Owing to the prohibitive cost of manual annotation for enormous medical images, self-supervised learning (SSL) has gained substantial attention and shown promise in various medical imaging tasks. Among SSL approaches, contrastive learning has emerged as a prominent one, encouraging models to encode semantic information that remains invariant between different augmented views. However, this invariance can be spurious for medical images, as subtle but critical medical features can be suppressed during augmentations. In this paper, we mitigate this issue by encoding the learned feature embeddings as probability distributions rather than fixed vectors, thus capturing a richer and more nuanced spectrum of information. Furthermore, we propose a unified probabilistic framework that seamlessly integrates multiple SSL approaches. Our method achieves superior performance over the state-of-the-art SSL methods on various downstream tasks across multiple datasets, including medical image segmentation and classification. We further validate the method through additional analyses of robustness to stronger augmentations, label efficiency under limited fine-tuning labels, and computational trade-offs. The code is released at https://github.com/wwzjer/ProbSSL.
Most memory systems for LLM agents are retrospective, preserving and retrieving past information to inform current decisions. Proactive agents, however, also require prospective memory: retaining future-directed intentions and realizing them when appropriate opportunities arise, even without explicit requests. Crucially, remembering the right intention does not guarantee acting at the right time: a related observation may call for waiting, while a later cue may make the same intention actionable. Inspired by cognitive theories of human prospective memory, we introduce Pro-Memory, a memory framework that separates maintaining future intentions from deciding when and how to realize them. Pro-Memory preserves pending objectives linked to their supporting evidence, assesses new observations against their original goals and activation conditions, and coordinates appropriate contributions with the agent's ongoing actions. It further updates intention states based on actions actually issued or evidence of resolution, while an experience memory distills feedback from completed episodes into guidance for future decisions. Experiments on two benchmarks spanning delayed-intention tasks and open-ended proactive assistance demonstrate consistent improvements in proactive task performance over representative memory approaches across multiple LLM backbones, while limiting unnecessary interventions.
Extreme events often occur sequentially, from earthquake-tsunami cascades to successive extreme losses in financial markets. We introduce an extremal token representation that encodes multivariate observations as a categorical sequence. A quiet token records the absence of threshold exceedances; otherwise, the token identifies the exceeding component with the largest marginal probability-scale score. The representation is invariant to componentwise strictly increasing transformations. It preserves the identity and temporal ordering of dominant exceedances but discards their magnitudes and the identities of nondominant simultaneous exceedances. A decoder-only transformer estimates the history-dependent next-token kernel on this representation, and recursive sampling generates future token sequences from the induced joint predictive law. We amortize our generative model by pretraining across simulated process families with varying parameters and dependence persistence. Next-token predictions are evaluated against exact conditional probabilities for held-out categorical processes and particle filter references for heavy-tailed vector autoregressive processes. Applied to ten-second returns for five semiconductor stocks, the pretrained model supports zero-shot transfer, while a few epochs of adaptation improve agreement between observed and generated token frequencies and transition patterns. These results support task-specific tokenization and simulation-based pretraining for modeling which dimensions dominate multivariate extremes.
Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference with a small drafter, whose per-guess acceptance rate determines the achievable speedup. Feature-level drafters share a design choice: every token, easy or hard, is drafted under a single forward pass. Many of the tokens the target rejects are ones the drafter is itself unsure about yet the target answers decisively. To address this, we introduce Parallel Reconsideration: guided by its own uncertainty, the drafter reconsiders its hesitant guesses with extra passes that run in parallel with the one-pass draft, adding negligible latency. A co-designed training recipe and serving-time drafting algorithm append these reconsidered guesses to the original draft tree as refined candidates. Across models and benchmarks, on average, Parallel Reconsideration improves over the baselines by 5.3% to 10.2% on acceptance length and by 3.5% to 9.2% on speedup.
