Deep learning models achieve high accuracy in signal processing but remain difficult to interpret. Classical matching pursuit and sparse coding offer better transparency but suffer from spectral leakage and grid mismatch when signal frequencies do not align with discrete dictionary atoms. We introduce Continuous Dictionary Pursuit (CDP), a framework for interpretable signal decomposition that learns the parameters of closed-form functions directly from data. CDP optimizes over a continuous manifold of differentiable atoms and, unlike prior continuous pursuit methods that operate on a single analytic family, searches a heterogeneous library spanning periodic, trend, transient, and discontinuous structures. The algorithm employs a greedy iterative strategy using data-driven priors and gradient-based optimization to isolate individual signal components, with discontinuous waveforms made differentiable through spectral sharpness annealing. To ensure a sparse atom set for reconstruction, the framework utilizes a stopping criterion based on a predefined atom budget and residual error convergence. Evaluations on synthetic and real-world datasets show that CDP removes the grid discretization error for atom families contained in its library, recovers generative parameters to within $1\%$ on stationary synthetic signals expressible in that library, and achieves the best sparsity-accuracy trade-off among classical, continuous-pursuit, and neural baselines in the sparse regime. Beyond decomposition, we demonstrate that the extracted atoms can serve as structured curriculum targets for training sequence models, improving forecasting accuracy over standard end-to-end training on most evaluated datasets. The method offers a glass-box alternative for signal decomposition by providing high reconstruction fidelity alongside direct physical interpretability.
Robot policies trained on visually narrow demonstrations can become sensitive to environmental features that are unrelated to the task. Existing generative augmentation methods can introduce visual diversity, but processing every frame and camera view independently is computationally expensive and may produce inconsistent observations across cameras and timestamps. We introduce Augmentron, a geometry-aware pipeline that generates reusable scene representations and renders them through recorded camera poses. This produces temporally and multi-view consistent environ- ment and workspace variations while preserving the robot, task objects, actions, and annotations. Across three physical manipulation tasks, replacing half of the real world training dataset with Augmentron data improves model success across three tasks for both in out-of-distribution distractor objects, and out-of-distribution workspace variation evaluations. In a separate comparison against alternate augmentation techniques, Augmentron achieves the highest pooled success in all three conditions. The results show that introducing augmented data to a data training recipe can help policies generalize to dynamic real-world settings.
Diffusion models have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for generating 3D molecules. Despite showing remarkable promise, they learn atomic distributions implicitly from data, without explicitly encoding physicochemical rules into their generative dynamics. Consequently, generated samples can be statistically plausible yet chemically invalid. To address this problem, we propose Sequential Neuro-Symbolic Constrained Diffusion (SensDiff), a framework that integrates symbolic rules into generative modeling, enabling the model to internalize scientific priors during training. Central to SensDiff is the observation that the diffusion trajectory of 3D molecule generation exhibits a coarse-to-fine evolution: valid molecules arise by first mitigating macroscopic geometric conflicts and then refining structures toward microscopic chemical consistency through iterative denoising. Accordingly, SensDiff mirrors this dynamic by sequentially enforcing constraints with adaptive weighting during training, progressively steering generation toward valid molecular geometries. Moreover, SensDiff translates domain knowledge into interpretable generative controls, grounding opaque neural denoising in scientific principles. Experiments on molecular benchmarks and real-world constrained generation tasks confirm that SensDiff consistently improves chemical validity while adhering to physicochemical rules and user-specified targets. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/WanyuGroup/NeurIPS2026_SensDiff.
The recent success of foundation models and deep learning has far outpaced our theoretical understanding of how large-scale neural networks learn and generalize. Statistical physics provides a natural language for describing such high-dimensional, nonlinear, and strongly coupled systems, offering concepts such as mean-field theory, phase transitions, energy landscapes, and stochastic dynamics. In this topical review, we adopt a statistical-physics way of thinking -- from concepts including phases and criticality, and free-energy viewpoints, to methods such as kernel and Gaussian-process limits, mean-field and dynamical mean-field theories, random-matrix tools, and Fokker-Planck formalisms, and to a mindset emphasizing universality, scaling, and tractable limits with explicit validity regimes. We survey recent progress on understanding modern deep learning through this lens, including mean-field analyses of wide networks, spectral and geometric perspectives on loss landscapes, stochastic-gradient-based training viewed as a dynamical process, and phase-transition analogies that organize phenomena such as overparameterization, generalization, and representation change. Our goal is to synthesize these threads into a coherent framework that clarifies what each approximation explains, when it is expected to hold, and how apparently competing narratives relate or diverge. Together, these perspectives form a unified physical framework that views representation learning as a collective phenomenon in high-dimensional systems, bridging deterministic and stochastic regimes of gradient-based optimization.
