Daily Papers

Despite the success of deep learning for text and image data, tree-based ensemble models are still state-of-the-art for machine learning with heterogeneous tabular data. However, there is a significant need for tabular-specific gradient-based methods due to their high flexibility. In this paper, we propose GRANDE, GRAdieNt-Based Decision Tree Ensembles, a novel approach for learning hard, axis-aligned decision tree ensembles using end-to-end gradient descent. GRANDE is based on a dense representation of tree ensembles, which affords to use backpropagation with a straight-through operator to jointly optimize all model parameters. Our method combines axis-aligned splits, which is a useful inductive bias for tabular data, with the flexibility of gradient-based optimization. Furthermore, we introduce an advanced instance-wise weighting that facilitates learning representations for both, simple and complex relations, within a single model. We conducted an extensive evaluation on a predefined benchmark with 19 classification datasets and demonstrate that our method outperforms existing gradient-boosting and deep learning frameworks on most datasets. The method is available under: https://github.com/s-marton/GRANDE

Grid-based structures are commonly used to encode explicit features for graphics primitives such as images, signed distance functions (SDF), and neural radiance fields (NeRF) due to their simple implementation. However, in n-dimensional space, calculating the value of a sampled point requires interpolating the values of its 2^n neighboring vertices. The exponential scaling with dimension leads to significant computational overheads. To address this issue, we propose a simplex-based approach for encoding graphics primitives. The number of vertices in a simplex-based structure increases linearly with dimension, making it a more efficient and generalizable alternative to grid-based representations. Using the non-axis-aligned simplicial structure property, we derive and prove a coordinate transformation, simplicial subdivision, and barycentric interpolation scheme for efficient sampling, which resembles transformation procedures in the simplex noise algorithm. Finally, we use hash tables to store multiresolution features of all interest points in the simplicial grid, which are passed into a tiny fully connected neural network to parameterize graphics primitives. We implemented a detailed simplex-based structure encoding algorithm in C++ and CUDA using the methods outlined in our approach. In the 2D image fitting task, the proposed method is capable of fitting a giga-pixel image with 9.4% less time compared to the baseline method proposed by instant-ngp, while maintaining the same quality and compression rate. In the volumetric rendering setup, we observe a maximum 41.2% speedup when the samples are dense enough.

Detection identifies objects as axis-aligned boxes in an image. Most successful object detectors enumerate a nearly exhaustive list of potential object locations and classify each. This is wasteful, inefficient, and requires additional post-processing. In this paper, we take a different approach. We model an object as a single point --- the center point of its bounding box. Our detector uses keypoint estimation to find center points and regresses to all other object properties, such as size, 3D location, orientation, and even pose. Our center point based approach, CenterNet, is end-to-end differentiable, simpler, faster, and more accurate than corresponding bounding box based detectors. CenterNet achieves the best speed-accuracy trade-off on the MS COCO dataset, with 28.1% AP at 142 FPS, 37.4% AP at 52 FPS, and 45.1% AP with multi-scale testing at 1.4 FPS. We use the same approach to estimate 3D bounding box in the KITTI benchmark and human pose on the COCO keypoint dataset. Our method performs competitively with sophisticated multi-stage methods and runs in real-time.

Intersection over Union (IoU) is the most popular evaluation metric used in the object detection benchmarks. However, there is a gap between optimizing the commonly used distance losses for regressing the parameters of a bounding box and maximizing this metric value. The optimal objective for a metric is the metric itself. In the case of axis-aligned 2D bounding boxes, it can be shown that IoU can be directly used as a regression loss. However, IoU has a plateau making it infeasible to optimize in the case of non-overlapping bounding boxes. In this paper, we address the weaknesses of IoU by introducing a generalized version as both a new loss and a new metric. By incorporating this generalized IoU (GIoU) as a loss into the state-of-the art object detection frameworks, we show a consistent improvement on their performance using both the standard, IoU based, and new, GIoU based, performance measures on popular object detection benchmarks such as PASCAL VOC and MS COCO.

We introduce the AnnoPage Dataset, a novel collection of 7550 pages from historical documents, primarily in Czech and German, spanning from 1485 to the present, focusing on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The dataset is designed to support research in document layout analysis and object detection. Each page is annotated with axis-aligned bounding boxes (AABB) representing elements of 25 categories of non-textual elements, such as images, maps, decorative elements, or charts, following the Czech Methodology of image document processing. The annotations were created by expert librarians to ensure accuracy and consistency. The dataset also incorporates pages from multiple, mainly historical, document datasets to enhance variability and maintain continuity. The dataset is divided into development and test subsets, with the test set carefully selected to maintain the category distribution. We provide baseline results using YOLO and DETR object detectors, offering a reference point for future research. The AnnoPage Dataset is publicly available on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12788419), along with ground-truth annotations in YOLO format.

