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Diagnosing mobile crashes in ultra-large-scale industrial applications is a formidable challenge due to the sheer volume of code, the complexity of mixed-language environments, and the inability to reproduce failures locally. Traditional static analysis struggles with scalability, while existing LLM-based agents often rely on reproducible environments unavailable in post-mortem scenarios. We present Holmes, a multi-agent system that automates root cause analysis by synthesizing multimodal runtime signals--stack traces, logs, and thread states--to reconstruct failure contexts without reproduction. Holmes introduces a hierarchical Retrieve-Explore-Reason architecture that leverages low-level artifacts (e.g., registers, assembly) to bridge the semantic gap between open-source business logic and closed-source system frameworks. By dynamically compressing the search space using runtime clues, Holmes precisely navigates 70-million-line codebases to identify non-local defects. Evaluated on real-world crashes from WeChat, Holmes achieves 87.6% accuracy in function-level fault localization and reduces average investigation time by over 98% (to ~77 seconds), demonstrating its effectiveness in transforming labor-intensive debugging into an efficient verification workflow.

Machine learning (ML) model serving has become a dominant consumer of GPU infrastructure, yet capacity planning in these systems remains largely ad hoc. Under-provisioning leads to service-level objective (SLO) violations and production incidents, while over-provisioning results in substantial resource waste. This paper presents \sys, an industrial load testing framework for ML serving systems that systematically estimates serving capacity through an adaptive, feedback-driven search strategy. The approach leverages real-time performance signals, incorporating dampening, spike tolerance, and convergence detection to efficiently identify maximum sustainable throughput under SLO constraints. We evaluate \sys through a longitudinal analysis of 14 industrial case studies spanning four ML architecture classes: recommendation, ranking, vision, and NLP. This study demonstrates that systematic load testing leads to substantial improvements in GPU resource efficiency and operational reliability. Prior to adopting \sys, a significant fraction of model launches were under-provisioned, resulting in recurring incidents; these issues were substantially reduced after deployment. Our results show that ML-specific design decisions are critical to accurate capacity estimation: workload calibration using recorded traffic reduces estimation error from approximately 30% to 2--6%, while proper warmup handling yields a 22.2% improvement in accuracy. Further analysis reveals key factors influencing prediction error, including model size and co-location effects. This paper distills six lessons and derive architectural guidelines for ML load testing, offering actionable insights for building reliable and efficient ML serving systems.

Subliminal learning lets a student inherit a teacher's hidden trait from distillation data that never names it. We ask when such transfer can be audited before training. The answer is not model identity or scale alone, but channel location: the carrier through which the trait reaches the student. We find three regimes. In a controlled initialization-dependent body channel, a pre-training screen works. Coverage, the cosine between the student's initial distillation update and the teacher's fine-tuning displacement, predicts held-out transfer (Spearman $ρ\approx 0.95$; AUROC 0.997). In pretrained language models, masked single-token traits instead ride convergent vocabulary geometry. This channel is initialization-independent, so initialization-alignment screens, including coverage, are not mechanistic; the useful handles are post-hoc detection and targeted mitigation. Even when a single-token named entity is removed from the loss, the student's held-out probability for that entity rises to 0.40 on average ($\sim 2500\times$), and a related semantic class transfers. In an untied-head model, orthogonalizing the trait's output row against entangled neighbours collapses leakage, while equal-size random-subspace edits do not. Thus removing a target string from distillation labels does not remove the corresponding preference: neighbouring tokens can carry it. Finally, conditional behaviours can route through the network body. For sycophancy, with agreement and correction markers masked from the loss, transfer reaches about 0.63 of the teacher's effect, localizes to body computation, and evades four audits across two model families. We scope this as masked transfer of a condition-present policy. Channel location is necessary for deciding which audits can be sound. It is not a deployment-ready screen: an audit used outside its carrier regime can give false assurance.