Covariate balancing is widely used for estimating causal effects in observational studies. A central challenge is determining which covariate features should be balanced. Forest-kernel balancing provides a data-driven way to learn informative balancing features. Existing forest-kernel balancing methods first learn a tree-based representation and then construct balancing weights. However, this procedure creates a mismatch, as limited tree capacity may be spent on features that are already well represented. We propose Balance-Guided Forest (BGF), which uses the current balancing weights to guide subsequent tree construction. BGF grows trees using a novel splitting score that combines residual imbalance with an outcome contrast, favoring splits that separate outcome-relevant regions where imbalance remains. This couples representation learning with covariate balancing rather than treating balancing as a downstream step. We establish an oracle-type bound that links the iterative construction to weighting error and causal bias. Simulations exhibit improvements in causal estimation relative to existing forest-kernel approaches. Real-data applications illustrate the practical behavior of BGF across observational studies.
Search can help LLM agents correct mistakes, but their starting conditions may shape which evidence they find and use. Drawing on cognitive-bias paradigms, we develop a controlled search harness to examine result order, records of prior work, and initial hypotheses while holding each question and document collection fixed. Matched controls distinguish order effects from differences in document composition and the effects of failed work from context length. Across 10 models and 1,000 synthetic search worlds, we track queries, retrieved documents, document openings, and final answers. Our comparisons suggest that final answers are more sensitive to initial evidence order during active search than when all evidence is supplied in full. Dead-end histories can reduce strategy switching relative to matched neutral histories, indicating an effect beyond context length. Under wrong hypotheses, stage measurements distinguish reduced retrieval or opening from errors that persist after counter-evidence is opened. Exploratory interventions show that opening counter-evidence more often can coincide with lower accuracy, while accuracy can improve with little change in opening.
Probabilistic traffic forecasting is essential for reliable Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), as it captures uncertainties in complex road networks. Recent diffusion- and flow-based generative models have facilitated uncertainty modeling through a multi-step sampling process. However, beyond slow inference, this process is designed to capture complex multimodal distributions, which misaligns with the limited complexity of the conditional traffic data distribution, causing models to underperform deterministic baselines. To address this, we introduce the \underline{Co}nsistency-\underline{Re}laxed \underline{Flow} Map (CoReFlow) model, presenting the first effort to leverage the one-step generation capability of flow maps, known as solution operators of probability-flow ordinary differential equations. Besides, we improve accuracy using a concise training objective that supervises the model via interpolation endpoints over finite time intervals. Unlike existing methods (e.g., self-distillation and MeanFlow Identity) that maintain trajectory consistency to model multimodal distributions, our objective leverages conditional mean to restrict the consistency, thereby achieving higher accuracy in the probabilistic traffic forecasting task. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets show CoReFlow achieves state-of-the-art forecasting accuracy. It surpasses recent baselines, provides competitive uncertainty modeling, and reduces inference costs compared to existing generative baselines.
Hopfield neural networks and noncooperative games provide seemingly different approaches to understanding how collective outcomes emerge from local interactions. In a neural network, individual units adjust their states according to local signals; in a game, players choose actions to maximise individual payoffs. I establish an exact equivalence between symmetric binary Hopfield networks and binary-action games that admit a quadratic potential. The equivalence identifies stable network configurations with pure-strategy Nash equilibria, and asynchronous neural updating with best-response dynamics. More broadly, the storage and retrieval of memories in neural networks correspond, respectively, to the design and selection of equilibria in games.
Finding specific objects, structures, and spatial patterns supports critical work in agriculture, infrastructure planning, environmental monitoring, and disaster response. These features, however, are often dispersed across very large regions and span dramatically different spatial scales, which defines a search space that is costly to embed, maintain, and search naively. We introduce GeoDIVE, a model that treats a multiresolution satellite image gallery as a forest and uses best-first traversal to determine which tiles to encode. At each visited node, a lightweight model then predicts an optimistic estimate of the best query similarity hidden among its descendants using the query and subtree representations. In evaluations with image and open-vocabulary text queries, GeoDIVE matches exhaustive search at 10% of the encoding cost for image queries and leads all tested baselines at every budget in both modalities. To support future evaluation of multiscale geospatial search, we also release object-level image and text queries for Git-10M, constructed from Microsoft building footprints and OpenStreetMap polygons with VLM-generated captions. Source code and models will be made publicly available.
