arXiv:2601.13529v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cervical cancer accounts for a significant portion of the global cancer burden among women. Interstitial brachytherapy (ISBT) is a standard procedure for treating cervical cancer; it involves placing a radioactive source through a straight hollow needle within or in close proximity to the tumor and surrounding tissue. However, the use of straight needles limits surgical planning to a linear needle path. We present the OncoReach stylet, a handheld, tendon-driven steerable stylet designed for compatibility with standard ISBT 15- and 13-gauge needles. Building upon our prior work, we evaluated design parameters like needle gauge, spherical joint count and spherical joint placement, including an asymmetric disk design to identify a configuration that maximizes bending compliance while retaining axial stiffness. Free space experiments quantified tip deflection across configurations, and a two-tube Cosserat rod model accurately predicted the centerline shape of the needle for most trials. The best performing configuration was integrated into a reusable handheld prototype that enables manual actuation. A patient-derived, multi-composite phantom model of the uterus and pelvis was developed to conduct a pilot study of the OncoReach steerable stylet with one expert user. Results showed the ability to steer from less-invasive, medial entry points to reach the lateral-most targets, underscoring the significance of steerable stylets.
Science Journals
arXiv:2605.15256v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current game world models simulate environments from a subjective, player-centric perspective. However, by treating the Non-Player Character (NPC) merely as background pixels, these models cannot capture interactions between the player and NPC. In that sense, they act as passive video renderers rather than real simulation engines, lacking the physical understanding needed to model action-induced NPC reactivities. We introduce ReactiveGWM, a reactive game world model that synthesizes dynamic interactions between the player and NPC. Instead of entangling all interaction dynamics, ReactiveGWM explicitly decouples player controls from NPC behaviors. Player actions are injected into the diffusion backbone via a lightweight additive bias, while high-level NPC responses (e.g., Offense, Control, Defense) are grounded through cross-attention modules. Crucially, these modules learn a game-agnostic representation of interactive logic. This enables zero-shot strategy transfer: our learned modules can be plugged directly into off-the-shelf, unannotated world models of different games. This instantly unlocks steerable NPC interactions without any domain-specific retraining. Evaluated on two Street Fighter games, ReactiveGWM maintains fine-grain player controllability while achieving robust, prompt-aligned NPC strategy adherence, paving the way for scalable, strategy-rich interaction with the NPC.
arXiv:2605.10100v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce HYPERPOSE, a novel 3D human pose estimation framework that performs spatio-temporal reasoning entirely within the Lorentz model of hyperbolic space $\mathbb{H}^d$ to natively preserve the hierarchical tree topology of the human skeleton. Current state-of-the-art pose estimators aim to capture complex joint dynamics by relying on transformers and graph convolutional networks. Since these architectures operate exclusively in Euclidean space which fundamentally mismatches the inherent tree structure of the human body, these methods inevitably suffer from exponential volume distortion and struggle to maintain structural coherence. To this end, we depart from flat spaces and aim to improve geometric fidelity with Hyperbolic Kinematic Phase-Space Attention (HKPSA), natively embedding complex joint relationships without distortion, alongside a multi-scale windowed hyperbolic attention mechanism that efficiently models temporal dynamics in $O(TW)$ complexity. Furthermore, to overcome the well-known instability of training non-Euclidean manifolds, HYPERPOSE introduces a novel Riemannian loss suite and an uncertainty-weighted curriculum, enforcing physical geodesic constraints like bone length and velocity consistency. Extensive evaluations on the Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP datasets demonstrate that HYPERPOSE achieves state-of-the-art structural and temporal coherence, significantly reducing both volume distortion and velocity error, while establishing new state-of-the-art benchmarks in overall positional accuracy.
