Generative driving planners can represent diverse ego futures, but a downstream scorer can choose only among sampled candidates; it cannot recover an absent maneuver. We present ForeseeDrive, which turns future scene evolution into a deployable interface for shaping candidate generation. Rather than reconstructing dense future states or scoring a fixed menu, ForeseeDrive derives query-indexed tokens from logged actor motion, occupancy evolution, route interactions, and TTC margins, and predicts the same token space from present context at deployment. The tokens condition trajectory geometry before candidates materialize. A zero-token-gated residual path and candidate-preservation loss limit unnecessary drift, while a TTC-margin guard targets brittle safe-to-unsafe boundary crossings. Under their respective benchmark protocols, ForeseeDrive reaches 89.2 PDMS on NAVSIM navtest, 0.41\,m average L2 and 0.05\% collision rate on nuScenes validation, and a 76.50 driving score on Bench2Drive. Controlled DiffusionDrive/NAVSIM diagnostics show an exact zero-token no-op, a small aligned-over-shuffled selected-PDM advantage under preservation, mixed oracle-best quality, and localized TTC-boundary failures. Together, the benchmark results and bounded mechanism tests support future-conditioned generation as a practical interface for anticipation. Code is included in the supplementary materials.
Evaluating candidate parallelization strategies through distributed training runs makes strategy selection prohibitively expensive at scale. Performance simulation offers a lower cost alternative, yet controlled comparisons among existing simulators remain difficult because they differ in the training stages they model and the workloads on which they are evaluated. We introduce LM-SimBench, a unified framework, profiling dataset, and benchmark for evaluating LLM training simulators. The framework decomposes simulation into functional stages from model compilation to schedule level aggregation, connecting execution representations and cost estimators to measurable evaluation targets. Following this framework, we profile 23 model settings from 10 dense and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLM families on an Ascend Neural Processing Unit (NPU) cluster. The resulting dataset contains 348 feasible configurations that jointly vary five parallelism dimensions and activation recomputation, with six views spanning configuration, rank, operator, event, and kernel granularity. Evaluations of representative training simulators demonstrate how LM-SimBench supports comparisons of prediction accuracy, assessment of configuration selection, and diagnosis of prediction errors. Matched GPU-NPU experiments validate the cross-platform applicability of the collection and evaluation protocol and demonstrate NPU-guided GPU configuration selection.
Ambient artificial intelligence (AI) scribes have moved rapidly from experimental pilots to enterprise-wide deployment across health systems, promising reduced documentation burden and improved clinician experience. While research evaluating these tools has expanded quickly, there are no agreed-upon protocols or standardized metrics for assessing their performance, making it difficult to compare findings or cumulatively synthesize evidence across studies. Across 54 recent evaluation studies, we identify ten evaluation dimensions and 40 distinct metrics, operationalized in 96 different ways-35 of them (36%) used by only a single study. Assessment is dominated by documentation efficiency and time, measured in 44 of 54 studies. The other dimensions appear at broadly similar rates (16-24 studies each), and safety and clinical outcome least consistently of all. Ripple effects on the broader care system, such as impact on patients' care outcomes, redistribution of work, changes in billing and coding intensity, and downstream use of notes by other clinicians are rarely assessed. Moreover, the metrics used rely heavily on self-report and are fragmented and inconsistently operationalized, which limits comparability and hinders synthesis across studies. As an effort to support more rigorous and cumulative evaluation, in this paper we review the study designs, data sources, and metrics commonly used to evaluate ambient AI scribes in healthcare settings, discuss the limitations of current evaluation practice, and argue for a more holistic approach grounded in a standardized, multi-dimensional set of metrics.
