In situ adjoint training extracts parameter gradients directly from measurement, but has so far been limited to reciprocal or restricted systems. We introduce the physical counterpart of the policy gradient theorem: a stochastic-adjoint gradient estimator that lifts these constraints by trading reciprocity for nondegenerate diffusion. As validation, we train a nonlinear resonator network, whose own dynamics supply the policy, against antagonistic temporal modulations with gradients from measured stochastic trajectories alone, without finite differences or a separate adjoint experiment.
UAV image collections contain spatially and temporally related frames, yet semantic-segmentation benchmarks commonly split them at image level. Such splitting can place samples from one acquisition in both model development and testing, obscuring transfer to a genuinely new survey. Using the 734-sample WeedyRice-RGBMS-DB, we fix a 124-image target-acquisition test set and compare two protocols with identical train, validation, and test counts: target-held-out, which excludes the target acquisition from development, and target-exposed, which admits its remaining images. SegFormer-B0 is evaluated with RGB, four-band multispectral (MS), and seven-channel RGB+MS input over two fixed-split seeds. RGB is strongest under complete acquisition holdout ($0.7317\pm0.0201$ IoU), whereas RGB+MS becomes strongest after target exposure ($0.7822\pm0.0269$). A fixed-split U-Net/ResNet18 replication confirms positive exposure gains for all three inputs, but retains RGB as the best modality under both protocols. Acquisition exposure therefore increases measured performance across both evaluated backbones, while its effect on modality ranking is architecture-dependent. A supplied-split audit reveals strong near-sequential dependence, and corruption tests show that early fusion is substantially more sensitive to RGB--MS displacement than to moderate radiometric scaling. These results support acquisition-aware same-test evaluation as a necessary complement to ordinary image-level splitting in multimodal UAV benchmarks. The code and supporting the findings of this study will be publicly released upon acceptance of the paper.
Catheterisation image processing requires segmentation models that are fast, accurate and explainable. While most of the existing studies usually focus on binary segmentation, there is a recent demand for simultaneous segmentation of multiple structures found in catheterization scenes. In this study, a dual-part MLBNet architecture is designed with multi-lateral encoder blocks and multi-head decoder branches for class-aware segmentation in cardiovascular catheterization scenes. Lateral branches in the encoder enable repeated feature extraction to learn diverse shared representations, while multiple decoder heads are used to introduce class-skewed branches that specialize in different structural properties in catheterization scenes. To analyze the performances of the dual-part MLBNet architecture, several multi-class segmentation angiogram data obtained during cardiovascular catheterization in phantom models, synthetic human-simulated aorta, and animal model are used for model training and evaluation. Results obtained showed the dual-part models could effectively separate guidewire, catheter, vessels and background pixels to their classes of memberships with high probability. The results demonstrate that all models were able to distinguish the dominant background class from foreground structures with high overall accuracy.
Temporal integration gives continuous-time recurrent networks memory, but in deep stacks it also delays bottom-up signals and attenuates top-down errors. We compensate for this delay by making each layer's bottom-up input prospective, and we develop Recursive Quadrature Filters (RQFs), biologically motivated temporal band-pass filters that are a special case of diagonal state-space models (SSMs). Starting from an energy model, we derive the RQF dynamics and show that each RQF is a band-pass filter whose learnable parameters control its tuning frequency and bandwidth. We then make each layer's bottom-up input prospective using a parameter-free two-tap update that leaves the recurrent transition and parallel scan unchanged. We extend this correction to general diagonal SSMs and show that it mitigates depth-dependent gradient attenuation when temporal gradients are truncated, i.e., spatial-only backpropagation. We evaluate the performance of RQFs, S5, and ORGaNICs (a nonlinear gated RNN with built-in attentional modulation and recurrent normalization) trained using full backpropagation through time (BPTT) and spatial-only backpropagation. Under full BPTT, the prospective variants of these models match or outperform their non-prospective controls in every configuration. A non-residual width-32 six-layer RQF achieves 96.09% accuracy on raw-audio Speech Commands with 31.9k parameters; a width-64 six-layer RQF achieves 83.36% on the 16,384-step Path-X task. We also introduce selective RQFs (sRQFs), which make each filter's input gain and, optionally, its bandwidth and tuning frequency input-dependent while retaining the parallel scan. With the input gain alone, the same six-layer model achieves 86.31% on Path-X; with all three input-dependent, a four-layer prospective sRQF solves Selective Copying (99.83%).
