arXiv:2605.16011v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adaptive learning refers to educational technologies that track learners' learning progress and adapt the instructional process based on individual learners' learning performance. It is increasingly recognized as critical for developing an effective learning support tool. Vision language models (VLMs) have seen adoption in mathematics education, and students have been using them as learning aids for personalized instruction. However, it is unknown whether VLMs have the ability to adapt to different learner profiles when providing mathematical instructions. Current VLMs lack a systematic evaluation framework for this adaptivity to different learner profiles in mathematics tutoring tasks. To address this gap, we draw on the learner model from the adaptive learning framework (Shute and Towle, 2018) and propose a learner model-based rubric. Our rubric formalizes adaptivity assessment into three aspects: cognitive aspects, motivational aspects, and complexity. We also evaluate two additional dimensions of VLM responses: correctness (of answers and solutions) and quality (of the response itself). Our experimental results show measurable differences in adaptivity across models and also reveal that current VLMs struggle to consistently produce learner model-based instructional responses, especially when receiving limited learner information.
Science Journals
arXiv:2605.13142v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In professional sports, a team has clinched the playoffs if they are guaranteed a postseason spot, regardless of the outcomes of any remaining games. As the season progresses, sports fans and other stakeholders are interested in precisely when, and under what conditions, their team will clinch the playoffs. In this paper, we investigate playoff clinching in the context of the National Hockey League (NHL), where it is computationally challenging to produce clinching scenarios due, in part, to complex tie-breakers. We present an algorithm that determines under which combinations of game outcomes in the next $n$ days a team will clinch the playoffs (i.e., "$n$-day lookahead clinching"). Our approach is a custom tree search which employs various preprocessing techniques, pruning strategies, and node ordering heuristics to efficiently explore the space of possible outcomes. The tree search leverages a constraint programming (CP)-based subroutine for inference that determines if a team has clinched the playoffs for some snapshot in time of the regular season (i.e., "0-day lookahead clinching"). This CP subroutine aims to find a counter-example in which the team being evaluated is eliminated, taking into account qualification rules and the NHL's extensive list of tie-breakers. We validate the efficacy of our algorithm using hundreds of scenarios based on public NHL data for the seasons 2021-22 through 2024-25. The methods introduced can be readily extended to other metrics of interest, including mathematical proof of playoff elimination, clinching the President's Trophy, as well as clinching (or being eliminated from clinching) any other seed in the standings.
arXiv:2605.16009v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Local navigation is one of the fundamental problems in robot navigation, and numerous approaches have been proposed over the years, including methods such as the Dynamic Window Approach, Model Predictive Control, and more recently, Control Barrier Functions and machine learning based techniques. While these methods perform well in simple environments, many of them rely on optimization or learning based procedures that can struggle in more complex scenarios. In contrast, this article proposes a more geometric algorithmic approach that enables a local navigation method with faster computation times and longer planning horizons. The proposed method is based on the computation of a sequence of circular regions from a local LiDAR scan that expand in the direction of the goal and capture free local navigable space. The proposed method was implemented in the ROS2 framework and evaluated in a simulated environment.
arXiv:2605.16008v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Plaque assays remain the gold standard readout of virus infectivity; however, plaque counting from plate images is labor-intensive and prone to inter-operator variability. We present an end-to-end, computer-aided workflow for cytopathic effect-based virus titration directly from laboratory plaque assay images. The proposed approach combines two models derived from the Segment Anything Model (SAM): a SAM2-based well-segmentation module that localizes assay wells across heterogeneous imaging conditions, and a SAM-based plaque-segmentation model that detects and enumerates plaques within each well. The method was evaluated on a mixed dataset comprising private plaque assay images of Mayaro virus and Coxsackievirus B3, together with public Vaccinia virus images from the VACVPlaque dataset. The pipeline outputs per-well plaque counts, automatically computes plaque-forming units per milliliter (PFU/mL), and is integrated into a web-based platform that allows users to review results and organize experiments. On held-out plates (17 from MAYV/CVB3 and 22 from VACV), the workflow generalized across two plate formats (6-well and 12-well) and showed strong agreement with manual annotations (Pearson correlation coefficients of 0.92 for MAYV/CVB3 and 0.88 for VACV). Automated plaque counts were further compared with annotations from four independent experts, demonstrating high concordance. The proposed system will be open sourced and publicly released upon acceptance of this manuscript to enable reproducible, scalable, and audit-ready plaque assay analysis while substantially reducing manual annotation effort.
