We identify a fundamental mismatch in empathetic reinforcement learning: support priorities evolve with the dialogue state, yet existing methods typically optimize predefined reward specifications that remain fixed across turns. To model these evolving support priorities, we organize empathetic support along cognitive, affective, and proactive empathy, and propose Context-Adaptive Rubric Evolution (CARE). At each turn, CARE generates a context-adaptive rubric by adjusting both the weights of these three empathy dimensions and their fine-grained evaluation criteria. The rubric generator is trained with turn-level rubric supervision and human preference data through supervised fine-tuning followed by preference-based reinforcement learning, and then serves as an adaptive reward interface for online empathetic RL. Integrated with both RLVER and MICA, CARE achieves state-of-the-art performance across SentientBench, EQBench3, and EMPA under three independent LLM judges. Notably, on EMPA, CARE improves EPM-Idx over the strongest baseline by at least 13 points under all three judges, including an increase from 28.11 to 83.54 under Gemini-2.5-Pro. Further analyses show that learned rubric priorities systematically vary across dialogue stages and user emotions, demonstrating that CARE adapts what is rewarded as support needs evolve. Code is available at https://asa13opp.github.io/CARE-project-page.
Predicting spatial gene expression from histology images could scale spatial transcriptomics (ST) to image-only cohorts, but conventional histology-based ST prediction is trained and evaluated mainly by per-gene spatial-profile reconstruction. This objective is misaligned with a key downstream use of ST: differentially expressed gene (DEG) discovery, where genes are ranked for a biological or morphology-defined contrast by evidence of between-group expression differences. We formulate image-based differential expression ranking (IDER), which asks whether predicted expression profiles preserve the contrast-specific ranked gene list obtained from measured profiles. IDER compares gene rankings induced by differential-expression statistics, rather than raw expression magnitudes or per-gene spatial correlations. We further introduce a differentiable IDER objective that aligns these statistics across genes and can be trained with morphology-derived proxy contrasts without predefined biological group labels. Experiments on public ST datasets show improved DEG-ranking agreement and pathway-enrichment overlap over conventional reconstruction objectives, including morphology-derived and pathologist-annotated tissue-region evaluations.
Adversarial attacks optimized on a single open-weight LLM can transfer to and jailbreak architecturally different models, allowing an attacker with white-box access to one model to compromise independently deployed systems. This creates a shared vulnerability across models, yet existing defenses are not designed for this cross-model threat. We find that cross-model transfer aligns with shared internal representation geometry, making it a natural defense target. AnchorRep targets this geometry directly with a lightweight LoRA adapter that pushes the defended model's internal representations of harmful prompts away from those of a frozen anchor model on the same prompts. Training uses a small set of harmful prompts and no adversarial examples. Across five models and four architectural families, AnchorRep reduces cross-model attack success rate to <=1.1% on 2,000 transferred attacks (0% on two), including the largest drop on Mistral (36% -> 1.1%). Existing defenses can reduce transfer, but only at high cost either inducing up to 77% degenerate benign output or increasing over-refusal by up to 18%. Because such degenerate benign outputs are not captured by standard refusal-based metrics, we introduce the Benign Garble Rate to quantify them. Our results suggest that cross-model robustness can be achieved by shaping representation geometry, without requiring attack-specific training
Effective behavioral intervention in chronic disease management requires a sequence of incremental steps, each grounded in what similar individuals have achieved. Multimodal records of daily behavior make such evidence available outside the clinic. Counterfactual explanation, an explainable AI approach, can turn these records into guidance, yet endpoint-only methods return a target state without a route to it. We propose POROS (Peer-Grounded Optimal Routes Over States), a domain-agnostic framework rooted in Bandura's self-efficacy theory and Festinger's social comparison theory. POROS constructs a Behavioral Progression Graph, a directed acyclic graph over observed patient states in which every edge requires both peer-grounded behavioral proximity and strict improvement in the observed health outcome. Every edge is bounded by a feasibility threshold derived from the cohort's day-to-day behavioral changes. Minimum-cost paths through this graph decompose behavioral gaps into incremental, peer-grounded steps. We evaluate POROS on two independent longitudinal cohorts of patients with type 1 diabetes, with a per-patient predictor estimating individual time in range (TIR, blood glucose within 70-180 mg/dL) along each path. Compared with an endpoint-only baseline, POROS returns multi-hop paths to the same target for 14.4% and 19.8% of days below the 70% TIR threshold, reducing the per-step change in carbohydrate intake, insulin dose, and bolus timing by 38-42% on the larger cohort. POROS also supports improvement within the same outcome class, connecting 78.1% and 83.7% of outcome-ordered pairs of well-controlled days. Together, these findings demonstrate how POROS translates multimodal health records into incremental, peer-grounded guidance for chronic disease management through observational path planning.