Deformable linear objects such as wires and cables are difficult to segment because they are thin, highly deformable, and frequently self-occluded, while large-scale instance-level annotations are expensive to obtain in real scenes. Existing resources either focus on cable tracing or semantic segmentation under constrained settings, or generate visually plausible images without physically grounded wire deformation. We present WireSeg-32k, a synthetic dataset for wire instance segmentation with 32,000 RGB images, instance masks, depth maps, and a complementary real-world test set with annotations. To generate this dataset, we develop DeformX, a co-simulation pipeline that couples Cosserat-rod dynamics with photorealistic Isaac Sim rendering, enabling physically plausible, contact-consistent wire shapes, CAD-based wire assets, and diverse visually grounded scenes. As a simple baseline, LoRA fine-tuning SAM3 on WireSeg-32k alone improves real-world mAP@75 by 10.2% over the off-the-shelf model, showing that physically grounded synthetic data can transfer to real wire perception.
A core obstacle to alignment evaluation is evaluation awareness: capable models can tell when they are being tested rather than deployed, weakening the conclusions a safety evaluation can support. We present two techniques that make simulated alignment evaluations harder to distinguish from real deployments. Our first technique, critique refinement, spends additional inference-time compute on each simulator action: the simulator generates multiple candidate actions, refines them using feedback from an instance of the target model on how to make them more realistic, and continues the evaluation with the most deployment-like candidate. Our second technique, DISH (Deployment-Imitating SWE-Agent Harness), wraps the target in an agent harness, reducing the gap between simulated and real deployment environments in coding settings. We test the techniques on multiple target models and find that applying both yields larger realism gains than either alone. We show that automated approaches can improve the realism of alignment evaluations, and that they compare favorably to spending the extra compute on more audit attempts.
Molecular line lists disagree at a level that measurably shifts retrieved C/O, so retrievals conditioned on a single list omit a dominant systematic from their error bars. Classical marginalization re-runs a full retrieval under K opacity realizations per object. We move that cost into simulation: while generating the training set we randomize opacities (smooth multiplicative Fourier fields in log(nu) plus a discrete line-list mixture, under a deliberately broad prior informed by measured inter-list differences), so a neural posterior estimator learns an already-marginalized posterior. On perturbed held-out spectra (n=2048) a standard NPE covers nominal 90% C/O intervals 43.3% of the time against 82.4% for a compute-matched marginalized network; three-seed control ensembles reach 93.2% on clean data but 61.4% under perturbation, against 89.4% marginalized, isolating the deficit as opacity-induced (TARP joint expected-coverage deviation 0.005 against 0.035 for a single control network). An axis ablation traces the gain to the continuous field (45.4% for the discrete swaps alone, 79.3% for the field alone). In simulation, real JWST bad-pixel masks with median filling cut the marginalized ensemble's C/O coverage from 0.894 to 0.683; an ensemble retrained with mask augmentation holds 0.918 under the full deployment preprocessing (n=1024). We apply the networks to one pipeline-combined JWST/NIRSpec G395H spectrum each of 14 late-T and Y dwarfs. The recommended mask-augmented ensemble returns C/O medians between 0.24 and 0.62 and contains the Hood et al. (2024) value of 0.53 for the T8 benchmark 2MASS J0415-0935, which every fixed-opacity control network excludes. With 90% intervals spanning about 0.43 of the prior width, this is a consistency check, not a validation.
Robots that act on everyday language requests need maps that record what each object is and where it is. Existing open-vocabulary 3D mapping systems usually require a depth sensor and commit to each object the first time they see it, when the evidence is weakest. We present VOIM, a training-free system that builds open-vocabulary 3D instance maps from RGB-D or from monocular RGB video alone. VOIM accumulates soft label evidence from frozen, off-the-shelf perception models in every voxel across views, and decides labels and object instances only after that evidence has built up. On ScanNet++, VOIM achieves the highest present-class mIoU among the compared methods, 10 points above the strongest baseline. From monocular video alone, VOIM also exceeds HOV-SG and ConceptGraphs run with depth and ground-truth poses. We also conduct real-robot navigation experiments on a quadruped to show that VOIM maps are usable in the real world.
Local learning methods offer an alternative to end-to-end backpropagation, but their unstructured local objectives can produce weak feature learning in deep networks. We study whether the order of hidden-state optimization can address this limitation. We propose a boundary-first inference schedule that partitions a model into chunks, first coordinates hidden states at chunk boundaries, and then refines representations within each chunk. We instantiate this schedule in predictive coding networks (PCNs), a local-learning framework in which hidden activities and prediction errors are explicitly exposed during inference. On CIFAR-10, the resulting boundary-first predictive-coding instantiation improves accuracy over standard predictive coding by $9.77\%$ under a standard parametrization and by $5.51\%$ under a $\mu$-parametrization. Diagnostic analyses further show more non-trivial early-layer updates, lower initial-to-final CKA, and more diverse layerwise gradients, consistent with stronger feature learning. These results support boundary-first, chunk-based inference as a practical design principle for predictive-coding training and motivate its study in broader local-learning systems.