arXiv:2605.01117v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Full-f global gyrokinetic simulations of the plasma boundary have until now required heroic computational efforts and case-by-case expert intervention, precluding systematic parameter scans. Here we demonstrate a paradigm shift: hundreds of independent, concurrent, and unsupervised full-f boundary gyrokinetic simulations in a geometry inspired by the Tokamak \`a Configuration Variable (TCV), covering both the closed flux surface region and the open-field-line scrape-off layer (SOL) while scanning triangularity, elongation, and heating power. All simulations are evolved much longer than the turbulence relaxation time until the steady state is reached. Analysis of the steady-state profiles reveals that the impact of plasma shaping on confinement is strongly power dependent: at low power, triangularity primarily controls the SOL ion temperature, while at high power it mostly affects the edge ion temperature gradient. The low-power hot SOL observed for positive triangularity is explained by a neoclassical trapped-ion mechanism in which triangularity modifies the field-line arc length between banana turning points and the high-field-side limiter, altering the interaction with cold neutral-ionization regions. Fingerprint analysis of turbulent transport categorize the simulations in a regime dominated by ion temperature gradient (ITG) or trapped electron modes (TEMs), confirmed by dedicated local linear gyrokinetic calculations. The generated open data represents a previously unobtainable resource. It can serve both as a benchmark for boundary transport models, and as a training dataset for data-driven methods in fusion foundation and surrogate models.
arXiv:2605.02651v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scientific peer review increasingly struggles to assess reproducibility at the scale and complexity of modern research output. Evaluating reproducibility requires reconstructing experimental dependencies, methodological choices, data flows, and result-generating procedures, which often exceeds what human reviewers can provide. Agentic Reproducibility Assessment (ARA) formalizes reproducibility assessment as a structured reasoning task over scientific documents. Given a paper, ARA extracts a directed workflow graph linking sources, methods, experiments, and outputs, then evaluates its reconstructability using structural and content-based scores for reproducibility assessments. Experiments on 213 ReScience C articles - the largest cross-domain benchmark of human-validated computational reproducibility studies considered to date - demonstrate ARA's generalizability and consistent workflow reconstruction and assessment across LLMs, model temperatures, and scientific domains. ARA achieves ~61% accuracy on three benchmarks, and the highest accuracy reported on ReproBench (60.71% vs. 36.84%) and GoldStandardDB (61.68% vs. 43.56%), highlighting its potential to complement human review at scale and enabling next-generation peer review. Code and Data available: https://github.com/AndresLaverdeMarin/agentic_reproducibility_assessment.
arXiv:2605.15475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce an empowered transposed Fully Connected Weighted (t-FCW) graph representation to embed point clouds into a metric space. While original t-FCW has shown promising results for point cloud classification, the reasons behind its effectiveness and its broader applicability remained unclear. In this work, we analyze the properties that make the empowered and original t-FCW effective and design a network that uses the empowered t-FCW exclusively as feature extractors. From an interpretability perspective, we build memory banks for classification, part segmentation, and semantic segmentation using the empowered t-FCW. Our analysis reveals that the empowered t-FCW inherits robustness from surface descriptors, provides interpretability through dimension-wise relations. These properties enable a highly efficient and interpretable network, which processes the ModelNet40 classification problem in approximately 7 seconds on an NVIDIA RTX A5000 GPU. Importantly, empowered t-FCW can function both as a lightweight standalone baseline and as a complementary plug-in to existing deep models.
