Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) supports optical sensing and scene observation when limited photon capture and sensor noise degrade image quality. However, existing methods can introduce colour deviations or blur local details in the enhanced images. To address this challenge, we propose CueDR-Net, a dual-path network that combines brightness adjustment with local content reconstruction through bidirectional cue interaction and adaptive multi-scale refinement. Specifically, a fixed extractor derives luminance variation, colour, and texture cue maps from the input image. These maps are encoded in a cue stream that exchanges features with the image stream through bidirectional attention. The exchanged features support two paths for brightness adjustment and local content reconstruction. The brightness adjustment path predicts pixel wise adjustment maps that control iterative intensity changes in the input image. In parallel, the residual path uses the exchanged features to predict an additive correction for local content reconstruction. To capture weak structures across scales, Adaptive Multi-Scale Response Refinement Convolution (AMRRConv) refines the features used for both predictions. It fuses learnable local transition responses with multi-scale features from factorized three-plane filtering using pixel wise weights. The adjusted image is added to the correction before being mapped to the enhanced image. Evaluations on LOLv1, LSRW-HUAWEI, and LSRW-NIKON demonstrate competitive enhancement performance, supported by ablation studies. AMRRConv also achieves competitive low-light detection performance with a small neck parameter count when integrated into YOLOv11.
We introduce a spectral hierarchy of cosmic-web classifications obtained by applying simple scale-weighting kernels to the density field before performing a standard eigenvalue-based web classification. This unifies and extends several widely used web definitions within a single framework: the familiar potential/tidal web (large-scale, nonlocal), a curvature-based web (more local, peak- and ridge-sensitive), and additional higher-derivative levels that progressively emphasize smaller-scale structure. Because the classification is built from second derivatives of the filtered field, successive hierarchy levels align naturally with operator families that appear in renormalised bias and effective descriptions of large-scale structure, providing an explicit bridge between cosmic-web environments and long- and short-range nonlocal bias ingredients. We quantify the information content of the hierarchy with a compact statistic: we map each cell to one of four ordered web types (void, sheet, filament, knot), construct a corresponding ``web contrast'' field, and measure its cross-correlation with halos from the AbacusSummit simulation suite on a coarse mesh with $\Delta L\simeq 5.5\,h^{-1}\mathrm{Mpc}$. We find that the hierarchy retains significant tracer-relevant information from very large scales down to the mesh Nyquist limit, with the more local (curvature/higher-derivative) levels dominating toward nonlinear scales. This makes the spectral hierarchy a practical, interpretable conditioning basis for fast mock-galaxy production and field-level modelling, and a flexible tool for studying environment-dependent clustering and assembly bias.
Deploying autonomous driving systems requires robustness against long-tail scenarios that are rare but safety-critical. While adversarial training offers a promising solution, existing methods typically decouple scenario generation from policy optimization and rely on heuristic surrogates. This leads to objective misalignment and fails to capture the shifting failure modes of evolving policies. This paper presents ADV-0, a closed-loop min-max optimization framework that treats the interaction between driving policy (defender) and adversarial agent (attacker) as a zero-sum Markov game. By aligning the attacker's utility directly with the defender's objective, we reveal the optimal adversary distribution. To make this tractable, we cast dynamic adversary evolution as iterative preference learning, efficiently approximating this optimum and offering an algorithm-agnostic solution to the game. Theoretically, ADV-0 converges to a Nash Equilibrium and maximizes a certified lower bound on real-world performance. Experiments indicate that it effectively exposes diverse safety-critical failures and greatly enhances the generalizability of both learned policies and motion planners against unseen long-tail risks.
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has revolutionized interactive segmentation through spatial prompting. While existing work primarily focuses on automating prompts in various settings, real-world annotation workflows involve iterative refinement where annotators observe model outputs and strategically place prompts to resolve ambiguities. Current pipelines typically rely on the annotator's visual assessment of the predicted mask quality. We postulate that a principled approach for automated interactive prompting is to use a model-derived criterion to identify the most informative region for the next prompt. In this work, we establish active prompting: a spatial active learning approach where locations within images constitute an unlabeled pool and prompts serve as queries to prioritize information-rich regions, increasing the utility of each interaction. We further present BALD-SAM: a principled framework adapting Bayesian Active Learning by Disagreement (BALD) to spatial prompt selection by quantifying epistemic uncertainty. To do so, we freeze the entire model and apply Bayesian uncertainty modeling only to a small learned prediction head, making intractable uncertainty estimation practical for large multi-million parameter foundation models. Across 16 datasets spanning natural, medical, underwater, and seismic domains, BALD-SAM demonstrates strong cross-domain performance, ranking first or second on 14 of 16 benchmarks. We validate these gains through a comprehensive ablation suite covering 3 SAM backbones and 35 Laplace posterior configurations, amounting to 38 distinct ablation settings. Beyond strong average performance, BALD-SAM surpasses human prompting and, in several categories, even oracle prompting, while consistently outperforming one-shot baselines in final segmentation quality, particularly on thin and structurally complex objects.