arXiv:2601.12894v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion Policy has dominated action generation due to its strong capabilities for modeling multi-modal action distributions, but its multi-step denoising processes make it impractical for real-time visuomotor control. Existing caching-based acceleration methods typically rely on $\textit{static}$ schedules that fail to adapt to the $\textit{dynamics}$ of robot-environment interactions, thereby leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose $\underline{\textbf{S}}$parse $\underline{\textbf{A}}$ction$\underline{\textbf{G}}$en ($\textbf{SAG}$) for extremely sparse action generation. To accommodate the iterative interactions, SAG customizes a rollout-adaptive prune-then-reuse mechanism that first identifies prunable computations globally and then reuses cached activations to substitute them during action diffusion. To capture the rollout dynamics, SAG parameterizes an observation-conditioned diffusion pruner for environment-aware adaptation and instantiates it with a highly parameter- and inference-efficient design for real-time prediction. Furthermore, SAG introduces a one-for-all reusing strategy that reuses activations across both timesteps and blocks in a zig-zag manner, minimizing the global redundancy. Extensive experiments on multiple robotic benchmarks demonstrate that SAG achieves up to 4$\times$ generation speedup without sacrificing performance. Project Page: https://sparse-actiongen.github.io.
arXiv:2605.15513v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Parallel reasoning, where a generator samples many candidate solutions and an aggregator selects the best, is one of the most effective forms of test-time scaling in large language models, and pairwise self-verification has become its strongest aggregation primitive. Yet pairwise verification carries a heavy cost: each judgment reads two complete solutions in full, and existing methods perform tens of such judgments per problem regardless of whether the comparison is informative. We introduce CAPS (Cascaded Adaptive Pairwise Selection), an inference-only framework that allocates verifier compute non-uniformly along two orthogonal axes: an evidence axis that adapts how much of each candidate the judge sees, and a distribution axis that adapts how comparisons are spread across the pool. CAPS instantiates these into a four-stage cascade with an optional rescue subroutine, and admits a closed-form verifier-token cost in which the per-candidate marginal cost is roughly halved relative to uniform full-evidence schedules. On four self-verifying models (Qwen3-14B, GPT-OSS-20B, Qwen3-4B-Instruct/Thinking) and five reasoning benchmarks spanning code (LiveCodeBench-v5/v6, CodeContests) and math (AIME 2025, HMMT 2025), CAPS outperforms the leading pairwise verifier on 14 of 20 suites while using 25.4% of its verifier-token budget on code, and outperforms pointwise self-verification on all 20. The trade-off suites admit an interpretable diagnostic in terms of the verifier's accuracy at partial versus full evidence, providing a concrete pre-deployment check for cascade suitability.
arXiv:2511.15623v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the notion of sufficient explanation, and a sufficiency-degree as attribution score for database tuples in relation to query answering. We also investigate and exploit connections with database repairs as used for dealing with inconsistent databases; and with causality-based necessary explanations, obtaining new computational results. We show how to use answer-set programs to specify sufficient explanations and compute sufficiency-degrees.
arXiv:2605.10799v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Corruption studies, the standard tool for evaluating chain-of-thought (CoT) faithfulness, infer which steps are ``computationally important'' from accuracy loss when steps are corrupted. We show that when benchmark chains end with an explicit terminal answer line, as in GSM8K and MATH, these tests largely measure \emph{answer placement} rather than where intermediate computation is carried out. Using matched GSM8K examples, removing only the final answer statement while preserving all reasoning collapses suffix sensitivity by about $19\times$ for Qwen~2.5-3B ($N{=}300$, $p{=}0.022$). Conflicting-answer prompts, which contain correct reasoning but a wrong explicit final answer, drive accuracy to zero or near-zero at 7B across five open-weight model families; wrong-answer following is strong at 3B--7B and attenuates sharply at larger scales. Replications on MATH, within-stable comparisons at 7B, and suffix-free chains show the same pattern in different guises: corruption sensitivity tracks the location of explicit answer text, not a fixed computational depth in the reasoning. Generation-time probes indicate that final answers are rarely early-determined during generation (${<}5\%$ early commitment), yet consumption-time behavior systematically follows explicit answer text. The confound is therefore largely a readout effect when the chain is consumed. We propose a three-prerequisite protocol (question-only control, format characterization, and an all-position sweep) as a practical minimum for future corruption-based faithfulness studies.