arXiv:2605.15480v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stochastic communication delays in teleoperation introduce signal discontinuities that undermine control stability and degrade control performance. Consequently, the conventional reinforcement learning (RL) methods struggle with the delayed observations due to the delay-induced observations, leading to high-frequency chattering. To address this, we propose a hybrid control framework, delay-resilient RL, integrating a state estimator utilizing Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) with a residual RL policy, which is resilient to stochastic delays. The LSTM reconstructs smooth, continuous state estimates from delayed observations, enabling the RL agent to learn a residual torque compensation policy that balances tracking accuracy with velocity smoothness. Experimental validation on Franka Panda robots demonstrates that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines, ensuring robust and stable teleoperation even under high-variance stochastic delays.
arXiv:2605.16001v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A broadcast on a connected graph is a function f that assigns each vertex v an integer f(v) with 0 <= f(v) <= ecc(v) where ecc(v) denotes the eccentricity of v. A vertex u hears a broadcasting vertex v (with f(v)>0) if u is at distance at most f(v) from v. Beyond the classical broadcast domination problem, where every vertex is required to hear at least one vertex, two variants raise intriguing combinatorial and algorithmic questions. In an independent broadcast, no broadcasting vertex hears another broadcasting vertex, while a broadcast packing requires that every vertex hears at most one broadcasting vertex. The corresponding problems Broadcast Independence and Broadcast Packing ask for broadcasts of values at least k under these constraints, where the value is the sum of the broadcast values. We initiate a systematic study of the parameterized complexity of such problems. We prove that Broadcast Independence and Broadcast Packing are FPT parameterized by the treewidth plus the diameter of G, with a family of dynamic-programming algorithms over nice tree decompositions. We obtain as a corollary that both problems are FPT parameterized by k and the treewidth of G and XP for treewidth only. The latter result shows that the known algorithm for trees (Bessy and Rautenbach, DAM 2022) can indeed be extended to bounded treewidth graphs. On the negative side, we show that Broadcast Independence is W[1]-hard parameterized by the pathwidth of G. Note that this result completes the picture for parameter k and treewidth for Broadcast Independence since it is known to be W[1]-hard for k only. We complement these results by showing that a weighted version of both problems, where the input comes with a weight function on the edges, is W[1]-hard parameterized by the vertex cover of G. Finally, we provide a constant-factor approximation algorithm parameterized by treewidth for Broadcast Independence.
arXiv:2605.15999v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces a motion planning framework to plan morphology and trajectory for morphing quadrotors under extremely constrained environments. We develop a novel obstacle avoidance cost function for nonlinear model predictive control (MPC) that enables navigation through extremely narrow gaps under limited perception from a 2D LiDAR. Classical artificial potential field-based costs typically have a high cost in narrow passages, artificially blocking the navigable path. In contrast, we propose a smooth exponential obstacle cost that preserves low traversal cost within narrow gaps while maintaining strong collision avoidance behavior. The formulation avoids hard activation thresholds and introduces a cost reduction factor to reduce the cost within narrow passages. Direct use of 2D LiDAR measurements in MPC allows navigation around arbitrarily shaped obstacles. The method is embedded within an acados-based nonlinear MPC framework. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate successful traversal of narrow corridors where typical repulsive cost functions would fail. The approach provides a computationally efficient and practical solution for navigating through tight spaces while maintaining safety from the obstacles. While we are implementing the framework on the morphing quadrotors, the cost function formulation is general-purpose for any mobile robot application, and is not limited to the morphing quadrotors. The implementation code is available at \href{https://github.com/harshjmodi1996/morphocopter_mpc}{Github Repo} and a short video is available at \href{https://zh.engr.tamu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/310/2026/03/MPC_MorphoCopter_video.mp4}{Video Link}.