Instance segmentation on 3D point clouds (3DIS) is a longstanding challenge in computer vision, where state-of-the-art methods are mainly based on full supervision. As annotating ground truth dense instance masks is tedious and expensive, solving 3DIS with weak supervision has become more practical. In this paper, we propose GaPro, a new instance segmentation for 3D point clouds using axis-aligned 3D bounding box supervision. Our two-step approach involves generating pseudo labels from box annotations and training a 3DIS network with the resulting labels. Additionally, we employ the self-training strategy to improve the performance of our method further. We devise an effective Gaussian Process to generate pseudo instance masks from the bounding boxes and resolve ambiguities when they overlap, resulting in pseudo instance masks with their uncertainty values. Our experiments show that GaPro outperforms previous weakly supervised 3D instance segmentation methods and has competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art fully supervised ones. Furthermore, we demonstrate the robustness of our approach, where we can adapt various state-of-the-art fully supervised methods to the weak supervision task by using our pseudo labels for training. The source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/GaPro.

Neural architectures such as Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), Transformers, and State-Space Models have shown great success in handling sequential data by learning temporal dependencies. Decision Trees (DTs), on the other hand, remain a widely used class of models for structured tabular data but are typically not designed to capture sequential patterns directly. Instead, DT-based approaches for time-series data often rely on feature engineering, such as manually incorporating lag features, which can be suboptimal for capturing complex temporal dependencies. To address this limitation, we introduce ReMeDe Trees, a novel recurrent DT architecture that integrates an internal memory mechanism, similar to RNNs, to learn long-term dependencies in sequential data. Our model learns hard, axis-aligned decision rules for both output generation and state updates, optimizing them efficiently via gradient descent. We provide a proof-of-concept study on synthetic benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Sublinear time complexity is required by the massively parallel computation (MPC) model. Breaking dynamic programs into a set of sparse dynamic programs that can be divided, solved, and merged in sublinear time. The rectangle escape problem (REP) is defined as follows: For n axis-aligned rectangles inside an axis-aligned bounding box B, extend each rectangle in only one of the four directions: up, down, left, or right until it reaches B and the density k is minimized, where k is the maximum number of extensions of rectangles to the boundary that pass through a point inside bounding box B. REP is NP-hard for k>1. If the rectangles are points of a grid (or unit squares of a grid), the problem is called the square escape problem (SEP) and it is still NP-hard. We give a 2-approximation algorithm for SEP with kgeq2 with time complexity O(n^{3/2}k^2). This improves the time complexity of existing algorithms which are at least quadratic. Also, the approximation ratio of our algorithm for kgeq 3 is 3/2 which is tight. We also give a 8-approximation algorithm for REP with time complexity O(nlog n+nk) and give a MPC version of this algorithm for k=O(1) which is the first parallel algorithm for this problem.

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

Document parsing has garnered widespread attention as vision-language models (VLMs) advance OCR capabilities. However, the field remains fragmented across dozens of specialized models with varying strengths, forcing users to navigate complex model selection and limiting system scalability. Moreover, existing two-stage approaches depend on axis-aligned bounding boxes for layout detection, failing to handle distorted or photographed documents effectively. To this end, we present Dolphin-v2, a two-stage document image parsing model that substantially improves upon the original Dolphin. In the first stage, Dolphin-v2 jointly performs document type classification (digital-born versus photographed) alongside layout analysis. For digital-born documents, it conducts finer-grained element detection with reading order prediction. In the second stage, we employ a hybrid parsing strategy: photographed documents are parsed holistically as complete pages to handle geometric distortions, while digital-born documents undergo element-wise parallel parsing guided by the detected layout anchors, enabling efficient content extraction. Compared with the original Dolphin, Dolphin-v2 introduces several crucial enhancements: (1) robust parsing of photographed documents via holistic page-level understanding, (2) finer-grained element detection (21 categories) with semantic attribute extraction such as author information and document metadata, and (3) code block recognition with indentation preservation, which existing systems typically lack. Comprehensive evaluations are conducted on DocPTBench, OmniDocBench, and our self-constructed RealDoc-160 benchmark. The results demonstrate substantial improvements: +14.78 points overall on the challenging OmniDocBench and 91% error reduction on photographed documents, while maintaining efficient inference through parallel processing.