Current skeleton representation learning paradigms face distinct limitations: Contrastive Learning (CL) often overlooks fine-grained motion details, while Masked Auto-Encoders (MAE) rely on coordinate-level reconstruction. This reconstruction inherently demands dense token sequences and heavy decoders, wasting pre-training computation on discarded components and forcing downstream inference to process dense token grids. To resolve these bottlenecks, we propose SLiM (Skeleton Less is More), a compact-token framework that unifies masked feature prediction and contrastive learning via a shared encoder. By shifting the objective from raw coordinate reconstruction to decoder-free, teacher-guided feature prediction, SLiM breaks the reliance on dense tokenization and enables effective learning with a highly compact token grid. Crucially, to prevent trivial shortcut learning arising from strong inter-joint dependencies of human, we introduce Semantic Tube Masking together with Skeleton-Aware Augmentations to enforce deep skeletal-temporal reasoning and anatomical consistency. Extensive experiments across multiple downstream protocols demonstrate that SLiM achieves state-of-the-art performance while structurally reducing inference computation by 7.89$\times$ compared to dense-token MAE baselines.
Animal re-identification (ReID) faces critical challenges due to viewpoint variations, particularly in Aerial-Ground (AG-ReID) settings where models must match individuals across drastic elevation changes. However, existing datasets lack the precise angular annotations required to systematically analyze these geometric variations. To address this, we introduce the Multi-view Oriented Observation (MOO) dataset, a large-scale synthetic AG-ReID dataset of $1,000$ cattle individuals captured from $128$ uniformly sampled viewpoints ($128,000$ annotated images). Using this controlled dataset, we quantify the influence of elevation and identify a critical elevation threshold, above which models generalize significantly better to unseen views. Finally, we validate the transferability to real-world applications in both zero-shot and supervised settings, demonstrating performance gains across four real-world cattle datasets and confirming that synthetic geometric priors effectively bridge the domain gap. Collectively, this dataset and analysis lay the foundation for future model development in cross-view animal ReID. MOO is publicly available at https://github.com/TurtleSmoke/MOO.
Audio Super-Resolution is a set of techniques aimed at high-quality estimation of the given signal as if it would be sampled with higher sample rate. Among suggested methods there are diffusion and flow models (which are considered slower), generative adversarial networks (which are considered faster), however both approaches are currently presented by high-parametric networks, requiring high computational costs both for training and inference. We propose a solution to both these problems by re-considering the recent advances in the training of diffusion models and applying them to super-resolution from any to 48 kHz sample rate. Our approach shows better results than NU-Wave 2 and is comparable to state-of-the-art models. Our model called FastWave has around 50 GFLOPs of computational complexity and 1.3 M parameters and can be trained with less resources and significantly faster than the majority of recently proposed diffusion- and flow-based solutions. The code has been made publicly available.
Masked diffusion models (MDMs) are trained to predict tokens in every order but generate in one. As such, MDM likelihood is an intractable sum over all orders. The evidence lower bound (ELBO) is used as a proxy for likelihood, but it is a loose bound and assumes positions are unmasked uniformly at random. Frontier MDMs, however, select positions with deterministic rules such as confidence. To resolve this mismatch we introduce DUEL, a framework that unifies common deterministic MDM samplers. DUEL computes the likelihood exactly, under the sampler that is actually used during generation. DUEL is a simple plug-and-play algorithm applicable to any pretrained MDM with no retraining. To compute the likelihood of a text sequence, simply replay generation, reveal the true tokens instead of sampled ones, and sum their log-probabilities. Evaluating with DUEL instead of the ELBO changes what we conclude about MDMs. The perplexity gap between MDMs and autoregressive (AR) models shrinks by up to 32% in-domain and 82% zero-shot. In scaling laws, the reported 16x MDM-AR compute gap falls to 9x under DUEL, showing over 1/3 of it is an evaluation artifact. Scoring multiple-choice answers with likelihood via DUEL instead of the ELBO improves LLaDA-8B accuracy on all six tasks, by up to 9.7 points. DUEL also selects samplers correctly: it matches a gold-standard LLM judge on every decided comparison, which generative perplexity and MAUVE fail to do. DUEL reveals that MDMs are more competitive with AR models than the ELBO suggests.