arXiv:2605.15998v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Coherent perfect absorbers (CPAs) have recently attracted considerable attention due to their ability to enhance light--matter interaction. By exploiting interference, CPAs enable even weakly absorbing materials to achieve complete absorption under appropriate excitation conditions. Generalizing this concept to the simultaneous absorption of arbitrary multimode input states remains challenging, however, since conventional implementations typically operate only for a single or a very small number of input channels. Here, we propose a compact realization of a multimode coherent perfect absorber based on a gradient-index (GRIN) fiber. Using the self-imaging property of the fiber, the bulky free-space architecture of previous approaches is replaced by a monolithic waveguiding platform that supports near-degenerate rephasing of many spatial modes. We show that standard GRIN profiles optimized for minimal intermodal dispersion enable highly efficient absorption of complex multimode fields, with field-of-view reflectivities well below \(1\%\) for realistic parameters. This approach provides a practical and scalable route toward efficient multimode absorption in fiber-based and integrated photonic systems, with potential applications in light harvesting, optical control, and imaging.
arXiv:2605.15984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Toxic speech detection has become a crucial challenge in maintaining safe online communication environments. However, existing approaches to toxic speech detection often neglect the contribution of paralinguistic cues, such as emotion, intonation, and speech rate, which are key to detecting speech toxicity. Moreover, current toxic speech datasets are predominantly text-based, limiting the development of models that can capture paralinguistic cues.To address these challenges, we present ToxiAlert-Bench, a large-scale audio dataset comprising over 30,000 audio clips annotated with seven major toxic categories and twenty fine-grained toxic labels. Uniquely, our dataset annotates toxicity sources -- distinguishing between textual content and paralinguistic origins -- for comprehensive toxic speech analysis.Furthermore, we propose a dual-head neural network with a multi-stage training strategy tailored for toxic speech detection. This architecture features two task-specific classification headers: one for identifying the source of sensitivity (textual or paralinguistic), and the other for categorizing the specific toxic type. The training process involves independent head training followed by joint fine-tuning to reduce task interference. To mitigate data class imbalance, we incorporate class-balanced sampling and weighted loss functions.Our experimental results show that leveraging paralinguistic features significantly improves detection performance. Our method consistently outperforms existing baselines across multiple evaluation metrics, with a 21.1% relative improvement in Macro-F1 score and a 13.0% relative gain in accuracy over the strongest baseline, highlighting its enhanced effectiveness and practical applicability.
arXiv:2605.15983v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We formulate the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) as optimal search over the reachability graph of a Timed Transition Petri Net with Resources, using relative-delay tokens so that scheduling decisions correspond to transition firings in the induced state space. We solve the resulting problem with $A^*$ guided by a heuristic that combines Critical Path and resource-based lower bounds, and prove that it is consistent under our token-based time semantics. Experiments on the PSPLIB benchmarks show that the approach outperforms strong exact Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MIP) baselines (SCIP, CBC) in both success rate and solve time. Per-instance analysis shows that heuristic search and MIP degrade along independent axes, resource tightness for $A^*$ and formulation size for MIP, with resource strength mediating which solver benefits from scale.
arXiv:2605.15951v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Finetuning Large Vision-Language Models with reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising approach to enhance their capability in object-level grounding. However, existing methods, mainly based on GRPO, assign rewards at the response level. Such sparse reward, often criterion-induced, leads to minimal learning signals when all candidate responses fail in challenging scenarios. In this work, we propose a group-revision optimisation paradigm that enhances learning on hard cases. It begins with a sampled initial response and generates a set of revised candidates to explore improved grounding outcomes. Inspired by reward shaping, we introduce a consolidation process that quantifies each candidate's improvement over the initial attempt and converts it into informative shaping signals. These signals are used to both refine the reward and modulate the advantage, amplifying the influence of high-quality revisions. Our method achieves consistent gains across referring and reasoning segmentation, REC, and counting benchmarks compared with prior GRPO-based models. Our code is available at https://github.com/yyliu01/GroupRevision.
