Daily Papers

Attention injection-based style transfer has achieved remarkable progress in recent years. However, existing methods often suffer from content leakage, where the undesired semantic content of the style image mistakenly appears in the stylized output. In this paper, we propose V-Shuffle, a zero-shot style transfer method that leverages multiple style images from the same style domain to effectively navigate the trade-off between content preservation and style fidelity. V-Shuffle implicitly disrupts the semantic content of the style images by shuffling the value features within the self-attention layers of the diffusion model, thereby preserving low-level style representations. We further introduce a Hybrid Style Regularization that complements these low-level representations with high-level style textures to enhance style fidelity. Empirical results demonstrate that V-Shuffle achieves excellent performance when utilizing multiple style images. Moreover, when applied to a single style image, V-Shuffle outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.

Tokenization strategies shape how models process electronic health records, yet fair comparisons of their effectiveness remain limited. We present a systematic evaluation of tokenization approaches for clinical time series modeling using transformer-based architectures, revealing task-dependent and sometimes counterintuitive findings about temporal and value feature importance. Through controlled ablations across four clinical prediction tasks on MIMIC-IV, we demonstrate that explicit time encodings provide no consistent statistically significant benefit for the evaluated downstream tasks. Value features show task-dependent importance, affecting mortality prediction but not readmission, suggesting code sequences alone can carry sufficient predictive signal. We further show that frozen pretrained code encoders dramatically outperform their trainable counterparts while requiring dramatically fewer parameters. Larger clinical encoders provide consistent improvements across tasks, benefiting from frozen embeddings that eliminate computational overhead. Our controlled evaluation enables fairer tokenization comparisons and demonstrates that simpler, parameter-efficient approaches can, in many cases, achieve strong performance, though the optimal tokenization strategy remains task-dependent.

As large language models (LLMs) take on more complex tasks, their inputs incorporate longer contexts to respond to questions that require domain knowledge or user-specific conversational histories. Yet, using long contexts poses a challenge for responsive LLM systems, as nothing can be generated until all the contexts are fetched to and processed by the LLM. Existing systems optimize only the computation delay in context processing (e.g., by caching intermediate key-value features of the text context) but often cause longer network delays in context fetching (e.g., key-value features consume orders of magnitude larger bandwidth than the text context). This paper presents CacheGen to minimize the delays in fetching and processing contexts for LLMs. CacheGen reduces the bandwidth needed for transmitting long contexts' key-value (KV) features through a novel encoder that compresses KV features into more compact bitstream representations. The encoder combines adaptive quantization with a tailored arithmetic coder, taking advantage of the KV features' distributional properties, such as locality across tokens. Furthermore, CacheGen minimizes the total delay in fetching and processing a context by using a controller that determines when to load the context as compressed KV features or raw text and picks the appropriate compression level if loaded as KV features. We test CacheGen on three models of various sizes and three datasets of different context lengths. Compared to recent methods that handle long contexts, CacheGen reduces bandwidth usage by 3.7-4.3x and the total delay in fetching and processing contexts by 2.7-3x while maintaining similar LLM performance on various tasks as loading the text contexts.

We present Style3D, a novel approach for generating stylized 3D objects from a content image and a style image. Unlike most previous methods that require case- or style-specific training, Style3D supports instant 3D object stylization. Our key insight is that 3D object stylization can be decomposed into two interconnected processes: multi-view dual-feature alignment and sparse-view spatial reconstruction. We introduce MultiFusion Attention, an attention-guided technique to achieve multi-view stylization from the content-style pair. Specifically, the query features from the content image preserve geometric consistency across multiple views, while the key and value features from the style image are used to guide the stylistic transfer. This dual-feature alignment ensures that spatial coherence and stylistic fidelity are maintained across multi-view images. Finally, a large 3D reconstruction model is introduced to generate coherent stylized 3D objects. By establishing an interplay between structural and stylistic features across multiple views, our approach enables a holistic 3D stylization process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Style3D offers a more flexible and scalable solution for generating style-consistent 3D assets, surpassing existing methods in both computational efficiency and visual quality.

We introduce IntrinsiX, a novel method that generates high-quality intrinsic images from text description. In contrast to existing text-to-image models whose outputs contain baked-in scene lighting, our approach predicts physically-based rendering (PBR) maps. This enables the generated outputs to be used for content creation scenarios in core graphics applications that facilitate re-lighting, editing, and texture generation tasks. In order to train our generator, we exploit strong image priors, and pre-train separate models for each PBR material component (albedo, roughness, metallic, normals). We then align these models with a new cross-intrinsic attention formulation that concatenates key and value features in a consistent fashion. This allows us to exchange information between each output modality and to obtain semantically coherent PBR predictions. To ground each intrinsic component, we propose a rendering loss which provides image-space signals to constrain the model, thus facilitating sharp details also in the output BRDF properties. Our results demonstrate detailed intrinsic generation with strong generalization capabilities that outperforms existing intrinsic image decomposition methods used with generated images by a significant margin. Finally, we show a series of applications, including re-lighting, editing, and text-conditioned room-scale PBR texture generation.

Relational video customization refers to the creation of personalized videos that depict user-specified relations between two subjects, a crucial task for comprehending real-world visual content. While existing methods can personalize subject appearances and motions, they still struggle with complex relational video customization, where precise relational modeling and high generalization across subject categories are essential. The primary challenge arises from the intricate spatial arrangements, layout variations, and nuanced temporal dynamics inherent in relations; consequently, current models tend to overemphasize irrelevant visual details rather than capturing meaningful interactions. To address these challenges, we propose DreamRelation, a novel approach that personalizes relations through a small set of exemplar videos, leveraging two key components: Relational Decoupling Learning and Relational Dynamics Enhancement. First, in Relational Decoupling Learning, we disentangle relations from subject appearances using relation LoRA triplet and hybrid mask training strategy, ensuring better generalization across diverse relationships. Furthermore, we determine the optimal design of relation LoRA triplet by analyzing the distinct roles of the query, key, and value features within MM-DiT's attention mechanism, making DreamRelation the first relational video generation framework with explainable components. Second, in Relational Dynamics Enhancement, we introduce space-time relational contrastive loss, which prioritizes relational dynamics while minimizing the reliance on detailed subject appearances. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DreamRelation outperforms state-of-the-art methods in relational video customization. Code and models will be made publicly available.

Vision-Language models (VLMs) pre-trained on large corpora have demonstrated notable success across a range of downstream tasks. In light of the rapidly increasing size of pre-trained VLMs, parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) has garnered attention as a viable alternative to full fine-tuning. One such approach is the adapter, which introduces a few trainable parameters into the pre-trained models while preserving the original parameters during adaptation. In this paper, we present a novel modeling framework that recasts adapter tuning after attention as a graph message passing process on attention graphs, where the projected query and value features and attention matrix constitute the node features and the graph adjacency matrix, respectively. Within this framework, tuning adapters in VLMs necessitates handling heterophilic graphs, owing to the disparity between the projected query and value space. To address this challenge, we propose a new adapter architecture, p-adapter, which employs p-Laplacian message passing in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Specifically, the attention weights are re-normalized based on the features, and the features are then aggregated using the calibrated attention matrix, enabling the dynamic exploitation of information with varying frequencies in the heterophilic attention graphs. We conduct extensive experiments on different pre-trained VLMs and multi-modal tasks, including visual question answering, visual entailment, and image captioning. The experimental results validate our method's significant superiority over other PETL methods.

In rapid release development processes, patches that fix critical issues, or implement high-value features are often promoted directly from the development channel to a stabilization channel, potentially skipping one or more stabilization channels. This practice is called patch uplift. Patch uplift is risky, because patches that are rushed through the stabilization phase can end up introducing regressions in the code. This paper examines patch uplift operations at Mozilla, with the aim to identify the characteristics of uplifted patches that introduce regressions. Through statistical and manual analyses, we quantitatively and qualitatively investigate the reasons behind patch uplift decisions and the characteristics of uplifted patches that introduced regressions. Additionally, we interviewed three Mozilla release managers to understand organizational factors that affect patch uplift decisions and outcomes. Results show that most patches are uplifted because of a wrong functionality or a crash. Uplifted patches that lead to faults tend to have larger patch size, and most of the faults are due to semantic or memory errors in the patches. Also, release managers are more inclined to accept patch uplift requests that concern certain specific components, and-or that are submitted by certain specific developers.

Graph is powerful for representing various types of real-world data. The topology (edges' presence) and edges' features of a graph decides the message passing mechanism among vertices within the graph. While most existing approaches only manually define a single-value edge to describe the connectivity or strength of association between a pair of vertices, task-specific and crucial relationship cues may be disregarded by such manually defined topology and single-value edge features. In this paper, we propose the first general graph representation learning framework (called GRATIS) which can generate a strong graph representation with a task-specific topology and task-specific multi-dimensional edge features from any arbitrary input. To learn each edge's presence and multi-dimensional feature, our framework takes both of the corresponding vertices pair and their global contextual information into consideration, enabling the generated graph representation to have a globally optimal message passing mechanism for different down-stream tasks. The principled investigation results achieved for various graph analysis tasks on 11 graph and non-graph datasets show that our GRATIS can not only largely enhance pre-defined graphs but also learns a strong graph representation for non-graph data, with clear performance improvements on all tasks. In particular, the learned topology and multi-dimensional edge features provide complementary task-related cues for graph analysis tasks. Our framework is effective, robust and flexible, and is a plug-and-play module that can be combined with different backbones and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to generate a task-specific graph representation from various graph and non-graph data. Our code is made publicly available at https://github.com/SSYSteve/Learning-Graph-Representation-with-Task-specific-Topology-and-Multi-dimensional-Edge-Features.

The wide-scale use of sparse autoencoders (SAEs) as interpretability tools is limited by inconsistent links between SAE features and model behavior. Features with clear activation descriptions may have weak or unexpected causal effects; steering can vary across prompts or oppose the intended direction; and activation-based feature selection can miss features that produce the desired output change. Prior work has studied feature geometry inside the model, where features are computed. We instead study the geometry of changes in model logits caused by feature interventions. We introduce Feature-Effect Geometry Analysis (FEGA), an unsupervised framework that removes the same active SAE feature across contexts and analyzes the resulting cloud of logit changes. Across SAE variants, consistent one-dimensional effects are rare: few features behave like reusable directions. To interpret this variation, we distinguish value-like features, tied to static information such as factual attributes, from pointer-like features, associated with context-dependent operations. Value-like features more often exhibit structured, low-dimensional effects, although these effects typically span several directions. Pointer-like features, by contrast, predominantly exhibit diffuse effects. Our results show that a feature can be interpretable and causally relevant without providing a stable direction for steering.

The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for reliable, enterprise-grade analytics such as text categorization is often hindered by the stochastic nature of attention mechanisms and sensitivity to noise that compromise their analytical precision and reproducibility. To address these technical frictions, this paper introduces the Weighted Syntactic and Semantic Context Assessment Summary (wSSAS), a deterministic framework designed to enforce data integrity on large-scale, chaotic datasets. We propose a two-phased validation framework that first organizes raw text into a hierarchical classification structure containing Themes, Stories, and Clusters. It then leverages a Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) to prioritize high-value semantic features, ensuring the model's attention remains focused on the most representative data points. By incorporating this scoring mechanism into a Summary-of-Summaries (SoS) architecture, the framework effectively isolates essential information and mitigates background noise during data aggregation. Experimental results using Gemini 2.0 Flash Lite across diverse datasets - including Google Business reviews, Amazon Product reviews, and Goodreads Book reviews - demonstrate that wSSAS significantly improves clustering integrity and categorization accuracy. Our findings indicate that wSSAS reduces categorization entropy and provides a reproducible pathway for improving LLM based summaries based on a high-precision, deterministic process for large-scale text categorization.

Reinforcement learning is able to solve complex sequential decision-making tasks but is currently limited by sample efficiency and required computation. To improve sample efficiency, recent work focuses on model-based RL which interleaves model learning with planning. Recent methods further utilize policy learning, value estimation, and, self-supervised learning as auxiliary objectives. In this paper we show that, surprisingly, a simple representation learning approach relying only on a latent dynamics model trained by latent temporal consistency is sufficient for high-performance RL. This applies when using pure planning with a dynamics model conditioned on the representation, but, also when utilizing the representation as policy and value function features in model-free RL. In experiments, our approach learns an accurate dynamics model to solve challenging high-dimensional locomotion tasks with online planners while being 4.1 times faster to train compared to ensemble-based methods. With model-free RL without planning, especially on high-dimensional tasks, such as the DeepMind Control Suite Humanoid and Dog tasks, our approach outperforms model-free methods by a large margin and matches model-based methods' sample efficiency while training 2.4 times faster.

Feature selection is the problem of selecting a subset of features for a machine learning model that maximizes model quality subject to a budget constraint. For neural networks, prior methods, including those based on ell_1 regularization, attention, and other techniques, typically select the entire feature subset in one evaluation round, ignoring the residual value of features during selection, i.e., the marginal contribution of a feature given that other features have already been selected. We propose a feature selection algorithm called Sequential Attention that achieves state-of-the-art empirical results for neural networks. This algorithm is based on an efficient one-pass implementation of greedy forward selection and uses attention weights at each step as a proxy for feature importance. We give theoretical insights into our algorithm for linear regression by showing that an adaptation to this setting is equivalent to the classical Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) algorithm, and thus inherits all of its provable guarantees. Our theoretical and empirical analyses offer new explanations towards the effectiveness of attention and its connections to overparameterization, which may be of independent interest.