arXiv:2510.15714v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Second-order optimization methods offer superior convergence rates but are often bottlenecked by the wall-clock cost of Hessian computation and factorization. In the moderate-dimensional regime where the full Hessian fits in memory, factorization $\mathcal{O}(d^3)$ typically dominates gradient evaluation $\mathcal{O}(nd)$, creating a synchronization barrier that negates the per-iteration progress of classical second-order methods. We propose the \emph{Split-Client} framework, which decouples optimization into parallel gradient and curvature processes. Unlike Lazy Hessian approaches, whose arithmetic-complexity analysis does not charge factorization time and whose optimal reuse frequency requires tuning, our method is fully \textbf{delay-adaptive}: its wall-clock complexity scales with the \emph{average} delay $\Bar{\tau}$, and it matches the optimally-tuned Lazy rate of $\mathcal{O}(\eps^{-3/2}\sqrt{\Bar{\tau}})$ without any tuning. For persistent curvature error, we provide a noise-adaptive schedule with $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{-3/4})$ rate (on $E[\|\nabla f\|]^{3/2}$), recovering the rate that uniform-error analyses such as Kamzolov et al (2023) achieve via inflated regularization. Under a verifiable subspace-alignment condition, an additional \emph{structured} analysis based on the secant condition of L-BFGS gives a faster $\mathcal{O}(T^{-1})$ rate, with a hybrid theorem interpolating smoothly between the two regimes. We extend the framework to Subsampled Cubic Newton with adaptive batch sizes and an aggregate sampling budget linear in $T$. Experiments on two non-convex problems show wall-clock speedups of up to $800\times$ over Vanilla and $30\times$ over Lazy in the strongly factorization-dominated regime.
arXiv:2601.09512v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: To teach robots complex manipulation tasks, a common approach is to fine-tune a pre-trained vision-language-action model (VLA) on task-specific data. However, since this recipe updates existing representations, it is unsuitable for long-term operation in the real world, where robots must continually adapt to new tasks and environments while retaining the knowledge they have already acquired. Existing continual learning methods for robotics commonly require storing previous data (exemplars), struggle with long task sequences, or rely on task identifiers for deployment. To address these limitations, we propose CLARE, a general, parameter-efficient framework for exemplar-free continual learning with VLAs. CLARE introduces lightweight modular adapters into selected VLA modules and autonomously expands the model only where necessary when learning a new task, guided by layer-wise feature similarity. During deployment, an autoencoder-based routing mechanism dynamically activates the most relevant adapters without requiring task labels. Through extensive experiments on the LIBERO benchmark and five real-world tasks, we show that CLARE achieves high performance on new tasks without catastrophic forgetting of earlier tasks, significantly outperforming even exemplar-based methods. Code, data, and videos are available at our website: https://tum-lsy.github.io/clare.
arXiv:2605.15232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test Suite Minimization (TSM) reduces the size of test suites while preserving their fault detection capability. In black-box TSM, reduction is performed without analyzing production code. While several black-box TSM approaches have explored metrics like test logs or test similarity, those often suffer from scalability and efficiency issues. On the other hand, change-proneness (CP), recently emerged as an efficient and scalable alternative metric, has only been applied at class level. To accurately identify fault-revealing test cases, we propose CP at finer-grained method-level and implement Method-level Change-proneness based Test-suite Minimization (MCTM). MCTM first calculates CP for each method from version control metadata, then determines the dependency between test cases and methods by analyzing the test-code call-graph. Next, it scores the association between test cases and their invoked methods using statistical measures such as Average, Geometric Mean etc. Finally, test cases with the highest scores are selected to form the reduced suite. Evaluation on 15 open-source Java projects with 635 buggy versions shows MCTM achieves 0.93 accuracy and 0.94 fault detection rate on average, significantly outperforming class-level CP and similarity-based approaches while maintaining superior efficiency.