arXiv:2603.13452v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fairness in machine learning is predominantly evaluated through outcome-oriented metrics, such as Demographic parity, which measure whether predictions are statistically consistent across protected groups. However, these metrics cannot detect whether a model uses systematically different reasoning for different demographic groups, which violates procedural fairness principles. This problem is compounded by intersectionality, where models may appear fair on individual attributes (e.g., race) while exhibiting significant disparities for intersectional subgroups (e.g., race $\times$ gender), a phenomenon known as fairness gerrymandering. In this work, we introduce Multi-category Explanation Stability Disparity (MESD), a procedural fairness metric that quantifies disparities in explanation quality across intersectional subgroups formed by the Cartesian product of multiple protected attributes. MESD integrates three components, which are label-aware aggregation aligned with outcome-conditional fairness, empirical-Bayes shrinkage to stabilize estimates for small intersectional groups, and Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) weighting to emphasize worst-case subgroup disparities. We integrate MESD within a multi-objective optimization framework (UEF) that jointly optimizes utility, outcome fairness, and procedural fairness using NSGA-II. We evaluated MESD and UEF on three benchmark datasets along with four state-of-the-art methods in several experiments, and we demonstrate that MESD reveals procedural disparities invisible to outcome metrics alone. We position our contribution within procedural justice theory and discuss implications for regulatory compliance and intersectional equity.
arXiv:2605.15950v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work extends the generalized nearest neighbor decoding (GNND), originally developed as a receiver architecture for memoryless channels, to a vectorized GNND (Vec-GNND) suitable for in-block memory (IBM) channels. Leveraging the generalized mutual information (GMI) as an operational lower bound on the mismatch capacity, an analytical characterization of the optimal Vec-GNND is obtained for general IBM channels with Gaussian codebooks. The formalism further provides closed-form optimality conditions and achievable GMIs for restricted variants of the receiver architecture. Furthermore, we formulate a GMI-based joint design viewpoint for Gaussian codebook covariance and decoding metrics. Since the metric optimization admits a closed-form solution for each fixed covariance, the joint design is reduced to an input-covariance optimization problem; for the diagonal covariance family, we derive first-order self-consistent optimality conditions. Numerical evaluations on block noncoherent additive white Gaussian noise channels and phase noise channels demonstrate consistent performance gains over conventional scaling-based baselines, highlighting the substantial advantages and potential relevance of the proposed Vec-GNND in realistic communication scenarios.
arXiv:2605.15935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Plasma shape control in tokamaks requires a real-time controller that tracks dynamically changing shape targets while tolerating diagnostic failures. Classical approaches decompose the problem into equilibrium reconstruction followed by a linear controller, and assume a fixed, fully operational sensor set. We present a reinforcement learning agent that addresses both limitations simultaneously. The agent is trained in NSFsim, a high-fidelity tokamak simulator configured for DIII-D, on a curated dataset of 120 experimental plasma shapes. The shape targets are resampled as random step changes every 0.25 s, exposing the agent to diverse transitions across the full shape envelope. At test time the agent zero-shot tracks dynamic shape sequences; on a held-out static configuration in simulation it achieves a mean shape error of 2.01 cm, and dynamic trajectory following is demonstrated qualitatively in simulation and on the physical device. Diagnostic dropout randomly masks 30% of magnetic sensors per episode, yielding a single policy robust to arbitrary sensor subsets without backup controllers or mode-switching logic. An asymmetric actor-critic architecture with privileged equilibrium information improves value estimation under partial observability; an auxiliary shape reconstruction head on the actor enables end-to-end shape reconstruction from raw diagnostics and serves as an interpretability tool for policy analysis. The policy transfers to experimental DIII-D shots, where it directly commands the coil actuators on two dynamic shape maneuvers, and to the independent GSevolve simulator.
