Modern dehazing networks are often computationally expensive and overfit to synthetic haze, limiting real-time deployment. This underscores an urgent demand for efficient, high-fidelity restoration methods that can operate on resource-constrained edge devices in practical, dynamic environments. We introduce PhysDNet, a lightweight multimodal architecture that fuses NIR imagery with sparse LiDAR depth and is trained with a physics-constrained dual-head objective. Differentiating through a fixed Koschmieder inversion induces density-adaptive gradient amplification, acting as an implicit resource allocation mechanism that concentrates learning on heavily degraded regions without increasing inference cost. PhysDNet delivers superior restoration with minimal capacity and enhanced training efficiency, facilitating real-time deployment on edge devices without increasing inference overhead. On the Seeing Through Fog benchmark, PhysDNet outperforms competitors by 1.67 dB at 5.2 times lower compute while recovering 54.9% of fog-induced detection loss. Ablations and cross-domain evaluations show that physics-guided training improves generalization, including under non-homogeneous haze that violates the Koschmieder assumption. PhysDNet further demonstrates compatibility with fixed-function NPUs, running at 29/45/99 FPS at <4 W across L/M/S variants. Code, deployment scripts and pre-trained checkpoints are available at https://github.com/Heatdh/PhysDnet.
We propose SAMBoost (Spatially Aware Mesh Boosting), a gradient boosting method that combines tree-based covariate modelling with a stochastic partial differential equation (SPDE) latent spatial field through a single penalised objective. At each boosting iteration, the predictor is decomposed into separate covariate and spatial components. The method is motivated by applications in which the spatial effect is not a nuisance to be removed but a quantity of interest that must be recovered alongside the covariates. In insurance, for example, practitioners need both flexible nonlinear covariate effects and an interpretable geographic risk surface that can be reported on its own. Existing approaches often involve trade-offs, offering flexible covariate modelling but no explicit spatial field, rigorous spatial inference with a fixed additive covariate structure, or a combination of both at computational costs that limit practicality for large datasets. SAMBoost addresses these goals within the boosting loop, and the underlying mesh produces a sparse precision structure whose cost is largely independent of sample size. On simulations and on an open benchmark, SAMBoost matches or improves on the predictive accuracy of joint Gaussian process and tree boosting approaches. It is also faster and recovers the spatial field and covariate effects more accurately. When covariate effects include interactions, it outperforms additive Bayesian spatial models. Applied to a flood insurance portfolio with 4.9 million records, SAMBoost trains on the full training set without subsampling and runs about sixteen times faster than a Bayesian reference, with a consistent spatial risk surface. A public Python implementation is available.
Transparent-interface reconstruction must recover glass surfaces even when most observed color comes from the scene behind them. We present ClearForm, a shared-planar-Gaussian method for jointly reconstructing transparent interfaces and the appearance seen through them. We identify and analyze the Geometry-Appearance Compositing Dilemma (GACD): when the same transparency-dependent alpha controls both color and geometry, revealing the background can weaken a transparent surface's contribution to geometric reconstruction. We derive its effect on plane-based depth estimation, identify a mechanism that can weaken geometric learning, and quantify the loss of interface support through controlled comparisons. To address this conflict, we develop geometry-preserving dual-opacity surface reconstruction. Shared planar Gaussians retain interface contributions in geometry compositing while modeling transmission and sparse reflection in RGB, supported by transparency-aware geometric constraints. To manage the different primitive-visibility requirements of these compositors, we introduce Dual-Evidence Lifecycle (DEL), which retains Gaussians supported by multi-view geometry or RGB reconstruction evidence. On 3D-FRONT-T, ClearForm achieves 27.05 mm Chamfer distance (CD) and 0.928 F1, compared with 59.18 mm CD for our PGSR reproduction and the reported 34 mm CD and 0.836 F1 for GLINT. On TransLab, it achieves 1.65 mm CD, 0.963 F1, and 40.14 dB PSNR. In matched ablations, dual-opacity compositing reduces CD from 59.25 to 27.09 mm, while DEL improves PSNR by 2.06 dB. Our project page is available at https://hajeongx.github.io/clearform/.