Many real-world high-dimensional time series exhibit long-memory, but Gaussian graphical model testing in this regime remains understudied. We develop a direct, data-adaptive test statistic for assessing conditional independence in the graph structure of stationary Gaussian time series. We establish a finite-sample, Berry--Esseen type Gaussian approximation bound for the statistic, which applies to both short-memory and long-memory time series. The testing procedure uses a block bootstrap method, on which we provide a finite-sample validity result including in the ultra-high-dimensional scenario, and can be extended to comparing graphical structures in two-sample tests. We also develop a consistency-empowered correction to the statistic and show that such tests attain asymptotic consistency in both size and power. Our proposed method is applied to real-world fMRI data to understand functional connectivities within brain in different periods.
Retrieval-based factuality evaluation, where LLM-generated claims are verified against evidence from authoritative medical corpora, has become the dominant paradigm for scalable hallucination detection in high-stakes clinical settings. Despite the urgency of reliable and transparent medical fact verification, most systems measure performance with aggregate metrics like F1, which obscure where and why failures occur. Existing RAG diagnostics require gold answers or annotated gold evidence, neither of which exists in this regime. We introduce two comprehensive taxonomies, grounded in a case study on the open-ended MedExpert dataset and 3 closed-ended datasets, decomposing failures into retrieval-stage errors along five quality dimensions, and verifier-reasoning errors into six consecutive steps. We adapt an automatic pattern induction pipeline using LLM-as-Judge to label evidence quality and classify verifier reasoning errors at scale, and then stress-test our findings across 4 retrieval methods and 6 frontier verifier models. Our analysis reveals that scaling model size, adding reasoning effort, expanding to authoritative web sources, and applying medical fine-tuning do not resolve these failure modes, demonstrating that they represent fundamental limitations of the retrieve-then-verify paradigm in open-ended medical settings rather than artifacts of outdated systems. We release our code and data at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Medical_RAG_eval-4AB5 for the full reproducibility of our results.
Customer experience (CX) agents use tools and large language models to address customer requests and guide conversational interactions with an organization's products. Improving these agents, especially in regulated industries, is difficult: they must detect intent, follow complex operational policies and use tools reliably. Manual end-to-end testing offers limited coverage, while live experiments expose customers to failures that can erode trust. We present a hypothesis-driven simulation workflow for screening candidate CX agents before deployment. Synthetic customers react to agent responses and simulated tool outputs enable multi-step agentic workflows without invoking production backends. We use the Snowglobe simulator on Nubank's Card Delivery agent and its expanded successor, Card Management - Nubank's highest-volume chat-support agent in Brazil. Across 4 deployed versions, simulated and production version-level binary evaluator scores show high correlation. Simulation-guided iteration increased transactional net promoter score (tNPS) by 36.69 points in a live A/B test. We also screened open-weight configurations in over 16,000 simulated conversations. In a subsequent live A/B test, the selected model increased self-service rate (SSR) by 8.82 percentage points to the highest level observed at Nubank, with no statistically significant change in tNPS. Simulation made broad exploration of models, reasoning settings, and prompts feasible without customer exposure, enabling production improvements that would have been impractical to pursue through live experimentation alone.
Image quality assessment predicts a mean opinion score (MOS), but for image aesthetics the mean hides the individual, so personalized assessment must start from the few images a new user rates. Fitting each person from scratch fails with ten ratings; networks fine-tuned per person carry over poorly to new kinds of images. We present Undertone-P, which learns from other raters a Gaussian prior over per-person regression weights on read-outs of frozen vision-language model (VLM) judges: the probability-weighted rating and the hidden state at the score token. Since people differ from the crowd in ways other raters reveal, a few ratings need only choose among those ways: a new user costs one closed-form solve, and no network is trained. On Ryu and Yanaka's PARA benchmark, the prior alone reaches a Spearman correlation of .640, above the best published 10- and 100-rating results (.581 and .620); 10 and 100 of a person's ratings raise it to .648 and .676. These ratings add most where tastes depart from the crowd: with 100 ratings, +.067 for the raters who agree least with it and +.206 on LAPIS artworks, against +.037 overall. Without labels, the judges' expected scores predict PARA's MOS at .835 (best published model we ran: .694). PARA-trained networks still lead under PARA's original protocol, likely through a stronger end-to-end MOS model.