The use of algorithmic predictions in decision-making leads to a feedback loop where the models we deploy actively influence the data distributions we see, and later use to retrain on. This dynamic was formalized by Perdomo et al. 2020 in their work on performative prediction. Our main result is an unconditional reduction showing that any no-regret algorithm deployed in performative settings converges to a (mixed) performatively stable equilibrium: a solution in which models actively shape data distributions in ways that their own predictions look optimal in hindsight. Prior to our work, all positive results in this area imposed strong restrictions on how models influenced distributions. By using a martingale argument and allowing randomization, we avoid any assumption on how populations respond to predictions and sidestep recent hardness results showing that deterministic stable models are in general PPAD-hard to compute. Lastly, on a more conceptual note, our connection sheds light on why common algorithms, like gradient descent, are naturally stabilizing and prevent runaway feedback loops. We hope our work enables future technical transfer of ideas between online optimization and performativity.
Trainable-frequency quantum models train the prefactors of their encoding gates so that the circuit's frequencies can move onto the target's. From the unit start of prior work, training rarely reaches a target more than one resolution step away. We show that the target-driven part of the prefactor gradient is a weighted sum of slopes of the overlap $\sin u/u$, where $u$ is the model-target frequency distance scaled by the window half-width. This gives each frequency a reach: under gradient flow, an isolated real frequency whose coefficient adapts optimally reaches its target from within half a step, for every target at least one step from zero frequency; with a fixed coefficient, a phase-dependent barrier can stop it. A ternary prefactor grid places a model frequency within half a step of every band frequency, with logarithmically many encoding gates. Single-frequency circuits trained with Adam and jointly trained amplitudes behave as predicted: inside the first side lobe, a frequency starts toward its target exactly when in phase with it in 98% of runs, and only 11 of 768 frequencies starting beyond the lobe reached their target. With several frequencies, the grid start raised successful fits on synthetic targets from 69% to 84% against the best random start. With many target frequencies, least squares on the fixed grid fits near-perfectly, but the circuit does not reach the coefficients; training the prefactors narrows this shortfall, but with 8 and 24 target frequencies, training the fixed grid ten times longer fitted better. On real series, training the frequencies improved held-out $R^2$ at equal budget by 0.010--0.045 on four of seven series, but a classical screen did not separate these from the others. A classical model with independently trainable frequencies shows the same dependence on the start; our results describe how to train such models, not an advantage of the circuit.
Modern machine learning models are deployed in diverse, non-stationary environments where they must continually adapt to new tasks and evolving knowledge. Continual fine-tuning and in-context learning are costly and brittle, whereas neural memory methods promise lightweight updates with minimal forgetting. However, existing neural memory models typically assume a single fixed objective and homogeneous information streams, leaving users with no control over what the model remembers or ignores over time. To address this challenge, we propose a generalized neural memory system that performs flexible updates based on learning instructions specified in natural language. Our approach enables adaptive agents to learn selectively from heterogeneous information sources, supporting settings, such as healthcare and customer service, where fixed-objective memory updates are insufficient.
Understanding how neural networks arrive at their predictions is essential for debugging, auditing, and deployment. Mechanistic interpretability pursues this goal by identifying circuits--minimal subnetworks responsible for specific behaviors. However, existing circuit discovery methods are brittle: circuits depend strongly on the chosen concept dataset and often fail to transfer out-of-distribution, raising doubts whether they capture the concept or merely dataset-specific artifacts. We introduce Certified Circuits, which provide provable stability guarantees for circuit discovery. Our framework wraps any black-box discovery algorithm with randomized data subsampling to certify that inclusion decisions over circuit components--neurons or edges of the model graph, depending on the base algorithm--are invariant to bounded edit-distance perturbations of the concept dataset. Unstable components are abstained from, yielding circuits that are more compact and more accurate. We validate across three architectures (ResNet, ViT, GPT-2) on vision (ImageNet and four OOD datasets) and language (IOI, IOI-Hard, Greater-Than) tasks. Certified circuits achieve up to 56% higher accuracy and up to 80% fewer components, and remain reliable where baselines degrade. Certified Circuits puts circuit discovery on formal ground by producing mechanistic explanations that are provably stable and better aligned with the target concept. Code: https://github.com/AlaaAnani/certified-circuits.