Constructing an adaptive hexahedral tessellation to fit an input triangle boundary is a key challenge in grid-based methods. The conventional method first removes outside elements (RO) and then projects the axis-aligned boundary onto the input triangle boundary, which has no guarantee on improving the initial Intersection over Union (IoU) and Hausdorff distance ratio (HR, w.r.t bounding box diagonal). The proposed MCHex approach replaces RO with a Marching Cubes method MCHex. Given the same computational budget (benchmarked using an identical precomputed Signed Distance Field, which dominates the runtime), MCHex provides better boundary approximation (higher IoU and lower HR) while guaranteeing a lower, yet still positive, minimum scaled Jacobian (>0 vs. RO's >0.48).

We present Multi-Baseline Radiance Fields (MuRF), a general feed-forward approach to solving sparse view synthesis under multiple different baseline settings (small and large baselines, and different number of input views). To render a target novel view, we discretize the 3D space into planes parallel to the target image plane, and accordingly construct a target view frustum volume. Such a target volume representation is spatially aligned with the target view, which effectively aggregates relevant information from the input views for high-quality rendering. It also facilitates subsequent radiance field regression with a convolutional network thanks to its axis-aligned nature. The 3D context modeled by the convolutional network enables our method to synthesis sharper scene structures than prior works. Our MuRF achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple different baseline settings and diverse scenarios ranging from simple objects (DTU) to complex indoor and outdoor scenes (RealEstate10K and LLFF). We also show promising zero-shot generalization abilities on the Mip-NeRF 360 dataset, demonstrating the general applicability of MuRF.

Recent end-to-end trainable methods for scene text spotting, integrating detection and recognition, showed much progress. However, most of the current arbitrary-shape scene text spotters use region proposal networks (RPN) to produce proposals. RPN relies heavily on manually designed anchors and its proposals are represented with axis-aligned rectangles. The former presents difficulties in handling text instances of extreme aspect ratios or irregular shapes, and the latter often includes multiple neighboring instances into a single proposal, in cases of densely oriented text. To tackle these problems, we propose Mask TextSpotter v3, an end-to-end trainable scene text spotter that adopts a Segmentation Proposal Network (SPN) instead of an RPN. Our SPN is anchor-free and gives accurate representations of arbitrary-shape proposals. It is therefore superior to RPN in detecting text instances of extreme aspect ratios or irregular shapes. Furthermore, the accurate proposals produced by SPN allow masked RoI features to be used for decoupling neighboring text instances. As a result, our Mask TextSpotter v3 can handle text instances of extreme aspect ratios or irregular shapes, and its recognition accuracy won't be affected by nearby text or background noise. Specifically, we outperform state-of-the-art methods by 21.9 percent on the Rotated ICDAR 2013 dataset (rotation robustness), 5.9 percent on the Total-Text dataset (shape robustness), and achieve state-of-the-art performance on the MSRA-TD500 dataset (aspect ratio robustness). Code is available at: https://github.com/MhLiao/MaskTextSpotterV3

We characterize the cut patterns that can be produced by "orthogonal fold & cut": folding an axis-aligned rectangular sheet of paper along horizontal and vertical creases, and then making a single straight cut (at any angle). Along the way, we solve a handful of related problems: orthogonal fold & punch, 1D fold & cut, signed 1D fold & cut, and 1D interval fold & cut.

A significant gap exists between theory and practice in deep learning. Generalization and approximation error bounds are often derived for simplified models or are too loose to be informative. Many rely on the manifold hypothesis and on geometric regularity such as intrinsic dimension, curvature, and reach. Progress requires insight into data-manifold geometry and suitable benchmarks, yet existing options are polarized: analytic manifolds with known geometry but limited applicability, or real-world datasets where geometry is only coarsely estimable. We introduce a benchmarking framework for studying data geometry. We repurpose and extend dSprites and COIL-20 with additional transformation dimensions and dense, axis-aligned sampling, and pair them with finite-difference estimators that recover curvature, reach, and volume at near-ground-truth accuracy in a regime where general-purpose estimators are unreliable or difficult to deploy. The framework is intended as a controlled testbed, useful as a calibration environment for geometric estimators and a sandbox for probing theoretical assumptions. To illustrate its use, we present two application studies, namely assessing the scaling behavior of the bounds of Genovese et al. and Fefferman et al., and tracking the layer-wise geometry of a β-VAE, highlighting the behavior of current bounds and the value of controlled benchmarks for guiding and validating future theory. A reference implementation is available at https://github.com/koulakis/manifold-microscope.