Remote-sensing foundation models increasingly unify representations across sensing modalities and downstream tasks, yet their prediction mechanisms remain largely task-specific. Separate decoders, prediction heads, and objectives leave prediction fragmented across tasks. This naturally raises a question: can heterogeneous remote-sensing tasks share the prediction process? UniFlow-RS answers this question with a single latent flow-matching predictor shared across tasks. This requires addressing two key challenges: unifying heterogeneous prediction spaces and harmonizing joint optimization across tasks. First, we cast heterogeneous task outputs into structured visual targets in a common latent space, allowing them to be modeled by the same pretrained flow predictor. Task-dependent conditioning further accommodates differences in input configurations. Second, we optimize all tasks with a common Flow Matching objective, eliminating task-specific prediction losses. To mitigate optimization mismatch across tasks and modalities, we introduce Task-Modality Adaptive Timestep Sampling (TMAS), which dynamically allocates training timesteps according to the online learning state of each task-modality group. Using a single shared model, UniFlow-RS handles six tasks and thirteen datasets, surpassing recent task-specific state-of-the-art methods on several benchmarks while remaining competitive on the others. Beyond these benchmarks, the same checkpoint demonstrates strong zero-shot transfer across unseen datasets, task settings, occlusion conditions, and near-infrared false-color imagery, without target-specific adaptation.
A single validation-tuned threshold can become brittle when dense-score distributions shift. We introduce AutoThreshold, a post-hoc policy that predicts the joint mass of positive and negative pixels over score bins. This target directly parameterizes threshold-indexed confusion counts, avoiding products of independently estimated prevalence and class-conditional rates. Softmax normalization and cumulative decoding yield coherent, monotone confusion profiles; a plug-in decoder then selects a threshold for any $F_β$ objective without retraining the head. Across three independently trained Kvasir pipelines transferred to four polyp datasets, Joint exceeds continuous Otsu by $0.0080 \pm 0.0046$ external macro Dice, with positive gains in 3/3 runs. On the reference pipeline, three head seeds achieve $0.6324 \pm 0.0027$, 0.0085 above Otsu; direct-utility Ridge achieves 0.6342, with the paired difference interval spanning zero. The same Joint checkpoints outperform Otsu for $F_{0.5}$, Dice, and $F_2$. On developmental KITTI Road leave-one-corruption-family-out evaluation, Joint improves over scalar regression by 0.0082 [0.0064, 0.0101], while direct utility is 0.0022 higher. These results establish joint confusion prediction as a useful, metric-retargetable inductive bias, without claiming Bayes-optimal $F_β$ decisions.
Compositional data have been analysed in the literature from three main points of view: directly on the simplex, in log-ratio coordinates, and as directional data on the unit sphere. In this paper, we construct a random forest framework for compositional responses that accommodates all three. Random forests are ensembles of decision trees, and the split criterion determines how each tree grows. We use the log-likelihood gain as the split criterion and consider distributions defined on the different spaces in which compositions can be represented. The Dirichlet likelihood has been studied in the literature, but its covariance is fixed by its mean up to a single scalar, and its maximum likelihood estimator has no closed form. To obtain more flexible criteria, we use two well-known transformations. First, the square-root transformation maps compositions onto the unit sphere, where existing directional distributions require numerical estimation. We introduce a tangent-normal (TN) distribution, which shares its parameters with the Kent distribution, and construct a split criterion whose gain is computed from additive sufficient statistics: the shape parameters are maximised out in closed form, up to an exponentially small truncation constant, so that no parameter is estimated iteratively. Second, the log-ratio transformation maps compositions to Euclidean space, where the multivariate logistic-normal distribution has a flexible covariance and a closed-form maximum log-likelihood, also based on additive sufficient statistics. Both criteria respond to a shift of the mean, measured relative to the covariance, and to a change in the covariance itself. In simulations, the most accurate forest depended on the covariance structure of the composition. The TN forest was the most accurate in two of the three designs.