End-to-end weather forecasting systems produce skillful global gridded and station forecasts directly from raw Earth observations, replacing the numerical weather prediction pipeline, including data assimilation, at a fraction of its cost. These systems are deterministic and issue no uncertainty. Here we render the Aardvark Weather model probabilistic by attaching one stochastic mechanism to each component: learned, input-dependent noise at the observation encoder, aimed at the uncertainty inherited from the observing system, and Monte Carlo dropout in the processor, aimed at the uncertainty of the learned dynamics. The resulting nested ensemble attributes forecast spread to the two sources through a law-of-total-variance decomposition, cross-checked by withholding observation streams. Probabilistic finetuning significantly improves the mean forecast, by 11% on average across variables and lead times. The ensemble is close to calibrated against ERA5 through the medium range, is at least as accurate as the deterministic model at weather stations while beating it in relative economic value at every lead time, and remains considerably behind the operational ECMWF IFS ensemble. The encoder branch behaves as observation-driven uncertainty. Component-attributed uncertainty makes end-to-end forecasts more transparent, a step toward observation-driven digital twins of the atmosphere.
Path-finding over knowledge graphs has become an effective way to ground LLM reasoning on multi-hop questions. However, biomedical QA introduces two distinct challenges that general-domain methods are not designed for: (i) queries do not expose intermediate reasoning and can be answered through multiple valid pathways, and (ii) biomedical knowledge graphs are densely connected, so path-finding methods easily take wrong turns. To address these challenges, we propose AdaPath, a path-finding framework that retrieves query-adaptive meta-paths from Path-Bank, which captures both query semantics and biomedical knowledge graph structure. AdaPath provides the missing cues in biomedical queries while effectively pruning dense knowledge graph neighborhoods during multi-hop reasoning. We further release BioStrat-QA, a biomedical KGQA benchmark that stratifies multi-hop queries by how much intermediate reasoning they expose. Across biomedical KGQA benchmarks, AdaPath consistently outperforms baselines, sustaining meaningful path-finding even when multi-hop queries expose less surface information. The source code is available at https://github.com/Jun-Hyeong-Kim/AdaPath.
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) achieve strong performance across many multimodal tasks; however, they often exploit spurious object-background correlations, resulting in predictions driven by contextual shortcuts rather than object-relevant visual evidence. Despite growing interest in hallucination and robustness evaluation, existing benchmarks provide limited control over whether model predictions are grounded in the target object or induced by correlated background cues. In this work, we introduce PURGE (\underline{P}artition-aware \underline{U}nlearning for \underline{R}emoving spurious-correlation \underline{G}enerated \underline{E}rrors), a framework for constructing, benchmarking, and mitigating spurious-correlation-induced failures in LVLMs. The framework consists of: -- (1) Structured dataset construction wherein we develop three complementary structured data construction strategies that partition examples by object-relevant evidence and spurious background cues, enabling controlled diagnosis of shortcut reliance; and -- (2) Partition-aware unlearning, which uses these partitions to selectively remove spurious object-background associations while preserving object-based reasoning. We evaluate the \algo~framework across multiple LVLMs, including LLaVA-1.6-7B, Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct, and Qwen3.5-9B, together with CLIP as a vision-language encoder, on a diverse suite of benchmarks, including CHAIR, POPE, Causal-HalBench, MM-SpuBench, AMBER, MMHal, and Waterbirds. Our results show that PURGE consistently reduces hallucinations and spurious-correlation-driven errors while maintaining or improving overall performance in most evaluated settings, providing both a reusable evaluation protocol and an effective mitigation framework for more reliable LVLMs.