Quantifying sponsor visibility in sports broadcasts is a critical marketing task traditionally hindered by manual, subjective, and unscalable analysis methods. While automated systems offer an alternative, their reliance on axis-aligned Horizontal Bounding Box (HBB) leads to inaccurate exposuremetrics when logos appear rotated or skewed due to dynamic camera angles and perspective distortions. This paper introduces ExposureEngine, an end-to-end system designed for accurate, rotation-aware sponsor visibility analytics in sports broadcasts, demonstrated in a soccer case study. Our approach predicts Oriented Bounding Box (OBB) to provide a geometrically precise fit to each logo regardless of the orientation on-screen. To train and evaluate our detector, we developed a new dataset comprising 1,103 frames from Swedish elite soccer, featuring 670 unique sponsor logos annotated with OBBs. Our model achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP@0.5) of 0.859, with a precision of 0.96 and recall of 0.87, demonstrating robust performance in localizing logos under diverse broadcast conditions. The system integrates these detections into an analytical pipeline that calculates precise visibility metrics, such as exposure duration and on-screen coverage. Furthermore, we incorporate a language-driven agentic layer, enabling users to generate reports, summaries, and media content through natural language queries. The complete system, including the dataset and the analytics dashboard, provides a comprehensive solution for auditable and interpretable sponsor measurement in sports media. An overview of the ExposureEngine is available online: https://youtu.be/tRw6OBISuW4 .

We present a fast algorithm for the design of smooth paths (or trajectories) that are constrained to lie in a collection of axis-aligned boxes. We consider the case where the number of these safe boxes is large, and basic preprocessing of them (such as finding their intersections) can be done offline. At runtime we quickly generate a smooth path between given initial and terminal positions. Our algorithm designs trajectories that are guaranteed to be safe at all times, and detects infeasibility whenever such a trajectory does not exist. Our algorithm is based on two subproblems that we can solve very efficiently: finding a shortest path in a weighted graph, and solving (multiple) convex optimal-control problems. We demonstrate the proposed path planner on large-scale numerical examples, and we provide an efficient open-source software implementation, fastpathplanning.

Factored feature volumes offer a simple way to build more compact, efficient, and intepretable neural fields, but also introduce biases that are not necessarily beneficial for real-world data. In this work, we (1) characterize the undesirable biases that these architectures have for axis-aligned signals -- they can lead to radiance field reconstruction differences of as high as 2 PSNR -- and (2) explore how learning a set of canonicalizing transformations can improve representations by removing these biases. We prove in a two-dimensional model problem that simultaneously learning these transformations together with scene appearance succeeds with drastically improved efficiency. We validate the resulting architectures, which we call TILTED, using image, signed distance, and radiance field reconstruction tasks, where we observe improvements across quality, robustness, compactness, and runtime. Results demonstrate that TILTED can enable capabilities comparable to baselines that are 2x larger, while highlighting weaknesses of neural field evaluation procedures.

We show the standard basis of transformer hidden states already provides a training-free, architecture-general feature basis. Individual dimensions encode semantic content via their signs (+/-1) and confidence via their magnitudes, acting as independent binary registers; a feature is a subset of dimensions with a consistent sign pattern, read by counting sign agreements with no learned rotation. We validate this Bag of Dims framework across seven models spanning language (Qwen 3.5-4B, Gemma 3-4B, Mistral 7B, Qwen3-32B), vision (DINOv2, ViT-Base), and audio (AST). Signs alone carry predictive content: unit-magnitude sign patterns preserve 60-93% top-5 next-token accuracy through the LM head, and decoder-free Hamming scoring reaches 80-90% top-4096. From a single-token cache (one forward pass per token, no context, no labels), we detect 175 categories at AUC 0.97-0.99 by sign agreement; a trained probe adds only +0.018 AUC and converges to axis-aligned weights. These features are causally operative: they survive the K/V attention projections, trace to the FFN neuron coalitions that write them (random-weight controls never reproduce this), and flipping a feature's signs during the live forward pass suppresses its concept across four language models, magnitude-matched and concept-specific. Dimensions stay independent throughout (pairwise mutual information below 0.006 bits). The structure is not specific to language: the same per-dimension signs appear in self-supervised vision (DINOv2, 9/12 ImageNet superclasses), supervised vision (ViT-Base, 11/12), and audio (AST, 50/50 ESC-50 categories), so it reflects transformer training in general, not the language-modeling objective. The standard basis already suffices for feature reading at one forward pass, no optimization, no GPU-days. The open problem shifts from finding the right rotation to cataloging what each dimension encodes.