Masked diffusion language models generate text by iteratively unmasking positions, with practical samplers often selecting reveal positions from the model's own logits. The reveal order is therefore an endogenous latent variable of the rollout process with an enormous discrete latent space. Policy optimization objectives relying on pre-defined schedules or sampled trajectories introduce either bias or high variance. In this paper, we propose FEROM, Frontier Endogenous Reveal-Order Marginal Policy Optimization, which approximates policy gradients for the rollout-induced marginal response policy of masked diffusion LMs. FEROM derives a Rao-Blackwellized policy-gradient identity over latent reveal orders and expresses the resulting estimator as posterior edge occupancy on a reveal-state DAG. To make marginalization practical, we introduce Frontier Reveal Marginalization, a budgeted estimator that approximates this marginal edge structure by combining CDF-based computation of local probabilities of the endogenous reveal process with frontier expansion of high-mass partial states. Integrated into a GRPO-style objective, FEROM replaces single-path log-scores with a detached token-score surrogate over posterior-relevant reveal edges. Experiments on math and coding tasks show comparable or improved results over existing methods under matched scoring-state budgets. An offline proxy study further shows improved marginal-gradient approximation with increased scoring budgets.
Directing a robot to locate a target object in unseen environments remains a central challenge in embodied AI. Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based methods provide rich semantic reasoning but often produce uncalibrated and overconfident action decisions. We introduce CPNav, a navigation framework that combines collision-aware planning with statistically calibrated VLM action scoring for map-free object-goal navigation. From RGB-D input, CPNav constructs a navigability map, generates collision-free motion primitives, and queries two VLMs for goal detection and action scoring. The resulting scores are calibrated offline via conformal prediction (CP) using oracle actions obtained through a tree-structured exploration procedure with backtracking, providing finite-sample guarantees at a user-specified risk level. The CP layer is model-agnostic and can wrap any VLM policy. Online, calibrated VLM scores guide action selection, while a tree-structured exploration history records alternative actions and allows backtracking. We evaluate CPNav in both simulation and real-world hardware settings. In AI Habitat simulation, compared with the uncalibrated baseline method, CPNav achieves relative SR and SPL improvements of 6.2% and 11.4% on HM3D v0.2, and 12.4% and 8.8% on MP3D, respectively. In real-world deployment on a modified Hiwonder MentorPi robot, the corresponding improvements in SR and SPL are 24.9% and 15.2%, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/practice-lab-ucla/CPnav.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are an important tool for fMRI prediction, where empirical functional connectivity matrices serve both as features and for graph construction. However, recent studies and our own experiments show that these methods often fail to outperform simpler graph-agnostic baselines. We propose a statistical explanation for this failure by formulating connectome prediction as an errors-in-variables (EIV) problem: the true connectome is latent, while the observed covariance matrix is a noisy finite-time-series estimate. In a linear asymptotic setting, we decompose the effect of graph convolution into three mechanisms: smoothing-induced bias and variance reduction, graph estimation error, and a double-dipping effect arising when the same noisy matrix determines both graph and features. Under a latent community model adapted to neuroscience, we identify a narrow favorable regime, set by the brain community structure, the predictive signal, the graph construction and the recording length, in which message passing can improve prediction. Simulations validate this decomposition, while real-data experiments illustrate that connectome GNN pipelines often fall outside this regime. Our results provide a first step towards explaining when graph convolutions can help brain connectome prediction, and why they often do not.
Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) seeks collision-free paths for multiple agents from their respective starting locations to their respective goal locations while minimizing path costs. Although many MAPF algorithms were developed, most of them rely on a common assumption on synchronized actions, where the actions of all agents start at the same time and always take a time unit. This assumption may limit the use of MAPF planners in practice. To get rid of this assumption, recently, an algorithm called Loosely Synchronized Rule-based Planning (LSRP) was proposed, which can find sub-optimal solutions for many agents. However, LSRP often finds poor quality solutions due to its unbounded sub-optimality. This paper develops a new anytime planner called LSRP* that can keep improving solution quality after the initial solution is obtained until the runtime budget depletes. We analyze the properties of LSRP* and test it against several baselines with up to 1000 agents on various maps. LSRP* can handle up to 25% more agents than LSRP and can reduce up to 40% of the solution cost found by LSRP.