arXiv:2603.27043v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce the Mandarin-English Language Interview (MELI) Corpus, an open-source resource of 29.8 hours of speech from 51 Mandarin-English bilingual speakers. MELI combines matched sessions in Mandarin and English with two speaking styles: read sentences and spontaneous interviews about language varieties, standardness, and learning experiences. Audio was recorded at 44.1 kHz (16-bit, stereo). Interviews were fully transcribed, force-aligned at word and phone levels, and anonymized. Descriptively, the Mandarin component totals ~14.7 hours (mean duration 17.3 minutes) and the English component ~15.1 hours (mean duration 17.8 minutes). We report token/type statistics for each language and document code-switching patterns (frequent in Mandarin sessions; more limited in English sessions). The corpus design supports within-/cross-speaker, within/cross-language acoustic comparison and links acoustics to speakers' stated language attitudes, enabling both quantitative and qualitative analyses. The MELI Corpus will be released with transcriptions, alignments, metadata, scans of labelled maps and documentation under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
arXiv:2605.05652v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Simulation-based inference (SBI) provides amortized Bayesian parameter inference from simulator-generated data without requiring explicit likelihood evaluation. Its reliability can degrade under model misspecification, where real-world observations are not well represented by the simulator used for training. Existing methods using unlabeled real-world data often align simulated and real-world data distributions, but marginal alignment alone does not directly preserve parameter-relevant information needed for posterior inference. We propose SPIN, an SBI framework with parameter-relevant information-preserving domain transfer using unlabeled, unpaired real-world observations. During training, SPIN translates labeled simulator observations toward the real-world domain and back to the simulator domain, using the original simulator labels to encourage domain transfer that preserves parameter-relevant mutual information. At test time, the learned real-to-simulator transport maps real-world observations into the simulator domain for posterior inference, without requiring real-world parameter labels or paired real--simulator observations. Across controlled synthetic and physical real-world benchmarks, SPIN improves real-world posterior inference, with the improvement becoming clearer as misspecification increases.
arXiv:2511.17426v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) has recently advanced through non-contrastive methods that couple an invariance term with variance, covariance, or redundancy-reduction penalties. While such objectives shape first- and second-order statistics of the representation, they largely ignore the local geometry of the underlying data manifold. In this paper, we introduce CurvSSL, a curvature-regularized self-supervised learning framework, and its RKHS extension, kernel CurvSSL. Our approach retains a standard two-view encoder-projector architecture with a Barlow Twins-style redundancy-reduction loss on projected features, but augments it with a curvature-based regularizer. Each embedding is treated as a vertex whose $k$ nearest neighbors define a discrete curvature score via cosine interactions on the unit hypersphere; in the kernel variant, curvature is computed from a normalized local Gram matrix in an RKHS. These scores are aligned and decorrelated across augmentations by a Barlow-style loss on a curvature-derived matrix, encouraging both view invariance and consistency of local manifold bending. Experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets with a ResNet-18 backbone show that curvature-regularized SSL yields competitive or improved linear evaluation performance compared to Barlow Twins and VICReg. Our results indicate that explicitly shaping local geometry is a simple and effective complement to purely statistical SSL regularizers.
arXiv:2605.03548v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reconstructing PDE-governed fields from sparse and irregular measurements is challenging due to their ill-posed nature. Deterministic surrogates are trained on dense fields that struggle with limited measurements and uncertainty quantification. Generative models, by learning distributions over spatiotemporal fields, can better handle sparsity and uncertainty. However, existing generative approaches enforce data consistency and PDE constraints simultaneously via sampling-time gradient guidance, resulting in slow and unstable inference. To this end, we propose PerFlow, a Physics-embedded rectified Flow for efficient sparse reconstruction and uncertainty quantification of spatiotemporal dynamics. PerFlow decouples observation conditioning from physics enforcement, performing guidance-free conditioning by feeding observations into rectified-flow dynamics while embedding hard physics via a constraint-preserving projection (e.g., incompressibility or conservation). Theoretically, we establish invariance guarantees to ensure that trajectories remain on the physics-consistent manifold throughout sampling. Experiments on various PDE systems demonstrate competitive reconstruction accuracy with sound physics consistency, while enabling efficient conditional sampling (e.g., 50 steps) and up to 320x faster inference than 2000-step guided diffusion baselines.