Sli2Vol propagates a binary mask through affinities between adjacent slices, but an error can persist because each prediction becomes the input to the next step. Three orthogonal annotations reduce dependence on any one chain, yet they offer more than three starting masks: where a chain crosses another annotated plane, the correct label is already known. Those labels could correct drift during propagation and indicate how much to trust each chain at fusion. Between annotated planes, the information carried by the chain may matter as well. A binary mask records foreground membership but discards distance to the boundary, a cue that could help follow gradual shape changes between slices.We address these two sources of error with a fixed pretrained affinity backbone. We anchor each chain by correcting its prediction where it crosses another annotated plane, then use its agreement with those labels to weight fusion. We compare this anchored mask with two ways of transporting boundary geometry: a truncated signed-distance field (SDF) propagated by dense affinity averaging, and a contour whose vertices follow motion cues from the same affinity. The contour tracker starts from a hand-crafted rule and learns a motion correction from supervoxel pseudo-objects in 506 CT volumes, without manual organ labels. On 2,091 held-out structure instances from approximately 403 CT scans spanning 17 abdominal structures, anchoring raises mean Dice from 0.737 with orthogonal mask propagation to 0.769 and improves every structure. Beyond the anchored mask, learned contour tracking improves Dice by 5.7\% for the esophagus and 5.9\% for the postcava, while SDF transport improves right-adrenal Dice by 2.8\%. The anchored methods have similar mean Dice (0.769--0.772); contour tracking performs worse on the kidneys, stomach, and hepatic vessel tree.
Coarse-to-fine stereo matching enables efficient disparity estimation but remains sensitive to errors in propagated disparity, which may place ground-truth correspondences outside subsequent local search ranges. We propose TRUST-Stereo (Teacher-Assisted Robust Uncertainty-Guided Search and Transfer for Fast Stereo Matching), which addresses this limitation through an Uncertainty-Guided Residual Search Module (UGRSM). UGRSM estimates the reliability of propagated disparity and predicts residual offsets to adaptively relocate local cost-volume centers. Additionally, we introduce a two-stage Senior-Junior Teacher Assistant knowledge distillation strategy to transfer rich monocular representations from a large foundation model to a lightweight backbone to achieve fast stereo matching performance. Experiments on KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015, ETH3D, and Middlebury demonstrate strong zero-shot generalization. Using only 1.4M synthetic stereo pairs, TRUST-Stereo achieves state-of-the-art results on several benchmark metrics, outperforming competing efficient methods trained with substantially larger datasets, including real-world pseudo-labeled samples. Specifically, it achieves a KITTI 2015 EPE of 0.93, ETH3D Bad 1.0 of 2.13% and Middlebury Bad 2.0 of 6.79% while maintaining inference at approximately 50 ms per stereo pair.
Background: The automatic identification of tree species from bark photographs is of practical interest for forestry inventory and the wood-processing industry, yet the design choices that govern the accuracy of deep-learning approaches have not been studied systematically, and some prior results may be inflated by leakage of images of the same trunk across training and test partitions. Methods: A systematic ablation study is conducted on the public BarkNet 1.0 dataset (20 species) under the established tree-level, leakage-safe partitioning scheme. Using ConvNeXt-V2 backbones, the following factors are varied in turn and evaluated by five-fold cross-validation: patch size, the strategy by which per-patch predictions are aggregated into an image-level decision, the training regime (single- versus two-stage), backbone capacity, the whole-image baseline, and the number of patches available at inference. Results: Per-patch accuracy rises monotonically with patch size (from 75.6% at 160 px to 89.6% at 512 px), and image-level accuracy rises in step, plateauing near 94.9% around 512 px. Learned aggregation exceeds majority voting by at most 0.7 pp, an advantage that shrinks as patches grow and attention becomes near-uniform. Backbone capacity (pico to tiny) alters accuracy by less than a point, and two-stage training offers no advantage over one-stage. Whole-image classification (91.9%) trails patch-based aggregation, since it admits no bag to average over; accuracy increases with the number of patches at inference, saturating around 64. Conclusions: The study yields a simple recommended configuration: patches as large as possible while leaving enough to average over (around 512 px here), with a nano backbone. It also quantifies the second-order role of learned aggregation and model capacity, providing a reproducible reference point for practitioners and future research
Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is a widely used deep reinforcement learning algorithm that combines entropy regularization with an actor-critic architecture. Standard implementations rely on one-step temporal-difference learning of Q-functions, yet alternative critic design choices remain underexplored. In this work, we revisit three such choices: learning soft advantages instead of soft Q-values, the use of multi-step return targets, and the training of multi-step critics from replay buffer data. Keeping the policy objective fixed, we compare the six critic variants these choices generate: (i) advantage and (ii) dueling-advantage critics learned from one-step transitions, and $\lambda$-return and soft Generalized Advantage Estimation (GAE) critics learned either (iii, iv) on-policy or (v, vi) from replayed trajectory segments. Each variant is evaluated across an entire random hyperparameter search on fourteen tasks, treating the hyperparameters as part of the algorithm. Learning soft advantages instead of soft Q-values does not improve performance, and the soft GAE critic adds nothing over the simpler $\lambda$-return critic. What does improve performance, most clearly on continuous control, is training a $\lambda$-return critic on replayed trajectory segments, even without importance weighting or trace cutting. This extends earlier evidence that uncorrected multi-step targets work well under replay to the full soft $\lambda$-return, entropy terms included. By design, the underlying ideas studied here extend beyond SAC, and our empirical findings aim to encourage their application to a broader class of reinforcement learning algorithms.