arXiv:2603.01290v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The 2026 Formula 1 technical regulations introduce a fundamental change to energy strategy: under a 50/50 internal combustion engine / battery power split with unlimited regeneration and a driver-controlled Override Mode, the optimal energy deployment policy depends not only on a driver's own state but on the hidden state of rival cars. This creates a Partially Observable Stochastic Game that cannot be solved by single-agent optimisation methods. We present a tractable two-layer inference and decision framework. The first layer is a 40-state Hidden Markov Model (HMM) that infers a probability distribution over each rival's ERS charge level (four modes: H, M, L_harvest, L_derate), Override Mode status, and tyre degradation state from six publicly observable telemetry signals. The second layer is a Deep Q-Network (DQN) policy that takes the HMM belief state as input and selects between energy deployment strategies. We formally characterise the counter-harvest trap, a deceptive strategy in which a car deliberately suppresses observable deployment signals to induce a rival into a failed attack, and show that detecting it requires belief-state inference over both ERS level and the harvest/derate sub-mode. On synthetic races, the HMM achieves 96.8% ERS-level accuracy (random baseline 25%), classifies L_harvest vs. L_derate with 89.4% accuracy, and detects counter-harvest trap conditions with 96.3% recall. Pre-season analysis indicates circuit-dependent recharge availability (1.0x to 2.2x per lap) as the primary confound; Melbourne is the hardest-case validation environment. Baum-Welch calibration on 2026 race telemetry begins with the Australian Grand Prix (8 March 2026).
arXiv:2605.15228v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern cloud and enterprise systems rely on identity-centric authorization, assuming that callers possessing valid credentials are safe to execute commands. The emergence of autonomous AI agents invalidates this assumption: agents can generate syntactically valid but semantically unsafe actions, making standing privileges a significant operational risk. This risk becomes especially acute in sovereign AI systems, where autonomous agents may interact with cloud infrastructure, regulated data, financial workflows, and national-scale digital services. Governed mutation substrates reduce this risk by interposing on agent actions: agents submit intents, infrastructure evaluates context and policy, and execution is mediated. However, this shifts the trust boundary: how can the decision to authorize an intent be made verifiable, distributed, and replayable? We introduce a Distributed Trust Framework (DTF), a verification framework for governed mutation systems that computes execution authority from structured, verifiable artifacts. DTF introduces a Justification Proof to encode the admissibility basis of an action, a consensus model for independent evaluation, an ephemeral Execution Identity derived from the approved proof, and an append-only Evidence Chain that preserves the authorization lifecycle. Under stated substrate assumptions, this architecture enforces a compact authorization invariant: no high-stakes execution without a proof object, no derived authority without consensus, and no valid mutation detached from evidence. We define the model, instantiate it over an OpenKedge-based governed mutation substrate, and show how it maps onto cloud-native environments. By shifting authorization from standing identity to proof-derived authority, DTF provides an infrastructure foundation for making agentic execution governable, auditable, and bounded in sovereign AI deployments.
arXiv:2605.15398v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in 3D generative editing, particularly pipelines based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), have achieved high-fidelity, multi-view-consistent scene manipulation from text prompts. However, we find that these pipelines also introduce new safety risks when unsafe prompts produce edits that are propagated and optimized across views. In this work, we study unsafe generation in 3D editing pipelines and show that such behavior can lead to coherent, undesirable Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) content in the final 3D representation. To address this, we propose 3DEditSafe, a safety-regularized 3D editing framework that constrains unsafe semantic propagation during optimization. 3DEditSafe combines generation-stage safety guidance with rendered-view 3D safety regularization, safe semantic projection, residue suppression, and mask-aware preservation to steer optimization away from unsafe editing directions. We evaluate our approach on EditSplat scenes using an object-compatible unsafe prompt benchmark and show that 2D safety guidance alone is not consistently sufficient to prevent unsafe 3D edits. 3DEditSafe reduces unsafe semantic alignment and view-level attack success rates, while revealing a safety-quality tradeoff in which stronger unsafe suppression can introduce artifacts or reduce unsafe-prompt fidelity. To our knowledge, this work is the first attempt to study and defend against unsafe generation in text-driven 3D editing pipelines, highlighting the need for safety mechanisms that operate directly on optimized 3D representations.