Objective: Epidemic outbreaks are often asynchronous across regions, yet collaborative forecasting is hampered by privacy laws and heterogeneous public health interventions. We developed and evaluated, as a proof of concept, a federated learning (FL) framework for cross-regional COVID-19 forecasting under asynchronous outbreaks among Guangdong, Macau, and Portugal, while maintaining data sovereignty. Methods: Using daily case data from WHO and China CDC for the three regions, whose outbreaks were asynchronous and interventions heterogeneous, we trained Long Short-Term Memory networks via FL for short-term forecasting, benchmarked against localized and centralized training using Root Mean Square Error, Mean Absolute Error, and Symmetric Mean Absolute Percentage Error. All experiments used the Flower FL framework with consistent hyperparameters across sites. Publicly available, aggregated case-count data were used so that the centralized benchmark could be computed as a reference. Results: The dataset comprised 1,233 daily observations (411 days) of new confirmed COVID-19 cases from November 24, 2021, to January 8, 2023. The earlier Omicron wave in Portugal supplied transmission dynamics that improved forecasts in the later-onset regions of Macau and Guangdong. The FL model achieved a normalized Root Mean Square Error of 0.028, an 88.3% improvement over the local model (0.240) and comparable to the centralized model, with network overhead mainly determined by model size and aggregation rounds. Conclusion: FL achieved short-term forecasting accuracy close to centralized training while maintaining data residency, with acceptable overhead. Leveraging asynchronous outbreaks across regions may offer a practical path to privacy-preserving collaborative forecasting, though prospective validation is required.
Channel estimation is crucial in wireless communication systems. Many existing works train and test their models using the same or similar channel. However, practical channels are infinitely diverse and time-variant while data-driven algorithms often degrade on new and previously unseen channels. This prohibits the practical implementation of neural networks for channel estimation, particularly in high speed scenarios characterized by rapidly channel profile changes and very high Doppler shifts. Online training can fine-tune models to adapt to new channels, but requires high computation resource and incurs significant latency for physical-layer devices. Moreover, online training cannot exhaustively cover all possible channels because there are infinitely many possible channels. Therefore, we investigate the ability of neural networks to generalize to wireless channels. This paper proposes design criteria to generate synthetic training data, which guaranty that the resulting networks perform robustly across wireless channels, especially for very high Doppler shifts and different Doppler spectra. It ensures that offline-trained neural networks require no prior information or online training to precisely estimate the new channels. To demonstrate general applicability, we use neural networks with different levels of complexity to show that the generalization achieved appears to be independent of architecture. From simulation results, neural networks achieve a certain performance across wireless channels with different unseen power delay profiles (PDP) and Doppler shifts.
Health Indices (HIs) summarize degradation from operational data and support diagnostic and prognostic tasks in Prognostics and Health Management (PHM). Their usefulness depends on capturing degradation and interpreting system condition. Autoencoders learn such representations from unlabelled monitoring data; however, when training is driven only by reconstruction, the physical meaning of latent variables remains undefined, limiting their interpretation and diagnostic value. This work proposes a physics-constrained autoencoder that embeds system knowledge as an inductive bias in the decoder architecture and as a learning bias in the loss function. The decoder contains differentiable physical equations that receive latent variables and operating conditions as inputs, structurally guiding each latent variable to represent a predefined physical quantity and enabling component-level analysis before aggregation into a system-level HI.The methodology is benchmarked on the N-CMAPSS dataset against alternative representations. Reconstruction reaches an $R^2$ of 0.9993 and an MAE of 0.0036, comparable to fully data-driven models. After operating-condition correction, the inferred physical quantities track degradation, and their aggregation produces an HI with a Spearman correlation of 0.9791 with the ground truth, an RMSE of 0.0286, and an MAE of 0.0233. The methodology is further evaluated using a single model trained across four datasets representing distinct degradation scenarios. This model preserves component-level signatures that distinguish compression-side from expansion-side degradation without diagnostic labels.Finally, the proposed framework enables degradation trends to be visualized on component maps, providing a health representation in a form familiar to engine operators and domain experts.