Frequency features and compression-invariant representation learning are widely assumed to be key to deepfake detection that survives video compression. We test this with CAFRL - block-DCT and FFT-phase streams, compression-level-conditioned band attention, and adversarial (gradient-reversal) compression invariance - and report a controlled negative. Under a pre-registered protocol with capacity- and augmentation-matched controls, a plain EfficientNet-B0 on multi-quality data beat CAFRL as specified at every compression level on the FaceForensics++ test split, by 3.66 AUC points at CRF 40 (paired, single seed). A self-audit of our own negative found four defects biased against the frequency hypothesis, and pre-specified re-tests repairing all four showed the deficit to be a recipe artifact, not an architecture failure: the baseline recipe recovered 3.96 points over the matching shipped-recipe variant. The frequency path made no detectable difference: discriminative alone (standalone validation AUC 0.91-0.98 late in training) but of no marginal value under this fusion, at two feature widths of one 4.0 M trunk, every seed-pooled interval for the intra-dataset compression contrasts including zero; on the single held-out manipulation tested, the fair variants sat below the plain backbone. The adversarial branch, as specified, added nothing and degraded its own conditioning estimator; at the fair recipe it is untested. Robustness under single-pass H.264 re-encoding came instead from data diversity: real constant-rate-factor variants beat synthetic JPEG augmentation by 7.3 points (single runs, non-overlapping intervals). The evidence is FaceForensics++-family, GAN-era and single-codec. Match controls on training recipe as well as capacity, and buy compression robustness with codec diversity before architecture.
Randomized sketch-and-solve algorithms accelerate overconstrained $\ell_2$ regression by replacing the input with a much smaller, randomly projected problem. While standard subspace embeddings nearly preserve the regression cost, coordinate-wise accuracy is more delicate: rather than the objective value, we want the solution vector itself to be close to the optimum in $\ell_\infty$ norm. Specifically, we seek $x'\in\mathbb{R}^d$ with $\|x'-x^\star\|_\infty\leq\frac{\epsilon}{\sqrt d}\|Ax^\star-b\|_2\|A^\dagger\|_{\mathrm{op}}$, where $A\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times d}$ is the design matrix, $b\in\mathbb{R}^n$ the label vector, $x^\star$ the optimal solution and $A^\dagger$ the pseudo-inverse of $A$. Price, Song and Woodruff introduced this problem and claimed that the subsampled randomized Hadamard transform (SRHT) with $O(\epsilon^{-2}d^{1+\Theta(\sqrt{\log\log n/\log d})})$ rows achieves this guarantee; we point out a gap in the proof. Song, Ye, Yin and Zhang later claimed $O(\epsilon^{-2}d\log^3 n)$ rows, but their proof relies on an independence assumption that does not hold in general, and we exhibit an explicit instance on which it fails. To achieve a truly nearly-linear-in-$d$ row count, we introduce a new fast, dense randomized transform combining a randomized Hadamard flattening, a random permutation, and balanced, disjoint Gaussian pooling. Conditioned on the Hadamard-and-permutation stage, the sketched problem becomes an exact Gaussian regression whose noise is independent of the entire sketched design, exactly what Song, Ye, Yin and Zhang's argument was missing. Our sketch yields the $\ell_\infty$ guarantee with $m=O(\epsilon^{-2}d\log d)$ rows, using one Hadamard pass with padded internal dimension $N=\widetilde{O}(n+\epsilon^{-2}d^3)$. It is also efficient to apply: $(SA,Sb)$ can be computed in $O(Nd\log N)=\widetilde{O}(nd+\epsilon^{-2}d^4)$ time.
Multimodal queries can require different types of reasoning. Some can be answered via perceptual reasoning, extracting information directly from the visual signal, while others require compositional reasoning that combines observations or deliberative reasoning that evaluates competing hypotheses. However, many existing methods apply a uniform reasoning strategy across queries, leading to unnecessary computation on simple tasks and insufficient reasoning on complex ones. We introduce Video-FLAIR, a training framework that learns to select the appropriate reasoning mode for each query using reinforcement learning. During training, the model generates responses under all three modes for the same prompt, enabling direct comparison. A composite reward compares these responses to favor the most effective one based on correctness, grounding, and cost, while discouraging unsupported or misaligned deliberation. This yields a supervision signal for learning adaptive reasoning without per-query annotations. Video-FLAIR improves accuracy over the Qwen2.5-VL base model by +5.4 on MathVista, +4.8 on Video-Holmes, and +4.8 on Video-MMMU, while reducing average token usage to 95 compared to 417 for always-thinking baselines.