Accurately predicting fast solar wind conditions is challenging, as uncertainties are large and unquantified by traditional single-value prediction models. In particular, the risks of high-speed solar wind streams (HSSs), which can cause damage to technological infrastructure, cannot be reliably assessed without probabilistic forecasts. We present PROSWIN, a probabilistic machine learning model that forecasts the hourly solar wind speed (SWS) at Earth with a four-day lead time. The approach combines solar images and magnetograms using a deep neural network coupled to a distributional regression algorithm. Because standard error metrics underweight the relevance of HSS peaks, we further introduce the prediction score, a model-selection metric that jointly rewards timeline and HSS peak accuracy. On 14 years of data, our forecast achieves very well-calibrated uncertainties (<1% average deviation). Using the continuous ranked probability score (CRPS), a metric that assesses distributional accuracy, we obtain a timeline CRPS of 41.0 km/s, an HSS peak CRPS of 45.3 km/s, and a prediction score of 42.3 km/s. We find that the 171 {\AA} channel is an important complement to the typically used 193 {\AA} and 211 {\AA} channels and that the prediction score for model selection improves the applicability of the model. Compared to selected models from the literature, ours is the only one that is accurate for both timeline and HSS peak values, rather than trading one off against the other. These results support the advantages of probabilistic over single-value solar wind models. The introduced methods are also transferable to other forecasting problems.
Visual object removal can eliminate a target from video frames, yet its acoustic trace persists in the soundtrack, causing obvious audio-visual inconsistency. Existing video inpainting models operate solely on pixels, while audio editing models, especially for the sound removal task, are typically driven by text and therefore rely on limited single-modal control, which is less effective than multimodal guidance that provides stronger semantic grounding and temporal synchronization cues. In this paper, we present Text-Visual Guided Sound Removal (TV-AudioRemover), a target sound removal framework that leverages the visually edited video together with a natural-language instruction to suppress the sound associated with the removed visual object from the original audio mixture. To acquire high-quality training data, we devise a pipeline to construct a million-scale dataset of single-object audio-visual aligned samples, from which we synthesize mixture-target pairs customized for model training. To effectively leverage visual context and follow instruction intent, we augment the model architecture with task tokens, generalizable instruction modeling, and modality-specific global guidance. We further adopt multi-task training to strengthen task-role comprehension, and employ a hard-mixture curriculum that leverages semantically similar acoustic mixtures during fine-tuning to enhance fine-grained source discrimination. To support evaluation, we present AV-Remove-Bench, a comprehensive audio-visual object removal benchmark, along with dedicated objective metrics and an MLLM-based evaluation protocol. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both subjective and objective metrics. Project page: https://yjx-research.github.io/TV-AudioRemover/.
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is expanding from tasks with well-defined correctness signals, such as mathematics and code, toward multifaceted quality requirements specified by multi-dimensional rubrics. Since policy optimization consumes one scalar per rollout, rubric-based pipelines must map multiple criterion scores into a scalar reward. This aggregation is often treated as score scaling, but it implicitly determines how quality dimensions trade off during training. The prevailing practice, normalizing each criterion and taking a linear combination, assumes that cardinal score differences are comparable across criteria and that gains on one criterion compensate for failures on another; both assumptions are unreliable when criteria are semantically heterogeneous. We propose Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rubric-based Ranking (RLVR$^2$), a verifiable ranking paradigm for rubric-based RLVR. For each criterion, RLVR$^2$ converts rubric scores into criterion-specific within-group ordinal outcomes, recovers a latent utility from the resulting comparison matrix, and merges these utilities into one training signal. By retaining only within-group ordering and discarding raw score magnitudes, RLVR$^2$ avoids calibrating heterogeneous rubric scales. It further supports objective-preserving attribute adjustment: auxiliary attributes that correlate with observed rankings but are not training objectives can enter the estimation without expanding the rubric or rewarding them directly. Across three model scales and 16 benchmarks, RLVR$^2$ consistently outperforms representative rubric-based baselines, achieving the best overall performance on most benchmarks at every scale. Analysis shows it controls systematic effects tied to reasoning efficiency and response formatting while preserving the quality objective.