Fault diagnosis in complex systems requires linking observed changes in physical quantities to the failure mechanisms that produce them. Experienced engineers perform this task by combining sensor information with knowledge of system behavior and fault propagation. Large Language Models (LLMs) can support this process, but their diagnostic reasoning depends on the availability of asset-specific engineering knowledge and on how this knowledge is represented and used during inference. This work introduces Chain of Physics (CoP), an LLM-based fault-diagnosis framework built around a Constrained Knowledge Graph (CKG) generated automatically from asset-specific reference documentation. CoP addresses failure-sensor association from textual engineering knowledge. The CKG stores diagnostic chains connecting failure modes, changes in physical quantities, and monitoring sensors. During inference, semantically similar graph paths are retrieved for each question and used as both information and in-context examples for the reasoning process. Candidate failure modes are extracted from the question and analysed independently through dedicated LLM calls, which generate plausible failure-to-observation chains. A final decision module compares these chains with the available answer choices. CoP is evaluated on the FailureSensorIQ benchmark across four industrial asset classes and three LLMs. Compared with direct prompting and conventional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), CoP improves diagnostic accuracy across all evaluated models, with gains ranging from 7.8 to 19.6 percentage points and from 11.7 to 18.2 percentage points, respectively. The results show that structured engineering knowledge can improve LLM-based diagnostic reasoning when graph retrieval is combined with in-context examples of fault propagation.
Biological neural circuits are both modular and recurrent, with dense communities sparsely linked to one another. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) for reinforcement learning are usually feed-forward, and it is unclear how to obtain functional modules in a recurrent SNN or what they buy. In this work, we introduce a class of spiking networks, called Community Recurrent SNNs (CoRe SNNs): recurrent networks partitioned into communities with fixed roles. A controller community receives the stimulus, each action has its own community, and latent communities carry internal state. Spiking activity is then a walk between communities, and the action is the community the walk reaches. All learning is local and three-factor, and the recurrent communities are closer to cortical microcircuits than a feed-forward actor. We compare three regimes for obtaining the communities: dynamic modularity, in which a new learning rule we introduce, Map-STDP, encourages modular structure during learning; partial modularity, in which a stochastic block model (SBM) initialization enforces it partly; and full modularity, in which sealing enforces it fully. On CartPole, across three spiking neuron models, Map-STDP improves learning over the same network without it matches full modularity (sealed communities) on two of the three models, and makes the observed spike walk more compressible. Replacing the feed-forward actor of a TD-STDP actor-critic with recurrent action communities improves on the feed-forward network on CartPole and LunarLander, and matches it on Acrobot. How strongly to enforce modularity depends on the task: full modularity helps most on Acrobot, while on LunarLander the dynamic, partial and full regimes perform alike. Overall, these recurrent modular networks can match or even improve upon feed-forward approaches, with improvements in bio-plausibility and energy efficiency.
Children's peer conflicts increasingly play out in group chats, where tone and timing are stripped away, and a hurtful message is easier to send than to say aloud. We present Lilo, a multi-agent conversational system that lets children practice such conversations, so they are better prepared when they encounter them in real digital communication. In Lilo, the child joins two AI-driven peers mid-argument, coached by a mentor character, also named Lilo, through a Stop-Think-Act traffic light. Through an exploratory study with 28 children (aged 9-11), we examine how children engage with Lilo's simulated peer conflict and the mentor's traffic-light interventions. The study included an intervention with Lilo, surveys before and after the intervention, and exit interviews. Participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy for coping with unpleasant messages after their interaction with Lilo. They felt safe experimenting, knowing nothing they wrote would be held against them.