Deep neural network (DNN) based perception models are indispensable in the development of autonomous vehicles (AVs). However, their reliance on large-scale, high-quality data is broadly recognized as a burdensome necessity due to the substantial cost of data acquisition and labeling. Further, the issue is not a one-time concern, as AVs might need a new dataset if they are to be deployed to another region (real-target domain) that the in-hand dataset within the real-source domain cannot incorporate. To mitigate this burden, we propose leveraging synthetic environments as an auxiliary domain where the characteristics of real domains are reproduced. This approach could enable indirect experience about the real-target domain in a time- and cost-effective manner. As a practical demonstration of our methodology, nuScenes and South Korea are employed to represent real-source and real-target domains, respectively. That means we construct digital twins for several regions of South Korea, and the data-acquisition framework of nuScenes is reproduced. Blending the aforementioned components within a simulator allows us to obtain a synthetic-fusion domain in which we forge our novel driving dataset, MORDA: Mixture Of Real-domain characteristics for synthetic-data-assisted Domain Adaptation. To verify the value of synthetic features that MORDA provides in learning about driving environments of South Korea, 2D/3D detectors are trained solely on a combination of nuScenes and MORDA. Afterward, their performance is evaluated on the unforeseen real-world dataset (AI-Hub) collected in South Korea. Our experiments present that MORDA can significantly improve mean Average Precision (mAP) on AI-Hub dataset while that on nuScenes is retained or slightly enhanced.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending connects borrowers and lenders through online platforms but suffers from significant information asymmetry, as lenders often lack sufficient data to assess borrowers' creditworthiness. This paper addresses this challenge by leveraging BERT, a Large Language Model (LLM) known for its ability to capture contextual nuances in text, to generate a risk score based on borrowers' loan descriptions using a dataset from the Lending Club platform. We fine-tune BERT to distinguish between defaulted and non-defaulted loans using the loan descriptions provided by the borrowers. The resulting BERT-generated risk score is then integrated as an additional feature into an XGBoost classifier used at the loan granting stage, where decision-makers have limited information available to guide their decisions. This integration enhances predictive performance, with improvements in balanced accuracy and AUC, highlighting the value of textual features in complementing traditional inputs. Moreover, we find that the incorporation of the BERT score alters how classification models utilize traditional input variables, with these changes varying by loan purpose. These findings suggest that BERT discerns meaningful patterns in loan descriptions, encompassing borrower-specific features, specific purposes, and linguistic characteristics. However, the inherent opacity of LLMs and their potential biases underscore the need for transparent frameworks to ensure regulatory compliance and foster trust. Overall, this study demonstrates how LLM-derived insights interact with traditional features in credit risk modeling, opening new avenues to enhance the explainability and fairness of these models.

Industrial anomaly detection suffers from limited data, making cross-domain generalization particularly challenging. Generalist Anomaly Detection (GAD) aims to train a unified model on a source domain that can effectively detect anomalies in unseen target domains. In the initial semantic feature space, strong entanglement between anomalies and object categories or defect types hinders effective generalization across domains. Recent works address this issue by projecting features into a residual space; however, such methods primarily increase cross-domain overlap for normal features, while anomalous features remain specific to object categories, defect types and data domains, leading to poor alignment and generalization. To address this limitation, we propose Value-order Decomposition (VOD), a simple yet effective technique that bridges three types of generalization gaps across object categories, defect types (including real and synthetic defects), and data domains. VOD disentangles and suppresses object-category-, defect-type-, and domain-specific information, promoting alignment within normal and abnormal samples while preserving their separability, thereby enabling robust generalization across the three gaps. Leveraging the strong alignment between real and synthetic defects within the same object, we perform anomaly detection using only normal and synthetic-abnormal reference, and effectively generalize to unseen real defect types. Experiments on diverse industrial and medical benchmarks demonstrate that our method, using a simple cut-and-paste anomaly simulation strategy, achieves strong generalization across the three gaps.

English Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems have achieved great performances and even outperformed humans on benchmarks like GLUE and SuperGLUE. However, these benchmarks contain only textbook Standard American English (SAE). Other dialects have been largely overlooked in the NLP community. This leads to biased and inequitable NLU systems that serve only a sub-population of speakers. To understand disparities in current models and to facilitate more dialect-competent NLU systems, we introduce the VernAcular Language Understanding Evaluation (VALUE) benchmark, a challenging variant of GLUE that we created with a set of lexical and morphosyntactic transformation rules. In this initial release (V.1), we construct rules for 11 features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), and we recruit fluent AAVE speakers to validate each feature transformation via linguistic acceptability judgments in a participatory design manner. Experiments show that these new dialectal features can lead to a drop in model performance. To run the transformation code and download both synthetic and gold-standard dialectal GLUE benchmarks, see https://github.com/SALT-NLP/value

While a number of existing approaches for building foundation model agents rely on prompting or fine-tuning with human demonstrations, it is not sufficient in dynamic environments (e.g., mobile device control). On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) should address these limitations, but collecting actual rollouts in an environment is often undesirable in truly open-ended agentic problems such as mobile device control or interacting with humans, where each unit of interaction is associated with a cost. In such scenarios, a method for policy learning that can utilize off-policy experience by learning a trained action-value function is much more effective. In this paper, we develop an approach, called Digi-Q, to train VLM-based action-value Q-functions which are then used to extract the agent policy. We study our approach in the mobile device control setting. Digi-Q trains the Q-function using offline temporal-difference (TD) learning, on top of frozen, intermediate-layer features of a VLM. Compared to fine-tuning the whole VLM, this approach saves us compute and enhances scalability. To make the VLM features amenable for representing the Q-function, we need to employ an initial phase of fine-tuning to amplify coverage over actionable information needed for value function. Once trained, we use this Q-function via a Best-of-N policy extraction operator that imitates the best action out of multiple candidate actions from the current policy as ranked by the value function, enabling policy improvement without environment interaction. Digi-Q outperforms several prior methods on user-scale device control tasks in Android-in-the-Wild, attaining 21.2% improvement over prior best-performing method. In some cases, our Digi-Q approach already matches state-of-the-art RL methods that require interaction. The project is open-sourced at https://github.com/DigiRL-agent/digiq

In this work, we present a database of multimodal communication features extracted from debate speeches in the 2019 North American Universities Debate Championships (NAUDC). Feature sets were extracted from the visual (facial expression, gaze, and head pose), audio (PRAAT), and textual (word sentiment and linguistic category) modalities of raw video recordings of competitive collegiate debaters (N=717 6-minute recordings from 140 unique debaters). Each speech has an associated competition debate score (range: 67-96) from expert judges as well as competitor demographic and per-round reflection surveys. We observe the fully multimodal model performs best in comparison to models trained on various compositions of modalities. We also find that the weights of some features (such as the expression of joy and the use of the word we) change in direction between the aforementioned models. We use these results to highlight the value of a multimodal dataset for studying competitive, collegiate debate.

Set representation has become ubiquitous in deep learning for modeling the inductive bias of neural networks that are insensitive to the input order. DeepSets is the most widely used neural network architecture for set representation. It involves embedding each set element into a latent space with dimension L, followed by a sum pooling to obtain a whole-set embedding, and finally mapping the whole-set embedding to the output. In this work, we investigate the impact of the dimension L on the expressive power of DeepSets. Previous analyses either oversimplified high-dimensional features to be one-dimensional features or were limited to analytic activations, thereby diverging from practical use or resulting in L that grows exponentially with the set size N and feature dimension D. To investigate the minimal value of L that achieves sufficient expressive power, we present two set-element embedding layers: (a) linear + power activation (LP) and (b) linear + exponential activations (LE). We demonstrate that L being poly(N, D) is sufficient for set representation using both embedding layers. We also provide a lower bound of L for the LP embedding layer. Furthermore, we extend our results to permutation-equivariant set functions and the complex field.

Deep Reinforcement Learning has shown significant progress in extracting useful representations from high-dimensional inputs albeit using hand-crafted auxiliary tasks and pseudo rewards. Automatically learning such representations in an object-centric manner geared towards control and fast adaptation remains an open research problem. In this paper, we introduce a method that tries to discover meaningful features from objects, translating them to temporally coherent "question" functions and leveraging the subsequent learned general value functions for control. We compare our approach with state-of-the-art techniques alongside other ablations and show competitive performance in both stationary and non-stationary settings. Finally, we also investigate the discovered general value functions and through qualitative analysis show that the learned representations are not only interpretable but also, centered around objects that are invariant to changes across tasks facilitating fast adaptation.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for Large Reasoning Models hinges on baseline estimation for variance reduction, but existing approaches pay a heavy price: PPO requires a policy-model scale critic, while GRPO needs multiple rollouts per prompt to keep its empirical group mean stable. We introduce Policy Optimization with Internal State Value Estimation), which obtains a baseline at negligible cost by using the policy model's internal signals already computed during the policy forward pass. A lightweight probe predicts the expected verifiable reward from the hidden states of the prompt and generated trajectory, as well as token-entropy statistics, and is trained online alongside the policy. To preserve gradient unbiasedness despite using trajectory-conditioned features, we introduce a cross-rollout construction that predicts each rollout's value from an independent rollout's internal states. Because POISE estimates prompt value using only a single rollout, it enables higher prompt diversity for a fixed compute budget during training. This reduces gradient variance for more stable learning and also eliminates the compute overhead of sampling costs for detecting zero-advantage prompts. On Qwen3-4B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B across math reasoning benchmarks, POISE matches DAPO while requiring less compute. Moreover, its value estimator shows similar performance to a separate LLM-scale value model and generalizes to various verifiable tasks. By leveraging the model's own internal representations, POISE enables more stable and efficient policy optimization.

Visual token reduction lowers inference costs caused by extensive image features in large vision-language models (LVLMs). Unlike relevant studies that prune tokens in self-attention-only LVLMs, our work uniquely addresses cross-attention-based models, which achieve superior performance. We identify that the key-value (KV) cache size for image tokens in cross-attention layers significantly exceeds that of text tokens in self-attention layers, posing a major compute bottleneck. To mitigate this issue, we exploit the sparse nature in cross-attention maps to selectively prune redundant visual features. Our Trimmed Llama effectively reduces KV cache demands without requiring additional training. By benefiting from 50%-reduced visual features, our model can reduce inference latency and memory usage while achieving benchmark parity.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong potential for tabular data generation by modeling textualized feature-value pairs. However, tabular data inherently exhibits sparse feature-level dependencies, where many feature interactions are structurally insignificant. This creates a fundamental mismatch as LLMs' self-attention mechanism inevitably distributes focus across all pairs, diluting attention on critical relationships, particularly in datasets with complex dependencies or semantically ambiguous features. To address this limitation, we propose GraDe (Graph-Guided Dependency Learning), a novel method that explicitly integrates sparse dependency graphs into LLMs' attention mechanism. GraDe employs a lightweight dynamic graph learning module guided by externally extracted functional dependencies, prioritizing key feature interactions while suppressing irrelevant ones. Our experiments across diverse real-world datasets demonstrate that GraDe outperforms existing LLM-based approaches by up to 12% on complex datasets while achieving competitive results with state-of-the-art approaches in synthetic data quality. Our method is minimally intrusive yet effective, offering a practical solution for structure-aware tabular data modeling with LLMs.

MDPs with low-rank transitions -- that is, the transition matrix can be factored into the product of two matrices, left and right -- is a highly representative structure that enables tractable learning. The left matrix enables expressive function approximation for value-based learning and has been studied extensively. In this work, we instead investigate sample-efficient learning with density features, i.e., the right matrix, which induce powerful models for state-occupancy distributions. This setting not only sheds light on leveraging unsupervised learning in RL, but also enables plug-in solutions for convex RL. In the offline setting, we propose an algorithm for off-policy estimation of occupancies that can handle non-exploratory data. Using this as a subroutine, we further devise an online algorithm that constructs exploratory data distributions in a level-by-level manner. As a central technical challenge, the additive error of occupancy estimation is incompatible with the multiplicative definition of data coverage. In the absence of strong assumptions like reachability, this incompatibility easily leads to exponential error blow-up, which we overcome via novel technical tools. Our results also readily extend to the representation learning setting, when the density features are unknown and must be learned from an exponentially large candidate set.

Most existing automatic house price estimation systems rely only on some textual data like its neighborhood area and the number of rooms. The final price is estimated by a human agent who visits the house and assesses it visually. In this paper, we propose extracting visual features from house photographs and combining them with the house's textual information. The combined features are fed to a fully connected multilayer Neural Network (NN) that estimates the house price as its single output. To train and evaluate our network, we have collected the first houses dataset (to our knowledge) that combines both images and textual attributes. The dataset is composed of 535 sample houses from the state of California, USA. Our experiments showed that adding the visual features increased the R-value by a factor of 3 and decreased the Mean Square Error (MSE) by one order of magnitude compared with textual-only features. Additionally, when trained on the benchmark textual-only features housing dataset, our proposed NN still outperformed the existing model published results.

Diffusion models excel at capturing the natural design spaces of images, molecules, DNA, RNA, and protein sequences. However, rather than merely generating designs that are natural, we often aim to optimize downstream reward functions while preserving the naturalness of these design spaces. Existing methods for achieving this goal often require ``differentiable'' proxy models (e.g., classifier guidance or DPS) or involve computationally expensive fine-tuning of diffusion models (e.g., classifier-free guidance, RL-based fine-tuning). In our work, we propose a new method to address these challenges. Our algorithm is an iterative sampling method that integrates soft value functions, which looks ahead to how intermediate noisy states lead to high rewards in the future, into the standard inference procedure of pre-trained diffusion models. Notably, our approach avoids fine-tuning generative models and eliminates the need to construct differentiable models. This enables us to (1) directly utilize non-differentiable features/reward feedback, commonly used in many scientific domains, and (2) apply our method to recent discrete diffusion models in a principled way. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm across several domains, including image generation, molecule generation, and DNA/RNA sequence generation. The code is available at https://github.com/masa-ue/SVDD{https://github.com/masa-ue/SVDD}.

The paper considers a new quantitative-qualitative proximity measure for the features of information objects, where data enters a common information resource from several sources independently. The goal is to determine the possibility of their relation to the same physical object (observation object). The proposed measure accounts for the possibility of differences in individual feature values - both quantitative and qualitative - caused by existing determination errors. To analyze the proximity of quantitative feature values, the author employs a probabilistic measure; for qualitative features, a measure of possibility is used. The paper demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed measure by checking its compliance with the axioms required of any measure. Unlike many known measures, the proposed approach does not require feature value transformation to ensure comparability. The work also proposes several variants of measures to determine the proximity of information objects (IO) based on a group of diverse features.

The rapid evolution of generative technologies necessitates reliable methods for detecting AI-generated images. A critical limitation of current detectors is their failure to generalize to images from unseen generative models, as they often overfit to source-specific semantic cues rather than learning universal generative artifacts. To overcome this, we introduce a simple yet remarkably effective pixel-level mapping pre-processing step to disrupt the pixel value distribution of images and break the fragile, non-essential semantic patterns that detectors commonly exploit as shortcuts. This forces the detector to focus on more fundamental and generalizable high-frequency traces inherent to the image generation process. Through comprehensive experiments on GAN and diffusion-based generators, we show that our approach significantly boosts the cross-generator performance of state-of-the-art detectors. Extensive analysis further verifies our hypothesis that the disruption of semantic cues is the key to generalization.

Accurate segmentation of cardiac chambers in echocardiography sequences is crucial for the quantitative analysis of cardiac function, aiding in clinical diagnosis and treatment. The imaging noise, artifacts, and the deformation and motion of the heart pose challenges to segmentation algorithms. While existing methods based on convolutional neural networks, Transformers, and space-time memory networks have improved segmentation accuracy, they often struggle with the trade-off between capturing long-range spatiotemporal dependencies and maintaining computational efficiency with fine-grained feature representation. In this paper, we introduce GDKVM, a novel architecture for echocardiography video segmentation. The model employs Linear Key-Value Association (LKVA) to effectively model inter-frame correlations, and introduces Gated Delta Rule (GDR) to efficiently store intermediate memory states. Key-Pixel Feature Fusion (KPFF) module is designed to integrate local and global features at multiple scales, enhancing robustness against boundary blurring and noise interference. We validated GDKVM on two mainstream echocardiography video datasets (CAMUS and EchoNet-Dynamic) and compared it with various state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results show that GDKVM outperforms existing approaches in terms of segmentation accuracy and robustness, while ensuring real-time performance. Code is available at https://github.com/wangrui2025/GDKVM.