Small language models are cheap to serve and feasible on local hardware, but strong public 135M-class systems are commonly trained with hundreds of billions to trillions of tokens on large clusters. We study a sharply resource-constrained regime: a complete 134.5M-parameter language-model pipeline executed on one NVIDIA L20 GPU. The released checkpoint, L20-Edu-135M, receives approximately 13B pretraining tokens: 10B FineWeb-Edu tokens followed by a 3B-token educational, mathematics, code, and reasoning mixture. We document the architecture, data gates, cross-source MinHash/LSH near-deduplication, segment deduplication, benchmark-overlap removal, throughput optimization, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with weight interpolation, and reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) on GSM8K. In a self-run zero-shot six-task harness, L20-Edu-135M obtains a mean score of 0.4150. It trails SmolLM-135M (0.4767) and SmolLM2-135M (0.4917), but its mean is 87.1% of SmolLM-135M's while its nominal token count is 2.17% as large. This ratio is descriptive, not evidence of statistical equivalence or a controlled scaling law. The model exceeds several older 100M-160M public baselines under the same harness. Direct GRPO-style RLVR decreases GSM8K exact-match accuracy from 1.82% to 1.59% (192-token completions) and 1.21% (320-token completions). These single-run results identify a concrete failure mode rather than establishing a general lower bound on RLVR. The contribution is an auditable resource-constrained case study, not a state-of-the-art claim.

Solar flares, particularly those of the M- and X-class, have a significant impact on human life because of their potential to disrupt critical infrastructure and communication systems on Earth. Accurate prediction of solar flares is crucial for mitigating these risks, but the black-box nature of conventional deep learning models used in flare prediction limits their trustworthiness and interpretability. In this paper, we propose a new approach to solar flare prediction using photospheric magnetic field parameters or features with deep learning. To improve model interpretability, we integrate explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques, including SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) and partial dependence plots (PDPs), into our prediction framework. XAI methods provide transparency by analyzing the importance and interactions of features used by our model. Specifically, SHAP values offer a global and local understanding of the features, while PDPs provide insights into feature-level trends. These techniques demonstrate the potential of XAI in deploying AI-driven solutions in high-impact applications such as solar flare prediction, paving the way for more informed decision-making in solar physics and space weather studies.

Full-duplex spoken dialogue models, such as Moshi, enable natural, low-latency voice conversations. However, they remain limited to the audio modality, lacking the facial expressions that are integral to human communication. We present Moshi-Face, the first full-duplex dialogue model that jointly processes the user's audio and facial input while simultaneously generating speech and facial motion. We first construct a vector-quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) as a face codec that encodes 3D head meshes extracted from facial videos into compact discrete tokens, referred to as face tokens, and conversely reconstructs 3D meshes from these tokens. We then extend Moshi with a Face Transformer module that generates face tokens non-autoregressively, enabling Moshi-Face to produce synchronized audio and face tokens in real time. Experiments show that Moshi-Face achieves audiovisual alignment at low latency while preserving the dialogue quality of the original audio-only model.

Single-reference unseen object 6D pose estimation reduces object onboarding by estimating poses of arbitrary novel objects from only one reference view. Recent correspondence-based pipelines have achieved robust performance with vision foundation model (VFM) features. However, they typically treat these features as intra-view descriptors, leaving dense visual-semantic cues, including appearance, structure, and context, insufficiently exchanged across views before geometric decoding. Consequently, the decoded point features may lack joint semantic and geometric discriminability, making correspondence estimation still difficult in challenging cases. Instead of processing features independently, we build the correspondence pipeline around an early cross-view semantic prior. Specifically, cross-view semantic interaction (CVSI) enables dense query and reference VFM tokens to exchange semantic context and form a cross-view prior. Nevertheless, direct CVSI may disturb the VFM token structure, while the resulting semantic prior still needs 3D representation consistency for rigid correspondence. To make this CVSI prior reliable for 3D correspondence learning, we introduce two complementary training-time constraints: the intra-view structure preservation (IVSP) loss preserves the original intra-view token affinity structure during interaction, while the reference-anchored geometric consistency (RAGC) loss enforces spatial representation consistency of decoded point features. The final pose is recovered from learned correspondences through weighted SVD. We further construct a challenging view-pair protocol from the BOP Challenge datasets YCB-V and TUD-L to evaluate robustness in difficult matching scenarios. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks under different view-pair settings show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining comparable inference speed.