We comment on the optimally-transported generalized method of moments (OTGMM) of Schennach and Starck (2026) and give counterexamples to Theorems 2-6. In the small-error analysis, the assumptions do not ensure consistency or asymptotic normality (Theorems 2-3). In the large-error analysis, Theorem 4 states the equivalence between the OTGMM estimator and the GMM estimator with modified moments, and Theorems 5-6 assert consistency and asymptotic normality. Through counterexamples, we show that the equivalence in Theorem 4 fails and a component of the Lagrange multiplier has different limits under the two estimators (Theorems 5-6). We also point out that, under misspecification, the population value selected by OTGMM depends on the metric. We give sufficient conditions and establish results following the original motivation for OTGMM. Our corrections to Theorems 4-6 change their assumptions or interpretation more substantially than those to Theorems 2 and 3. Furthermore, we correct Assumption 16 and the test's null distribution.
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance across a range of computer vision tasks, mainly thanks to the self-attention mechanism. However, its complexity, increasing quadratically with the number of tokens, remains the major obstacle to ViT efficiency and deployment at scale. Token merging reduces this cost by aggregating redundant tokens. Yet existing methods are typically evaluated within a single architecture, leaving open whether their effectiveness stems from the merging mechanism itself or from the specific decoder they are paired with. We extend Graph-Guided Token Merging (G2TM), a single module inserted early in a ViT-based network, beyond its original Segmenter setting. We evaluate G2TM across three semantic segmentation frameworks (Segmenter, SETR, EoMT) and three decoder families (Linear, Transformer-, convolution-based), as well as standard ViT image classification. Our results show that G2TM's behavior and accuracy-efficiency trade-off are consistent across every tested architecture for a given backbone size, indicating that its effectiveness is a property of the encoder rather than the decoder. G2TM also generalizes well to image classification, achieving an even smaller degradation in accuracy compared to semantic segmentation. We further find that G2TM's optimal hyperparameters, resulting in a consistent drop in GFLOPs of 22-47% and an increase in throughput by up to 74% for segmentation models on ADE20K dataset, depend primarily on the backbone's pre-training recipe and on the target dataset, rather than on the decoder choice.
Induction circuits retrieve a value by matching a query to information carried from the token before that value. How this address forms, incorporates context, and supports sequential retrieval remains less clear. We use hybrid language models as a tractable testbed and identify the historical source key as a common causal interface between local preparation and global retrieval. Probes and restoration interventions connect this interface across controlled models, pretrained recurrent and sliding-window hybrids, and released language models. We organize the analysis by address context radius and sequential retrieval depth. First, shared local parameters couple predecessor Carrying to recurrent state processing; separating these demands or biasing initialization promotes address formation. Second, adapting input representations extends an established literal circuit to category matching, making semantically compatible records active competitors. Earlier context resolves this competition through the source key, with a sharp visibility boundary in a controlled single-read model and compositional relays across local layers. Third, fixed relations support memorization shortcuts, whereas sequential generalization requires learning an output-to-query bridge between retrievals. Controlled state-tracking and compositional in-context tasks demonstrate this requirement across stacked stages, looped recurrence, and intermediate-token generation. Together, these results connect circuit formation, contextual disambiguation, and sequential use through a shared retrieval interface. Code is available at https://github.com/ckpassenger/bind-match-copy.
Deep learning models for dynamic survival analysis (DSA) achieve strong predictive performance by incorporating longitudinal patient data, but their black box nature limits clinical trust and adoption. Existing explainability methods cannot handle longitudinal, irregular inputs and functional survival outputs simultaneously, which limits their usability in DSA. We propose DynSHAP, a SHAP framework suited specifically for dynamic survival analysis. It extends common marginal SHAP estimators to this setting by treating time--feature pairs as players in the Shapley game. We further introduce Temporal DynSHAP, which learns linear dependencies in features over time and uses conditional sampling to address them in explanations. When applied to synthetic data with known ground-truth attributions, Temporal DynSHAP recovers temporally dependent features more accurately than marginal estimators for a given state-of-the-art model. Applied to two real-world clinical datasets and two DSA architectures, DynSHAP produces attributions faithful to model learning, allowing medical experts to see which patient information drove the prediction and when.
In bespoke art commissions, laypeople know what they feel but lack the words to specify it: one participant wanted a laid-off truck driver depicted as "a ghost in his own machine" but left the medium, scale, and palette unsaid. We frame this as an articulation bottleneck at an under-served upstream stage: requirement discovery, which precedes any artist or image generator and forces the commissioner to constitute intent in the first place. We present MAIA (Multi-Agent Intent Articulation), a multi-agent system that scaffolds this stage through Socratic inquiry under a "Verification over Invention" rule, turning vague affect into a text-only brief of visual terms the user verifies. In a within-subjects study (N = 16), the full configuration produced a large, significant gain in Cognitive Support over a minimal baseline (r = 0.97, p_FDR = 0.003; LMM p_FDR < 0.001). Thematic analysis traces the same mechanism, and a validator gate structurally blocks unratified content. An exploratory blind review by three professional concept artists provides complementary descriptive evidence that the rewritten briefs were more complete and executable.