arXiv:2510.19315v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study succinctness as a measure of the expressive power of transformers. Succinctness -- how compactly a formalism can describe a language relative to other formalisms -- is a classical notion in logic and automata theory. We prove that fixed-precision transformers are remarkably succinct: they can be exponentially more succinct than both linear temporal logic (LTL) and recurrent neural networks, and, by extension, state-space models, and doubly exponentially more succinct than finite automata. In other words, there exist families of languages describable by polynomial-size transformers whose smallest equivalent LTL formula or recurrent neural network is exponentially large, and whose smallest equivalent automaton is doubly exponentially large. We also establish matching upper bounds, showing that any fixed-precision transformer can be converted to an LTL formula with at most an exponential blow-up -- improving a prior doubly exponential translation. As a consequence of this succinctness, we show that basic verification problems for transformers, such as emptiness and equivalence, are provably intractable: specifically, EXPSPACE-complete.
arXiv:2510.08398v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The recent rapid advancement of Text-to-Video (T2V) generation technologies are engaging the trained models with more world model ability, making the existing benchmarks increasingly insufficient to evaluate state-of-the-art T2V models. First, current evaluation dimensions, such as per-frame aesthetic quality and temporal consistency, are no longer able to differentiate state-of-the-art T2V models. Second, event-level temporal causality-an essential property that differentiates videos from other modalities-remains largely unexplored. Third, existing benchmarks lack a systematic assessment of world knowledge, which are essential capabilities for building world models. To address these issues, we introduce VideoVerse, a comprehensive benchmark focusing on evaluating whether the current T2V model could understand complex temporal causality and world knowledge to synthesize videos. We collect representative videos across diverse domains and extract their event-level descriptions with inherent temporal causality, which are then rewritten into text-to-video prompts by independent annotators. For each prompt, we design ten evaluation dimensions covering dynamic and static properties, resulting in 300 prompts, 815 events, and 793 evaluation questions. Consequently, a human preference-aligned QA-based evaluation pipeline is developed by using modern vision-language models to systematically benchmark leading open- and closed-source T2V systems, revealing the current gap between T2V models and desired world modeling abilities.
arXiv:2504.18522v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider the problem of modeling the effects of perturbations like gene knockouts on measurements such as single-cell RNA counts. Given data for some perturbations, we aim to predict the distribution of measurements for new combinations of perturbations. To address this challenging extrapolation task, we posit that perturbations act additively in a suitable, unknown embedding space. We formulate the data-generating process as a latent variable model, in which perturbations amount to mean shifts in latent space and can be combined additively. We then prove that, given sufficiently diverse training perturbations, the representation and perturbation effects are identifiable up to orthogonal transformation and use this to derive extrapolation guarantees for unseen perturbations that can be expressed as linear combinations of seen ones. To estimate the model from data, we propose the perturbation distribution autoencoder (PDAE), which is trained by maximizing the distributional similarity between true and simulated perturbation distributions. The trained model can then be used to predict previously unseen perturbation distributions. In support of our theoretical results, we demonstrate through simulations that PDAE can accurately predict the effects of unseen but identifiable perturbations, and showcase the method on combinatorial gene perturbation data.
arXiv:2508.18167v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding and generating human-like text, yet they largely operate as reactive agents, responding only when directly prompted. This passivity creates an "awareness gap," limiting their potential as truly collaborative partners in dynamic human discussions. We introduce $\textit{DiscussLLM}$, a framework designed to bridge this gap by training models to proactively decide not just $\textit{what}$ to say, but critically, $\textit{when}$ to speak. Our primary contribution is a scalable two-stage data generation pipeline that synthesizes a large-scale dataset of realistic multi-turn human discussions. Each discussion is annotated with one of five intervention types (e.g., Factual Correction, Concept Definition) and contains an explicit conversational trigger where an AI intervention adds value. By training models to predict a special silent token when no intervention is needed, they learn to remain quiet until a helpful contribution can be made. We explore two architectural baselines: an integrated end-to-end model and a decoupled classifier-generator system optimized for low-latency inference. We evaluate these models on their ability to accurately time interventions and generate helpful responses, paving the way for more situationally aware and proactive conversational AI.