World-Action Models improve robot control by predicting future visual dynamics, but iterative video denoising incurs substantial inference overhead. Recent approaches reduce this cost through partial future denoising, yet typically rely on fixed refinement budgets. Our empirical observations reveal that preferred refinement depths vary across tasks and states, while different future regions exhibit varying relevance to action generation. Motivated by these findings, we propose Elastic-WAM, which adaptively allocates world refinement computation across temporal denoising time and spatial future space. A unified spatiotemporal refinement demand field governs when to stop world refinement, how far to advance each denoising step, and which regions to refresh. We parameterize this field with a shared temporal basis and spatial amplitudes, and learn it through a three-stage action-grounded supervised procedure. At inference, the learned field guides recurrent sparse world refinement to improve task success while reducing inference overhead. Evaluations across diverse simulation benchmarks and real-world long-horizon manipulation demonstrate state-of-the-art control performance with reduced inference latency.
Recent work shows that multimodal agents increasingly self-improve without recurring human annotation. However, each self-improvement mechanism is designed and evaluated within a single scenario, leaving its preconditions unverified under cross-scenario transfer. This survey investigates the structural source of asymmetric mechanism transfer across four scenarios: multimodal reasoning, multimodal generation, GUI and Web navigation, and embodied manipulation. We first formalize the self-evolving multimodal agent by four criteria and a differentia of self-reference, and adopt the three-stage self-evolving loop of experience generation, feedback acquisition, and update consolidation as our analytical framework to position the scenarios along ceilings on rollout count and feedback fidelity. Comparing self-evolving with fixed loops within each scenario separates the limitations that the scenario imposes from those inherent in the self-evolving design. We then recast each mechanism as a trade-off that raises a scarce factor by presupposing a task-structural resource, such as output equivalence or checkable outcomes, and judge it portable, conditional, blocked, or redundant across scenarios. We attribute the asymmetry to divergent combinations of scarce factors and resources across opposite transfer directions, and identify the matched-budget measurements that could overturn these still untested verdicts.
Text-to-image diffusion models can learn and reproduce an individual's identity from only a few reference photos, creating risks of unauthorized and misleading content generation. Proactive defenses address this risk by adding adversarial perturbations to facial images before release, thereby disrupting identity acquisition during downstream personalization. However, existing methods typically rely on dense $L_\infty$-bounded perturbations, whose accumulated distortions can become visible around facial structures. Recent methods improve protected-image quality, but often at the cost of reduced protection effectiveness. In this paper, we propose Sparse Encoder Attack on Latent Variance (SEAL), a sparse adversarial protection framework that modifies only 5% of the spatial locations in a facial image. SEAL combines a differentiable top-k masking scheme that jointly optimizes perturbation locations and values with a variance-oriented objective over the frozen VAE encoder's latent distribution to disrupt identity-consistent representations. A saliency-guided dispersion penalty further discourages perturbation concentration in perceptually salient facial regions. Experiments on CelebA-HQ and VGGFace2 show that SEAL achieves the best protected-image quality among the compared methods, exceeding 41 dB PSNR with 0.97 SSIM and at most 0.07 LPIPS, while reducing identity similarity to at most 0.15 after diffusion personalization. These results demonstrate that sparse location optimization enables strong identity protection while preserving high visual quality. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Lvxan/SEAL
How can the facts that justify an answer be found from a question and presented as a sequence of connected statements? This paper models a context as a graph of logical facts and takes as given which expressions represent each fact. A parent fact can express a relation among its subfacts, and a preserving edge allows the content of a subfact to be recovered within a full representation of its parent. Suppose a root fact justifies the full answer and a path of preserving edges leads from that root to a fact that designates an object shared by the question and the answer. Under the conditions of the model, a search starting from the objects in the question reaches the root and covers every fact in the selected expansion. The root then admits a text that forms a single link connecting the question to the full answer and justifying it. For chains with several links, the paper gives a complete enumeration of candidate orders within the stated class and specifies when the link texts jointly preserve the justification and support every transition.