Person identification from millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar point clouds has primarily focused on gait. However, since indoor walking is typically brief and fragmented, gait-based identification is largely constrained to designated passages that support continuous walking. Meanwhile, non-gait activities of daily living (ADLs) are pervasive and also encode discriminative personal signatures. In this study, we evaluate the feasibility of ADL-based identification from sparse mmWave point clouds using mm-ADL, a dataset comprising seven core ADLs collected from 11 subjects under controlled protocols. Moving beyond uniform gait introduces significant activity-dependent variations that confound identity representations. To address this challenge, we systematically benchmark three activity-identity learning paradigms: monolithic learning, joint multi-task learning, and two-stage activity-conditioned routing, under both closed-set identification (ID) and subject-disjoint re-identification (ReID) biometric settings. In parallel, we propose Dual-Stream Static-Dynamic PointNet (DS-SDPNet), an architecture tailored to radar point clouds that captures complementary spatial morphology and motion dynamics. Across seven ADLs, DS-SDPNet achieves 70.2% mean closed-set identification accuracy and outperforms existing baselines on both mm-ADL and mmGait. Moreover, benchmarking the three paradigms without ground-truth activity labels during inference yields up to 68.0% closed-set accuracy and 75.4% ReID mAP, providing a systematic baseline and confirming the feasibility of point-cloud-based biometric identification across diverse daily activities.
Neural networks acquire internal representations through learning. In this work, we formulate stochastic gradient descent (SGD) as a Markovian stochastic process and derive a Fisher-information flow speed limit that bounds the rate at which trainable parameters can acquire information about data-generating parameters. The resulting inequality decomposes the upper bound on the information flow into drift and noise contributions, thereby quantifying the roles of deterministic learning forces and SGD-induced fluctuations from an information-theoretic perspective. We verify the bound in analytically tractable basis-function linear regression, where the information budget predicted by the bound reproduces the ordering and characteristic time scales with which different data-generating parameters are encoded in the learned parameters. These results establish Fisher-information speed limits as a quantitative framework for understanding which properties of the data-generating process are acquired, in what order, and how rapidly they can be encoded in the trainable parameters.
The optimal transport (OT) map provides a geometric transformation for aligning probability distributions and has become a useful tool in machine learning. However, existing estimators of the OT map still exhibit a gap between sharp statistical guarantees and practical parametric estimation based on stable training objectives. Theoretical estimators achieve minimax optimal convergence rates, but they are typically nonparametric and can incur demanding implementation design or inference costs. Practical estimators are parametric and scalable, but their statistical guarantees remain underexplored, and their min-max, adversarial-like training objectives can be sensitive to optimization algorithms. We propose BROT (Barycentric Regression for Optimal Transport), a simple two-step method that first computes the unregularized OT plan and then fits a deep neural network (DNN) to the induced barycentric targets by least-squares regression. Under standard regularity conditions, we prove that the DNN estimator of BROT attains the minimax convergence rate, when the ground-truth OT map is Lipschitz. Numerical studies on synthetic datasets and an image dataset show that BROT provides accurate map estimates, strong target distribution matching, and competitive transport costs, compared to existing estimation methods. Experiments on two downstream tasks, single-cell perturbation prediction and unsupervised domain adaptation, further suggest that the accurate estimation of BROT can translate into stronger task performance.
On-device LLM inference is attractive for privacy and responsiveness, but remains challenging on mobile and embedded devices because model weights far exceed available DRAM. Prior systems exploit activation sparsity and offload weights to SSD or flash storage, but face a fundamental systems trade-off: accurate sparse execution decisions require the latest context, whereas efficient computation-I/O overlap requires early prediction. As a result, existing designs either serialize execution or incur redundant weight fetches, extra computation, and large cache overheads. We present LeanStream, a streaming speculate-and-refine framework for efficient on-device LLM inference. LeanStream progressively refines computation, loading, and cache-retention priorities using partial GPU results, enabling fine-grained overlap between GPU execution and storage I/O. We implement LeanStream on both mobile and embedded platforms. Compared with prior on-device LLM inference systems, LeanStream reduces memory usage by 4.8$\times$ to 7.5$\times$ at the best throughput achieved by prior work, while further improving token generation throughput by 1.6$\times$ to 2.1$\times$. Source code is available at https://github.com/RenyuanLIU/LeanStream.