Targeted data selection has emerged as a crucial paradigm for efficient instruction tuning, aiming to identify a small yet influential subset of training examples for a specific target task. In practice, influence is often measured through the effect of an example on parameter updates. To make selection scalable, many approaches leverage optimizer statistics (e.g., Adam states) as an axis-aligned surrogate for update geometry (i.e., diagonal precondition), implicitly treating parameters as coordinate-wise independent. We show that this assumption breaks down in parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods such as LoRA. In this setting, the induced optimization geometry exhibits strong cross-parameter coupling with non-trivial off-diagonal interactions, while the task-relevant update directions are confined to a low-dimensional subspace. Motivated by this mismatch, we propose GIST (Gradient Isometric Subspace Transformation), a simple yet principled alternative that replaces axis-aligned scaling with robust subspace alignment. GIST recovers a task-specific subspace from validation gradients via spectral filtering (SVD), projects training gradients into this coupled subspace, and scores examples by their alignment with target directions.Extensive experiments have demonstrated that GIST matches or outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline with only 0.29% of the storage and 25% of the computational time under the same selection budget.

We present SuperNormal, a fast, high-fidelity approach to multi-view 3D reconstruction using surface normal maps. With a few minutes, SuperNormal produces detailed surfaces on par with 3D scanners. We harness volume rendering to optimize a neural signed distance function (SDF) powered by multi-resolution hash encoding. To accelerate training, we propose directional finite difference and patch-based ray marching to approximate the SDF gradients numerically. While not compromising reconstruction quality, this strategy is nearly twice as efficient as analytical gradients and about three times faster than axis-aligned finite difference. Experiments on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the superiority of SuperNormal in efficiency and accuracy compared to existing multi-view photometric stereo methods. On our captured objects, SuperNormal produces more fine-grained geometry than recent neural 3D reconstruction methods.

Despite the growing popularity of explainable and interpretable machine learning, there is still surprisingly limited work on inherently interpretable clustering methods. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in explaining the classic k-means algorithm, leading to efficient algorithms that approximate k-means clusters using axis-aligned decision trees. However, interpretable variants of k-means have limited applicability in practice, where more flexible clustering methods are often needed to obtain useful partitions of the data. In this work, we investigate interpretable kernel clustering, and propose algorithms that construct decision trees to approximate the partitions induced by kernel k-means, a nonlinear extension of k-means. We further build on previous work on explainable k-means and demonstrate how a suitable choice of features allows preserving interpretability without sacrificing approximation guarantees on the interpretable model.

Diffusion models have emerged as the state-of-the-art for image generation, among other tasks. Here, we present an efficient diffusion-based model for 3D-aware generation of neural fields. Our approach pre-processes training data, such as ShapeNet meshes, by converting them to continuous occupancy fields and factoring them into a set of axis-aligned triplane feature representations. Thus, our 3D training scenes are all represented by 2D feature planes, and we can directly train existing 2D diffusion models on these representations to generate 3D neural fields with high quality and diversity, outperforming alternative approaches to 3D-aware generation. Our approach requires essential modifications to existing triplane factorization pipelines to make the resulting features easy to learn for the diffusion model. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on 3D generation on several object classes from ShapeNet.

We present a meta-learning framework for learning new visual concepts quickly, from just one or a few examples, guided by multiple naturally occurring data streams: simultaneously looking at images, reading sentences that describe the objects in the scene, and interpreting supplemental sentences that relate the novel concept with other concepts. The learned concepts support downstream applications, such as answering questions by reasoning about unseen images. Our model, namely FALCON, represents individual visual concepts, such as colors and shapes, as axis-aligned boxes in a high-dimensional space (the "box embedding space"). Given an input image and its paired sentence, our model first resolves the referential expression in the sentence and associates the novel concept with particular objects in the scene. Next, our model interprets supplemental sentences to relate the novel concept with other known concepts, such as "X has property Y" or "X is a kind of Y". Finally, it infers an optimal box embedding for the novel concept that jointly 1) maximizes the likelihood of the observed instances in the image, and 2) satisfies the relationships between the novel concepts and the known ones. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Three-dimensional objects are commonly represented as 3D boxes in a point-cloud. This representation mimics the well-studied image-based 2D bounding-box detection but comes with additional challenges. Objects in a 3D world do not follow any particular orientation, and box-based detectors have difficulties enumerating all orientations or fitting an axis-aligned bounding box to rotated objects. In this paper, we instead propose to represent, detect, and track 3D objects as points. Our framework, CenterPoint, first detects centers of objects using a keypoint detector and regresses to other attributes, including 3D size, 3D orientation, and velocity. In a second stage, it refines these estimates using additional point features on the object. In CenterPoint, 3D object tracking simplifies to greedy closest-point matching. The resulting detection and tracking algorithm is simple, efficient, and effective. CenterPoint achieved state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes benchmark for both 3D detection and tracking, with 65.5 NDS and 63.8 AMOTA for a single model. On the Waymo Open Dataset, CenterPoint outperforms all previous single model method by a large margin and ranks first among all Lidar-only submissions. The code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/tianweiy/CenterPoint.

