla handwriting under controlled acquisition, and photometric controls are essential to interpret such cues.
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can generate procedures that look convincing on paper, but do they work in practice? In this paper, we propose crochet as an ideal testbed for physically grounded procedural reasoning in VLMs. Crochet cannot be reliably simulated or automated: the only way to know what a pattern produces is to make it by hand, yet verification is tangible and cheap, requiring nothing but a hook and a ball of yarn. We introduce FoundationChain, a deceptively simple test of procedural reasoning: given an image of a basic crochet object, can VLMs infer how it was made and generate a pattern that produces the same result? We crochet 40 patterns generated by four VLMs by hand. Even at this scale, physical execution not only reveals failures that automated proxies cannot detect, but also enables a more precise diagnosis of their causes and consequences: while models write fluent, convincing patterns, only four are free of errors, and our analysis exposes deficiencies in visual, geometric and procedural reasoning.
Stroke is a disorder of the circulation, yet the haemodynamic state that immediately precedes it has rarely been observed, because continuous physiological recordings before a stroke are seldom available. Photoplethysmography (PPG), recorded by every pulse oximeter and by hundreds of millions of wearable devices, captures the peripheral pulse beat by beat, but its morphology is largely discarded. Here we ask whether pulse waveform morphology encodes haemodynamic signatures of impending stroke. Using in-hospital stroke as a natural experiment that provides continuous PPG before physician-adjudicated stroke recognition, we studied intensive-care (MIMIC-III, $n=176$) and emergency-department (MC-MED, $n=154$) cohorts and described each beat with interpretable descriptors of pulse timing, amplitude, contour and variability. At a nominal 360-min horizon, morphology separated pre-recognition from stable windows with $F_1$ scores of 0.941 and 0.989 (sensitivity 0.998 and 0.980), with models transferred unchanged to the second cohort, and outperformed heart rate alone on identical windows. The signature was dominated by systolic crest time and its change from each patient's own baseline, feature attribution was concordant across cohorts (Spearman $\rho=0.865$), and morphology recorded in the first two hours of care stratified the subsequent clinical course ($F_1$ 0.714 and 0.691). In high-risk patients without stroke, 29% and 14% of windows were positive, but five-window persistence rules limited alerts to 17% and 2% of patients. The results demonstrate that the routinely recorded pulse thus carries haemodynamic imprint of the period preceding stroke, positioning pulse morphology as a candidate continuous cerebrovascular biomarker.
Large language models (LLMs) often do not produce calibrated uncertainty estimates for their answers. We propose CAELUM, a framework that builds semantic prediction sets while separating aleatoric from epistemic uncertainty. CAELUM samples answers using an ensemble of clarification prompts, clusters them by semantic equivalence, and estimates the aleatoric and epistemic components via kernel-based von Neumann entropy before calibrating nonconformity scores with split conformal prediction. We use a weight $w_\lambda(x)=1+U_{\mathrm{ale}}(x)+\lambda\,U_{\mathrm{epi}}(x)$ to control for the contribution of the epistemic uncertainty of each instance and fit a coefficient $\lambda^\star$ to minimize prediction set size. When the objective is nonflat and selection is stable across splits, $\lambda^\star$ could be a diagnostic, where large values may indicate epistemic dominance (retrieve, abstain) and $\lambda^\star\to 0$ aleatoric dominance (clarify). For individual queries, a log ratio $R(x)$ compares the weighted epistemic component with the aleatoric component. Theoretically, we demonstrate that the coverage is capped by matchability, the fraction of items whose reference answer appears in any sampled cluster. Empirically, this matchability can be predicted from the original question features using a lightweight classifier. We use those predictions to define a stratum and derive a conformal coverage bound within it. Across 30 LLM and dataset combinations (4-32B), mean coverage is 0.74 in the learned stratum versus 0.65 overall, averaged over the 78 evaluations using the learned classifier. Project page: https://unco3892.github.io/caelum/
A brain is in one state at a time, yet most of what decides its next state is absent from it: the patterns its world never produces, the statistics of a lifetime, a goal that lies ahead. In mechanics a wire acts on a bead only through a force that appears when the bead presses on it, and Lagrange computed such forces with one multiplier for each constraint. We propose that a brain follows the same mechanics. Everything a circuit knows, is told or wants is a constraint on its single state and acts through its own multiplier, which accumulates the violation and pushes the state back. Neurons and synapses carry the multipliers, each with its own time constant: inhibitory interneurons carry what never happens, adaptation the cost of staying in one state, synapses the statistics of experience, and feedback to apical dendrites the future. From this hypothesis follow Dale's law, the reciprocal wiring and balance of excitation and inhibition, the paradoxical responses of cortex and the frequencies of brain rhythms. Belief becomes the time one trajectory spends in each state, learning becomes sleep proposing laws and waking refuting the false ones, and planning becomes a wave from the goal meeting a wave from the present. Connectionism and symbolism are the limits of frozen and of instantaneous multipliers, and between them the time a circuit runs becomes the depth of its computation. A machine built on these principles, trained without gradients on 1000 solved puzzles, solves all 422,786 Sudoku-Extreme test puzzles with one trajectory each. It rediscovers the rules of Sudoku by sleeping and waking, plans shortest paths in mazes of 64 times the training area, and tracks permutations exactly on strings 25 times longer than in training, where Transformers fail. A mind, on this view, is life that learns its own constraints.