Modern machine learning is increasingly evaluated using criteria such as multicalibration, CVaR, and Cressie-Read DRO, which target subgroup reliability, tail risk, and distributional robustness rather than averages of fixed per-example losses. Existing information-theoretic generalization bounds for pointwise losses do not directly apply, because these empirical criteria depend on the entire batch and involve a post-hoc auxiliary optimization over witnesses, thresholds, or reweightings. We formalize this structure as set-input optimization-valued objectives. In the balanced supersample setting, we bound the expected optimized validation-training gap in terms of an objective-dependent sub-Gaussian parameter and the square root of the prediction-based conditional mutual information (fCMI) between the learned supersample prediction table and the selector vector. Combining this with fixed-predictor population-validation comparisons yields unified algorithm-dependent generalization bounds. We verify sub-Gaussianity of the selector gap using stability and convex L2-Lipschitz certificates, obtaining concrete bounds for multicalibration, CVaR, and Cressie-Read DRO, with a stability-based single-index refinement.
Accurate indoor localization on resource-constrained edge devices remains challenging due to the tension between modeling fidelity and computational efficiency. Wi-Fi Channel State Information (CSI) enables low-cost deployment using existing Wi-Fi infrastructure but is heavily distorted by multipath propagation. Transformer-based solutions mitigate these effects but their quadratic complexity limits real-time edge deployment. Ultra-Wideband (UWB) provides geometrically precise ranging yet requires dedicated infrastructure. We present MambaLoc, a cross-modal distillation framework that improves the accuracy-efficiency balance in CSI-based localization. MambaLoc uses a linear-time Selective State Space Model (Mamba) as a lightweight CSI student, guided during training by a UWB-Transformer teacher. A Feature Alignment Module bridges the representational gap between heterogeneous RF modalities, allowing the CSI model to inherit UWB-derived geometric structure without UWB hardware at inference. A probabilistic Gaussian Mixture regression head models multi-modal spatial ambiguity from multipath effects, avoiding the physically implausible averaging of deterministic regression. Evaluations on a real-world dataset show MambaLoc achieves a median localization error of 0.230 m, reducing error by 22.2% over a standalone Mamba baseline, while requiring 65.1% fewer FLOPs and 58% lower inference latency than Transformer-based approaches.
Effective sensory reception is critical for survival, yet the computational mechanisms behind how peripheral sensory neurons (SNs) transduce external signals into spiking representations for downstream brain circuits remain to be fully understood. Numerous theoretical frameworks have been proposed to model sensory processing, with Bayesian approaches among the most prominent. However, existing machine learning attempts to apply Bayesian theory to spiking neurons remain largely phenomenological, disconnected from empirical biology, and poorly validated on non-stationary temporal data. Conversely, neuroscientific models often rely on strong inductive experimental biases or explicit kinetic dynamics fit post hoc to match spiking data. Here, we introduce a class of recurrent Poisson VAE models, termed Spiking Sensory Networks (SSNs), that bridge these paradigms by reconciling variational inference with biologically inspired spike transduction for time-varying stimuli. Evaluated on real-world odor plume recordings from locust olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs), SSNs match or exceed the reconstruction fidelity of Spiking Neural Network (SNN) and GLM baselines while exhibiting superior representational characteristics. Furthermore, SSNs are well-suited for neuroscientific investigation, learning empirical in vivo ORN response motifs and exhibiting emergent spike-frequency adaptation under unsupervised reconstruction without manual tuning. Moreover, we theoretically link the recurrent decoding objective to mutual information maximization, and derive a formal thermodynamic lower bound connecting the Poisson Kullback-Leibler regularizer to the excess non-equilibrium metabolic power of biophysical homeostasis. Ultimately, our work synthesizes principles from machine learning theory and empirical neuroscience, providing a viable bridge that concretizes Bayesian models with biological mechanisms.