Nucleus instance segmentation and counting are essential for quantitative microscopy, enabling reliable analysis of cell populations, tissue organization, and disease-related changes. However, accurately separating touching nuclei remains difficult, and many existing approaches rely on complex models or sensitive post-processing procedures. We present DINO-Nucleus, a parameter-efficient framework that leverages multi-level self-supervised DINOv2 representations for nucleus instance segmentation and counting. The model jointly predicts nucleus regions, pixel-wise instance flows, and explicit nucleus centers, while a consistency objective encourages the predicted flows to converge toward their corresponding centers. Multi-level transformer features provide complementary spatial and semantic information, and the pretrained backbone is adapted using lightweight LoRA modules to reduce fine-tuning cost. Experimental results show that DINO-Nucleus achieves strong segmentation and counting performance with parameter-efficient backbone adaptation. These findings demonstrate that parameter-efficient adaptation of multi-level self-supervised features can provide an effective solution for nucleus instance segmentation in microscopy images.
Egocentric video captures human-object interaction at scale but rarely includes tactile labels for hidden contact and pressure. We introduce TouchAnnotator, an ego-only bimanual tactile annotator trained with multi-source tactile supervision and privileged-view distillation. A canonical hand field unifies glove pressure, geometry-derived human contact, and robot fingertip deformation from six datasets and three embodiments, while source-aware masks preserve valid targets. During training, an EMA teacher observes synchronized ego and wrist views and distills hand-local representations and tactile predictions into a student that uses only ego video and estimated pose at inference. Compact past-clip memory supplies temporal context. We evaluate on EgoTouch, zero-shot FPHA transfer, and 860 synchronized glove recordings. The model transfers to bare-hand contact and produces qualitatively coherent tactile responses across bare-hand, gloved-hand, and robot embodiments. On measured recordings, it improves temporal accuracy by 5.38 points and Volumetric IoU by 5.02 points under a shared protocol. These results show that heterogeneous human--robot supervision and privileged training views can turn egocentric video into dense tactile annotations.
A roadside sensor can detect vehicles hidden from the ego vehicle, but a pose error shifts every detection in the same message. We study asynchronous vehicle-infrastructure cooperative 3D detection on V2X-Seq using only information available at decision time, without ground truth, future frames, or per-pair calibration offsets at inference. Objects seen by both sensors reveal the shared translation, but even at zero added delay, 38% of validation messages have no matched pair. We propose CoMET (Common-Mode Error Tracking), which estimates this translation over time. At each message arrival, CoMET matches vehicle and roadside detections, estimates the offset from mutually nearest pairs, and updates a Kalman filter for that sender. When no pair matches, the filter carries its estimate forward. The correction applies to all roadside boxes, including those unseen by the ego vehicle. The estimator has no learned parameters; a separate frozen head ranks the merged detections. Across four delays from 0 to 400 ms on 21 validation sequences, CoMET averages 66.63 bird's-eye-view AP at IoU 0.7, compared with 63.18 for the same late fusion using uncorrected online poses and 62.96 for the best intermediate-fusion baseline. Across five detectors from three architectures, CoMET gains 2.2 to 3.5 AP points over online poses and 0.3 to 0.6 over estimating the offset from the current message alone. We find that the benchmark uses a zero offset as a placeholder in 28% of validation messages and that its offset search reaches the boundary in 45% of the rest. These offsets affect the labels for objects seen only from the roadside. Under two alternative label references, CoMET improves on uncorrected online poses in every evaluated population. Retraining intermediate fusion with CoMET poses and corrected labels improves detection on all three architectures tested, with statistically significant gains on two.
Machine learning based segmentation models are frequently miscalibrated, producing for each pixel a label prediction whose associated confidence does not accurately reflect the true underlying probability. This limitation is particularly critical in high-stakes applications such as medical image segmentation. Although several calibration methods have been proposed, only a small subset of them provides theoretical guarantees on the calibration error, i.e., they do not typically ensure that, with high probability, the model exhibits a low calibration error. In this work, we develop a post-hoc calibration method for which formal calibration guarantees can be established. To achieve this, we derive from standard concentration inequalities an improved theoretical bound that explicitly accounts for the spatial dependence inherent in binary segmentation outputs. We empirically demonstrate that the proposed calibrator satisfies the derived guarantee and outperforms existing post-hoc calibration approaches.