We present BioMatrix, the first multimodal foundation model that natively integrates sequences, structures, and natural language for both molecules and proteins within a single decoder-only architecture. Existing biological foundation models pursue native multimodality and broad entity coverage separately: those that fuse multiple modalities under a shared objective remain confined to a single entity type, while those spanning multiple entity types either omit explicit structural modeling or rely on adapter-based designs in which the model cannot natively generate the very modalities it can read. BioMatrix closes this gap by mapping molecular sequences (supporting both SMILES and SELFIES notations), molecular structures, protein sequences, protein structures, and natural language into a shared discrete token space through a unified tokenization scheme, so that all modalities are consumed and produced uniformly under a single next-token prediction objective — without external encoders, projection adapters, or modality-specific output heads. Built upon the Qwen3 language model (1.7B and 4B), BioMatrix is continually pretrained on 304.4 billion tokens spanning general and domain-specific text, sequence and structure views of molecules and proteins, and cross-modal corpora that interleave biomolecular entities with scientific text and link distinct entities through molecule-protein and protein-protein interaction data. After tuning on a comprehensive suite of downstream applications covering 80 tasks across 6 categories — encompassing single-entity and multi-entity understanding and generation tasks across and within modalities — BioMatrix achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on 77 out of 80 tasks, demonstrating that a single, natively multimodal generalist model can effectively match or surpass specialized approaches across a wide range of biological tasks.

Supervised learning demands large quantities of labeled data, a bottleneck that is expensive and reliant on domain-specific expertise. Self-supervised learning, particularly contrastive learning, has emerged as a compelling alternative, enabling rich representation learning directly from unlabeled data. Yet its success hinges critically on the design of positive and negative sample pairs. Existing approaches for time series rely on hand-crafted augmentations and masking heuristics that embed strong domain assumptions, often limiting generalization across diverse temporal patterns and potentially introducing spurious correlations. In this work, we challenge this paradigm by demonstrating that explicitly encoding temporal shift invariance through a simple, deterministic view construction is sufficient to learn strong representations for time series classification. By exploiting temporal structure, our method, Shift Invariant Feature Training (ShiFT), achieves state-of-the-art performance on six diverse real-world time series benchmark datasets, as well as the UCR and UEA archives, while reducing training time. Beyond empirical performance, we present a systematic analysis of contrastive learning dynamics in time series settings, examining the effects of batch size and the number of negatives on downstream performance. Our findings provide practical insights for designing efficient contrastive learning frameworks for time series representation learning. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/sfi-norwai/ShiFT.

Planning contact-rich whole-arm manipulation is challenging because interactions that involve extended robot geometry give rise to complex contact dynamics that are difficult to model accurately. This creates a need for planning principles that do not rely heavily on precise contact models. Caging offers one such geometric notion of robustness to modeling inaccuracy by restricting object escape through geometrically enclosing the object. However, existing caging formulations are difficult to incorporate into continuous optimization-based manipulation planning. We reformulate caging as a minimum-time escape problem in which the object seeks to leave an enclosing robot geometry in the shortest time. This yields a continuous escape-time field that measures the robot's enclosure quality and we show it satisfies an eikonal equation. We therefore can approximate this field using a physics-informed neural network, producing a smooth differentiable representation that can be embedded directly into manipulation planning. The resulting objective supports whole-arm manipulation planning to favor robot configurations resisting object escape. This improves the manipulation robustness to contact model mismatch, thus enabling planning with simplified contact models, including quasi-dynamic approximations and simplified object geometry. Across simulation and real-world experiments, we show improved robustness to disturbances and contact-model mismatch relative to baselines. These results suggest that geometric enclosure can serve as a practical robustness primitive for whole-arm manipulation. A supplementary video, which includes an intuitive overview of our method and experiment video results, is available on our project webpage.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a promising method for high-quality, real-time 3D reconstruction. To associate 3DGS with mesh representations, existing methods primarily focus on 3DGS-to-mesh reconstruction from multi-view images. In contrast, the problem of converting a mesh into 3DGS has received comparatively less attention. Instead of relying on heuristic strategies that bind 3D Gaussians to the mesh, we propose a novel white-box 3DGS construction framework, termed Mesh2GS, which generates 3DGS directly from mesh geometry based on plenoptic sampling theory, achieving Nyquist-level performance for high-quality global illumination rendering. Firstly, we propose a plenoptic sampling guided 3DGS construction strategy that theoretically derives the minimum sampling rate of the sampled views and the distribution of 3D Gaussians. Second, we propose a novel 3DGS update procedure with albedo--shading decomposition for efficient global-illumination capture. Finally, we introduce a neural illumination enhancement module to handle non-Lambertian effects. Experimental results demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art baselines and is practically effective for both real-time shared rendering and non-Lambertian effects capturing specular highlights. The project code will be released upon acceptance.