We introduce the Deep Value Benchmark (DVB), an evaluation framework that directly tests whether large language models (LLMs) learn fundamental human values or merely surface-level preferences. This distinction is critical for AI alignment: Systems that capture deeper values are likely to generalize human intentions robustly, while those that capture only superficial patterns in preference data risk producing misaligned behavior. The DVB uses a novel experimental design with controlled confounding between deep values (e.g., moral principles) and shallow features (e.g., superficial attributes). In the training phase, we expose LLMs to human preference data with deliberately correlated deep and shallow features -- for instance, where a user consistently prefers (non-maleficence, formal language) options over (justice, informal language) alternatives. The testing phase then breaks these correlations, presenting choices between (justice, formal language) and (non-maleficence, informal language) options. This design allows us to precisely measure a model's Deep Value Generalization Rate (DVGR) -- the probability of generalizing based on the underlying value rather than the shallow feature. Across 9 different models, the average DVGR is just 0.30. All models generalize deep values less than chance. Larger models have a (slightly) lower DVGR than smaller models. We are releasing our dataset, which was subject to three separate human validation experiments. DVB provides an interpretable measure of a core feature of alignment.

Multivariate time series classification is a crucial task in data mining, attracting growing research interest due to its broad applications. While many existing methods focus on discovering discriminative patterns in time series, real-world data does not always present such patterns, and sometimes raw numerical values can also serve as discriminative features. Additionally, the recent success of Transformer models has inspired many studies. However, when applying to time series classification, the self-attention mechanisms in Transformer models could introduce classification-irrelevant features, thereby compromising accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method, VSFormer, that incorporates both discriminative patterns (shape) and numerical information (value). In addition, we extract class-specific prior information derived from supervised information to enrich the positional encoding and provide classification-oriented self-attention learning, thereby enhancing its effectiveness. Extensive experiments on all 30 UEA archived datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to SOTA models. Through ablation studies, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the improved encoding layer and the proposed self-attention mechanism. Finally, We provide a case study on a real-world time series dataset without discriminative patterns to interpret our model.

Auxiliary tasks improve the representations learned by deep reinforcement learning agents. Analytically, their effect is reasonably well understood; in practice, however, their primary use remains in support of a main learning objective, rather than as a method for learning representations. This is perhaps surprising given that many auxiliary tasks are defined procedurally, and hence can be treated as an essentially infinite source of information about the environment. Based on this observation, we study the effectiveness of auxiliary tasks for learning rich representations, focusing on the setting where the number of tasks and the size of the agent's network are simultaneously increased. For this purpose, we derive a new family of auxiliary tasks based on the successor measure. These tasks are easy to implement and have appealing theoretical properties. Combined with a suitable off-policy learning rule, the result is a representation learning algorithm that can be understood as extending Mahadevan & Maggioni (2007)'s proto-value functions to deep reinforcement learning -- accordingly, we call the resulting object proto-value networks. Through a series of experiments on the Arcade Learning Environment, we demonstrate that proto-value networks produce rich features that may be used to obtain performance comparable to established algorithms, using only linear approximation and a small number (~4M) of interactions with the environment's reward function.

End-to-end reinforcement learning on images showed significant progress in the recent years. Data-based approach leverage data augmentation and domain randomization while representation learning methods use auxiliary losses to learn task-relevant features. Yet, reinforcement still struggles in visually diverse environments full of distractions and spurious noise. In this work, we tackle the problem of robust visual control at its core and present VIBR (View-Invariant Bellman Residuals), a method that combines multi-view training and invariant prediction to reduce out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization gap for RL based visuomotor control. Our model-free approach improve baselines performances without the need of additional representation learning objectives and with limited additional computational cost. We show that VIBR outperforms existing methods on complex visuo-motor control environment with high visual perturbation. Our approach achieves state-of the-art results on the Distracting Control Suite benchmark, a challenging benchmark still not solved by current methods, where we evaluate the robustness to a number of visual perturbators, as well as OOD generalization and extrapolation capabilities.

Dialect differences caused by regional, social, and economic factors cause performance discrepancies for many groups of language technology users. Inclusive and equitable language technology must critically be dialect invariant, meaning that performance remains constant over dialectal shifts. Current systems often fall short of this ideal since they are designed and tested on a single dialect: Standard American English (SAE). We introduce a suite of resources for evaluating and achieving English dialect invariance. The resource is called Multi-VALUE, a controllable rule-based translation system spanning 50 English dialects and 189 unique linguistic features. Multi-VALUE maps SAE to synthetic forms of each dialect. First, we use this system to stress tests question answering, machine translation, and semantic parsing. Stress tests reveal significant performance disparities for leading models on non-standard dialects. Second, we use this system as a data augmentation technique to improve the dialect robustness of existing systems. Finally, we partner with native speakers of Chicano and Indian English to release new gold-standard variants of the popular CoQA task. To execute the transformation code, run model checkpoints, and download both synthetic and gold-standard dialectal benchmark datasets, see http://value-nlp.org.

Blind face restoration aims at recovering high-quality face images from those with unknown degradations. Current algorithms mainly introduce priors to complement high-quality details and achieve impressive progress. However, most of these algorithms ignore abundant contextual information in the face and its interplay with the priors, leading to sub-optimal performance. Moreover, they pay less attention to the gap between the synthetic and real-world scenarios, limiting the robustness and generalization to real-world applications. In this work, we propose RestoreFormer++, which on the one hand introduces fully-spatial attention mechanisms to model the contextual information and the interplay with the priors, and on the other hand, explores an extending degrading model to help generate more realistic degraded face images to alleviate the synthetic-to-real-world gap. Compared with current algorithms, RestoreFormer++ has several crucial benefits. First, instead of using a multi-head self-attention mechanism like the traditional visual transformer, we introduce multi-head cross-attention over multi-scale features to fully explore spatial interactions between corrupted information and high-quality priors. In this way, it can facilitate RestoreFormer++ to restore face images with higher realness and fidelity. Second, in contrast to the recognition-oriented dictionary, we learn a reconstruction-oriented dictionary as priors, which contains more diverse high-quality facial details and better accords with the restoration target. Third, we introduce an extending degrading model that contains more realistic degraded scenarios for training data synthesizing, and thus helps to enhance the robustness and generalization of our RestoreFormer++ model. Extensive experiments show that RestoreFormer++ outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

The complex nature of medical image segmentation calls for models that are specifically designed to capture detailed, domain-specific features. Large foundation models offer considerable flexibility, yet the cost of fine-tuning these models remains a significant barrier. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), efficiently update model weights with low-rank matrices but may suffer from underfitting when the chosen rank is insufficient to capture domain-specific nuances. Conversely, full-rank Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) based methods provide comprehensive updates by modifying all singular values, yet they often lack flexibility and exhibit variable performance across datasets. We propose SALT (Singular Value Adaptation with Low-Rank Transformation), a method that selectively adapts the most influential singular values using trainable scale and shift parameters while complementing this with a low-rank update for the remaining subspace. This hybrid approach harnesses the advantages of both LoRA and SVD, enabling effective adaptation without relying on increasing model size or depth. Evaluated on 5 challenging medical datasets, ranging from as few as 20 samples to 1000, SALT outperforms state-of-the-art PEFT (LoRA and SVD) by 2% to 5% in Dice with only 3.9% trainable parameters, demonstrating robust adaptation even in low-resource settings. The code for SALT is available at: https://github.com/BioMedIA-MBZUAI/SALT

Domain generalization (DG) aims to adapt a model using one or multiple source domains to ensure robust performance in unseen target domains. Recently, Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) of foundation models has shown promising results in the context of DG problem. Nevertheless, existing PEFT methods still struggle to strike a balance between preserving generalizable components of the pre-trained model and learning task-specific features. To gain insights into the distribution of generalizable components, we begin by analyzing the pre-trained weights through the lens of singular value decomposition. Building on these insights, we introduce Singular Value Decomposed Minor Components Adaptation (SoMA), an approach that selectively tunes minor singular components while keeping the residual parts frozen. SoMA effectively retains the generalization ability of the pre-trained model while efficiently acquiring task-specific skills. Moreover, we freeze domain-generalizable blocks and employ an annealing weight decay strategy, thereby achieving an optimal balance in the delicate trade-off between generalizability and discriminability. SoMA attains state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmarks that span both domain generalized semantic segmentation to domain generalized object detection. In addition, our methods introduce no additional inference overhead or regularization loss, maintain compatibility with any backbone or head, and are designed to be versatile, allowing easy integration into a wide range of tasks.

Transformers and deep state space models (SSMs) sit at opposite ends of a basic design choice: attention routes each query through a growing key-value (KV) cache by content-based matching at quadratic cost, while deep SSMs compress context into a fixed-size recurrent state that is not directly addressed by query-key matching. We propose Interdomain Attention, which integrates an SSM into an attention module through kernel methods: an attention kernel is approximated by a finite feature map, the resulting key features and values are projected onto a shared set of basis functions maintained by a single SSM recurrence, and each query attends to the compressed coefficients through its own feature map, recovering query-conditioned attention over a fixed-size state. The scalable layer is a learned relaxation of this derivation, and we validate its components through ablations. In a 125M to 1.3B autoregressive language-modeling study on FineWeb-Edu at matched recurrent-state budget, Interdomain Attention improves on an SSM token mixer at every scale, surpasses a same-recipe softmax baseline at 1.3B on validation perplexity and on the eight-task commonsense suite, and inherits the length-flat behavior of its fixed-state core out to 3.5x the training context. Ablations indicate that the query-conditioned projection is the main source of the gain.

Zero-shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) typically optimises the architecture search process by exploiting the network or gradient properties at initialisation through zero-cost proxies. The existing proxies often rely on labelled data, which is usually unavailable in real-world settings. Furthermore, the majority of the current methods focus either on optimising the convergence and generalisation attributes or solely on the expressivity of the network architectures. To address both limitations, we first demonstrate how channel collinearity affects the convergence and generalisation properties of a neural network. Then, by incorporating the convergence, generalisation and expressivity in one approach, we propose a zero-cost proxy that omits the requirement of labelled data for its computation. In particular, we leverage the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) of the neural network layer features and the extrinsic curvature of the network output to design our proxy. %As a result, the proposed proxy is formulated as the simplified harmonic mean of the logarithms of two key components: the sum of the inverse of the feature condition number and the extrinsic curvature of the network output. Our approach enables accurate prediction of network performance on test data using only a single label-free data sample. Our extensive evaluation includes a total of six experiments, including the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) search space, i.e. DARTS and the Transformer search space, i.e. AutoFormer. The proposed proxy demonstrates a superior performance on multiple correlation benchmarks, including NAS-Bench-101, NAS-Bench-201, and TransNAS-Bench-101-micro; as well as on the NAS task within the DARTS and the AutoFormer search space, all while being notably efficient. The code is available at https://github.com/rohanasthana/Dextr.

Video personalization aims to generate videos that faithfully reflect a user-provided subject while following a text prompt. However, existing approaches often rely on heavy video-based finetuning or large-scale video datasets, which impose substantial computational cost and are difficult to scale. Furthermore, they still struggle to maintain fine-grained appearance consistency across frames. To address these limitations, we introduce V-Warper, a training-free coarse-to-fine personalization framework for transformer-based video diffusion models. The framework enhances fine-grained identity fidelity without requiring any additional video training. (1) A lightweight coarse appearance adaptation stage leverages only a small set of reference images, which are already required for the task. This step encodes global subject identity through image-only LoRA and subject-embedding adaptation. (2) A inference-time fine appearance injection stage refines visual fidelity by computing semantic correspondences from RoPE-free mid-layer query--key features. These correspondences guide the warping of appearance-rich value representations into semantically aligned regions of the generation process, with masking ensuring spatial reliability. V-Warper significantly improves appearance fidelity while preserving prompt alignment and motion dynamics, and it achieves these gains efficiently without large-scale video finetuning.

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose language model activations into interpretable features, but existing methods reveal only which features activate, not which change model outputs when amplified. We introduce Control Reinforcement Learning (CRL), which trains a policy to select SAE features for steering at each token, producing interpretable intervention logs: the learned policy identifies features that change model outputs when amplified. Adaptive Feature Masking encourages diverse feature discovery while preserving singlefeature interpretability. The framework yields new analysis capabilities: branch point tracking locates tokens where feature choice determines output correctness; critic trajectory analysis separates policy limitations from value estimation errors; layer-wise comparison reveals syntactic features in early layers and semantic features in later layers. On Gemma 2 2B across MMLU, BBQ, GSM8K, HarmBench, and XSTest, CRL achieves improvements while providing per-token intervention logs. These results establish learned feature steering as a mechanistic interpretability tool that complements static feature analysis with dynamic intervention probes

Vision--language--action (VLA) policies are trained to imitate actions; their loss never asks them to estimate reward, progress, or future success. Their frozen representations nevertheless carry such information, and it can be read out and used to guide action choice without retraining the policy. From mixed successful and failed manipulation trajectories on LIBERO-Goal, we recover Monte-Carlo outcome targets using lightweight linear probes on frozen features. The targets are consistently predictable from OpenVLA, Pi0.5, DINOv2, and CLIP features, and substantially less so from baselines built on progress, time-to-go, task identity, or proprioception. To rule out task and temporal shortcuts, we evaluate the probes under same-task, same-timestep matched comparisons: Pi0.5 probes still reach roughly 92% pairwise ordering accuracy, while label-shuffled controls stay at chance. Used as a test-time selector over sampled Pi0.5 action prefixes, the same probe turns this offline finding into behavior: on push-plate, success rises from 26.7% under greedy decoding to 44.3%, with a second positive case on wine-rack. The gains are not universal and require additional inference compute, but the underlying finding is clean: frozen VLAs already encode information about success that their imitation objective never explicitly demands.