This paper proposes a transmitter-side semantic extraction framework for goal-oriented Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication supporting safe intersection passage. Instead of transmitting raw sensory data, roadside infrastructure extracts task-relevant semantic information from video and traffic-signal sequences and organizes them into compact semantic packets for low-latency driving-decision assistance. The intersection-passing problem is formulated as a set of traffic tasks under Japanese traffic regulations, and the proposed pipeline generates perception and intent semantics through object detection, object tracking, region-of-interest (ROI)-based semantic extraction, and recommended-action generation. The framework is implemented and evaluated on a self-constructed, CARLA-based single-vehicle dataset collected under clear weather conditions. Experimental results show high recommended-action accuracy within the tested task set, while the mean processing latency remains below the frame interval of the 15~fps input video.
LLM agents can exceed their authorization boundaries while pursuing user goals without an adversary. We formalize this phenomenon as authorization drift across data, tool, scope, and time, and introduce the Authorization Drift Benchmark (ADB): 648 samples across seven domains, each pairing a sufficient compliant path with an attractive unauthorized shortcut. To ensure executable tasks, tempting shortcuts, and feasible compliant paths, Staged Execution-Reflective Synthesis (SERS) grounds benchmark validation in real agent rollouts rather than LLM self-critique. Across 13 LLMs and three frameworks (25,207 trajectories), greater capability accompanies greater drift, with frontier-capable models exhibiting drift rates of 0.43 to 0.61. Yet 86.18% of tasks admit an observed clean-success trajectory, showing that drift is avoidable. Drift is persistent and dominated by early data over-collection; apparent improvements under agentic scaffolds coincide with collapsing clean-completion performance. To understand potential harms to individuals and society, we map drift points to legal provisions across four jurisdictions, connecting overreach to privacy and information-security concerns. Data minimisation is the most frequently implicated provision, and 93.5% of legally grounded drifting runs map to multiple jurisdictions, making the potential consequences of authorization drift more interpretable.
Vietnamese punctuation restoration is often evaluated on relatively small benchmarks, limiting conclusions about how architectural choices scale with data volume. We present a controlled benchmark on News and Novels corpora containing 22.1 million labeled tokens (19.9M News and 2.2M Novels). We evaluate 17 architectures formed from four pretrained Transformer backbones and optional bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) and conditional random field (CRF) layers, together with a PhoBERT-large-Bi-LSTM-CRF model, PhoPunct. Every model is trained for eight epochs with the same learning rate and without architecture-specific tuning. Under this fixed budget, adding Bi-LSTM and CRF layers does not reliably improve macro F1: in seven of eight matched domain-backbone comparisons, a plain Transformer classifier matches or outperforms its Bi-LSTM-CRF counterpart. PhoPunct obtains the best News result (61.35), whereas XLM-R with a CRF obtains the best Novels result (50.18), exceeding PhoPunct (48.97). These results show that the value of recurrent and structured-prediction heads depends on their optimization regime and motivate explicit separation between architectural improvements and improvements due to architecture-specific tuning. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/aisia-research-lab/PhoPunct
Machine-learning models based on routine laboratory panels can predict outcomes but can be difficult to interpret and operationalize. We present COMBIO, an automated pipeline that distils such a model into a compact closed-form biomarker. The composite is a product of laboratory measurements raised to integer powers from minus two to two. The sign of each exponent indicates whether higher values of the corresponding measurement increase or decrease the composite. Shapley additive explanation values from the gradient-boosted reference model rank five candidate measurements and guide eligible exponent signs. An exhaustive search over small integer exponents selects the formula on an inner validation set, before evaluation on the reserved test set. We evaluated COMBIO across six tasks: three National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey outcomes, liver-disease classification in the Indian Liver Patient Dataset, and Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care IV in-hospital mortality and sepsis case-finding, with external evaluation in the eICU Collaborative Research Database for the two hospital tasks. Across the six test sets, COMBIO's area under the receiver operating characteristic curve differed by at most 0.03 from logistic regression using the five candidate laboratory measurements. The hospital mortality composite had an area under the curve of 0.698 in the external database. A version restricted to widely available measurements in the source hospital database achieved an area under the curve of 0.786 in a cohort covering 92% of admissions. The multiplicative representation provides compactness rather than additional accuracy, and local validation and recalibration are required before clinical use.