Long-horizon language-model agents are dominated, in lines of code and in operational complexity, not by their underlying model but by the harness that wraps it: context compaction, tool caching, semantic memory, trajectory reuse, speculative tool prediction, and the glue that binds the model to a sandboxed execution environment. We argue that harness design is a first-class machine-learning problem and that automated configuration search dominates manual stacking once the flag space exceeds a handful of bits. We defend this claim in two steps. First, we formalize automated harness optimization as constrained noisy Bayesian optimization over a mixed-variable, cost-heterogeneous configuration space with cold-start-corrected rewards and a posterior chance-constrained safety check, and give a reference solver, HARBOR (Harness Axis-aligned Regularized Bayesian Optimization Routine), built from a block-additive SAAS surrogate, multi-fidelity cost-aware acquisition, and TuRBO trust regions. Second, we instantiate the problem in a flag-gated harness over a production coding agent and report a controlled four-round manual-tuning case study against a fixed task suite and an end-to-end HARBOR run. The formulation itself is task-class agnostic: the configuration space, reward correction, acquisition, and safety check apply to any agent harness with a bounded flag space and a reproducible task suite.

All-atom molecular simulation serves as a quintessential ``computational microscope'' for understanding the machinery of life, yet it remains fundamentally limited by the trade-off between quantum-mechanical (QM) accuracy and biological scale. We present UBio-MolFM, a universal foundation model framework specifically engineered to bridge this gap. UBio-MolFM introduces three synergistic innovations: (1) UBio-Mol26, a large bio-specific dataset constructed via a multi-fidelity ``Two-Pronged Strategy'' that combines systematic bottom-up enumeration with top-down sampling of native protein environments (up to 1,200 atoms); (2) E2Former-V2, a linear-scaling equivariant transformer that integrates Equivariant Axis-Aligned Sparsification (EAAS) and Long-Short Range (LSR) modeling to capture non-local physics with up to ~4x higher inference throughput in our large-system benchmarks; and (3) a Three-Stage Curriculum Learning protocol that transitions from energy initialization to energy-force consistency, with force-focused supervision to mitigate energy offsets. Rigorous benchmarking across microscopic forces and macroscopic observables -- including liquid water structure, ionic solvation, and peptide folding -- demonstrates that UBio-MolFM achieves ab initio-level fidelity on large, out-of-distribution biomolecular systems (up to ~1,500 atoms) and realistic MD observables. By reconciling scalability with quantum precision, UBio-MolFM provides a robust, ready-to-use tool for the next generation of computational biology.

Online surgical phase recognition (SPR) underpins context-aware operating-room systems and requires committing to a prediction at every frame from past context alone. Surgical video poses three demands that natural-video recognizers do not jointly address: procedures span tens of thousands of frames, time flows non-uniformly as long routine stretches are punctuated by brief phase-defining transitions, and the visual domain is narrow so backbone features are strongly correlated across channels. Existing recognizers either let per-frame cost grow with elapsed length, or hold cost bounded but advance state at a uniform rate with channel-independent dynamics, leaving the latter two demands unaddressed. We present SurgicalMamba, a causal SPR model built on Mamba2's structured state-space duality (SSD) that holds per-frame cost at O(d). It introduces three SSD-compatible components, each targeting one demand: a dual-path SSD block that separates long- and short-term regimes at the level of recurrent state; intensity-modulated stepping, a continuous-time time-warp that adapts the slow path's effective rate to phase-relevant information; and state regramming, a per-chunk Cayley rotation that opens cross-channel mixing in the otherwise axis-aligned SSM recurrence. The learned rotation planes inherit a phase-aligned structure without any direct supervision, offering an interpretable internal signature of surgical workflow. Across seven public SPR benchmarks, SurgicalMamba reaches state-of-the-art accuracy and phase-level Jaccard under strict online evaluation: 94.6%/82.7% on Cholec80 (+0.7 pp/+2.2 pp over the strongest prior) and 89.5%/68.9% on AutoLaparo (+1.7 pp/+2.0 pp), at 119 fps on a single GPU. Ablations isolate the contribution of each component. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/sukjuoh/Surgical-Mamba.