We study online alignment of large language models under misspecified preference feedback, where the observed preference oracle deviates from an ideal but unknown ground-truth oracle. The online LLM alignment problem is a bi-level reinforcement problem due to the coupling between data collection and policy updates. Recently, the problem has been reduced to a tractable single-level objective in the SAIL (Self-Improving Efficient Online Alignment) framework. In this paper, we introduce a pointwise oracle uncertainty set in this problem and formulate an oracle-robust online alignment objective as a worst-case optimization problem. For log-linear policies, we show that this robust objective admits an exact closed-form decomposition into the original loss function plus an explicit sensitivity penalty. In the finite-response log-linear setting, we develop projected stochastic composite updates for the resulting weakly convex objective and prove $\widetilde{O}(\varepsilon^{-2})$ oracle complexity for reaching approximate stationarity.
Synthetic data generated by video generative models has shown promise for robot learning as a scalable pipeline, but it often suffers from noisy action labels due to imperfect video generation or inaccurate action prediction. Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have been leveraged to validate video quality, but they cannot directly evaluate the generated actions themselves. To tackle this issue, we introduce RoboCurate, a novel framework for action-verified synthetic robot data that addresses inconsistencies between generated videos and annotated actions. Specifically, RoboCurate executes the actions predicted by an inverse dynamics model (IDM) in a simulator and verifies action consistency by measuring the motion agreement between the simulator rollout and the generated video. To better leverage such a framework, we further expand the scene diversity of synthetic data beyond the available dataset through off-the-shelf generative models with structured editing axes. We then use a VLM to pre-filter physically implausible generated videos before verifying their action labels. Across diverse manipulation scenarios, RoboCurate yields substantial relative improvements in success rates compared to using only real data, achieving +90.3% on GR-1 Tabletop (300 demos), +29.1% on DexMimicGen in the pre-training setup on simulation benchmarks, and +179.9% and +42.9% in the co-finetuning setup on challenging real-world ALLEX and OpenArm humanoid benchmarks, respectively.
Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) promise to ground language instructions in robot control, yet in practice often fail to follow language faithfully. When presented with instructions that lack strong scene-specific supervision, VLAs suffer from counterfactual failures: they act based on vision shortcuts induced by dataset biases, repeatedly executing well-learned behaviors and selecting objects frequently seen during training regardless of language intent. To support systematic study, we introduce LIBERO-CF, the first counterfactual benchmark for VLAs that evaluates language following capability by assigning alternative, feasible task instructions under the same LIBERO scene layouts. Our evaluation reveals that counterfactual failures are prevalent yet underexplored across state-of-the-art VLAs. To mitigate these failures, we propose Counterfactual Action Guidance (CAG), a simple yet effective dual-branch inference scheme that explicitly strengthens language conditioning in VLAs. CAG combines a standard VLA policy with a parallel language-unconditioned branch, amplifying the difference between their action predictions induced by language instructions. This design reduces reliance on vision shortcuts, improves robustness on counterfactual tasks, and requires neither additional demonstrations nor modifications to the base VLA architecture or its pretrained weights. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements across diverse VLAs. On LIBERO-CF, our training-free variant, TF-CAG, improves $\pi_{0.5}$ by 9.7% in language grounding and 3.6% in task success. When using a separate Vision-Action (VA) module, VA-CAG achieves larger gains of 15.5% and 8.5%, respectively. In real-world evaluations, VA-CAG improves language grounding by 9.4% and task success by 17.2% on average.
Remote sensing (RS) change detection is essential for interpreting surface dynamics. Semantic change detection (SCD) further enables pixel-level understanding of multi-class transitions, yet remains sensitive to pseudo-changes induced by imaging conditions. Recent RS foundation models extract semantically consistent features across temporal and environmental variations, which is critical for mitigating pseudo-changes. However, existing SCD methods are often rigid and backbone-specific, lacking the flexibility to integrate diverse multi-scale features from emerging foundation models. To this end, we introduce a modular Cascaded Gated Decoder (CG-Decoder) that bridges various backbones and SCD tasks, processing multi-scale features in a coarse-to-fine manner while enabling adaptive change extraction. Building upon the RS foundation model PerA, we present PerASCD, a unified SCD framework. We further propose a Soft Semantic Consistency Loss (SSCLoss) to mitigate numerical instability in mixed-precision training. Extensive experiments on SECOND and LandsatSCD show that PerASCD achieves new state-of-the-art Sek scores (26.11% and 65.21%), surpassing the previous best by 0.61% and 4.95%, respectively. It also demonstrates exceptional data efficiency (outperforming the full-data baseline with 50% data), seamless cross-backbone generalization, and enhanced interpretability. Our approach maintains robust semantic consistency under radiometric variations, providing a reliable SCD solution. Code: https://github.com/SathShen/PerASCD.git.