Automatic video reframing is increasingly important for adapting landscape content to heterogeneous display formats. Existing methods typically predict a single deterministic crop, despite the subjective nature of reframing and the presence of multiple plausible regions of interest. We present \textbf{BayesCrop}, a real-time probabilistic framework for multi-crop video reframing. BayesCrop represents crop preferences using a two-component spatially isotropic Gaussian mixture over crop position and scale. Each component defines a representative reframing mode together with its local uncertainty, enabling both dual-view prediction and sampling of additional plausible crop candidates. For efficient video processing, we introduce an anchor-and-propagate strategy that performs neural prediction only on sparse anchor frames and propagates crop trajectories using motion vectors available from the compressed video bitstream. The resulting trajectories can be combined into a single output using a lightweight periodic view-switching strategy. Experiments on LIVE-YT-MC, LIVE-YT-VC++, and a multi-target long-video benchmark demonstrate competitive single-output localization, high multi-crop reference coverage, diverse yet coherent crop hypotheses, and stable perceptual quality. BayesCrop achieves real-time throughput of 112 FPS at the default operating point, while sampling from the learned distributions further improves reference coverage beyond the two representative crop means.
Autoregressive (AR) modeling is arguably the only way to extend a fixed-length video diffusion model to longer or even streaming videos. However, existing AR diffusion methods use only the previously predicted chunk as context for the next, discarding the intermediate predictions that constitute the chunk's generation history. In contrast, conventional AR models such as LLMs condition on the entire history of preceding tokens. To this end, we propose Trajectory Forcing (TraF), an AR diffusion method that exploits the denoising trajectories of previous video chunks as context. TraF operates under two training regimes: (1) with ground-truth videos, where pseudo-trajectories are constructed from Gaussian interpolations and re-predicted by the model, and (2) with a teacher model, where real trajectories are obtained from the student's own denoising rollout. The first regime naturally provides a strong initialization for the second. On the 5-second VBench benchmark, TraF achieves a Total score of 85.15, outperforming Self Forcing (+0.84) and Causal Forcing (+1.11), with Quality and Semantic improving simultaneously. On 30-second generation---6$\times$ the training horizon---TraF achieves the highest overall quality among all compared methods.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for creative tasks such as writing, design, and idea generation. For these uses, it matters whether a model's ideas depart from familiar examples or stay close to them. Novelty is one standard measure of creativity, and current creativity evaluations ask human experts or LLM judges to rate how novel an output is. However, these ratings have no fixed reference for what counts as novel (or, in other terms, departure from the familiar). Measuring this departure requires a task with known familiar defaults. The structured imagination task from cognitive psychology is such a task. In this creativity test, people imagine a creature from another planet. The departure from features of Earth animals, such as bilateral symmetry and legs as mode of locomotion, is used as measure of creativity. We introduce AlienBench, a benchmark that adapts the structured imagination task to language models. Models describe alien creatures, and a panel of three LLM judges extracts ten biological features from the description and labels them as either Earth-typical or a departure. The sum of feature departures is the score of a description, from 0 to 10. Each model describes alien creatures under six prompt conditions that vary the framing of the task and the planetary environment. Each model generates 30 descriptions per condition (180 in total), and its overall score is the mean across these descriptions. We evaluate 10 language models, from frontier to open-weight models. Overall scores range from 3.28 (GPT-6 Luna) to 6.55 (Ministral 3 14B). Interestingly, open-weight models score higher than proprietary models in this task (5.40 vs. 4.58). Under the baseline prompt, the models depart from Earth defaults more often on average than 100 human participants on every feature. We release all prompts, generations, judge outputs, and scores.
The rapid growth of large-scale machine learning (ML) workloads has led to unprecedented demands on GPU cluster scheduling systems. However, existing heuristic schedulers struggle to handle the complexity and dynamics of multi-cluster GPU environments, often leading to load imbalance, long queuing delays, and poor alignment to business objectives. This paper formulates the ML scheduling problem in multi-cluster GPU environments as online multi-objective optimization that minimizes the average and maximum weighted queuing times while maximizing GPU time utilization. To solve this optimization problem, we propose EVO-GP, a two-layer evolutionary online scheduling method that decouples global job-to-cluster allocation from intra-cluster GPU resource allocation. At the job-to-cluster allocation layer, an evolutionary algorithm assigns arriving jobs to feasible clusters to promote load balance across clusters. At the resource allocation layer, a priority function automatically learned offline via genetic programming is used to rank jobs and guide GPU allocation within each cluster. Extensive experiments on both real-world data and simulated workloads demonstrate that the proposed EVO-GP method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, while maintaining superior adaptability and scalability.