Vegetation monitoring under climate stress requires answering not only how it will evolve given the expected weather, but how it would respond to alternative meteorological conditions. Forecasting models return the expected vegetation state for the observed weather and cannot answer these scenario-conditioned questions, because future weather is fixed to the recorded trajectory. We present VegSim, a geospatial world model for scenario-conditioned vegetation simulation. VegSim infers a latent vegetation state from sparse satellite-derived NDVI histories, past meteorological covariates, and static spatial context, propagates it forward under future weather forcing through recurrent latent dynamics, and decodes predictive NDVI quantiles at each lead time. Because future forcing enters as a controllable input, the same trained model supports probabilistic forecasting under observed weather and conditional simulation under user-defined meteorological forcing, without supervision on scenario responses. We evaluate VegSim on GreenEarthNet across in-distribution data and spatial, temporal, and joint spatial-temporal shift, where it achieves strong point and probabilistic accuracy against time series and Earth observation forecasting baselines while using a compact architecture. We then simulate vegetation responses across Europe under four meteorological scenarios, and in a France summer 2022 case study, obtaining spatially coherent patterns consistent with known sensitivity to temperature and precipitation. The code is available at https://github.com/arco-group/vegsim.

We present Nous, a novel agent memory architecture grounded in the principle that knowledge is prediction, not storage. Rather than persisting facts as database records, vector embeddings, or knowledge-graph triples, Nous maintains a predictive world model: a collection of categorical probability distributions, called dimensions, one per entity-attribute pair observed in conversation. Each incoming observation is scored by its information-theoretic surprise S = -log2 P(obs | D), and the distribution is updated via a closed-form Bayesian posterior. The primary stored artifact is the delta, a record of the shift from prior to posterior belief, rather than the fact itself. Forgetting emerges naturally as entropy decay toward the uniform distribution, and identity resolution is handled through mutual information between entity dimension sets. Evaluated on the LoCoMo long-term conversational memory benchmark across ten conversations (1,540 questions) using GPT-4o-mini as backbone, Nous achieves F1 of 63.50 (single-hop), 55.32 (multi-hop), 58.57 (temporal), and 62.50 (open-domain). Against A-MEM's self-reported GPT-4o-mini numbers, Nous shows substantial gains in three of four categories, though we note that independent citations of A-MEM's results disagree with each other on category assignment, a reproducibility issue we discuss openly rather than resolve unilaterally. We additionally compare against BeliefMem, a concurrently developed system built on the same core premise of belief-based rather than deterministic memory; on the same benchmark and backbone, Nous's self-reported numbers exceed BeliefMem's self-reported numbers on all four categories, though we flag several uncontrolled differences between the two evaluation pipelines that prevent this from being a fully controlled comparison. Nous requires no external vector database or graph engine.

Abnormality detection in complex systems faces two practical barriers: abnormal labels are scarce, and binary labels do not quantify how far an event has departed from normal behavior. We study a normal-world modeling formulation for this setting. Instead of learning a large and incomplete space of abnormal classes, the model learns the normal world from abundant normal events and uses a few abnormal examples only to calibrate the boundary of normality. We instantiate this idea as a Hypergraph Entropic Normal-World Model. The model represents multivariate sensor windows as context-conditioned hypergraphs, where hyperedges capture high-order relations among groups of variables. It then defines abnormality by an entropy-aware normal-world energy that combines temporal prediction surprise, hypergraph consistency surprise, and latent normal-manifold departure. On the NASA C-MAPSS turbofan degradation benchmark, the proposed full energy achieves strong zero-shot and few-shot performance across all four subsets and reaches AUROC 0.9983 on FD004, the most complex setting with multiple operating conditions and fault modes. Beyond standard detection metrics, we introduce mechanistic validation tests to probe whether the energy encodes normal-world structure rather than a superficial input-output mapping. The learned energy accepts unseen healthy engines, increases along degradation trajectories, and sharply penalizes context-mismatched cross-variable coupling breaks. These results suggest that normal-world energy can serve as an anomaly score, a graded risk measure, and a testable representation of normal system behavior under severe abnormal-label scarcity.

Diffusion-based video editing has made significant progress; however, achieving precise and temporally consistent object-level control, especially in multi-object scenarios, remains challenging due to attention leakage, identity drift, and unstable temporal dynamics. In this work, we propose IDAGEdit, a training-free framework for fine-grained multi-object video editing with strong temporal consistency. The framework adopts Layout-guided Attention Modulation to facilitate coherent multi-object editing, while Instance-level Masks are introduced to preserve individual object identity and enforce localized attention within each object region, thereby enabling fine-grained, object-level editing. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our method improves temporal stability and multi-object controllability over state-of-the-art video editing approaches.