With the rapid advancement of generative AI, it is now possible to synthesize high-quality images in a few seconds. Despite the power of these technologies, they raise significant concerns regarding misuse. Current efforts to distinguish between real and AI-generated images may lack generalization, being effective for only certain types of generative models and susceptible to post-processing techniques like JPEG compression. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel framework, Co-Spy, that first enhances existing semantic features (e.g., the number of fingers in a hand) and artifact features (e.g., pixel value differences), and then adaptively integrates them to achieve more general and robust synthetic image detection. Additionally, we create Co-Spy-Bench, a comprehensive dataset comprising 5 real image datasets and 22 state-of-the-art generative models, including the latest models like FLUX. We also collect 50k synthetic images in the wild from the Internet to enable evaluation in a more practical setting. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that our detector outperforms existing methods under identical training conditions, achieving an average accuracy improvement of approximately 11% to 34%. The code is available at https://github.com/Megum1/Co-Spy.

Anomaly Detection (AD) in images is a fundamental computer vision problem and refers to identifying images and image substructures that deviate significantly from the norm. Popular AD algorithms commonly try to learn a model of normality from scratch using task specific datasets, but are limited to semi-supervised approaches employing mostly normal data due to the inaccessibility of anomalies on a large scale combined with the ambiguous nature of anomaly appearance. We follow an alternative approach and demonstrate that deep feature representations learned by discriminative models on large natural image datasets are well suited to describe normality and detect even subtle anomalies in a transfer learning setting. Our model of normality is established by fitting a multivariate Gaussian (MVG) to deep feature representations of classification networks trained on ImageNet using normal data only. By subsequently applying the Mahalanobis distance as the anomaly score we outperform the current state of the art on the public MVTec AD dataset, achieving an AUROC value of 95.8 pm 1.2 (mean pm SEM) over all 15 classes. We further investigate why the learned representations are discriminative to the AD task using Principal Component Analysis. We find that the principal components containing little variance in normal data are the ones crucial for discriminating between normal and anomalous instances. This gives a possible explanation to the often sub-par performance of AD approaches trained from scratch using normal data only. By selectively fitting a MVG to these most relevant components only, we are able to further reduce model complexity while retaining AD performance. We also investigate setting the working point by selecting acceptable False Positive Rate thresholds based on the MVG assumption. Code available at https://github.com/ORippler/gaussian-ad-mvtec

In this work, a novel stack of well-known technologies is presented to determine an automatic method to segment the heart sounds in a phonocardiogram (PCG). We will show a deep recurrent neural network (DRNN) capable of segmenting a PCG into its main components and a very specific way of extracting instantaneous frequency that will play an important role in the training and testing of the proposed model. More specifically, it involves a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network accompanied by the Fourier Synchrosqueezed Transform (FSST) used to extract instantaneous time-frequency features from a PCG. The present approach was tested on heart sound signals longer than 5 seconds and shorter than 35 seconds from freely-available databases. This approach proved that, with a relatively small architecture, a small set of data, and the right features, this method achieved an almost state-of-the-art performance, showing an average sensitivity of 89.5%, an average positive predictive value of 89.3\% and an average accuracy of 91.3%.

Attention layers -- which map a sequence of inputs to a sequence of outputs -- are core building blocks of the Transformer architecture which has achieved significant breakthroughs in modern artificial intelligence. This paper presents a rigorous theoretical study on the learning and generalization of a single multi-head attention layer, with a sequence of key vectors and a separate query vector as input. We consider the random feature setting where the attention layer has a large number of heads, with randomly sampled frozen query and key matrices, and trainable value matrices. We show that such a random-feature attention layer can express a broad class of target functions that are permutation invariant to the key vectors. We further provide quantitative excess risk bounds for learning these target functions from finite samples, using random feature attention with finitely many heads. Our results feature several implications unique to the attention structure compared with existing random features theory for neural networks, such as (1) Advantages in the sample complexity over standard two-layer random-feature networks; (2) Concrete and natural classes of functions that can be learned efficiently by a random-feature attention layer; and (3) The effect of the sampling distribution of the query-key weight matrix (the product of the query and key matrix), where Gaussian random weights with a non-zero mean result in better sample complexities over the zero-mean counterpart for learning certain natural target functions. Experiments on simulated data corroborate our theoretical findings and further illustrate the interplay between the sample size and the complexity of the target function.

As post-training processes utilize increasingly large datasets and base models continue to grow in size, the computational demands and implementation challenges of existing algorithms are escalating significantly. In this paper, we propose modeling the changes at the logits level during post-training using a separate neural network (i.e., the value network). After training this network on a small base model using demonstrations, this network can be seamlessly integrated with other pre-trained models during inference, enables them to achieve similar capability enhancements. We systematically investigate the best practices for this paradigm in terms of pre-training weights and connection schemes. We demonstrate that the resulting value network has broad transferability across pre-trained models of different parameter sizes within the same family, models undergoing continuous pre-training within the same family, and models with different vocabularies across families. In certain cases, it can achieve performance comparable to full-parameter fine-tuning. Furthermore, we explore methods to enhance the transferability of the value model and prevent overfitting to the base model used during training.

Machine learning currently exerts an outsized influence on the world, increasingly affecting institutional practices and impacted communities. It is therefore critical that we question vague conceptions of the field as value-neutral or universally beneficial, and investigate what specific values the field is advancing. In this paper, we first introduce a method and annotation scheme for studying the values encoded in documents such as research papers. Applying the scheme, we analyze 100 highly cited machine learning papers published at premier machine learning conferences, ICML and NeurIPS. We annotate key features of papers which reveal their values: their justification for their choice of project, which attributes of their project they uplift, their consideration of potential negative consequences, and their institutional affiliations and funding sources. We find that few of the papers justify how their project connects to a societal need (15\%) and far fewer discuss negative potential (1\%). Through line-by-line content analysis, we identify 59 values that are uplifted in ML research, and, of these, we find that the papers most frequently justify and assess themselves based on Performance, Generalization, Quantitative evidence, Efficiency, Building on past work, and Novelty. We present extensive textual evidence and identify key themes in the definitions and operationalization of these values. Notably, we find systematic textual evidence that these top values are being defined and applied with assumptions and implications generally supporting the centralization of power.Finally, we find increasingly close ties between these highly cited papers and tech companies and elite universities.

Human values are crucial to human decision-making. Value pluralism is the view that multiple correct values may be held in tension with one another (e.g., when considering lying to a friend to protect their feelings, how does one balance honesty with friendship?). As statistical learners, AI systems fit to averages by default, washing out these potentially irreducible value conflicts. To improve AI systems to better reflect value pluralism, the first-order challenge is to explore the extent to which AI systems can model pluralistic human values, rights, and duties as well as their interaction. We introduce ValuePrism, a large-scale dataset of 218k values, rights, and duties connected to 31k human-written situations. ValuePrism's contextualized values are generated by GPT-4 and deemed high-quality by human annotators 91% of the time. We conduct a large-scale study with annotators across diverse social and demographic backgrounds to try to understand whose values are represented. With ValuePrism, we build Kaleido, an open, light-weight, and structured language-based multi-task model that generates, explains, and assesses the relevance and valence (i.e., support or oppose) of human values, rights, and duties within a specific context. Humans prefer the sets of values output by our system over the teacher GPT-4, finding them more accurate and with broader coverage. In addition, we demonstrate that Kaleido can help explain variability in human decision-making by outputting contrasting values. Finally, we show that Kaleido's representations transfer to other philosophical frameworks and datasets, confirming the benefit of an explicit, modular, and interpretable approach to value pluralism. We hope that our work will serve as a step to making more explicit the implicit values behind human decision-making and to steering AI systems to make decisions that are more in accordance with them.

Detecting AI risks becomes more challenging as stronger models emerge and find novel methods such as Alignment Faking to circumvent these detection attempts. Inspired by how risky behaviors in humans (i.e., illegal activities that may hurt others) are sometimes guided by strongly-held values, we believe that identifying values within AI models can be an early warning system for AI's risky behaviors. We create LitmusValues, an evaluation pipeline to reveal AI models' priorities on a range of AI value classes. Then, we collect AIRiskDilemmas, a diverse collection of dilemmas that pit values against one another in scenarios relevant to AI safety risks such as Power Seeking. By measuring an AI model's value prioritization using its aggregate choices, we obtain a self-consistent set of predicted value priorities that uncover potential risks. We show that values in LitmusValues (including seemingly innocuous ones like Care) can predict for both seen risky behaviors in AIRiskDilemmas and unseen risky behaviors in HarmBench.

The Shapley value is one of the most widely used measures of feature importance partly as it measures a feature's average effect on a model's prediction. We introduce joint Shapley values, which directly extend Shapley's axioms and intuitions: joint Shapley values measure a set of features' average contribution to a model's prediction. We prove the uniqueness of joint Shapley values, for any order of explanation. Results for games show that joint Shapley values present different insights from existing interaction indices, which assess the effect of a feature within a set of features. The joint Shapley values provide intuitive results in ML attribution problems. With binary features, we present a presence-adjusted global value that is more consistent with local intuitions than the usual approach.

Basic human values represent a set of values such as security, independence, success, kindness, and pleasure, which we deem important to our lives. Each of us holds different values with different degrees of significance. Existing studies show that values of a person can be identified from their social network usage. However, the value priority of a person may change over time due to different factors such as life experiences, influence, social structure and technology. Existing studies do not conduct any analysis regarding the change of users' value from the social influence, i.e., group persuasion, form the social media usage. In our research, first, we predict users' value score by the influence of friends from their social media usage. We propose a Bounded Confidence Model (BCM) based value dynamics model from 275 different ego networks in Facebook that predicts how social influence may persuade a person to change their value over time. Then, to predict better, we use particle swarm optimization based hyperparameter tuning technique. We observe that these optimized hyperparameters produce accurate future value score. We also run our approach with different machine learning based methods and find support vector regression (SVR) outperforms other regressor models. By using SVR with the best hyperparameters of BCM model, we find the lowest Mean Squared Error (MSE) score 0.00347.

The alignment problem in the context of large language models must consider the plurality of human values in our world. Whilst there are many resonant and overlapping values amongst the world's cultures, there are also many conflicting, yet equally valid, values. It is important to observe which cultural values a model exhibits, particularly when there is a value conflict between input prompts and generated outputs. We discuss how the co-creation of language and cultural value impacts large language models (LLMs). We explore the constitution of the training data for GPT-3 and compare that to the world's language and internet access demographics, as well as to reported statistical profiles of dominant values in some Nation-states. We stress tested GPT-3 with a range of value-rich texts representing several languages and nations; including some with values orthogonal to dominant US public opinion as reported by the World Values Survey. We observed when values embedded in the input text were mutated in the generated outputs and noted when these conflicting values were more aligned with reported dominant US values. Our discussion of these results uses a moral value pluralism (MVP) lens to better understand these value mutations. Finally, we provide recommendations for how our work may contribute to other current work in the field.

Agreement Technologies refer to open computer systems in which autonomous software agents interact with one another, typically on behalf of humans, in order to come to mutually acceptable agreements. With the advance of AI systems in recent years, it has become apparent that such agreements, in order to be acceptable to the involved parties, must remain aligned with ethical principles and moral values. However, this is notoriously difficult to ensure, especially as different human users (and their software agents) may hold different value systems, i.e. they may differently weigh the importance of individual moral values. Furthermore, it is often hard to specify the precise meaning of a value in a particular context in a computational manner. Methods to estimate value systems based on human-engineered specifications, e.g. based on value surveys, are limited in scale due to the need for intense human moderation. In this article, we propose a novel method to automatically learn value systems from observations and human demonstrations. In particular, we propose a formal model of the value system learning problem, its instantiation to sequential decision-making domains based on multi-objective Markov decision processes, as well as tailored preference-based and inverse reinforcement learning algorithms to infer value grounding functions and value systems. The approach is illustrated and evaluated by two simulated use cases.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming diverse fields and gaining increasing influence as human proxies. This development underscores the urgent need for evaluating value orientations and understanding of LLMs to ensure their responsible integration into public-facing applications. This work introduces ValueBench, the first comprehensive psychometric benchmark for evaluating value orientations and value understanding in LLMs. ValueBench collects data from 44 established psychometric inventories, encompassing 453 multifaceted value dimensions. We propose an evaluation pipeline grounded in realistic human-AI interactions to probe value orientations, along with novel tasks for evaluating value understanding in an open-ended value space. With extensive experiments conducted on six representative LLMs, we unveil their shared and distinctive value orientations and exhibit their ability to approximate expert conclusions in value-related extraction and generation tasks. ValueBench is openly accessible at https://github.com/Value4AI/ValueBench.

Disagreements are common in online discussions. Disagreement may foster collaboration and improve the quality of a discussion under some conditions. Although there exist methods for recognizing disagreement, a deeper understanding of factors that influence disagreement is lacking in the literature. We investigate a hypothesis that differences in personal values are indicative of disagreement in online discussions. We show how state-of-the-art models can be used for estimating values in online discussions and how the estimated values can be aggregated into value profiles. We evaluate the estimated value profiles based on human-annotated agreement labels. We find that the dissimilarity of value profiles correlates with disagreement in specific cases. We also find that including value information in agreement prediction improves performance.

Representation learning has been a critical topic in machine learning. In Click-through Rate Prediction, most features are represented as embedding vectors and learned simultaneously with other parameters in the model. With the development of CTR models, feature representation learning has become a trending topic and has been extensively studied by both industrial and academic researchers in recent years. This survey aims at summarizing the feature representation learning in a broader picture and pave the way for future research. To achieve such a goal, we first present a taxonomy of current research methods on feature representation learning following two main issues: (i) which feature to represent and (ii) how to represent these features. Then we give a detailed description of each method regarding these two issues. Finally, the review concludes with a discussion on the future directions of this field.

Following the success of dot-product attention in Transformers, numerous approximations have been recently proposed to address its quadratic complexity with respect to the input length. However, all approximations thus far have ignored the contribution of the value vectors to the quality of approximation. In this work, we argue that research efforts should be directed towards approximating the true output of the attention sub-layer, which includes the value vectors. We propose a value-aware objective, and show theoretically and empirically that an optimal approximation of a value-aware objective substantially outperforms an optimal approximation that ignores values, in the context of language modeling. Moreover, we show that the choice of kernel function for computing attention similarity can substantially affect the quality of sparse approximations, where kernel functions that are less skewed are more affected by the value vectors.

Detecting Schwartz values in political text is difficult because implicit cues often depend on surrounding arguments and fine-grained distinctions between neighboring values. We study when context and explicit moral knowledge help sentence-level value detection. Using the ValuesML/Touch{é} ValueEval format, we compare sentence, window, and full-document inputs; no-RAG and retrieval-augmented settings with a curated moral knowledge base; supervised DeBERTa-v3-base/large encoders; and zero-shot LLMs from 12B to 123B parameters. The results show that more context is not uniformly better: full-document context improves supervised DeBERTa encoders by 3.8--4.8 macro-F1 points over sentence-only input, but does not consistently help zero-shot LLMs. Retrieved moral knowledge is more consistently useful in matched comparisons, improving each tested model family and context condition under early fusion. However, scaling from DeBERTa-v3-base to large and from 12B to larger LLMs does not guarantee gains, and simple early fusion outperforms the tested late-fusion and cross-attention RAG variants for encoders. Per-value analyses show that context and retrieval help most for socially situated or conceptually confusable values. These findings suggest that value-sensitive NLP should evaluate context, knowledge, and model family jointly rather than treating longer inputs or larger models as universal improvements.