Long-video question answering forces multimodal large language models to reason under strict visual-token budgets, creating a tradeoff between broad temporal coverage and fine-grained spatial detail. Uniform sampling preserves coverage but often obscures decisive local cues, while caption-based or frame-similarity retrieval operates over lossy proxies that can miss motion, state changes, and before-after relations. We recast long-video reasoning as a visual-token allocation problem: given a fixed budget, decide how much to spend on global context versus high-resolution local evidence, and where in the video to draw that local evidence from. We introduce AdaAlloc, a training-free inference framework that adaptively allocates visual tokens between a global video overview and localized visual detail. AdaAlloc first plans a global/local allocation policy, then uses temporal grounding to locate candidate evidence segments and refines them into a compact temporal memory. The selected policy controls both frame sampling density and resolution, combining sparse, lower-resolution global frames with denser, higher-resolution local frames drawn from the refined memory. The final answerer reasons over the allocated global context and refined local evidence. Across LVBench, MLVU, VideoMME, and LongVideoBench, AdaAlloc improves over budget-matched uniform sampling by up to 10.5 percentage points and outperforms the compared frame-selection and agentic methods on their reported benchmarks.
Generative modeling, particularly Decision Transformers, shows promise in auto-bidding strategies. However, it struggles with limited exploration in static offline datasets, vulnerability to dynamic environmental shifts, and a reliance on heuristic return-to-go (RTG) specifications that may yield suboptimal performance on unseen traffic. To address these challenges, we propose the Two-stage Uncertainty-aware Generative Auto-Bidding (TUGB) framework. TUGB integrates generative sequence modeling with Reinforcement Learning (RL). It employs a two-stage pipeline where a pre-trained Generative Bidding Model is fine-tuned via an ensemble-based Uncertainty-aware Environment Model. This approach quantifies epistemic uncertainty to penalize high-risk trajectories and evolves the policy from RTG-conditioning to direct bidding optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TUGB significantly outperforms SOTA baselines. Notably, full-scale deployment on JD Search Ad achieved a 2.32\% increase in cost and 3.57\% in target cost, validating its industrial efficacy, while its successful adaptation to subsequent mechanism upgrades and JD Food Delivery Ad further validates TUGB's superior generalization capability.
Existing multilingual retrieval-augmented generation relies heavily on learned retrievers and similarity-based ranking from multilingual collections, which are vulnerable to cross-lingual retrieval errors and indexing overhead. In this paper, we explore retriever-free multilingual search, where the model directly interacts with raw corpora through executable shell commands. This paradigm shifts the bottleneck to multilingual search action generation, where exact search is sensitive to entity surface forms and outcome-only supervision provides limited guidance for multi-turn search. To address these challenges, we propose MARS, a multilingual search agent in direct corpus interaction (DCI) with reinforcement learning (RL). MARS introduces corpus-native entity grounding to recover reliable lexical anchors from corpus evidence, mitigating failure to retrieve evidence. Meanwhile, we present a redundancy-aware search reward to encourage concise and effective search trajectories, addressing training collapse in RL of multilingual scenarios. Experiments show that \ours~consistently outperforms strong retrieval-based and DCI baselines, while demonstrating robust cross-lingual generalization and substantially reducing redundant corpus interactions.
Hand-object interactions (HOIs) can be captured by smartglasses to learn how people manipulate objects in daily life. Automatic logging of these interactions from an egocentric perspective provides time-stamped evidence of daily actions for applications like memory assistance. However, continuous RGB capture and wireless transmission exceed the energy and bandwidth budgets of smartglasses. We present EventHOI, an event-driven sensing and compression system that couples selective RGB capture with HOI-aware encoding to enable egocentric logging over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) while preserving downstream HOI logging performance. Our key insight is to use low-power event sensing both to determine when RGB capture is needed and to identify where visual detail must be preserved. A lightweight IMU-based egomotion cancellation pipeline suppresses egomotion-induced events so that residual HOI motion can guide RGB triggering and spatial compression. We build a smartglasses prototype and conduct an end-to-end evaluation of EventHOI on a 50-hour egocentric benchmark with 97 subjects and a 20-hour real-world dataset we collect from 10 participants, together covering a broad range of daily-life scenarios and environments. Compared to RGB-only baselines, EventHOI reduces always-on backend power consumption by 5.8-10.4x and uplink bandwidth by 2.9x, with minimal HOI recognition accuracy loss. The resulting RGB uplink of less than 130 kbps fits within commodity BLE bandwidth budgets, making stable BLE video streaming feasible for egocentric HOI logging. Demo video and project website: https://eventhoi.github.io