4D dynamics (3D geometry evolving over time) is a fundamental representation of the physical world and plays a crucial role in world modeling (e.g., animation and games). Owing to the scarcity of large-scale, long-horizon 4D mesh data with arbitrary shapes, early text-to-4D methods rely on distillation or test-time optimization from video diffusion priors, making inference prohibitively slow. Recent feed-forward generators greatly reduce inference cost but offer limited spatiotemporal controllability, and short-horizon generation often leads to error accumulation in long-horizon sequences. We propose a novel feed-forward in-betweening framework for arbitrary 4D meshes with keyframe conditioning. Building on universal mesh-animation latents, we introduce a frame-wise mesh VAE that encodes each frame into topology-agnostic latent tokens anchored by a reference mesh for keyframe conditioning. We further introduce a keyframe-conditioned rectified flow model with an MMDiT backbone that synthesizes non-keyframe frames conditioned on sparse keyframes. Experiments show strong performance and improved controllability on both DyMesh16 and DyMesh32 benchmarks.

Few-step distillation for video diffusion models has attracted significant attention, driven by the urgent demand for efficient deployment in real-world scenarios. However, Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD), a leading paradigm, tends to degrade under limited NFE budgets, manifesting in video generation as layout instability, oversaturation, and broken motion dynamics. We trace this failure to a structural limitation: standard DMD is an intra-sample distribution-matching objective with coordinate-wise gradients, and thus imposes no explicit constraint on the relational geometry across batch elements or temporal frames, leaving the underlying copula largely unregulated. Combined with the mode-seeking tendency of its reverse-KL objective, this absence of relational guidance makes DMD prone to collapsing into local optima in the few-step regime. Motivated by this insight, we propose Copula-aware DMD (CoDMD), a lightweight relational regularizer that reuses score estimates already produced by the frozen teacher and the online fake model to construct pairwise relation matrices across samples and frames. These are matched through a supplementary distributional objective that requires no additional networks, datasets, or sampling trajectories. On the Wan-2.1-T2V model series at 1.3B & 14B scales, CoDMD distills 50-step teachers into 4-step students, achieving an approximate 25$\times$ speed-up while attaining VBench scores of 84.46 & 84.87, outperforming prior trajectory-based (rCM 82.81 & 84.05) and distribution-based (DMD 83.38 & 83.81) methods.

Scaling dexterous manipulation requires generalization across objects, scenes, and tasks, yet existing data sources face a trade-off between scale and scene/embodiment alignment: teleoperation data is well aligned with robot deployment but expensive to collect; simulation is scalable but limited by the sim-to-real gap; and real egocentric videos scale effectively but remain misaligned with robot deployment. We propose Wh0, a framework that uses generative video world models as scalable and controllable sources of egocentric human-hand manipulation data to unlock the manipulation capabilities of pretrained dexterous VLA models. Conditioned on language, objects, and scenes, Wh0 uses a generative world model to produce WM-H, a 50k-episode dataset of egocentric human-object interaction videos. Wh0 then converts the generated videos into robot-trainable supervision through hand motion reconstruction and visual editing. Co-trained with a limited amount of real robot data, WM-H adapts pretrained VLA models to dexterous manipulation deployment. Across 18 real-world dexterous manipulation tasks, compared with a model post-trained only on robot data, Wh0 improves zero-shot success on unseen tasks from 8.3% to 38.9%. Ablation studies further show that scalable generation and scene/embodiment alignment are key drivers of performance gains. Videos and open-source code can be found on our project website: https://chenyt31.github.io/wh0.github.io/.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become central to LLM post-training, yet the methods that dominate current pipelines, PPO and GRPO, represent only a narrow slice of what RL offers. Understanding why these methods prevail, and what alternatives exist, requires a principled examination of the design decisions that underlie any RL algorithm. This survey organizes that examination around three stages of algorithm construction. We begin with MDP creation: how the reward function, state space, action space, termination condition, and discount factor are, or could be, defined for LLM training. We then turn to exploration, covering temperature sampling, entropy regularization, intrinsic motivation, tree search, and curriculum learning. Finally, we address learning along four classical RL dimensions: model-free versus model-based, value-based versus policy-based versus actor-critic, on-policy versus off-policy, and credit assignment, including both Monte Carlo methods, which rely on full return estimates, and bootstrapping methods, which update estimates using other learned predictions. Mapping the LLM literature onto this taxonomy reveals a strikingly non-uniform distribution of research effort. Critic-free policy gradients and Monte Carlo credit assignment are densely populated, while value-based methods, off-policy actor-critic training, and bootstrapping-based credit assignment remain largely unexplored despite well-established counterparts in classical RL. These gaps represent concrete opportunities for transferring proven RL techniques to LLM training. By making these gaps explicit alongside the methods that have proven effective, this survey offers researchers in both RL and LLMs a shared framework for understanding current practice and identifying promising directions for future work.