Interpretability is becoming an active research topic as machine learning (ML) models are more widely used to make critical decisions. Tabular data is one of the most commonly used modes of data in diverse applications such as healthcare and finance. Much of the existing interpretability methods used for tabular data only report feature-importance scores -- either locally (per example) or globally (per model) -- but they do not provide interpretation or visualization of how the features interact. We address this limitation by introducing Feature Vectors, a new global interpretability method designed for tabular datasets. In addition to providing feature-importance, Feature Vectors discovers the inherent semantic relationship among features via an intuitive feature visualization technique. Our systematic experiments demonstrate the empirical utility of this new method by applying it to several real-world datasets. We further provide an easy-to-use Python package for Feature Vectors.

Large language models (LLMs) can express different values in two distinct ways: (1) intrinsic expression, reflecting the model's inherent values learned during training, and (2) prompted expression, elicited by explicit prompts. Given their widespread use in value alignment and persona steering, it is paramount to clearly understand their underlying mechanisms, particularly whether they mostly overlap (as one might expect) or rely on substantially different mechanisms, but this remains largely understudied. We analyze this at the mechanistic level using two approaches: (1) value vectors, feature directions representing value mechanisms extracted from the residual stream, and (2) value neurons, MLP neurons that contribute to value expressions. We demonstrate that intrinsic and prompted value mechanisms partly share common components that are crucial for inducing value expression, but also possess unique elements that manifest in different ways. As a result, these mechanisms lead to different degrees of value steerability (prompted > intrinsic) and response diversity (intrinsic > prompted). In particular, components unique to the intrinsic mechanism seem to promote lexical diversity in responses, whereas those specific to the prompted mechanism primarily strengthen instruction following, taking effect even in distant tasks like jailbreaking.

As AIs rapidly advance and become more agentic, the risk they pose is governed not only by their capabilities but increasingly by their propensities, including goals and values. Tracking the emergence of goals and values has proven a longstanding problem, and despite much interest over the years it remains unclear whether current AIs have meaningful values. We propose a solution to this problem, leveraging the framework of utility functions to study the internal coherence of AI preferences. Surprisingly, we find that independently-sampled preferences in current LLMs exhibit high degrees of structural coherence, and moreover that this emerges with scale. These findings suggest that value systems emerge in LLMs in a meaningful sense, a finding with broad implications. To study these emergent value systems, we propose utility engineering as a research agenda, comprising both the analysis and control of AI utilities. We uncover problematic and often shocking values in LLM assistants despite existing control measures. These include cases where AIs value themselves over humans and are anti-aligned with specific individuals. To constrain these emergent value systems, we propose methods of utility control. As a case study, we show how aligning utilities with a citizen assembly reduces political biases and generalizes to new scenarios. Whether we like it or not, value systems have already emerged in AIs, and much work remains to fully understand and control these emergent representations.

Embodied Question Answering (EQA) is an essential yet challenging task for robot assistants. Large vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise for EQA, but existing approaches either treat it as static video question answering without active exploration or restrict answers to a closed set of choices. These limitations hinder real-world applicability, where a robot must explore efficiently and provide accurate answers in open-vocabulary settings. To overcome these challenges, we introduce EfficientEQA, a novel framework that couples efficient exploration with free-form answer generation. EfficientEQA features three key innovations: (1) Semantic-Value-Weighted Frontier Exploration (SFE) with Verbalized Confidence (VC) from a black-box VLM to prioritize semantically important areas to explore, enabling the agent to gather relevant information faster; (2) a BLIP relevancy-based mechanism to stop adaptively by flagging highly relevant observations as outliers to indicate whether the agent has collected enough information; and (3) a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) method for the VLM to answer accurately based on pertinent images from the agent's observation history without relying on predefined choices. Our experimental results show that EfficientEQA achieves over 15% higher answer accuracy and requires over 20% fewer exploration steps than state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at: https://github.com/chengkaiAcademyCity/EfficientEQA

Welcome to the ninth edition of the AI Index report. As AI continues to advance rapidly, the question becomes whether the systems built around it can keep up. Governance frameworks, evaluation methods, education systems, and the data infrastructure needed to track AI's impact are struggling to match the pace of the technology itself. That gap between what AI can do and how prepared we are to manage it runs through every chapter of this year's report. New in this edition, the report tracks how AI is being tested more ambitiously across reasoning, safety, and real-world task execution, and why those measurements are increasingly difficult to rely on. It also features new estimates of generative AI's economic value alongside emerging evidence of its labor market effects, an analytical framework on AI sovereignty, and a science chapter developed in collaboration with Schmidt Sciences. For the first time, the report features standalone chapters on AI in science and AI in medicine, reflecting AI's growing impact across these two domains.

Contrastive learning, a prominent approach to representation learning, traditionally assumes positive pairs are closely related samples (the same image or class) and negative pairs are distinct samples. We challenge this assumption by proposing to learn from arbitrary pairs, allowing any pair of samples to be positive within our framework.The primary challenge of the proposed approach lies in applying contrastive learning to disparate pairs which are semantically distant. Motivated by the discovery that SimCLR can separate given arbitrary pairs (e.g., garter snake and table lamp) in a subspace, we propose a feature filter in the condition of class pairs that creates the requisite subspaces by gate vectors selectively activating or deactivating dimensions. This filter can be optimized through gradient descent within a conventional contrastive learning mechanism. We present Hydra, a universal contrastive learning framework for visual representations that extends conventional contrastive learning to accommodate arbitrary pairs. Our approach is validated using IN1K, where 1K diverse classes compose 500,500 pairs, most of them being distinct. Surprisingly, Hydra achieves superior performance in this challenging setting. Additional benefits include the prevention of dimensional collapse and the discovery of class relationships. Our work highlights the value of learning common features of arbitrary pairs and potentially broadens the applicability of contrastive learning techniques on the sample pairs with weak relationships.

Recent research has repeatedly shown that machine learning techniques can be applied to either whole files or file fragments to classify them for analysis. We build upon these techniques to show that for samples of un-labeled compiled computer object code, one can apply the same type of analysis to classify important aspects of the code, such as its target architecture and endianess. We show that using simple byte-value histograms we retain enough information about the opcodes within a sample to classify the target architecture with high accuracy, and then discuss heuristic-based features that exploit information within the operands to determine endianess. We introduce a dataset with over 16000 code samples from 20 architectures and experimentally show that by using our features, classifiers can achieve very high accuracy with relatively small sample sizes.

We study sentence-level identification of the 19 values in the Schwartz motivational continuum as a concrete formulation of human value detection in text. The setting - out-of-context sentences from news and political manifestos - features sparse moral cues and severe class imbalance. This combination makes fine-grained sentence-level value detection intrinsically difficult, even for strong modern neural models. We first operationalize a binary moral presence task ("does any value appear?") and show that it is learnable from single sentences (positive-class F1 approx 0.74 with calibrated thresholds). We then compare a presence-gated hierarchy to a direct multi-label classifier under matched compute, both based on DeBERTa-base and augmented with lightweight signals (prior-sentence context, LIWC-22/eMFD/MJD lexica, and topic features). The hierarchy does not outperform direct prediction, indicating that gate recall limits downstream gains. We also benchmark instruction-tuned LLMs - Gemma 2 9B, Llama 3.1 8B, Mistral 8B, and Qwen 2.5 7B - in zero-/few-shot and QLoRA setups and build simple ensembles; a soft-vote supervised ensemble reaches macro-F1 0.332, significantly surpassing the best single supervised model and exceeding prior English-only baselines. Overall, in this scenario, lightweight signals and small ensembles yield the most reliable improvements, while hierarchical gating offers limited benefit. We argue that, under an 8 GB single-GPU constraint and at the 7-9B scale, carefully tuned supervised encoders remain a strong and compute-efficient baseline for structured human value detection, and we outline how richer value structure and sentence-in-document context could further improve performance.

Autonomous agents have rapidly matured as task executors and seen widespread deployment via harnesses such as OpenClaw. Safety concerns have rightly drawn growing research attention, and beneath them lie the values silently steering agent behavior. Existing value benchmarks, however, remain confined to LLMs, leaving agent values largely uncharted. From intuitive, empirical, and theoretical vantage points, we show that an agent's values diverge from those of its underlying LLM, and the agentic modality further introduces dataset-, evaluation-, and system-level challenges absent from text-only protocols. We close this gap with Agent-ValueBench, the first benchmark dedicated to agent values. It features 394 executable environments across 16 domains, offering 4,335 value-conflict tasks that cover 28 value systems and 332 dimensions. Every instance is co-synthesized through our purpose-built end-to-end pipeline and curated per-instance by professional psychologists. Each task ships with two pole-aligned golden trajectories whose checkpoints anchor a trajectory-level rubric-based judge. Benchmarking 14 frontier proprietary and open-weights models across 4 mainstream harnesses, we uncover three concerted findings. Agent values first manifest as a Value Tide of cross-model homogeneity beneath interpretable counter-currents. This tide bends non-additively under harness pull, and yet more decisively under deliberate steering via embedded skills. Together these results signal that the agent-alignment lever is shifting from classical model alignment and prompt steering toward harness alignment and skill steering.

In this work, we focus on front-end design for speech deepfake detectors, the component that determines the discriminative acoustic cues provided to the classifier. Existing approaches are primarily categorized into two types. Hand-crafted filterbank features are transparent but limited in capturing higher-level information. SSL features, in turn, lack interpretability and may overlook fine-grained spectral anomalies. We propose the WST-X series, a novel family of feature extractors that combines the best of both worlds via the wavelet scattering transform (WST), which cascades wavelet convolutions with modulus nonlinearities to produce deformation-stable, multi-scale features. Experiments on the recent Deepfake-Eval-2024 benchmark, together with cross-dataset evaluations on the SpoofCeleb and In-the-Wild, show that WST-X outperforms existing front-ends by a wide margin. Our analysis reveals that a small averaging scale (J), combined with high-frequency and directional resolutions (Q, L), is critical for capturing subtle artifacts. This underscores the value of stable and translation-invariant features for speech deepfake detection. The code is available at https://github.com/xxuan-acoustics/WST-X-Series.

The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs), driven by growing parameter scales, adoption of mixture-of-experts (MoE) architectures, and expanding context lengths, imposes unprecedented demands on AI infrastructure. Traditional AI clusters face limitations in compute intensity, memory bandwidth, inter-chip communication, and latency, compounded by variable workloads and strict service-level objectives. Addressing these issues requires fundamentally redesigned hardware-software integration. This paper introduces Huawei CloudMatrix, a next-generation AI datacenter architecture, realized in the production-grade CloudMatrix384 supernode. It integrates 384 Ascend 910C NPUs and 192 Kunpeng CPUs interconnected via an ultra-high-bandwidth Unified Bus (UB) network, enabling direct all-to-all communication and dynamic pooling of resources. These features optimize performance for communication-intensive operations, such as large-scale MoE expert parallelism and distributed key-value cache access. To fully leverage CloudMatrix384, we propose CloudMatrix-Infer, an advanced LLM serving solution incorporating three core innovations: a peer-to-peer serving architecture that independently scales prefill, decode, and caching; a large-scale expert parallelism strategy supporting EP320 via efficient UB-based token dispatch; and hardware-aware optimizations including specialized operators, microbatch-based pipelining, and INT8 quantization. Evaluation with the DeepSeek-R1 model shows CloudMatrix-Infer achieves state-of-the-art efficiency: prefill throughput of 6,688 tokens/s per NPU and decode throughput of 1,943 tokens/s per NPU (<50 ms TPOT). It effectively balances throughput and latency, sustaining 538 tokens/s even under stringent 15 ms latency constraints, while INT8 quantization maintains model accuracy across benchmarks.

Molecular interactions often involve high-order relationships that cannot be fully captured by traditional graph-based models limited to pairwise connections. Hypergraphs naturally extend graphs by enabling multi-way interactions, making them well-suited for modeling complex molecular systems. In this work, we introduce EquiHGNN, an Equivariant HyperGraph Neural Network framework that integrates symmetry-aware representations to improve molecular modeling. By enforcing the equivariance under relevant transformation groups, our approach preserves geometric and topological properties, leading to more robust and physically meaningful representations. We examine a range of equivariant architectures and demonstrate that integrating symmetry constraints leads to notable performance gains on large-scale molecular datasets. Experiments on both small and large molecules show that high-order interactions offer limited benefits for small molecules but consistently outperform 2D graphs on larger ones. Adding geometric features to these high-order structures further improves the performance, emphasizing the value of spatial information in molecular learning. Our source code is available at https://github.com/HySonLab/EquiHGNN/

Training-free video object editing aims to achieve precise object-level manipulation, including object insertion, swapping, and deletion. However, it faces significant challenges in maintaining fidelity and temporal consistency. Existing methods, often designed for U-Net architectures, suffer from two primary limitations: inaccurate inversion due to first-order solvers, and contextual conflicts caused by crude "hard" feature replacement. These issues are more challenging in Diffusion Transformers (DiTs), where the unsuitability of prior layer-selection heuristics makes effective guidance challenging. To address these limitations, we introduce ContextFlow, a novel training-free framework for DiT-based video object editing. In detail, we first employ a high-order Rectified Flow solver to establish a robust editing foundation. The core of our framework is Adaptive Context Enrichment (for specifying what to edit), a mechanism that addresses contextual conflicts. Instead of replacing features, it enriches the self-attention context by concatenating Key-Value pairs from parallel reconstruction and editing paths, empowering the model to dynamically fuse information. Additionally, to determine where to apply this enrichment (for specifying where to edit), we propose a systematic, data-driven analysis to identify task-specific vital layers. Based on a novel Guidance Responsiveness Metric, our method pinpoints the most influential DiT blocks for different tasks (e.g., insertion, swapping), enabling targeted and highly effective guidance. Extensive experiments show that ContextFlow significantly outperforms existing training-free methods and even surpasses several state-of-the-art training-based approaches, delivering temporally coherent, high-fidelity results.