arXiv:2605.15227v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-driving laboratories (SDLs) have attracted increasing attention as a means of accelerating scientific discovery; however, developing SDL software remains technically demanding. To improve accessibility, orchestration software frameworks have been proposed to coordinate SDL components. Nevertheless, existing frameworks are primarily designed for human interaction and do not provide standardized interfaces suitable for AI agents. In this work, we propose an SDL software architecture based on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), in which all SDL functionalities are exposed through MCP servers. Following this design principle, we introduce an MCP-based SDL orchestrator, named NIMO Controller. It provides a visual programming interface automatically generated through MCP-based tool discovery, allowing human users to design experimental workflows without writing code. The same MCP backend can also be accessed by AI agents, providing a unified interface for both human users and AI agents. We demonstrate the proposed system through a case study on a color-matching SDL. The results validate the usability of the proposed MCP-based SDL architecture.
arXiv:2511.21277v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents LatencyScope, a mathematical framework for computing one-way uplink and downlink latency in fifth-generation radio access networks across diverse system configurations. LatencyScope models latency sources across the protocol stack, including radio interfaces, scheduling decisions, processing delays, frame structures, and hardware and software constraints, while capturing dependencies among configuration parameters and stochastic sources of delay. The framework also includes a configuration analyzer that uses these models to search billions of candidate settings and identify those that satisfy latency-reliability targets under user-specified constraints. We validate LatencyScope on two open-source fifth-generation radio access network testbeds, as well as on measurements from a public commercial fifth-generation network. The results show that LatencyScope closely matches empirical latency distributions, captures observed lower and upper latency bounds, and substantially outperforms prior analytical models and widely used fifth-generation network simulators. LatencyScope can determine whether ultra-reliable low-latency communication targets are feasible for a given deployment and, when they are feasible, efficiently find satisfying configurations, helping network operators reason about latency modeling, configuration analysis, and system-level bottlenecks.
arXiv:2511.19399v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep research agents perform multi-step research to produce long-form, well-attributed answers. However, most open deep research agents are trained on easily verifiable short-form QA tasks via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, which does not extend to realistic long-form tasks. We address this with Reinforcement Learning with Evolving Rubrics (RLER), where rubrics are constructed and maintained to co-evolve with the policy model during training. This allows the rubrics to incorporate newly explored information from search and contrasting model responses, enabling better fact checking and more discriminative on-policy feedback. Using RLER, we develop Deep Research Tulu (DR Tulu-8B), the first fully open model that is directly trained for open-ended, long-form deep research. Across four long-form deep research benchmarks in science, healthcare, and general domains, DR Tulu substantially outperforms existing open deep research agents (by 15.6% over Tongyi DR on average) and matches or exceeds proprietary deep research agents (by 0.7% over OpenAI DR on average), while being significantly smaller and cheaper per query (1000x cheaper than OpenAI DR per query).
arXiv:2511.18225v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum machine learning seeks to leverage quantum computers to improve upon classical machine learning algorithms. Currently, robust uncertainty quantification methods remain underdeveloped in the quantum domain, despite the critical need for reliable and trustworthy predictions. Recent work has introduced quantum conformal prediction, a framework that produces prediction sets that are guaranteed to contain the true outcome with a user-specified probability. In this work, we formalise how the time-varying noise inherent in quantum processors can undermine conformal guarantees, even when calibration and test data are exchangeable. To address this challenge, we draw on Adaptive Conformal Inference, a method which maintains validity over time via repeated recalibration. We introduce Adaptive Quantum Conformal Prediction (AQCP), an algorithm which provides asymptotic average coverage guarantees under arbitrary hardware noise conditions. Empirical studies on an IBM quantum processor demonstrate that AQCP achieves the target coverage level and exhibits greater stability than quantum conformal prediction.