Accurate and comprehensive video captions with consistent subject references are critical for downstream understanding and generation tasks. However, few existing benchmarks can objectively and comprehensively evaluate these properties across diverse durations and scenarios, thereby hindering the advancement of video captioning models. To bridge this gap, we propose CapRiCorn-1K, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate both video captioning quality and subject referential consistency across long temporal horizons and diverse video domains. To accommodate varied evaluation needs, our benchmark supports both audiovisual and visual-only settings. Extensive experiments on CapRiCorn-1K reveal that current models generally struggle to generate accurate and comprehensive captions while maintaining consistent subject references. Moreover, as video duration increases, both the overall caption quality and subject referential consistency decline. Notably, our evaluation metrics exhibit strong correlations with the performance of downstream understanding and generation tasks conditioned on the generated captions, further validating their effectiveness. The project is available at https://github.com/xlchen0205/CapRiCorn-1K .

Art therapy has demonstrated effectiveness across diverse clinical populations, and its theoretical traditions have generated valuable perspectives on symbolism, expression, narrative reconstruction, meaning-making, physiological responses, and neurobiological processes. While these approaches provide important accounts of therapeutic experience and change, they have placed comparatively less emphasis on how cognition, regulation, and interaction dynamics evolve during the creative process itself, making it difficult to analyze how creativity and therapeutic outcomes emerge through time. As a result, art therapy research continues to rely heavily on qualitative interpretation, outcome measures, and retrospective self-report, while the dynamics of therapeutic change remain difficult to quantify. This paper proposes an enactive, dynamical framework for understanding and measuring cognitive change in art therapy through the analysis of creative interaction dynamics over time. Within this framework, therapeutic change is hypothesized to be reflected in cognitive trajectories, temporally unfolding patterns of engagement that reveal shifts in stability, exploration, and adaptation. To operationalize this framework, the paper introduces the Cognitive Trajectory Laboratory (CTL), an instrumented drawing environment that transforms interaction traces into cognitive trajectories unfolding through time, enabling the identification of emergent properties, significant events, and overarching chapters of the creative process. By making the dynamics of creative engagement measurable, the proposed framework and accompanying laboratory provide new methodological tools for art therapy assessment and research while creating opportunities for longitudinal analysis of therapeutic change. Implications are discussed for process-oriented evaluation and computational modeling of creative engagement.

Memorization in machine learning models enables high performance on rare in-distribution samples by capturing their atypical patterns. However, it also causes harmful retention of noise and outliers, degrading generalization. While memorization has been extensively studied in both supervised and self-supervised learning in the vision domain, it remains unexplored in multi-modal contrastive learning. We address this gap by introducing MultiMem, the first metric designed to quantify memorization in multi-modal contrastive learning. Through our systematic analysis, we demonstrate that cross-modal semantic misalignment has the strongest influence on memorization, with text being the dominant modality driving memorization, followed by video, image, and audio. We show that targeted augmentations applied across all modalities effectively reduce memorization as measured by our MultiMem metric and improve model performance. Overall, this work establishes the first framework for measuring and mitigating memorization in multi-modal contrastive learning, preventing harmful data retention and contributing to higher-performing models.

Adversarial imitation learning (AIL) achieves high-quality imitation compared to behavioral cloning (BC), but demands substantial online environment interaction. Recent empirical work has explored initializing AIL algorithms with BC pretrained policies to address this limitation, yet a rigorous theoretical understanding of pretraining's role in AIL remains elusive. This paper provides a systematic theoretical analysis and introduces principled pretraining algorithms for accelerating AIL. We begin by analyzing AIL with policy pretraining alone, identifying reward error as the dominant source of suboptimality. This reveals a critical and previously overlooked gap: the absence of reward pretraining. Motivated by this finding, we develop a principled policy-reward co-pretraining approach grounded in a reward shaping analysis. Our analysis uncovers a fundamental connection between expert policies and shaping rewards, which naturally gives rise to CoPT-AIL, an approach that jointly pretrains both policy and reward through a single BC procedure. We prove that CoPT-AIL achieves an improved imitation gap bound over standard AIL, establishing the first theoretical guarantee for the benefits of pretraining in AIL. Experimental results confirm CoPT-AIL's superior performance over existing AIL methods.