Auto-research agents now run machine-learning development unattended for hours, revising data pipelines, models, and validation from their own feedback, yet on most competitions they still finish below strong human competitors. Outcome-based benchmarks record this gap but not its cause, because they grade the final submission and discard the development process behind it. We introduce TraceML, which pairs human and agent work on the same competitions under one version-level schema: 4,465 human Kaggle trajectories across 134 competitions, seven of which are also worked by two agent scaffolds, giving 430 paired human and 207 agent trajectories. Every code version carries its score, its timestamp, and labels for the action taken, its intent, the edit size, and the score effect. Read this way, the gap becomes concrete. Experts alternate data work, validation, model changes, and ensembling, and return to approaches they had set aside. Each agent scaffold instead collapses into a narrow loop: Codex spends its steps re-weighting ensembles and tuning submissions, MLEvolve mutates its model in place, and neither pivots at the human rate nor reopens abandoned work. A short planning prompt distilled from human practice moves the behaviors it names toward the human profile and lifts scores, but the effort profile stays agent-shaped: instruction closes only the part of the gap that reduces to instructions. We release the corpus, the schema, and the labeling models, together with an open-source toolkit that turns a run from any command-line agent into a TraceML trajectory and reads it against the human cohorts.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful but limited by static parametric knowledge that becomes outdated once pretraining ends. Knowledge editing addresses this problem by updating model behavior on target facts without full retraining. In particular, in-context knowledge editing has gained attention because it is training-free and readily applicable to black-box LLMs. Recent reinforcement learning (RL)-based approaches improve over fixed retrieval strategies by adapting prompt construction to the quantity-quality trade-off. Despite initial success, they fail to model the prompt as a structured entity under the distinct and often competing objectives of reliability, generality, and specificity. Previous methods largely optimize a single objective and make decisions over only part of the prompt construction process, thereby overlooking both the balance of different objectives and the global organization of demonstrations. We propose Multi-Objective In-context Knowledge Editing (MO-IKE), a multi-objective RL algorithm that formulates prompt construction for in-context knowledge editing as a Constrained Markov Decision Process. MO-IKE trains a dynamic retriever to optimize competing objectives in knowledge editing, enabling more balanced and globally coherent prompt construction. On Llama-3.2, MO-IKE improves edit success (reliability) from 85.0% to 92.0%, paraphrase consistency (generality) from 77% to 79%, while increasing retention rate (specificity) by 23.0% compared to prior RL-based methods.
Understanding how (multimodal) large language models perform on physics problems requires benchmarks that reflect the difficulty and breadth of expert-level physical reasoning. Existing physics benchmarks remain limited in the following two important ways: (1) short of high-difficulty datasets, and (2) lack of comprehensive coverage of visual forms, knowledge points, and step-by-step solution processes. As a result, model performance on current datasets may not be fully representative of their ability to solve complex physics problems. To address these issues, we present PhysElite, a large-scale bilingual multimodal benchmark for Olympiad-level physics reasoning. PhysElite contains 11,586 Olympiad-tier problems. For each problem, we provide corresponding visual diagrams, step-by-step bilingual Chinese-English solution derivations, and the final answer. We benchmark 18 open-source and closed-source MLLMs, and find that even the strongest model reaches only 33.7% answer accuracy. We additionally conduct step-level process evaluation to diagnose where models fail in the reasoning chain. Our datasets are released at https://github.com/PremiLab-Math/PhysElite.
Recent work uses an NLI benchmark of the imperfective paradox to argue that large language models exhibit a Teleological Bias and Calibration Crisis. We identify three validity concerns in benchmark construction, including aspectual reduction, semantic bias, and relation bias. Under a strict NLI standard, 76% of the Group A instances do not explicitly rule out culmination; in native-speaker annotation, 38% of Group A and 29% of Group C examples permit an alternative interpretation. To better isolate the semantic contrast, we construct Lexically Matched Minimal Pairs. Moreover, by formulating event-semantic NLI as a multi-step reasoning problem, we evaluate intermediate semantic judgments and use oracle-guided settings. We find that incorrect NLI entailment does not fully support teleological bias. Prompting often changes final NLI decisions without reliably improving the underlying semantic judgments, offering a possible explanation for the Calibration Crisis.
We present LAION-BVD (LAION - Big Video Dataset), a large-scale open video dataset for multimodal learning, which contains 1.3B platform-specific video URLs collected from CommonCrawl. From these, we download 80M videos with a total duration of 13.5 million hours. The dataset is designed for multimodal pre-training across the video, audio, and image modalities. Using content-aware scene detection, we extract clips for which we synthetically generate video and audio captions. Models trained on these data achieve competitive performance on standard video-text and audio-text benchmarks, with consistent improvements as training or model scale increases. Additionally, we explore video frames as an alternative source of image-text data by extracting scene-changing frames. These frames exhibit a visual distribution distinct from standard web image corpora, and models trained on this dataset achieve strong image-text retrieval performance. We release LAION-BVD to the research community. It significantly expands open access to multimodal videos at an unprecedented scale.