arXiv:2605.15537v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces RTL-BenchMT, an agentic framework for dynamically maintaining RTL generation benchmarks. Large Language Models (LLMs) assisted automated RTL generation is one of the most important directions in EDA research. However, current RTL benchmarks face two critical challenges: (1) flawed cases in the benchmarks and (2) overfitting to the benchmarks. Both challenges are difficult to resolve purely by manual engineering effort. To address these issues and systematically reduce human maintenance costs, we propose an automated agentic framework, RTL-BenchMT. RTL-BenchMT focuses on two key applications: (1) automatically identifying and revising flawed benchmark cases and (2) automatically detecting and updating overfitting cases. With the assistance of RTL-BenchMT, we conduct a thorough, in-depth analysis of flawed and overfitting cases and produce a refined benchmark suite that will be open-sourced to the community.
arXiv:2605.15542v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: GUI agents powered by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capability in understanding and executing user instructions. However, accurately grounding instruction-relevant elements from high-resolution screenshots cluttered with irrelevant UI components remains challenging for existing approaches. Inspired by how humans dynamically adjust their perceptual scope to locate task-related regions on complex screens, we propose DRS-GUI, a training-free dynamic region search framework for GUI grounding that can be seamlessly integrated into existing MLLMs. DRS-GUI introduces a lightweight UI Perceptor that performs three human-like perceptual actions (Focus, Shift, and Scatter) to progressively explore the interface and generate region proposals. To dynamically schedule these actions, we further design an Action Planner based on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). A region quality reward is employed to evaluate and select the highly instruction-relevant region, efficiently pruning redundant UI elements. Experiments demonstrate that DRS-GUI yields a 14\% improvement on ScreenSpot-Pro for general and GUI-specific MLLMs (Qwen2.5-VL-7B and UGround-V1-7B), significantly enhancing grounding performance and generalization.
arXiv:2511.18127v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Real-time 3D hand forecasting is a critical component for fluid human-computer interaction in applications like AR and assistive robotics. However, existing methods are ill-suited for these scenarios, as they typically require offline access to accumulated video sequences and cannot incorporate language guidance that conveys task intent. To overcome these limitations, we introduce SFHand, the first streaming framework for language-guided 3D hand forecasting. SFHand autoregressively predicts a comprehensive set of future 3D hand states, including hand type, 2D bounding box, 3D pose, and trajectory, from a continuous stream of video and language instructions. Our framework combines a streaming autoregressive architecture with an ROI-enhanced memory layer, capturing temporal context while focusing on salient hand-centric regions. To enable this research, we also introduce EgoHaFL, the first large-scale dataset featuring synchronized 3D hand poses and language instructions. We demonstrate that SFHand achieves new state-of-the-art results in 3D hand forecasting, outperforming prior work by a significant margin of up to 35.8%. Furthermore, we show the practical utility of our learned representations by transferring them to downstream embodied manipulation tasks, improving task success rates by up to 13.4% on multiple benchmarks. Dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/ut-vision/EgoHaFL, project page: https://github.com/ut-vision/SFHand.
arXiv:2603.08677v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Rare nonadiabatic events play a central role in photochemistry but remain difficult to simulate because excited-state dynamics is computationally demanding and often stochastic. Here we introduce a deterministic and time-reversible implementation of nonadiabatic dynamics that enables the application of transition path sampling (TPS) to excited-state processes. Our approach builds on the Mapping Approach to Surface Hopping (MASH) and establishes the conditions required for path ensemble sampling, in particular time reversibility and detailed balance. Combining this dynamics with the TPS framework yields a new method, termed nonadiabatic transition path sampling (NATPS). Using a model system of electronically coupled potential energy surfaces, we demonstrate that NATPS efficiently generates ensembles of reactive trajectories and provides mechanistic insight into nonadiabatic pathways. Compared with brute-force trajectory simulations and forward-flux sampling approaches, NATPS substantially reduces the computational effort required to obtain reactive trajectories.