Diffusion models are typically sampled independently, even when the downstream objective is to obtain a diverse set of candidates. We introduce a variance-weighted batch distribution that favours collections of samples with large empirical spread after a prescribed linear feature map. The target is specified explicitly, and the sampler is derived as the corresponding Doob $h$-transform of independent diffusion dynamics. The resulting correction has a compact form: an interaction term that repels posterior denoised means, together with a curvature term that moves particles to the region of higher feature variance. This yields an interacting-particle sampler with a transparent probabilistic target rather than a heuristic repulsive drift.

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) has driven rapid progress in mathematical and code reasoning, but when extended to science, existing benchmarks do not decompose what generalizes: do gains reflect structural transfer, property transfer, or memorization? We introduce Mat-Pref, a benchmark of 10,837 ionic-substitution questions across 11 inorganic structure families, grounded in density functional theory calculations from the Materials Project, with three evaluation splits that isolate in-distribution performance, generalization to entirely held-out structure families, and cross-property transfer: applying band-gap reasoning to hosts seen during training only through formation-energy supervision. Four zero-shot frontier models (70-671B parameters) remain in the 33-54% range on every split, confirming that scale alone does not resolve the compositional chemical reasoning this task demands. A two-stage pipeline of supervised fine-tuning followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) lifts Qwen3-8B to 65.2% in-distribution and 71.6% on held-out families, exceeding zero-shot Qwen3-235B by over 20 percentage points on both structural-generalization splits. Self-consistency sampling shows that the SFT policy can already produce correct answers but cannot reliably surface them as the modal response; GRPO reshapes the distribution so that correct answers become modal rather than merely reachable, and this sharper commitment is visible mechanistically: logit lens analysis reveals a ${\sim}$20pp advantage in answer crystallization at the critical decision layer. We formalize this observation as a distractor-permutation consistency metric under which GRPO narrows the gap between lenient scoring (at least one permutation correct) and strict scoring (all permutations correct) from 24.0 to 14.3 percentage points.

Characterizing the complete wall-pressure spectrum in turbulent wall-bounded flows requires simultaneous access to the viscous-scale high-wavenumber content and the outer-layer low-wavenumber content — a requirement that neither short-domain direct numerical simulation (DNS) nor sparse experimental measurements alone can satisfy. We propose Patched Flow Matching (Patched FM), a generative framework that fuses these two complementary sources by learning a patch-local prior over inner-scaled wall-pressure statistics from short-domain DNS and assimilating sparse sensor measurements at inference time through training-free posterior sampling. The patch-additive decomposition of the flow matching vector field decouples the generative prior from the global domain size, enabling reconstruction on domains arbitrarily larger than the training configuration. By expressing the patch prior in inner-scaled coordinates, where high-wavenumber wall-pressure statistics are approximately Reynolds-number invariant, the framework extends to higher Reynolds numbers through hierarchical transfer learning with as few as $500$ short-domain snapshots ($2.5%$ of the base training data) at a fraction of the scratch-training cost. Applied to compressible channel-flow DNS at $Re_τ= 180$, $500$, and $1000$, Patched FM reconstructs full-resolution wall-pressure fields on a domain four times larger than the training configuration ($L_x^L = 16πδ$ versus $L_x^S = 4πδ$) from sensor coverage as low as $0.25%$, recovering the low-wavenumber spectral content inaccessible to short-domain DNS with high fidelity in both streamwise and spanwise directions. Zero-shot generalization to unseen Reynolds numbers and ablation studies further confirm the role of inner scaling as a physical prerequisite for data-efficient Reynolds-number transfer.

Knowledge Distillation (KD) has established itself as a pivotal technique for compressing large pre-trained language models. However, existing methods that force a student to strictly mimic the teacher's sentence embeddings or internal features often incur prohibitive computational costs and yield suboptimal performance due to the inherent capacity gap. To address these challenges, we propose TALAS (Teacher-Anchored Layer Alignment with Sharpness-aware minimization), a unified framework that synergizes hierarchical (multi-layer) alignment with robust optimization. First, we introduce a Teacher-Anchored mechanism that selectively distills final sentence embeddings only into the student's upper layers, thereby reducing overhead while respecting capacity constraints. Second, we bridge the semantic gap in lower layers via Layer-Aligned Self-Distillation, which propagates knowledge top-down using internal geometric relational constraints in the embedding space. Finally, to prevent the student from memorizing point-wise teacher noise, we integrate Adaptive Sharpness-Aware Minimization (ASAM) into the training objective, guiding the model towards flat minima for enhanced generalization. Empirical results on standard sentence embedding benchmarks demonstrate that TALAS consistently outperforms strong distillation baselines while achieving superior training efficiency in terms of computational cost and memory footprint.