Vision-Language Models suffer severe KV cache pressure at inference, as a single image often encodes into thousands of tokens. Most existing methods exploit token sparsity through token pruning, but permanently discarding visual content causes substantial degradation on fine-grained perception tasks. This motivates a complementary axis, feature sparsity: under a fixed KV cache budget, compressing the channel dimension preserves more visual tokens at the same memory cost. Prior Key channel pruning methods, however, face a structural trade-off: token-wise channel pruning is expressive but unstructured and slow, while head-wise approach is hardware-friendly but less robust. We resolve this with RotateK, a rotation-based structured Key channel pruning framework. RotateK applies an online PCA-based rotation that aligns token-dependent channel importance into a shared low-dimensional subspace, enabling accurate pruning under lightweight head-wise masks; a fused Triton attention kernel operates directly on sparse-channel Keys for efficient decoding. Experiments on two representative VLM backbones show that RotateK consistently outperforms prior Key channel pruning in both accuracy and decoding latency, while joint token-channel pruning improves over token-only baselines at matched KV cache budgets.

Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on extensive safety alignment, yet the mechanistic basis of refusal remains opaque. In this work, we investigate whether safety compliance is a deep semantic decision or a manipulable linear feature. We introduce Contrastive Logit Steering (CLS), a zero-optimization framework that isolates the "refusal direction" by contrasting hidden states derived from safe and unrestricted system prompts. Unlike representation engineering methods that intervene on internal activations, CLS operates directly on the output distribution, serving as a diagnostic probe for alignment fragility. When coupled with prefix injection to bypass initial refusal reflexes, this method induces a phase transition where guardrails collapse. Our experiments on 7 model families reveal that safety implementation is architecturally deterministic. While models like Llama-3.1 exhibit a "Late Decision" topology that is easily bypassed by CLS (reaching 95% ASR in approximately one second), others like Qwen-2.5 demonstrate "Early Divergence" by integrating safety mid-computation. Direct comparison with established activation-level steering methods shows that CLS achieves substantially higher attack success rates on Llama 2 (73% vs. 22.6%) and Qwen 7B (91% vs. 79.2%), demonstrating that logit-level intervention exposes alignment vulnerabilities that hidden-state methods underestimate. Beyond attacks, we show that this linearity enables bidirectional control: inverting the steering vector "hardens" models against jailbreaks without retraining. Our findings suggest that current alignment techniques create a steerable "safety axis" that serves as both a critical vulnerability and a precise primitive for defense.

Protein-protein interaction (PPI) modeling has been widely studied as a binary or multi-label classification task. While emerging multimodal large language models (LLMs) can now describe single proteins, they remain unable to generate free-form descriptions of interactions between protein pairs. Moving beyond controlled vocabulary annotations, we propose to model PPI using free-text description, enabling richer expressiveness, improved interpretability, and better integration with literature knowledge base. We present PPI2Text, a multimodal LLM for free-form PPI captioning from amino acid sequences, that encodes each protein using ESM3 encoder, constructs a pair map from the two representations to capture interactions across all residue pairs, and autoregressively generates descriptions using a Qwen3 language decoder. We further introduce PaCo-RoPE, a coordinate-aligned positional encoding that aligns each axis of the pair grid with the residue positions of the corresponding protein. In addition, we release PPI2Text-Dataset, a 351k-pair corpus of free-form PPI descriptions aggregated from ten curated biological databases and further synthesized with Gemini under evidence-tiered prompting. PPI2Text consistently outperforms strong baselines across multiple ablation settings and evaluation protocols. It not only achieves higher scores on linguistic metrics against synthesized references, but also excels on factuality metrics, where an LLM-based judge evaluates outputs against raw biological evidence.

Modern feed-forward 3D reconstruction methods like VGGT predict pixel-aligned pointmaps in camera-centric coordinate frames. However, this choice of coordinate frame is not always optimal. We propose instead to predict pointmaps in upright, gravity-aligned frames that exploit strong structural cues present in many real-world scenes. Unlike camera-centric frames, gravity-aligned frames share a common vertical axis across viewpoints, reducing the rotational degrees of freedom needed to relate pointmaps to one another. To this end, we introduce the Gravity Grounded Geometry Transformer (G3T), fine-tuned from existing models on gravity-aligned 3D data. G3T produces highly accurate gravity-aware predictions, including upright pointmaps and camera-to-gravity poses. We further introduce G3T-Long, a submap-based incremental 3D reconstruction pipeline that leverages the reduced rotational degrees of freedom afforded by upright frames to achieve significantly improved reconstruction accuracy.