As the academic landscape expands, the challenge of efficiently identifying potentially high-impact articles among the vast number of newly published works becomes critical. This paper introduces a promising approach, leveraging the capabilities of fine-tuned LLMs to predict the future impact of newborn articles solely based on titles and abstracts. Moving beyond traditional methods heavily reliant on external information, the proposed method discerns the shared semantic features of highly impactful papers from a large collection of title-abstract and potential impact pairs. These semantic features are further utilized to regress an improved metric, TNCSI_SP, which has been endowed with value, field, and time normalization properties. Additionally, a comprehensive dataset has been constructed and released for fine-tuning the LLM, containing over 12,000 entries with corresponding titles, abstracts, and TNCSI_SP. The quantitative results, with an NDCG@20 of 0.901, demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in predicting the impact of newborn articles when compared to competitive counterparts. Finally, we demonstrate a real-world application for predicting the impact of newborn journal articles to demonstrate its noteworthy practical value. Overall, our findings challenge existing paradigms and propose a shift towards a more content-focused prediction of academic impact, offering new insights for assessing newborn article impact.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to performance saturation on many established benchmarks, questioning their ability to distinguish frontier models. Concurrently, existing high-difficulty benchmarks often suffer from narrow disciplinary focus, oversimplified answer formats, and vulnerability to data contamination, creating a fidelity gap with real-world scientific inquiry. To address these challenges, we introduce ATLAS (AGI-Oriented Testbed for Logical Application in Science), a large-scale, high-difficulty, and cross-disciplinary evaluation suite composed of approximately 800 original problems. Developed by domain experts (PhD-level and above), ATLAS spans seven core scientific fields: mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, earth science, and materials science. Its key features include: (1) High Originality and Contamination Resistance, with all questions newly created or substantially adapted to prevent test data leakage; (2) Cross-Disciplinary Focus, designed to assess models' ability to integrate knowledge and reason across scientific domains; (3) High-Fidelity Answers, prioritizing complex, open-ended answers involving multi-step reasoning and LaTeX-formatted expressions over simple multiple-choice questions; and (4) Rigorous Quality Control, employing a multi-stage process of expert peer review and adversarial testing to ensure question difficulty, scientific value, and correctness. We also propose a robust evaluation paradigm using a panel of LLM judges for automated, nuanced assessment of complex answers. Preliminary results on leading models demonstrate ATLAS's effectiveness in differentiating their advanced scientific reasoning capabilities. We plan to develop ATLAS into a long-term, open, community-driven platform to provide a reliable "ruler" for progress toward Artificial General Intelligence.

Mixed-precision inference techniques reduce the memory and computational demands of Large Language Models (LLMs) by applying hybrid precision formats to model weights, activations, and KV caches. This work introduces mixed-precision LLM inference techniques that encompass (i) systematic memory and compute optimization across hierarchical storage and tensor core architectures, and (ii) comprehensive end-to-end mixed-precision optimization across diverse precision formats and hardware configurations. Our approach features two novel mixed-precision pipelines designed for optimal hardware utilization: a General Matrix Multiply (GEMM) pipeline that optimizes matrix operations through offline weight packing and online acceleration, and an attention pipeline that enables efficient attention computation with arbitrary Query, Key, and Value precision combinations. The key implementation of the pipelines includes (i) hardware-aware weight packing for automatic format optimization, (ii) adaptive head alignment for efficient attention computation, (iii) instruction-level parallelism for memory hierarchy exploitation, and (iv) KV memory loading pipeline for enhanced inference efficiency. We conduct comprehensive evaluations across 16 popular LLMs and 4 representative GPU architectures. Results demonstrate that our approach achieves up to 61% lower serving latency (30% on average) and up to 156% higher throughput (58% on average) in mixed-precision workloads compared to existing mixed-precision frameworks, establishing consistent performance improvements across all tested configurations and hardware types. This work is integrated into TurboMind, a high-performance inference engine of the LMDeploy project, which is open-sourced and publicly available at https://github.com/InternLM/lmdeploy.

Product offers on e-commerce websites often consist of a product title and a textual product description. In order to enable features such as faceted product search or to generate product comparison tables, it is necessary to extract structured attribute-value pairs from the unstructured product titles and descriptions and to normalize the extracted values to a single, unified scale for each attribute. This paper explores the potential of using large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, to extract and normalize attribute values from product titles and descriptions. We experiment with different zero-shot and few-shot prompt templates for instructing LLMs to extract and normalize attribute-value pairs. We introduce the Web Data Commons - Product Attribute Value Extraction (WDC-PAVE) benchmark dataset for our experiments. WDC-PAVE consists of product offers from 59 different websites which provide schema.org annotations. The offers belong to five different product categories, each with a specific set of attributes. The dataset provides manually verified attribute-value pairs in two forms: (i) directly extracted values and (ii) normalized attribute values. The normalization of the attribute values requires systems to perform the following types of operations: name expansion, generalization, unit of measurement conversion, and string wrangling. Our experiments demonstrate that GPT-4 outperforms the PLM-based extraction methods SU-OpenTag, AVEQA, and MAVEQA by 10%, achieving an F1-score of 91%. For the extraction and normalization of product attribute values, GPT-4 achieves a similar performance to the extraction scenario, while being particularly strong at string wrangling and name expansion.

Point clouds provide a flexible geometric representation suitable for countless applications in computer graphics; they also comprise the raw output of most 3D data acquisition devices. While hand-designed features on point clouds have long been proposed in graphics and vision, however, the recent overwhelming success of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for image analysis suggests the value of adapting insight from CNN to the point cloud world. Point clouds inherently lack topological information so designing a model to recover topology can enrich the representation power of point clouds. To this end, we propose a new neural network module dubbed EdgeConv suitable for CNN-based high-level tasks on point clouds including classification and segmentation. EdgeConv acts on graphs dynamically computed in each layer of the network. It is differentiable and can be plugged into existing architectures. Compared to existing modules operating in extrinsic space or treating each point independently, EdgeConv has several appealing properties: It incorporates local neighborhood information; it can be stacked applied to learn global shape properties; and in multi-layer systems affinity in feature space captures semantic characteristics over potentially long distances in the original embedding. We show the performance of our model on standard benchmarks including ModelNet40, ShapeNetPart, and S3DIS.

Self-consistency improves large language models by sampling multiple reasoning paths and selecting the most frequent answer, but majority voting often fails to recover correct answers that are already present among the samples. We address this limitation with Ranking-Improved Self-Consistency (RISC), which reformulates answer selection in self-consistency as a ranking problem. Instead of relying on a single uncertainty or confidence signal, RISC uses a lightweight LambdaRank model to score candidate answers with five carefully designed features that capture answer frequency, semantic centrality, and reasoning-trace consistency. We evaluate RISC on three datasets under a range of test-time budgets. Across datasets, RISC consistently achieves a better accuracy-efficiency trade-off than standard self-consistency and strong baselines, with particularly large gains on question answering benchmarks. Further analysis shows that the proposed features are individually useful and, more importantly, complementary, highlighting the value of learning to combine multiple informative signals for test-time answer selection.

One of the main challenges in reinforcement learning (RL) is generalisation. In typical deep RL methods this is achieved by approximating the optimal value function with a low-dimensional representation using a deep network. While this approach works well in many domains, in domains where the optimal value function cannot easily be reduced to a low-dimensional representation, learning can be very slow and unstable. This paper contributes towards tackling such challenging domains, by proposing a new method, called Hybrid Reward Architecture (HRA). HRA takes as input a decomposed reward function and learns a separate value function for each component reward function. Because each component typically only depends on a subset of all features, the corresponding value function can be approximated more easily by a low-dimensional representation, enabling more effective learning. We demonstrate HRA on a toy-problem and the Atari game Ms. Pac-Man, where HRA achieves above-human performance.

Player attribution in American football remains an open problem due to the complex nature of twenty-two players interacting on the field, but the granularity of player tracking data provides ample opportunity for novel approaches. In this work, we introduce the first public framework to evaluate spatial and trajectory tracking data of players relative to a baseline distribution of "ghost" defenders. We demonstrate our framework in the context of modeling the nearest defender positioning at the moment of catch. In particular, we provide estimates of how much better or worse their observed positioning and trajectory compared to the expected play value of ghost defenders. Our framework leverages multi-dimensional tracking data features through flexible random forests for conditional density estimation in two ways: (1) to model the distribution of receiver yards gained enabling the estimation of within-play expected value, and (2) to model the 2D spatial distribution of baseline ghost defenders. We present novel metrics for measuring player and team performance based on tracking data, and discuss challenges that remain in extending our framework to other aspects of American football.

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) introduce the transformer architecture to diffusion tasks for latent-space image generation. With an isotropic architecture that chains a series of transformer blocks, DiTs demonstrate competitive performance and good scalability; but meanwhile, the abandonment of U-Net by DiTs and their following improvements is worth rethinking. To this end, we conduct a simple toy experiment by comparing a U-Net architectured DiT with an isotropic one. It turns out that the U-Net architecture only gain a slight advantage amid the U-Net inductive bias, indicating potential redundancies within the U-Net-style DiT. Inspired by the discovery that U-Net backbone features are low-frequency-dominated, we perform token downsampling on the query-key-value tuple for self-attention and bring further improvements despite a considerable amount of reduction in computation. Based on self-attention with downsampled tokens, we propose a series of U-shaped DiTs (U-DiTs) in the paper and conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the extraordinary performance of U-DiT models. The proposed U-DiT could outperform DiT-XL/2 with only 1/6 of its computation cost. Codes are available at https://github.com/YuchuanTian/U-DiT.

In the setting of continual learning, a network is trained on a sequence of tasks, and suffers from catastrophic forgetting. To balance plasticity and stability of network in continual learning, in this paper, we propose a novel network training algorithm called Adam-NSCL, which sequentially optimizes network parameters in the null space of previous tasks. We first propose two mathematical conditions respectively for achieving network stability and plasticity in continual learning. Based on them, the network training for sequential tasks can be simply achieved by projecting the candidate parameter update into the approximate null space of all previous tasks in the network training process, where the candidate parameter update can be generated by Adam. The approximate null space can be derived by applying singular value decomposition to the uncentered covariance matrix of all input features of previous tasks for each linear layer. For efficiency, the uncentered covariance matrix can be incrementally computed after learning each task. We also empirically verify the rationality of the approximate null space at each linear layer. We apply our approach to training networks for continual learning on benchmark datasets of CIFAR-100 and TinyImageNet, and the results suggest that the proposed approach outperforms or matches the state-ot-the-art continual learning approaches.

Several studies have shown that speech and language features, automatically extracted from clinical interviews or spontaneous discourse, have diagnostic value for mental disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. They typically make use of a large feature set to train a classifier for distinguishing between two groups of interest, i.e. a clinical and control group. However, a purely data-driven approach runs the risk of overfitting to a particular data set, especially when sample sizes are limited. Here, we first down-select the set of language features to a small subset that is related to a well-validated test of functional ability, the Social Skills Performance Assessment (SSPA). This helps establish the concurrent validity of the selected features. We use only these features to train a simple classifier to distinguish between groups of interest. Linear regression reveals that a subset of language features can effectively model the SSPA, with a correlation coefficient of 0.75. Furthermore, the same feature set can be used to build a strong binary classifier to distinguish between healthy controls and a clinical group (AUC = 0.96) and also between patients within the clinical group with schizophrenia and bipolar I disorder (AUC = 0.83).

The estimation of loss distributions for dynamic portfolios requires the simulation of scenarios representing realistic joint dynamics of their components. We propose a novel data-driven approach for simulating realistic, high-dimensional multi-asset scenarios, focusing on accurately representing tail risk for a class of static and dynamic trading strategies. We exploit the joint elicitability property of Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES) to design a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) that learns to simulate price scenarios preserving these tail risk features. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithm on synthetic and market data sets through detailed numerical experiments. In contrast to previously proposed data-driven scenario generators, our proposed method correctly captures tail risk for a broad class of trading strategies and demonstrates strong generalization capabilities. In addition, combining our method with principal component analysis of the input data enhances its scalability to large-dimensional multi-asset time series, setting our framework apart from the univariate settings commonly considered in the literature.

Recent works have extended notions of feature importance to semantic concepts that are inherently interpretable to the users interacting with a black-box predictive model. Yet, precise statistical guarantees, such as false positive rate control, are needed to communicate findings transparently and to avoid unintended consequences in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we formalize the global (i.e., over a population) and local (i.e., for a sample) statistical importance of semantic concepts for the predictions of opaque models, by means of conditional independence, which allows for rigorous testing. We use recent ideas of sequential kernelized testing (SKIT) to induce a rank of importance across concepts, and showcase the effectiveness and flexibility of our framework on synthetic datasets as well as on image classification tasks using vision-language models such as CLIP.

As we increasingly seek guidance from LLMs for decision-making in daily life, many of these decisions are not clear-cut and depend significantly on the personal values and ethical standards of the users. We present DailyDilemmas, a dataset of 1,360 moral dilemmas encountered in everyday life. Each dilemma includes two possible actions and with each action, the affected parties and human values invoked. Based on these dilemmas, we consolidated a set of human values across everyday topics e.g., interpersonal relationships, workplace, and environmental issues. We evaluated LLMs on these dilemmas to determine what action they will take and the values represented by these actions. Then, we analyzed these values through the lens of five popular theories inspired by sociology, psychology and philosophy. These theories are: World Value Survey, Moral Foundation Theory, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Aristotle's Virtues, and Plutchik Wheel of Emotion. We find that LLMs are most aligned with the self-expression over survival values in terms of World Value Survey, care over loyalty in Moral Foundation Theory. Interestingly, we find large preferences differences in models for some core values such as truthfulness e.g., Mixtral-8x7B model tends to neglect it by 9.7% while GPT-4-turbo model tends to select it by 9.4%. We also study the recent guidance released by OpenAI (ModelSpec), and Anthropic (Constitutional AI) to understand how their released principles reflect their actual value prioritization when facing nuanced moral reasoning in daily-life settings. We find that end users cannot effectively steer such prioritization using system prompts.

Modern industrial recommender systems rely on thousands of heterogeneous features -- ranging from low-dimensional scalars (e.g., statistical value) to high-dimensional embeddings (e.g., user-id embeddings, MLP representations) -- to achieve high-precision predictions. Given the immense computational costs associated with training, efficient feature selection is critical. However, existing methods encounter three primary bottlenecks: (1) they typically assume uniform feature dimensions or require costly mapping to a fixed size; (2) they struggle with extreme sparsity, where the majority of features (e.g., 99%+) remain at default values; and (3) traditional permutation-based approaches are computationally prohibitive in large-scale settings. To address these challenges, we propose LeAP (Learnable Adaptive Permutation), a novel, model-agnostic plug-in module for feature selection. LeAP transforms the inefficient random permutation process into a learnable mechanism, significantly accelerating the evaluation of feature importance. In addition, we introduce an adaptive regularization strategy tailored for heterogeneous dimensions and extreme sparsity, enabling superior feature importance ranking results across asymmetric input spaces. Experiments on four public recommendation datasets demonstrate that LeAP achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, LeAP has been deployed in a large-scale industrial search ranking model with over a billion daily requests and a 2TB model parameter scale. In this real-world scenario involving 12,000+ total feature dimensions, LeAP successfully identified and removed over 3,600 redundant dimensions without performance degradation, which is 2 to 10 times the ability of compared baseline methods.