Burst buffers (BBs) are essential for mitigating I/O bottlenecks in modern HPC systems. However, existing BB file systems often suffer from structural performance degradation due to fixed data layouts that fail to align with diverse application behaviors. While current machine-learning-based optimizations focus primarily on tuning storage stack parameters for a given layout, they offer diminishing returns when a fundamental mismatch exists between I/O patterns and the underlying data organization. Furthermore, these approaches typically incur prohibitive costs due to extensive training or intrusive profiling. To bridge this gap, we present Proteus, a semantic-aware BB system that treats data layout as a first-class optimization dimension. The core insight of Proteus is that application I/O intent can be reconstructed by synergetically combining static code structures with lightweight runtime signals. Through a hybrid pipeline and a single execution probe, Proteus extracts latent semantic cues to determine the optimal layout prior to production runs-eliminating the need for prior training or exhaustive profiling. Evaluation with representative HPC workloads shows that Proteus achieves 91.30% decision accuracy, delivering up to 3.24$\times$ and 2.9$\times$ speedups for write-intensive and metadata-intensive workloads, respectively.

The Categorical Jacobian (CJ) of Zhang et al. (2024) reads protein contacts from a language model by perturbing every residue with every alternative amino acid, about 19L forward passes. We show the signal it reconstructs is already concentrated in a small subset of attention heads: averaging the top-K contact-relevant heads, selected on as few as 10 labeled proteins, recovers contacts in one forward pass and beats CJ on leakage-clean data for every bidirectional model where CJ is defined, and matches or beats it in-distribution (the exceptions being the smallest 8M model and a statistical tie on ESM Cambrian). Ablations localize the gain to labeled head selection, not averaging: at a matched label budget the unweighted mean ties a supervised L1 logistic regression on the same heads, so the parameter-free mean is selection's minimal form, not the source of the advantage. Our primary test is leakage-clean: on a CAMEO split where neither selection nor evaluation touches data the models have plausibly memorized, the head readout beats CJ on ESM-2-650M by +9 pp (N=29, p<0.001), with the within-model margin reproducing across architectures on a wider pretraining-aware set. Both methods fall 30-36 percentage points from their in-distribution Zhang numbers to the leakage-clean numbers, consistent with substantial pretraining overlap inflating prior numbers (a CAMEO-vs-Zhang difficulty shift contributes too, so we read it as an upper bound on the leakage component). We additionally introduce representation-CJ, a hidden-state generalization of the Jacobian for architectures without a masked-LM head; show that the optimal K tracks how diffusely a model spreads its contact heads; and find that both methods lose the contact signal on both causal LMs we test (ProGen2), suggesting attention-encoded pair structure may depend on bidirectional pretraining.

Diffusion models excel at capturing multi-modal action distributions in robot imitation learning. However, in multi-task and long-horizon scenarios, monolithic architectures lack structural generalization capabilities, suffering from gradient conflicts between distinct semantic sub-stages. While pure data-driven Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) methods introduce labor division, they frequently trigger routing collapse, and instantiating full-scale experts causes parameter explosion and high expansion costs. To address these issues, we propose Concept-prior Routed Diffusion Experts (CoRDE), a structure-guided variational distillation framework. CoRDE extracts semantic distributions from a frozen concept encoder to guide the variational posterior responsibility via a learnable soft mapping matrix. This mechanism introduces an entropy-controlled responsibility inference process that encourages confident routing under reliable semantic predictions while preserving the stochastic diffusion term for behavioral diversity. To overcome parameter inflation, CoRDE employs a parameter-efficient expert pool using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on a shared frozen backbone. Theoretical analysis shows that the mixture score discrepancy is bounded by responsibility-weighted local expert errors, supporting high-fidelity generation under low-rank expert adaptation. Empirical evaluations confirm that, compared to existing baselines, CoRDE systematically reduces routing collapse, forming robust, semantically aligned expert allocations while achieving superior action quality and incremental learning efficiency.