Most self-supervised learning (SSL) methods encourage invariance across augmentations, but strict flip invariance can suppress informative left--right correspondences in approximately bilateral data such as medical images and human faces. We propose Mirror-Fusion-Augmented Self-Supervised Learning (MFASSL), a Vision Transformer framework that injects a soft reflection prior into standard SSL without redesigning the backbone. MFASSL constructs mirror-paired views aligned to an estimated symmetry axis and introduces a lightweight Mirror-Fusion Attention (MFA) module for adaptive token-level interaction between mirrored regions while preserving asymmetric cues. The base SSL objective is further coupled with reflection-consistency and mid-layer token-alignment losses. Across CheXpert, BraTS, CelebA-HQ, and WFLW, MFASSL improves downstream performance, calibration, and reflection robustness over MoCo-v3, DINO, and MAE baselines under matched ViT-B/16 settings. It also achieves stronger and more consistent gains than recent equivariant SSL approaches with only approximately 2.7\% additional parameters. These results show that lightweight geometry-aware priors can effectively complement invariance-based SSL.

We present the B-fields mapped in IRDC G34.43+0.24 using 850\,μm polarized dust emission observed with the POL-2 instrument at JCMT. We examine the magnetic field geometries and strengths in the northern, central, and southern regions of the filament. The overall field geometry is ordered and aligned closely perpendicular to the filament's main axis, particularly in regions containing the central clumps MM1 and MM2, whereas MM3 in the north has field orientations aligned with its major axis. The overall field orientations are uniform at large (POL-2 at 14arcsec and SHARP at 10arcsec) to small scales (TADPOL at 2.5arcsec and SMA at 1.5arcsec) in the MM1 and MM2 regions. SHARP/CSO observations in MM3 at 350\,μm from Tang et al. show a similar trend as seen in our POL-2 observations. TADPOL observations demonstrate a well-defined field geometry in MM1/MM2 consistent with MHD simulations of accreting filaments. We obtained a plane-of-sky magnetic field strength of 470pm190\,μG, 100pm40\,μG, and 60pm34\,μG in the central, northern and southern regions of G34, respectively, using the updated Davis-Chandrasekhar-Fermi relation. The estimated value of field strength, combined with column density and velocity dispersion values available in the literature, suggests G34 to be marginally critical with criticality parameter rm λ values 0.8pm0.4, 1.1pm0.8, and 0.9pm0.5 in the central, northern, and southern regions, respectively. The turbulent motions in G34 are sub-Alfvénic with Alfvénic Mach numbers of 0.34pm0.13, 0.53pm0.30, and 0.49pm0.26 in the three regions. The observed aligned B-fields in G34.43+0.24 are consistent with theoretical models suggesting that B-fields play an important role in guiding the contraction of the cloud driven by gravity.

Context. Recent developments in exoplanetary research highlight the importance of Love numbers in understanding their internal dynamics, formation, migration history and their potential habitability. Love numbers represent crucial parameters that gauge how exoplanets respond to external forces such as tidal interactions and rotational effects. By measuring these responses, we can gain insights into the internal structure, composition, and density distribution of exoplanets. The rate of apsidal precession of a planetary orbit is directly linked to the second-order fluid Love number, thus we can gain valuable insights into the mass distribution of the planet. Aims. In this context, we aim to re-determine the orbital parameters of WASP-43b-in particular, orbital period, eccentricity, and argument of the periastron-and its orbital evolution. We study the outcomes of the tidal interaction with the host star:whether tidal decay and periastron precession are occurring in the system. Method. We observed the system with HARPS, whose data we present for the first time, and we also analyse the newly acquired JWST full-phase light curve. We fit jointly archival and new radial velocity and transit and occultation mid-times, including tidal decay, periastron precession and long-term acceleration in the system. Results. We detected a tidal decay rate of \dotP_a=(-1.99pm0.50) and a periastron precession rate of \dotomega=(0.1851+0.0070-0.0077)=(0.1727+0.0083-0.0089)deg/d=(621.72+29.88-32.04)arcsec/d. This is the first time that both periastron precession and tidal decay are simultaneously detected in an exoplanetary system. The observed tidal interactions can neither be explained by the tidal contribution to apsidal motion of a non-aligned stellar or planetary rotation axis nor by assuming non-synchronous rotation for the planet, and a value for the planetary Love number cannot be derived. [...]