In this work, we present adaptive domain decomposition finite basis physics-informed neural networks (ADD-FBPINNs). The proposed method integrates Partition of Unity Networks (POUNets), a data-driven approach for learning domain partitions, with finite Basis physics-informed neural networks (FBPINNs) to perform more efficient domain decomposition and achieve more accurate approximations. FBPINNs improve upon the accuracy of standard physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) through user-defined subdivisions of the computational domain. By adapting the domain decomposition based on the solution's features using a separable POUNet, the framework can automatically learn partitions that are stable and can be geometrically interpretable. We test this approach on the two-dimensional Helmholtz equation, two-dimensional Poisson equation with multiscale features, and viscous Burgers equation and observe improved accuracy compared with FBPINNs with fixed domain decomposition.
A central challenge in assistive brain-to-robot control is decoding a user's latent intent from complex and noisy brain signals. Prior approaches evaluate decoders as single-trial classifiers with accuracy-based metrics, but this neglects the inherently sequential nature of assistive control. Since a planner must integrate intermittent, noisy decoder outputs over time, single-step accuracy can only be a proxy when predicting downstream task performance. We formalize brain-to-robot control as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), and prove that there is a sharp phase transition: regret is uniformly bounded across the horizon as long as pairs of goals are all decoder-distinguishable, but grows linearly otherwise. We show that a single channel statistic, the worst-pair Chernoff information $\Gamma_{\min}$ sets this boundary. Then, we derive a closed-form regret predictor $U_{\mathrm{id}}(C)$, that can be computed from any confusion matrix in $O(K^2)$ time. Across two domains spanning orthogonal information channels, we show that $U_{\mathrm{id}}$ predicts cumulative planning regret beyond what accuracy can explain. We then highlight a pathological accuracy trap, in which two decoders have identical validation accuracy 35.1% on real EEG data (BNCI2014001 subject 5) but result in a difference of $9.6\times$ in held-out regret, which $U_{\mathrm{id}}$ predicts. Same-signal control confirms $U_{\mathrm{id}}$'s advantage with decoders that span independent feature channels. Ultimately, our work provides a drop-in diagnostic to evaluate and select sensors and decoders in sequential assistive control.
Comparing sparse autoencoders (SAEs) requires connecting feature correspondence, differences between whole dictionaries, and uncertainty from finite evaluation data. We develop a framework that connects these tasks through an energy-weighted optimal-transport plan under a specified similarity geometry. The same plan defines a dictionary-level discrepancy, decomposes it into latent contributions, and quantifies how each latent's mass is distributed across counterparts. We characterize relationships between decoder, activation, and first-order causal similarities; idealized models clarify the interpretation of splitting and absorption. For fixed trained SAEs, we derive joint asymptotic inference for transport costs and fractions, accounting for activation similarities and both energy marginals estimated from the same documents. A joint document bootstrap gives asymptotically valid simultaneous confidence bands. Experiments across four language models locate cross-seed discrepancy and separate context-dependent changes.