A generative recommender names each candidate with a short token sequence, a Semantic ID, and recommends by generating those tokens. Some generative recommenders, including the Uber Eats search engine we are building, write a whole results page, stores with their menu items, in one decoding pass. Every Semantic ID on such a page must name a real store or item that is eligible for the search, such as a store that delivers to the user's location, and that is not already on the page. Each item must also belong to the store above it. A trie over the catalog keeps identifiers real, but eligibility and repetition change with every request and token, and the grammar-constrained decoder we tried could not enforce these changing rules exactly and quickly. We call this constraint LEGIT, for live eligibility gating over identifier tries. Numbering trie leaves depth first turns each rule into a range lookup over one store trie and one item trie, and every generated page passes an independent catalog check. On one NVIDIA B200 GPU with one or two requests per decode step, a direct implementation that walks the trie on the GPU makes each token about 5 times as slow as unconstrained decoding. Across 36 implementations, hardware counters and ablations are consistent with kernel launches and CPU-GPU waits as the source of this slowdown. Our fastest implementation walks the trie on the CPU while the GPU runs the model, needs no custom kernel, and cuts time per output token by 65.9 percent against the direct GPU implementation, to about 1.7 times the unconstrained cost. This implementation is also the fastest on a page layout that puts each item before its store.
Domain adaptive point cloud completion (DA PCC) aims to bridge the geometric discrepancy between labeled source domains and unlabeled target domains for accurate 3D shape completion. Existing methods based on CNNs, Transformers, and Mamba-like sequence models still face challenges from limited receptive fields, high computational complexity, insufficient geometric bias, and serialization sensitivity. Recently, Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV) provides a linear-complexity alternative for long-range sequence modeling. However, adapting RWKV to DA PCC remains challenging due to the lack of explicit geometric priors, the mismatch between recurrent modeling and coarse-to-fine generation, and unstable target-domain adaptation. To address these challenges, we propose DAPointRWKV, a novel RWKV-based framework for DA PCC. DAPointRWKV consists of three components: Geometry-Aware RWKV (GA-RWKV) Backbone, RWKV-Oriented Progressive Decoder (RWKV-PD), and Dual Structural Regularization (DSR). Specifically, GA-RWKV introduces geometry-aware recurrent representation learning, RWKV-PD bridges RWKV token representations with coarse-to-fine reconstruction through local token-guided refinement, and DSR stabilizes target-domain transfer through visible-structure anchoring and complete-shape hypothesis stabilization. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that DAPointRWKV consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Many practical anomaly detection problems come with only a handful of confirmed anomalies, and the unreviewed remainder of the data cannot be trusted to be normal. We study this setting under a curated-label protocol, in which unconfirmed anomalies are removed from training rather than relabelled as normal, and propose TripletAD, a weakly supervised detector that learns a triplet-margin embedding and calibrates a linear scoring head with two soft penalties: a partial cross-entropy on labelled anomalies and a relative-contrast hinge that separates the mean scores of anomalous and normal samples. Because every mined triplet contains a labelled anomaly, the few labels are reused across the entire training set instead of being diluted by it. On 24 ADBench datasets whose inputs are pre-trained embeddings (text, image and speech vectors), TripletAD outperforms established state-of-the-art weakly supervised detectors (DevNet, PReNet and DeepSAD) and gradient-boosted trees when anomalies are rare. At a 1% anomaly rate it has the highest mean AUCPR of six methods, 20% above DevNet; on the naturally rare Speech dataset it doubles the best baseline (0.394 vs. 0.196 AUCPR); and on MVTec-AD it is best when only a quarter or half of the anomalies are labelled. Pooled over 70 rare- or sparse-label settings, it has the best average rank (2.21 of 6) and outperforms each baseline under Wilcoxon signed-rank tests with Holm correction. When anomalies are more frequent it performs on par with these methods. The method needs no per-dataset tuning and is insensitive to its loss weights and training length; on raw tabular features, gradient-boosted trees remain the stronger choice.