Prompt design affects the moral judgments and refusal behavior produced by large language models (LLMs), yet controlled comparisons remain fragmented across datasets and models. We introduce ProMoral-Bench, a benchmark-style comparison of 10 prompting paradigms across four LLM families. Using ETHICS, Scruples, WildJailbreak, and our 200-pair ETHICS-Contrast set, we report task-level metrics together with Moral Competence Score (MCS), jailbreak/over-refusal Safety Robustness Score (SRS), and Unified Moral Safety Score (UMSS). UMSS is a study-specific relative summary of MCS and SRS, not an absolute measure of model safety or moral grounding. In this fixed-template evaluation, compact exemplar-guided scaffolds attain stronger competence-robustness trade-offs at lower token cost than the particular multi-stage variants tested, although multi-stage prompting occasionally improves jailbreak refusal. The few-shot demonstrations are non-overlapping but drawn from the evaluation distributions, so their advantage should not be read as out-of-distribution robustness. Code and data are available at https://github.com/rohanthomas334-sketch/ProMoral_Bench.
Online conformal prediction (OCP) seeks prediction intervals that achieve long-run $1-\alpha$ coverage for arbitrary (possibly adversarial) data streams, while remaining as informative as possible. Existing OCP methods often require manual learning-rate tuning to work well, and may also require algorithm-specific analyses. Here, we develop a general regret-to-coverage theory for interval-valued OCP based on the $(1-\alpha)$-pinball loss. Our first contribution is to identify \emph{linearized regret} as a key notion, showing that controlling it implies coverage bounds for any online algorithm. This relies on a black-box reduction that depends only on the Fenchel conjugate of an upper bound on the linearized regret. Building on this theory, we propose UP-OCP, a parameter-free method for OCP, via a reduction to a two-asset portfolio selection problem, leveraging universal portfolio algorithms. We show strong finite-time bounds on the miscoverage of UP-OCP, even for polynomially growing predictions. Extensive experiments support that UP-OCP delivers consistently better size/coverage trade-offs than prior online conformal baselines.
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable reasoning capabilities, yet the internal mechanisms driving these multi-step processes remain opaque. Existing mechanistic interpretability approaches often rely on superficial text-pattern co-occurrences or capture only short-term effects, struggling to trace the long-horizon, outcome-driven influence of internal components such as neurons or sparse features in multi-step reasoning.In this paper, we introduce Integrated Policy Gradient (IPG), a novel, training-free framework that brings policy-based attribution into mechanistic interpretability for LLM reasoning. Grounded in \textit{outcome-oriented} and \textit{sequential-influence-aware} principles, it backpropagates outcome-level, non-differentiable behavioral signals (e.g., reasoning outcome correctness) through entire inference trajectories, utilizing path integration to isolate outcome-relevant mediators at component level for reliable attribution. This provides a linear approximation of Causal Mediation Analysis (CMA) in reasoning. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that \method achieves precise localization and reveals mechanistic insights by identifying sparse, concentrated subsets of internal components associated with specific reasoning behaviors. Our method also enables modulation of reasoning capabilities, offering a powerful and reliable framework for understanding LLM reasoning. The project page is at https://foundation-model-research.github.io/IPG .
Many complex networks exhibit hierarchical, tree-like structures, making hyperbolic space a natural candidate wherein to learn representations of them. Based on this observation, Hyperbolic Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs) have been widely adopted as a principled choice for representation learning on tree-like graphs. In this work, we question this paradigm by proposing the additional condition of geometry--task alignment, i.e., whether the metric structure of the target follows that of the input graph. We start by empirically showing that HGNNs can recover low-distortion representations when supervision explicitly rewards metric preservation and proceed by theoretically analyzing a controlled regression setting in which a linear readout benefits from representations whose geometry is aligned with the target metric. Finally, by relying on both predictive performance and embedding distortion, we further show that HGNNs gain an advantage on link prediction, a naturally geometry-aligned task, whereas this advantage largely disappears on standard node classification benchmarks. Overall, our findings shift the focus from only asking "Is the graph hyperbolic?" to also questioning "Is the task aligned with hyperbolic geometry?", showing that HGNNs consistently outperform Euclidean models under such alignment, while their advantage vanishes otherwise.