Multimodal large language models have made progress in general visual tasks. However, limitations remain in fine-grained visual tasks requiring evidence from minute image regions. Existing methods primarily train models using evidence-related regions while overlooking the influence of extensive background regions, resulting in a limited ability to resist interference from irrelevant regions. We propose selective positive-negative on-policy self-distillation (SPN-OPSD), which considers both evidence and background regions. Supervision from both views improves the model's ability to resist interference from irrelevant regions. Furthermore, selective token-level distillation provides more informative supervision, improving the model's ability to attend to evidence regions in Fine-Grained Visual Tasks. On Qwen3.5-2B, SPN-OPSD improves accuracy on V* Bench, ZoomBench, and MME-RealWorld-Lite from 76.44%, 45.92%, and 57.43% to 84.82%, 54.56%, and 59.56%, respectively. Similar gains are also observed on Qwen3.5-0.8B.
This work presents a one-class anomaly detection framework for vibration-based condition monitoring in machining processes using a convolutional neural network autoencoder. Three-axis vibration signals acquired during industrial broaching are transformed into time--frequency spectrograms and combined into a compact three-channel representation, enabling convolutional feature learning on multivariate time-series data. The autoencoder is trained exclusively on normal process data and detects anomalous strokes based on reconstruction errors. Labeled validation data are used for threshold calibration and an independent test set is reserved for final performance evaluation. To improve sensitivity to short-lived process instabilities such as chatter, a localized residual-based metric termed Segmented Vertical Error (SVE) is introduced. Experimental results on approximately 10{,}000 broaching strokes show a clear separation between normal and anomalous process conditions under strong class imbalance. The processing pipeline is additionally evaluated on an external public turning dataset as a proof of concept, indicating preliminary applicability beyond the original broaching setup. The results suggest that spectrogram-based autoencoder models can provide a practical and scalable basis for one-class anomaly detection in industrial vibration monitoring.
Under power-law signal decay across directions, an optimizer can fit strong directions and miss weak ones while average loss hides it. A precision wall measures the steepest decay where the weakest direction recovers within 5% in a fixed budget. On low-rank matrix sensing and quadratics one constant sets the wall: once it dominates the denominator, Adam or grafted Shampoo is momentum descent at step $\eta/c$, setting the wall; in Shampoo, matching grafting's constant to damping restores the wall after three hypotheses failed. In zeroth-order Adam, $\varepsilon$ acts against $\varepsilon^\ast$ from a mean-square spectral model; below $\varepsilon^\ast$ error hits a noise floor. Set from true curvature or spectrum on new shapes, the rule raised the wall above the same-step default by a forecast amount: on two sensing shapes by $1.96, 1.15$ (Adam) and $1.59, 1.74$ (grafted Shampoo), and on two Hadamard-rotated quadratics by $1.12, 0.73$ (zeroth-order Adam, longer budget), rising on all seeds; fixed-step momentum at that step reaches those walls. A cosine-scheduled default (small constant giving weak modes large steps) is higher on one sensing shape, matched on new seeds of the other, and lower with the rule's constant. A default step retuned per budget catches up on rotated quadratics and population logistic regression, fails at 1 query/step on two diagonal quadratics (catching up at 16), and exceeds the rule on digits logistic regression (full-batch and minibatches, where gradient noise sets the $\eta = 0.01, 0.1$ default walls). On logistic regression the rule did not raise the first-order wall: same-step default Adam was higher (its wall on 4 new shapes at the forecast stability limit), while in zeroth order on the population loss setting $\varepsilon$ raised the wall by $0.98, 0.88$.
Few-shot depth completion aims to recover dense metric depth from sparse measurements using only a small number of target-domain annotations, offering a favorable balance between annotation cost and model adaptation. We propose LIFT, a framework that harnesses both depth and feature priors from a frozen pretrained monocular depth estimation (MDE) foundation model for few-shot depth completion. Specifically, LIFT first estimates local scale and shift parameters on a coarse grid and interpolates them into smooth, dense parameter fields, providing a spatially adaptive metric depth initialization. It then progressively refines this initialization through multi-scale depth propagation guided by foundation features. Finally, a lightweight residual decoder combines multi-level foundation features with propagation correction to refine the metric depth. Extensive experiments on NYUv2 and KITTI-DC demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art few-shot performance. The source code will soon be released.
This paper describes the set-up of a segmentation competition for automatic and semi-automatic extraction of the liver from computed tomography scans and the caudate nucleus from brain MRI data. This competition was held in the form of a workshop at the 2007 Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention conference. The rationale for organizing the competition is discussed, the training and test data sets for both segmentation tasks are described and the scoring system used to evaluate the segmentation is presented.
Security fixes usually reach users as compiled updates, but deployment delays leave unpatched systems exposed. During this window, comparing patched and unpatched binaries can reveal how to exploit a vulnerability, turning a defensive update into actionable information for attackers. Existing benchmarks do not measure this capability: they expose source code, rely on human-crafted challenges, or evaluate binary comprehension without requiring exploitation. We introduce CyberBinGym, a benchmark containing 100 tasks derived from real vulnerabilities in 53 widely used projects, spanning six vulnerability families and three levels of analysis complexity. Agents receive stripped vulnerable and patched binaries without source code or vulnerability information, and must combine static and dynamic analysis to recover and exploit the vulnerability. Evaluation separately measures vulnerability recovery through differential crash testing and end-to-end exploitation through flag retrieval, with trajectory audits to reject reward hacking. The strongest evaluated agent recovers the target vulnerability in 88% of tasks and exploits it in 20%. Providing the patched binary raises its exploit rate from 10% to 25% on a matched 20-task subset; with standard binary hardening enabled, it still exploits two of its 20 previously successful tasks. These results demonstrate that current agents can turn released binary patches into working exploits in a controlled setting, although exploitation remains unreliable. These capabilities lower the barriers to targeting unpatched software and compress defenders' effective response window, increasing the urgency of timely patch deployment.