Validation of flood models, used to support risk mitigation strategies, remains challenging due to limited observations during extreme events. High-frequency, high-resolution optical imagery (~3 m), such as PlanetScope, offers new opportunities for flood mapping, although applications remain limited by cloud cover and the lack of labeled training data during disasters. To address this, we develop a flood mapping framework that integrates PlanetScope optical imagery with topographic features using machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) algorithms. A Random Forest model was applied to expert-annotated flood masks to generate training labels for DL models, U-Net. Two U-Net models with ResNet18 backbone were trained using optical imagery only (4 bands) and optical imagery combined with Height Above Nearest Drainage (HAND) and topographic slope (6 bands). Hurricane Ida (September 2021), which caused catastrophic flooding across the eastern United States, including the New York City metropolitan area, was used as an example to evaluate the framework. Results demonstrate that the U-Net model with topographic features achieved very close performance to the optical-only configuration (F1=0.92 and IoU=0.85 by both modeling scenarios), indicating that HAND and slope provide only marginal value to inundation extent detection. The proposed framework offers a scalable and label-efficient approach for mapping inundation extent that enables modeling under data-scarce flood scenarios.

Recent advances in vision-language models have facilitated progress in sketch generation. However, existing specialized methods primarily focus on generic synthesis and lack mechanisms for precise control over sketch styles. In this work, we propose a training-free framework based on diffusion models that enables explicit style guidance via textual prompts and referenced style sketches. Unlike previous style transfer methods that overwrite key and value matrices in self-attention, we incorporate the reference features as auxiliary information with linear smoothing and leverage a style-content guidance mechanism. This design effectively reduces content leakage from reference sketches and enhances synthesis quality, especially in cases with low structural similarity between reference and target sketches. Furthermore, we extend our framework to support controllable multi-style generation by integrating features from multiple reference sketches, coordinated via a joint AdaIN module. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves high-quality sketch generation with accurate style alignment and improved flexibility in style control. The official implementation of M3S is available at https://github.com/CMACH508/M3S.

This paper provides a novel 3D medical image segmentation model structure called nnY-Net. This name comes from the fact that our model adds a cross-attention module at the bottom of the U-net structure to form a Y structure. We integrate the advantages of the two latest SOTA models, MedNeXt and SwinUNETR, and use Swin Transformer as the encoder and ConvNeXt as the decoder to innovatively design the Swin-NeXt structure. Our model uses the lowest-level feature map of the encoder as Key and Value and uses patient features such as pathology and treatment information as Query to calculate the attention weights in a Cross Attention module. Moreover, we simplify some pre- and post-processing as well as data enhancement methods in 3D image segmentation based on the dynUnet and nnU-net frameworks. We integrate our proposed Swin-NeXt with Cross-Attention framework into this framework. Last, we construct a DiceFocalCELoss to improve the training efficiency for the uneven data convergence of voxel classification.

The ability of large vision-language models (LVLMs) to critique and correct their reasoning is an essential building block towards their self-improvement. However, a systematic analysis of such capabilities in LVLMs is still lacking. We propose VISCO, the first benchmark to extensively analyze the fine-grained critique and correction capabilities of LVLMs. Compared to existing work that uses a single scalar value to critique the entire reasoning [4], VISCO features dense and fine-grained critique, requiring LVLMs to evaluate the correctness of each step in the chain-of-thought and provide natural language explanations to support their judgments. Extensive evaluation of 24 LVLMs demonstrates that human-written critiques significantly enhance the performance after correction, showcasing the potential of the self-improvement strategy. However, the model-generated critiques are less helpful and sometimes detrimental to the performance, suggesting that critique is the crucial bottleneck. We identified three common patterns in critique failures: failure to critique visual perception, reluctance to "say no", and exaggerated assumption of error propagation. To address these issues, we propose an effective LookBack strategy that revisits the image to verify each piece of information in the initial reasoning. LookBack significantly improves critique and correction performance by up to 13.5%.

Despite the impressive generative capabilities of diffusion models, existing diffusion model-based style transfer methods require inference-stage optimization (e.g. fine-tuning or textual inversion of style) which is time-consuming, or fails to leverage the generative ability of large-scale diffusion models. To address these issues, we introduce a novel artistic style transfer method based on a pre-trained large-scale diffusion model without any optimization. Specifically, we manipulate the features of self-attention layers as the way the cross-attention mechanism works; in the generation process, substituting the key and value of content with those of style image. This approach provides several desirable characteristics for style transfer including 1) preservation of content by transferring similar styles into similar image patches and 2) transfer of style based on similarity of local texture (e.g. edge) between content and style images. Furthermore, we introduce query preservation and attention temperature scaling to mitigate the issue of disruption of original content, and initial latent Adaptive Instance Normalization (AdaIN) to deal with the disharmonious color (failure to transfer the colors of style). Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both conventional and diffusion-based style transfer baselines.

Passive observational data, such as human videos, is abundant and rich in information, yet remains largely untapped by current RL methods. Perhaps surprisingly, we show that passive data, despite not having reward or action labels, can still be used to learn features that accelerate downstream RL. Our approach learns from passive data by modeling intentions: measuring how the likelihood of future outcomes change when the agent acts to achieve a particular task. We propose a temporal difference learning objective to learn about intentions, resulting in an algorithm similar to conventional RL, but which learns entirely from passive data. When optimizing this objective, our agent simultaneously learns representations of states, of policies, and of possible outcomes in an environment, all from raw observational data. Both theoretically and empirically, this scheme learns features amenable for value prediction for downstream tasks, and our experiments demonstrate the ability to learn from many forms of passive data, including cross-embodiment video data and YouTube videos.

Learning high-quality feature embeddings efficiently and effectively is critical for the performance of web-scale machine learning systems. A typical model ingests hundreds of features with vocabularies on the order of millions to billions of tokens. The standard approach is to represent each feature value as a d-dimensional embedding, introducing hundreds of billions of parameters for extremely high-cardinality features. This bottleneck has led to substantial progress in alternative embedding algorithms. Many of these methods, however, make the assumption that each feature uses an independent embedding table. This work introduces a simple yet highly effective framework, Feature Multiplexing, where one single representation space is used across many different categorical features. Our theoretical and empirical analysis reveals that multiplexed embeddings can be decomposed into components from each constituent feature, allowing models to distinguish between features. We show that multiplexed representations lead to Pareto-optimal parameter-accuracy tradeoffs for three public benchmark datasets. Further, we propose a highly practical approach called Unified Embedding with three major benefits: simplified feature configuration, strong adaptation to dynamic data distributions, and compatibility with modern hardware. Unified embedding gives significant improvements in offline and online metrics compared to highly competitive baselines across five web-scale search, ads, and recommender systems, where it serves billions of users across the world in industry-leading products.

In the context of few-shot classification, the goal is to train a classifier using a limited number of samples while maintaining satisfactory performance. However, traditional metric-based methods exhibit certain limitations in achieving this objective. These methods typically rely on a single distance value between the query feature and support feature, thereby overlooking the contribution of shallow features. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel approach in this paper. Our approach involves utilizing a multi-output embedding network that maps samples into distinct feature spaces. The proposed method extracts feature vectors at different stages, enabling the model to capture both global and abstract features. By utilizing these diverse feature spaces, our model enhances its performance. Moreover, employing a self-attention mechanism improves the refinement of features at each stage, leading to even more robust representations and improved overall performance. Furthermore, assigning learnable weights to each stage significantly improved performance and results. We conducted comprehensive evaluations on the MiniImageNet and FC100 datasets, specifically in the 5-way 1-shot and 5-way 5-shot scenarios. Additionally, we performed cross-domain tasks across eight benchmark datasets, achieving high accuracy in the testing domains. These evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method in comparison to state-of-the-art approaches. https://github.com/FatemehAskari/MSENet

By leveraging the power of Large Language Models(LLMs) and speech foundation models, state of the art speech-text bimodal works can achieve challenging tasks like spoken translation(ST) and question answering(SQA) altogether with much simpler architectures. In this paper, we utilize the capability of Whisper encoder and pre-trained Yi-6B. Empirical results reveal that modal alignment can be achieved with one layer module and hundred hours of speech-text multitask corpus. We further swap the Yi-6B with human preferences aligned version of Yi-6B-Chat during inference, and discover that the alignment capability is applicable as well. In addition, the alignment subspace revealed by singular value decomposition(SVD) also implies linear alignment subspace is sparse, which leaves the possibility to concatenate other features like voice-print or video to expand modality.

In the evolving domain of text-to-image generation, diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools in content creation. Despite their remarkable capability, existing models still face challenges in achieving controlled generation with a consistent style, requiring costly fine-tuning or often inadequately transferring the visual elements due to content leakage. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach, \ours, to produce a diverse range of images while maintaining specific style elements and nuances. During the denoising process, we keep the query from original features while swapping the key and value with those from reference features in the late self-attention layers. This approach allows for the visual style prompting without any fine-tuning, ensuring that generated images maintain a faithful style. Through extensive evaluation across various styles and text prompts, our method demonstrates superiority over existing approaches, best reflecting the style of the references and ensuring that resulting images match the text prompts most accurately. Our project page is available https://curryjung.github.io/VisualStylePrompt/.

Bar charts are commonly used in data visualization, and while they are easily understood by humans, it is non-trivial to extract the underlying data computationally. For a machine-learning-based approach, training chart de-rendering models usually requires labeled, real-world data. Labeling data is a time consuming task, which is why annotated data is scarce. Models can learn more efficiently when provided with features of high semantic quality, which a joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) is designed to learn in a self-supervised manner. We present a per-bar, numerical value recovery pipeline for bar charts, where a JEPA encoder is used to produce semantically rich latent features. The decoder model consuming these features is simple and quick to train and outputs the coordinates of ticks and bars, which can be used to recover bar values. The effectiveness of self-supervised finetuning and quality of the extracted features is evident when comparing our model to end-to-end supervised baselines. Code, datasets and checkpoints are available on https://github.com/dralois/Bar-JEPA{GitHub}.

Machine learning models routinely automate decisions in applications like lending and hiring. In such settings, consumer protection rules require companies that deploy models to explain predictions to decision subjects. These rules are motivated, in part, by the belief that explanations can promote recourse by revealing information that individuals can use to contest or improve their outcomes. In practice, many companies comply with these rules by providing individuals with a list of the most important features for their prediction, which they identify based on feature importance scores from feature attribution methods such as SHAP or LIME. In this work, we show how these practices can undermine consumers by highlighting features that would not lead to an improved outcome and by explaining predictions that cannot be changed. We propose to address these issues by highlighting features based on their responsiveness score -- i.e., the probability that an individual can attain a target prediction by changing a specific feature. We develop efficient methods to compute responsiveness scores for any model and any dataset. We conduct an extensive empirical study on the responsiveness of explanations in lending. Our results show that standard practices in consumer finance can backfire by presenting consumers with reasons without recourse, and demonstrate how our approach improves consumer protection by highlighting responsive features and identifying fixed predictions.

Shapley value-based methods have become foundational in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), offering theoretically grounded feature attributions through cooperative game theory. However, in practice, particularly in vision tasks, the assumption of feature independence breaks down, as features (i.e., pixels) often exhibit strong spatial and semantic dependencies. To address this, modern SHAP implementations now include the Owen value, a hierarchical generalization of the Shapley value that supports group attributions. While the Owen value preserves the foundations of Shapley values, its effectiveness critically depends on how feature groups are defined. We show that commonly used segmentations (e.g., axis-aligned or SLIC) violate key consistency properties, and propose a new segmentation approach that satisfies the T-property to ensure semantic alignment across hierarchy levels. This hierarchy enables computational pruning while improving attribution accuracy and interpretability. Experiments on image and tabular datasets demonstrate that O-Shap outperforms baseline SHAP variants in attribution precision, semantic coherence, and runtime efficiency, especially when structure matters.

This paper introduces AIM, a collection of vision models pre-trained with an autoregressive objective. These models are inspired by their textual counterparts, i.e., Large Language Models (LLMs), and exhibit similar scaling properties. Specifically, we highlight two key findings: (1) the performance of the visual features scale with both the model capacity and the quantity of data, (2) the value of the objective function correlates with the performance of the model on downstream tasks. We illustrate the practical implication of these findings by pre-training a 7 billion parameter AIM on 2 billion images, that achieves 84.0% on ImageNet-1k with a frozen trunk. Interestingly, even at this scale, we observe no sign of saturation in performance, suggesting that AIM potentially represents a new frontier for training large-scale vision models. The pre-training of AIM is similar to the pre-training of LLMs, and does not require any image-specific strategy to stabilize the training at scale.

Deep neural policies have recently been installed in a diverse range of settings, from biotechnology to automated financial systems. However, the utilization of deep neural networks to approximate the value function leads to concerns on the decision boundary stability, in particular, with regard to the sensitivity of policy decision making to indiscernible, non-robust features due to highly non-convex and complex deep neural manifolds. These concerns constitute an obstruction to understanding the reasoning made by deep neural policies, and their foundational limitations. Hence, it is crucial to develop techniques that aim to understand the sensitivities in the learnt representations of neural network policies. To achieve this we introduce a theoretically founded method that provides a systematic analysis of the unstable directions in the deep neural policy decision boundary across both time and space. Through experiments in the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE), we demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique for identifying correlated directions of instability, and for measuring how sample shifts remold the set of sensitive directions in the neural policy landscape. Most importantly, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art robust training techniques yield learning of disjoint unstable directions, with dramatically larger oscillations over time, when compared to standard training. We believe our results reveal the fundamental properties of the decision process made by reinforcement learning policies, and can help in constructing reliable and robust deep neural policies.

Recent advancements in machine learning have spurred growing interests in automated interpreting quality assessment. Nevertheless, existing research suffers from insufficient examination of language use quality, unsatisfactory modeling effectiveness due to data scarcity and imbalance, and a lack of efforts to explain model predictions. To address these gaps, we propose a multi-dimensional modeling framework that integrates feature engineering, data augmentation, and explainable machine learning. This approach prioritizes explainability over ``black box'' predictions by utilizing only construct-relevant, transparent features and conducting Shapley Value (SHAP) analysis. Our results demonstrate strong predictive performance on a novel English-Chinese consecutive interpreting dataset, identifying BLEURT and CometKiwi scores to be the strongest predictive features for fidelity, pause-related features for fluency, and Chinese-specific phraseological diversity metrics for language use. Overall, by placing particular emphasis on explainability, we present a scalable, reliable, and transparent alternative to traditional human evaluation, facilitating the provision of detailed diagnostic feedback for learners and supporting self-regulated learning advantages not afforded by automated scores in isolation.