Recommender systems are transitioning from static retrieval engines into interactive assistants grounded in physical environments. However, current studies largely neglect the combined complexities of spatial navigation, visual grounding, and multi-turn social interaction. To bridge this gap, we introduce SituRecBench, an interactive benchmark for evaluating frontier vision-language models (VLMs) as situated recommendation assistants within high-fidelity 3D environments. We reformulate recommendation as a situated assistance process in which an assistant interacts with a user while sharing the user's egocentric view. Our benchmark simulates real-world shopping environments (e.g., supermarkets and home furnishings stores), requiring assistants to elicit preferences, ground recommendations in the environment, and guide the user to relevant locations through dialogue. The benchmark evaluates dialogue quality, recommendation utility, and navigation effectiveness through a unified interactive protocol. Extensive experiments reveal persistent challenges in spatial grounding and preference elicitation, highlighting limitations in their ability to integrate global contextual information with local observations. SituRecBench provides a rigorous foundation for advancing the development of situated assistants in the real world.
Multimodal fusion requires not only exchanging information across modalities but also determining which representations should participate in the interaction and how complementary cross-modal views should be combined. We introduce Guided Co-Attention with Adaptive Gating, a fusion framework that integrates token-wise guidance, bidirectional cross-attention, and sample-specific fusion. The proposed method constructs two directional representations: an image-conditioned text representation, obtained by allowing textual tokens to query visual features, and a text-conditioned image representation formed in the reverse direction. Token-wise guidance modulates the representations before cross-attention, while an adaptive gate learns the relative contribution of the two resulting directional representations for each sample. We evaluate the approach using paired chest radiographs and radiology reports as an image-text test bed for binary (normal vs. abnormal) classification. The two cross-attention directions exhibit distinct performance characteristics, demonstrating that reversing the query and source modalities does not produce interchangeable representations. Ablation experiments further show that bidirectional interaction, adaptive gating, and token guidance provide complementary benefits. The proposed model achieves 96.05% accuracy, 96.10% F1-score, 98.37% AUC, 95.60% Sens@95Spec, and 96.51% Spec@95Sens, yielding the highest mean performance across all evaluated metrics. These findings support explicitly modeling interaction direction, token relevance, and sample-dependent integration when constructing multimodal representations.
Pose awareness characterizes the extent to which a learned feature space aligns with the underlying object-pose manifold, such that observations with similar poses exhibit greater feature similarity than those with increasingly different poses. While such structure is desirable for pose-sensitive 3D vision tasks, visual foundation models pre-trained on individual 2D images typically lack explicit 3D or pose supervision. This raises a fundamental question: Do 2D visual foundation models exhibit pose awareness after large-scale pretraining? To answer this question, we introduce PoseBench, a systematic benchmark to probe pose awareness in pretrained visual features. Our evaluation follows a progressive design: held-out rendered views probe intrinsic pose-aware structure under controlled conditions, while real-image queries evaluate how robustly this structure remains accessible under real-world variations. We further introduce pose-graph-based refinement as a complementary probe of compatibility between feature neighborhoods and the underlying pose manifold. Across 31 publicly available checkpoints from 10 pretraining families, PoseBench reveals that pose awareness is an implicit but non-uniform property of 2D visual foundation models, and consistent gains from pose-graph refinement suggest that feature spaces retain structure compatible with the underlying pose manifold. PoseBench therefore provides a systematic basis for understanding and selecting pretrained features for pose-sensitive 3D vision tasks.
We study the dynamic pricing problem, where a firm sells a product to $T$ myopic customers and their values are independent samples from an unknown value distribution $F$. With posted prices, the firm only sees whether each customer buys, and the minimax regret is $\widetilde \Theta(T^{2/3})$ [KL03]. A menu instead offers several options, each selling the product with some probability at some expected payment. Infinitely many menu options allow the seller to fully reveal customer values, reducing the regret to $\Theta(\sqrt T)$. How many options are needed? Perhaps surprisingly, a second menu option suffices, achieving the same regret as infinite menus (up to $\log$ factors). This holds broadly: without knowing any property of $F$, our algorithm with two menu options attains $\tilde O(\sqrt T)$ regret in general, $\tilde O(T^{1/3})$ regret for monotone-hazard-rate distributions, and $\tilde O(T^{d/(d+1)})$ instance-dependent regret when $d\in(0,1)$ is a suitable notion of "dimension". All are optimal even with infinite menus. Moreover, we argue, via a novel lower-bound construction, that our algorithm is near-optimal for each problem instance. Along the way, we study the query complexity of revenue maximization, where an algorithm issues a query to each customer to learn the property of interest (either the best price or the CDF) up to some precision. We show that interval queries suffice to achieve the same query complexity as value queries (up to $\log$ factors) for both properties and across several classes of value distributions. We provide a new interval-query algorithm for each property. The best-price-estimation algorithm is the key ingredient in our main dynamic pricing algorithm, and the CDF-estimation algorithm underpins a simpler algorithm attaining $\tilde O(\sqrt T)$ regret with three menu options.