Adversarial diffusion distillation has conventionally relied on image features for discrimination. We revisit this choice for multimodal diffusion transformers (MMDiTs), whose text stream becomes image-dependent through joint attention. We introduce Text-Stream Adversarial Distillation (TSAD), which exploits intermediate text-token states as a new adversarial representation. Because the text stream has already read the image while remaining tied to the text condition, changing that condition changes what information it extracts from the image. Building on this property, we introduce Aspect-Cued Discrimination (ACD), which conditions the discriminator on different aspects of the sample, such as typography, objects, or style, to steer which properties are emphasized during adversarial training. Building on the expert-discriminator design of NitroFusion, we integrate TSAD and ACD in NitroFusion2. NitroFusion2 brings few-step distillation from the conventional 4-8-step regime down to just 1-2 steps at comparable quality. At one step, it produces sharp rendered text and rich fine-grained details, making one-step generation practical rather than merely a stress test for distillation. At two steps, it remains competitive across the evaluated benchmarks. These results establish the MMDiT text stream as a powerful and steerable representation for adversarial diffusion distillation.
Modern railway perception requires large comprehensive image datasets, but creating them is slowed by manual labeling, especially for track polylines and other complex infrastructure geometry. This paper presents the Active Railway Infrastructure Dataset Annotation framework, a railway-specific semi-automated pipeline that converts instance predictions from a mask scoring instance segmentation network into bounding-boxes, polygons, polylines, and paired polylines. To keep automatic track geometry annotation reliable without ground truth, it applies confidence thresholds and an unique contour-agreement quality score as an acceptance gate. An active learning loop ranks remaining images by uncertainty and adapts the number of manual queries per cycle. This is achieved through a novel quantity control mechanism, in which easy images are auto-accepted and human effort targets hard cases. Experiments on disjoint, diverse imagery and time-sequential, redundant imagery quantify effort reduction and accuracy trade-offs, achieving about two thirds reduction in the disjoint regime and up to 93% in the sequential regime. The study also provides guidance for initial label budgets and stopping to avoid over-annotation.
Large-scale ranking and recommendation models of Web platforms benefit from increased compute much as large language models do, and their scaling behavior is broadly power-law in form. Yet ranking models have heterogeneous architectures which makes their scaling law less straightforward than that of LLMs. We address how to discover the scaling law of an arbitrary ranking model efficiently. We introduce a scaling layer, which groups primitive architecture parameters into semantically coherent groups and defines how they co-vary, inducing a mapping from a low-dimensional space of hyper-hyperparameters into the full architecture space. On top of it, Axia fits scaling-informed surrogates, selects configurations by a posterior-based acquisition criterion, and returns a Pareto frontier from which per-model operating points are validated -- replacing exhaustive sweeps with a small number of informative runs. A fleet-level evaluation protocol, computed on a fixed representative model set under matched trial budgets, makes refinements to either component measurable. Our contribution is an automated system that learns model-specific complexity-quality relationships and gives uncertainty-aware guidance for allocating compute across a heterogeneous model ecosystem. Across 34 model iterations in two development cycles on Meta's ads ranking and retrieval system, the workflow yielded a mean 0.66% offline normalized-entropy improvement and 0.36% cumulative online lift.
Many temporal approaches for video recognition rely on explicit cross-channel aggregation projections, which have quadratic complexity in the number of channels, introducing significant computational overhead. In addition, the spatio-temporal representation used for video recognition is biased either toward local order interactions (for CNNs) or toward global order interactions (for transformers). Starting from the multi-order spatial representation of MogaNet, our method introduces two complementary contributions to tackle these problems. First, for the temporal modelling, we introduce parallel multi-order processing with depthwise-only convolutions and implicit gating-based aggregation, which is linear in the number of channels, inducing a considerable computational reduction. Second, we propose a dual interaction between spatial and temporal dimensions, which allows a better spatio-temporal representation without increasing the computational cost. By combining these two contributions, our proposed VideoMogaNet achieves performance on par with or better than state-of-the-art action recognition approaches across multiple video benchmarks (UCF101, HMDB51, Kinetics-400, Diving48), while considerably reducing the cost of the temporal branch.