Self-interested intelligent agents that negotiate with humans should interpret nonverbal expressions and adapt their behavior accordingly. However, generic facial-affect models degrade across individuals and contexts, creating a generalization gap. We introduce an affect-adaptive negotiation strategy that incorporates Continual Learning with Imagination for Facial Expression Recognition (CLIFER) to personalize valence-arousal perception in real time. Differential feedback converts changes in valence-arousal direction and intensity into adjustments of the agent's target utility. An asynchronous architecture updates CLIFER in the background during live interaction. In a counterbalanced within-subject study in which 66 participants negotiated with a humanoid robot, the CL-enabled agent achieved significantly higher individual utility and elicited higher participant concession rates than the FaceChannel baseline. The CL condition yielded significantly higher mean arousal estimates, alongside a broader output range. Participant utility and Nash distance did not change significantly between conditions. These outcomes support the practical value of coupling continual affective personalization with differential feedback for real-time negotiation.
Hybrid models combine softmax attention with linear attention, which compresses history into fixed-size recurrent states to balance model quality and inference efficiency. However, linear attention has not pushed this compression to its limit: we find that the queries, keys, and values of linear layers concentrate in a stable, low-dimensional subspace, a phenomenon we call the linear attention sink, so each state is effectively low-rank, with a rank that varies across states. Yet existing serving systems keep these redundant states dense, reading and rewriting them in full at every decoding step, so their memory traffic grows with the batch size and dominates the decoding cost. Thus SinkState stores each recurrent state in an adaptive low-rank form throughout inference with buffered updates and a local SVD restricted to the top subspace. SinkState further consolidates the remaining components asynchronously on the CPU. On four hybrid models with Mamba-2 and Gated DeltaNet (GDN) layers, from 4B to 120B parameters, SinkState reduces the peak memory of recurrent states by up to 2.6x (1.9x on average) and speeds up decoding by up to 1.58x (1.25x on average) over Mamba-SSM and FLA, while maintaining accuracy.
We present an AI assistant for automating anti-corruption expertise of draft legislation based on the TRACE architecture, designed to screen bills for corruption risks: pinpoint provisions an expert would criticise and name the regulatory defect in each. The pipeline combines a deterministic parsing core, model-guided single-provision qualification, rule-based factor assignment, and external human oversight. To evaluate the assistant, we constructed an open benchmark from the published conclusions of Ukraine's National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NAZK), comprising 132 draft laws with 474 model-extracted findings. A system flag agrees with a finding when it targets a compatible provision and an LLM judge rates the risk as the same (strict) or partly the same (lenient). On 100 draft laws, the pipeline matches 0.28 of the findings within its top ten flags using the local Gemma 4 31B model, 0.30 with Sonnet 5.5, and 0.43-0.46 across all flags (non-blind; the frozen blind baseline achieves 0.21, 95% CI 0.16-0.26). Across all runs, most misses occur on provisions that the system located but qualified as a different risk, and none of the 32 legal-collision findings was matched. On 21 acts held out from tuning, the pipeline outperforms a monolithic prompt containing the full methodology under the strict measure, though not under the lenient one, and Opus 5.5 adds nothing over Sonnet. The reported scores reflect agreement with model-extracted findings rated by an LLM judge whose two access routes agree on 73 of 74 labels, without human expert validation.
We introduce DyShip, a framework for classifying speaker familiarity and kinship from dyadic conversations in the Seamless Interaction corpus. We compare five speech representations: spectrograms, MFCCs, self-supervised WavLM representations, x-vectors, and estimated articulatory movements. Spectral features perform best for familiarity classification, reaching an accuracy of 87.81%, while WavLM achieves the highest kinship accuracy of 85.17%. X-vectors and articulatory features yield weaker results on familiarity classifiaction, but shine for kinship classification, with an AUC of 0.909 for x-vectors. Most classifiers exceed previously reported human and audio language model scores on the same dataset. These findings highlight the potential of conventional acoustic features for relationship inference and motivate further investigation of the conversational cues captured by different representations.