arXiv:2505.19241v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The recent success in using human preferences to align large language models (LLMs) has significantly improved their performance in various downstream tasks, such as question answering, mathematical reasoning, and code generation. However, achieving effective LLM alignment depends on high-quality datasets of human preferences. Collecting these datasets requires human preference annotation, which is costly and resource-intensive, necessitating efficient active data selection methods. Existing methods either lack a strong theoretical foundation or depend on restrictive assumptions about the reward function, such as linear latent reward functions. To this end, we propose an algorithm, ActiveDPO, that uses a theoretically grounded data selection criterion for non-linear reward functions while directly leveraging the LLM itself to parameterize the reward model used for active data selection. As a result, ActiveDPO explicitly accounts for the LLM's influence on data selection, unlike methods that select data without considering the LLM that is being aligned, thereby leading to more effective and efficient data collection. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that ActiveDPO outperforms existing methods across various models and real-world preference datasets.
arXiv:2511.14282v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep neural networks achieve outstanding performance across vision and language tasks, yet their large parameter counts limit deployment in resource-constrained settings. One-shot pruning reduces model size without retraining, but models trained with standard objectives often suffer substantial accuracy drops under aggressive sparsity. Prior work mitigates this drop along two directions: regularizers such as $\ell_1$ and DeepHoyer that shape the weight distribution during training, and pruning-robust optimizers such as SAM, CrAM, and S$^2$SAM that flatten the loss landscape. However, existing regularizers either shrink all weights uniformly ($\ell_1$) or induce scale-invariant sparsity (DeepHoyer), without concentrating weight energy onto a small set of informative parameters. We propose a Weight Concentration Regularizer (WCR), a training-time regularizer that amplifies the magnitude of a small subset of parameters while driving the remainder toward zero, so that magnitude pruning predominantly removes parameters with negligible functional contribution. We provide a convergence analysis and evaluate WCR on LLM fine-tuning, image classification, and medical segmentation, demonstrating consistent improvements in pruning robustness across architectures and compatibility with existing pruning-robust optimizers.
arXiv:2511.19115v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In AI, the existential risk denotes the hypothetical threat posed by an artificial system that would possess both the capability and the objective, either directly or indirectly, to eradicate humanity. This issue is gaining prominence in scientific debate due to recent technical advancements and increased media coverage. In parallel, AI progress has sparked speculation and studies about the potential emergence of artificial consciousness. The two questions, AI consciousness and existential risk, are sometimes conflated, as if the former entailed the latter. Here, I explain that this view stems from a common confusion between consciousness and intelligence. Yet these two properties are empirically and theoretically distinct. Arguably, while intelligence is a direct predictor of an AI system's existential threat, consciousness is not. There are, however, certain incidental scenarios in which consciousness could influence existential risk, in either direction. Consciousness could be viewed as a means towards AI alignment, thereby lowering existential risk; or, it could be a precondition for reaching certain capabilities or levels of intelligence, and thus positively related to existential risk. Recognizing these distinctions can help AI safety researchers and public policymakers focus on the most pressing issues.
arXiv:2511.08103v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Highly correlated photon sources can be realized through cooperative coupling among quantum systems, giving rise to superradiant collective emission. In solid-state ensembles, however, such collective behaviour is confined to subwavelength dimensions and is strongly suppressed at room temperature by inhomogeneous broadening and rapid dephasing, limiting practical implementations. Here, we show that molecular J-aggregates sustain room temperature superradiant emission and enter a highly collective regime when strongly coupled to delocalized photonic modes of a silicon bound-state-in-the-continuum (BIC) metasurface, extending J-exciton interactions far beyond the subwavelength limit. This enhanced cooperativity produces a photonic-fraction-dependent increase in emission rate and intensity and drives the system into a highly superbunched photon emission regime with g^((2))(0)>13. Spatial coherence measurements and stochastic modelling reveal that metasurface-mediated synchronization of ~10^3 J-excitons occurs within coupled superradiant domains spanning up to 6.7 um in diameter, corresponding to a 50-fold increase in inter-aggregate cooperative distance. These results establish exciton-polaritons in resonant dielectric metasurfaces as a platform to enhance superradiant emission and engineer temporally correlated light sources with picosecond-scale emission dynamics operating at room temperature.