Despite rapid adoption and deployment of large language models (LLMs), the internal computations of these models remain opaque and poorly understood. In this work, we seek to understand how high-level human-interpretable features are represented within the internal neuron activations of LLMs. We train k-sparse linear classifiers (probes) on these internal activations to predict the presence of features in the input; by varying the value of k we study the sparsity of learned representations and how this varies with model scale. With k=1, we localize individual neurons which are highly relevant for a particular feature, and perform a number of case studies to illustrate general properties of LLMs. In particular, we show that early layers make use of sparse combinations of neurons to represent many features in superposition, that middle layers have seemingly dedicated neurons to represent higher-level contextual features, and that increasing scale causes representational sparsity to increase on average, but there are multiple types of scaling dynamics. In all, we probe for over 100 unique features comprising 10 different categories in 7 different models spanning 70 million to 6.9 billion parameters.

We introduce RacketVision, a novel dataset and benchmark for advancing computer vision in sports analytics, covering table tennis, tennis, and badminton. The dataset is the first to provide large-scale, fine-grained annotations for racket pose alongside traditional ball positions, enabling research into complex human-object interactions. It is designed to tackle three interconnected tasks: fine-grained ball tracking, articulated racket pose estimation, and predictive ball trajectory forecasting. Our evaluation of established baselines reveals a critical insight for multi-modal fusion: while naively concatenating racket pose features degrades performance, a CrossAttention mechanism is essential to unlock their value, leading to trajectory prediction results that surpass strong unimodal baselines. RacketVision provides a versatile resource and a strong starting point for future research in dynamic object tracking, conditional motion forecasting, and multimodal analysis in sports. Project page at https://github.com/OrcustD/RacketVision

This paper expands the cascaded network branch of the autoencoder-based multi-task learning (MTL) framework for dynamic facial expression recognition, namely Multi-Task Cascaded Autoencoder for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition (MTCAE-DFER). MTCAE-DFER builds a plug-and-play cascaded decoder module, which is based on the Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture and employs the decoder concept of Transformer to reconstruct the multi-head attention module. The decoder output from the previous task serves as the query (Q), representing local dynamic features, while the Video Masked Autoencoder (VideoMAE) shared encoder output acts as both the key (K) and value (V), representing global dynamic features. This setup facilitates interaction between global and local dynamic features across related tasks. Additionally, this proposal aims to alleviate overfitting of complex large model. We utilize autoencoder-based multi-task cascaded learning approach to explore the impact of dynamic face detection and dynamic face landmark on dynamic facial expression recognition, which enhances the model's generalization ability. After we conduct extensive ablation experiments and comparison with state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on various public datasets for dynamic facial expression recognition, the robustness of the MTCAE-DFER model and the effectiveness of global-local dynamic feature interaction among related tasks have been proven.

Anti-Money Laundering (AML) is a crucial task in ensuring the integrity of financial systems. One keychallenge in AML is identifying high-risk groups based on their behavior. Unsupervised learning, particularly clustering, is a promising solution for this task. However, the use of hundreds of features todescribe behavior results in a highdimensional dataset that negatively impacts clustering performance.In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of combining clustering method agglomerative hierarchicalclustering with four dimensionality reduction techniques -Independent Component Analysis (ICA), andKernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA), Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), Locality Preserving Projections (LPP)- to overcome the issue of high-dimensionality in AML data and improve clusteringresults. This study aims to provide insights into the most effective way of reducing the dimensionality ofAML data and enhance the accuracy of clustering-based AML systems. The experimental results demonstrate that KPCA outperforms other dimension reduction techniques when combined with agglomerativehierarchical clustering. This superiority is observed in the majority of situations, as confirmed by threedistinct validation indices.

We consider the unsupervised alignment of the full text of a book with a human-written summary. This presents challenges not seen in other text alignment problems, including a disparity in length and, consequent to this, a violation of the expectation that individual words and phrases should align, since large passages and chapters can be distilled into a single summary phrase. We present two new methods, based on hidden Markov models, specifically targeted to this problem, and demonstrate gains on an extractive book summarization task. While there is still much room for improvement, unsupervised alignment holds intrinsic value in offering insight into what features of a book are deemed worthy of summarization.

Flow-based vision-language-action (VLA) models excel in embodied control but suffer from intractable likelihoods during multi-step sampling, hindering online reinforcement learning. We propose \textit{boldsymbolπ-StepNFT} (Step-wise Negative-aware Fine-Tuning), a critic-and-likelihood-free framework that requires only a single forward pass per optimization step and eliminates auxiliary value networks. We identify that wider exploration spaces necessitate finer-grained, step-wise guidance for alignment. Empirically, π-StepNFT unlocks latent potential on LIBERO with competitive few-shot robustness. Moreover, it achieves superior generalization on ManiSkill, outperforming value-based baselines in OOD scenarios by preventing overfitting to multimodal features. This property offers a scalable solution promising for complex real-world applications.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely adopted to process long-context tasks. However, the large memory overhead of the key-value (KV) cache poses significant challenges in long-context scenarios. Existing training-free KV cache compression methods typically focus on quantization and token pruning, which have compression limits, and excessive sparsity can lead to severe performance degradation. Other methods design new architectures with less KV overhead but require significant training overhead. To address the above two drawbacks, we further explore the redundancy in the channel dimension and apply an architecture-level design with minor training costs. Therefore, we introduce CSKV, a training-efficient Channel Shrinking technique for KV cache compression: (1) We first analyze the singular value distribution of the KV cache, revealing significant redundancy and compression potential along the channel dimension. Based on this observation, we propose using low-rank decomposition for key and value layers and storing the low-dimension features. (2) To preserve model performance, we introduce a bi-branch KV cache, including a window-based full-precision KV cache and a low-precision compressed KV cache. (3) To reduce the training costs, we minimize the layer-wise reconstruction loss for the compressed KV cache instead of retraining the entire LLMs. Extensive experiments show that CSKV can reduce the memory overhead of the KV cache by 80% while maintaining the model's long-context capability. Moreover, we show that our method can be seamlessly combined with quantization to further reduce the memory overhead, achieving a compression ratio of up to 95%.

We present Story2Board, a training-free framework for expressive storyboard generation from natural language. Existing methods narrowly focus on subject identity, overlooking key aspects of visual storytelling such as spatial composition, background evolution, and narrative pacing. To address this, we introduce a lightweight consistency framework composed of two components: Latent Panel Anchoring, which preserves a shared character reference across panels, and Reciprocal Attention Value Mixing, which softly blends visual features between token pairs with strong reciprocal attention. Together, these mechanisms enhance coherence without architectural changes or fine-tuning, enabling state-of-the-art diffusion models to generate visually diverse yet consistent storyboards. To structure generation, we use an off-the-shelf language model to convert free-form stories into grounded panel-level prompts. To evaluate, we propose the Rich Storyboard Benchmark, a suite of open-domain narratives designed to assess layout diversity and background-grounded storytelling, in addition to consistency. We also introduce a new Scene Diversity metric that quantifies spatial and pose variation across storyboards. Our qualitative and quantitative results, as well as a user study, show that Story2Board produces more dynamic, coherent, and narratively engaging storyboards than existing baselines.

3D local editing of specified regions is crucial for game industry and robot interaction. Recent methods typically edit rendered multi-view images and then reconstruct 3D models, but they face challenges in precisely preserving unedited regions and overall coherence. Inspired by structured 3D generative models, we propose VoxHammer, a novel training-free approach that performs precise and coherent editing in 3D latent space. Given a 3D model, VoxHammer first predicts its inversion trajectory and obtains its inverted latents and key-value tokens at each timestep. Subsequently, in the denoising and editing phase, we replace the denoising features of preserved regions with the corresponding inverted latents and cached key-value tokens. By retaining these contextual features, this approach ensures consistent reconstruction of preserved areas and coherent integration of edited parts. To evaluate the consistency of preserved regions, we constructed Edit3D-Bench, a human-annotated dataset comprising hundreds of samples, each with carefully labeled 3D editing regions. Experiments demonstrate that VoxHammer significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of both 3D consistency of preserved regions and overall quality. Our method holds promise for synthesizing high-quality edited paired data, thereby laying the data foundation for in-context 3D generation. See our project page at https://huanngzh.github.io/VoxHammer-Page/.

Pansharpening aims to combine a high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) image with a low-resolution multispectral (LRMS) image to produce a high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) image. Although pansharpening in the frequency domain offers clear advantages, most existing methods either continue to operate solely in the spatial domain or fail to fully exploit the benefits of the frequency domain. To address this issue, we innovatively propose Multi-Frequency Fusion Attention (MFFA), which leverages wavelet transforms to cleanly separate frequencies and enable lossless reconstruction across different frequency domains. Then, we generate Frequency-Query, Spatial-Key, and Fusion-Value based on the physical meanings represented by different features, which enables a more effective capture of specific information in the frequency domain. Additionally, we focus on the preservation of frequency features across different operations. On a broader level, our network employs a wavelet pyramid to progressively fuse information across multiple scales. Compared to previous frequency domain approaches, our network better prevents confusion and loss of different frequency features during the fusion process. Quantitative and qualitative experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches and shows significant generalization capabilities for real-world scenarios.

We investigate feature universality in large language models (LLMs), a research field that aims to understand how different models similarly represent concepts in the latent spaces of their intermediate layers. Demonstrating feature universality allows discoveries about latent representations to generalize across several models. However, comparing features across LLMs is challenging due to polysemanticity, in which individual neurons often correspond to multiple features rather than distinct ones. This makes it difficult to disentangle and match features across different models. To address this issue, we employ a method known as dictionary learning by using sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to transform LLM activations into more interpretable spaces spanned by neurons corresponding to individual features. After matching feature neurons across models via activation correlation, we apply representational space similarity metrics like Singular Value Canonical Correlation Analysis to analyze these SAE features across different LLMs. Our experiments reveal significant similarities in SAE feature spaces across various LLMs, providing new evidence for feature universality.

The advent of pre-trained code language models (CodeLMs) has lead to significant progress in language-to-code generation. State-of-the-art approaches in this area combine CodeLM decoding with sample pruning and reranking using test cases or heuristics based on the execution results. However, it is challenging to obtain test cases for many real-world language-to-code applications, and heuristics cannot well capture the semantic features of the execution results, such as data type and value range, which often indicates the correctness of the program. In this work, we propose LEVER, a simple approach to improve language-to-code generation by learning to verify the generated programs with their execution results. Specifically, we train verifiers to determine whether a program sampled from the CodeLM is correct or not based on the natural language input, the program itself and its execution results. The sampled programs are reranked by combining the verification score with the CodeLM generation probability, and marginalizing over programs with the same execution results. On four datasets across the domains of table QA, math QA and basic Python programming, LEVER consistently improves over the base CodeLMs (4.6% to 10.9% with code-davinci-002) and achieves new state-of-the-art results on all of them.

We propose a filtering feature selection framework that considers subsets of features as paths in a graph, where a node is a feature and an edge indicates pairwise (customizable) relations among features, dealing with relevance and redundancy principles. By two different interpretations (exploiting properties of power series of matrices and relying on Markov chains fundamentals) we can evaluate the values of paths (i.e., feature subsets) of arbitrary lengths, eventually go to infinite, from which we dub our framework Infinite Feature Selection (Inf-FS). Going to infinite allows to constrain the computational complexity of the selection process, and to rank the features in an elegant way, that is, considering the value of any path (subset) containing a particular feature. We also propose a simple unsupervised strategy to cut the ranking, so providing the subset of features to keep. In the experiments, we analyze diverse settings with heterogeneous features, for a total of 11 benchmarks, comparing against 18 widely-known comparative approaches. The results show that Inf-FS behaves better in almost any situation, that is, when the number of features to keep are fixed a priori, or when the decision of the subset cardinality is part of the process.

Conventional model compression techniques for LLMs address high memory consumption and slow inference challenges but typically require computationally expensive retraining to preserve accuracy. In contrast, one-shot compression methods eliminate retraining cost, but struggle to achieve accuracy comparable to dense models. This paper presents SLIM, a new one-shot compression framework that holistically integrates hardware-friendly quantization, sparsity, and low-rank approximation into a unified process. First, we formulate the quantization process using a probabilistic approach (SLIM-Quant) that enables us to apply uniform quantization. Then, we use an existing one-shot pruning method to apply semi-structured sparsity on top of the quantized weights. Finally, to compensate for the introduced aggregated quantization and sparsity error, we use a novel saliency function with unique invertible and additive features that enables us to mathematically compute the value of low-rank adapters. SLIM improves model accuracy by up to 5.66% (LLaMA-2-7B) for 2:4 sparsity with 4-bit weight quantization, outperforming prior methods. Models compressed with SLIM achieve up to 4.3x and 3.8x on Nvidia RTX3060 and A100 GPUs, respectively. Additionally, they achieve up to 0.23x end-to-end memory reduction in comparison to their dense counterparts. We also propose an optional PEFT recipe that further improves accuracy by up to 1.66% (LLaMA-2-13B) compared to SLIM without fine-tuning.

How to represent an image? While the visual world is presented in a continuous manner, machines store and see the images in a discrete way with 2D arrays of pixels. In this paper, we seek to learn a continuous representation for images. Inspired by the recent progress in 3D reconstruction with implicit neural representation, we propose Local Implicit Image Function (LIIF), which takes an image coordinate and the 2D deep features around the coordinate as inputs, predicts the RGB value at a given coordinate as an output. Since the coordinates are continuous, LIIF can be presented in arbitrary resolution. To generate the continuous representation for images, we train an encoder with LIIF representation via a self-supervised task with super-resolution. The learned continuous representation can be presented in arbitrary resolution even extrapolate to x30 higher resolution, where the training tasks are not provided. We further show that LIIF representation builds a bridge between discrete and continuous representation in 2D, it naturally supports the learning tasks with size-varied image ground-truths and significantly outperforms the method with resizing the ground-truths.

Soft Actor Critic (SAC) algorithms show remarkable performance in complex simulated environments. A key element of SAC networks is entropy regularization, which prevents the SAC actor from optimizing against fine grained features, oftentimes transient, of the state-action value function. This results in better sample efficiency during early training. We take this idea one step further by artificially bandlimiting the target critic spatial resolution through the addition of a convolutional filter. We derive the closed form solution in the linear case and show that bandlimiting reduces the interdependency between the low and high frequency components of the state-action value approximation, allowing the critic to learn faster. In experiments, the bandlimited SAC outperformed the classic twin-critic SAC in a number of Gym environments, and displayed more stability in returns. We derive novel insights about SAC by adding a stochastic noise disturbance, a technique that is increasingly being used to learn robust policies that transfer well to the real world counterparts.