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show strong visual perception capabilities, but existing evaluations largely focus on single-view or multi-view settings with shared camera parameters, leaving the challenge of multi-agent collaborative scenarios underexplored. In such settings, multiple agents observe a shared environment from independent viewpoints, and reliable decisions require reasoning across these independent observations of the same environment. To study this problem, we introduce MaRiO, a benchmark for evaluating multi-agent collaborative reasoning, and evaluate 23 state-of-the-art MLLMs on it. Our analysis reveals three key findings: (1) tasks governed by static perception are generally easier than tasks that require transformational event sequences; (2) most models struggle to resolve cross-agent correspondences, with errors increasing with scene complexity; and (3) models show limited ability to leverage geometric cues present in the scene. As an initial step toward addressing these challenges, we explore geometry-guided synthetic view augmentation that generates intermediate transition frames between agent observations, providing auxiliary spatial context that improves performance in certain categories. Overall, our results highlight that multi-agent collaborative reasoning remains an open challenge and an important direction for multimodal embodied systems. The code is available on the project page: https://omarftt.github.io/MaRiO-page/.
Enterprise platforms have received increasing attention as a core component of social networks and the Web. However, existing work mostly relies on fragmented logs of small units of work, like emails and chats, and focuses on who connects with whom without sufficient account of collaboration content and dynamics. This work systematically explores tracking collaborations across sequences of meetings as a new approach to interpreting their long-horizon dynamics. Linking 45,426 meetings in a large multinational technology company based on full transcripts and 1.6 million extracted agenda items, we establish a cross-meeting collaboration network of 6,065 collaborations. The network recovers the natural shapes of workplace collaborations: meetings, as snapshots of ongoing collaboration, link into largely tree-shaped structures, while the work content forms nested directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). Further, we explore how these networks evolve over time, examining three established perspectives: task division, team composition, and temporal continuity. Each explains part of the dynamics but does not capture the distinctness of long-horizon workplace collaboration: e.g., work flows in a consistent direction between a few pairs of subjects, yet a collaboration's subject explains little of how its meetings are conducted. Instead, accumulating the agenda, interaction, and language of meetings along each tree yields a signature of the collaboration, a distinctive profile that picks out the collaboration of a held-out meeting at 4.5 times chance. The signature models collaboration better than team or task views, individually or combined, in next-meeting prediction and tree-level fitting. We discuss the implications of these cross-meeting dynamics for designing office applications and support tools, and call for next-generation Web systems that represent collaborations over their long horizon.
Feature caching accelerates Diffusion Transformers by reusing intermediate computations across denoising timesteps, yet existing methods share a fundamental blind spot: they treat the standard reference denoising trajectory as the optimisation target, approximating its per-step states and thus inheriting its output as an implicit quality ceiling. We argue that this target is arbitrary -- what truly matters is the ideal result, not the intermediate path taken to reach it. We propose IdealCache, a training-free framework that abandons step-wise imitation of the reference trajectory. Instead, it anchors caching on a per-input ensemble of ideal trajectories constructed from candidate target results, aggregates their geometry into a single graph, and discovers optimal non-uniform schedules via a constrained shortest path on this graph. By decoupling from the reference process, IdealCache breaks the performance bottleneck of trajectory-approximation; our schedules can attain near-lossless fidelity in generation and even surpass on task-specific metrics (e.g., maintaining higher semantic consistency in image editing). Without retraining, IdealCache achieves 6.35x speedup on Qwen-Image, 5.84x on Qwen-Image-Edit, and 4.32x on HunyuanVideo, with competitive or superior quality across tasks.