The Archive

Contextual queueing bandits provide a framework for learning to schedule heterogeneous jobs under unknown context-dependent service rates. Under stochastic contexts, existing algorithms achieve $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{-1/4})$ queue length regret, defined as the expected difference between the learner's and oracle's queue lengths at horizon $T$. In this paper, we improve this rate to $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{-1/2})$. The key observation is that random exploration is needed only up to a carefully chosen cutoff round, rather than throughout the entire horizon. We propose CQB-$η$-2, a thre...

Speech restoration through silent speech interfaces (SSIs) has emerged as a promising assistive technology for individuals with impaired or absent laryngeal voice production. Among non-invasive SSI modalities, surface electromyography (sEMG) and video-based lipreading provide complementary articulatory information, yet their integration for continuous speech synthesis remains underexplored. Moreover, existing multimodal approaches rarely address robustness to modality degradation or temporary sensor failure, limiting their applicability in realistic scenarios. In this work, we propose a maske...

Output space pattern sampling is a powerful alternative to exhaustive pattern mining for exploring large pattern spaces, as it enables users to focus on representative patterns drawn according to a chosen interestingness measure. In this paper, we address the problem of sampling interval patterns under user-defined syntactic constraints. We introduce CFips, a sampling approach that incorporates constraints directly into the sampling procedure. The approach relies on a multi-step sampling framework and supports several syntactic constraints by decomposing them into elementary predicates on int...

A new feature in the Amazon Shopping app allows users to generate designs with Alexa, then print them on products like T-shirts, hoodies, and tumblers.

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a central tool for sample-efficient design, and latent-space Bayesian optimization (LSBO) extends it to structured objects such as molecules and proteins. In parallel, tabular foundation models such as TabPFN and TabICL now achieve state-of-the-art regression performance and are increasingly used as BO surrogates. Because their Bayesian behavior is induced by large synthetic pretraining collections, the composition of this pretraining distribution is crucial. LSBO creates a distinctive mismatch: the induced map from latent code to objective value differs markedly...

Recursive self-design refers to AI-assisted modification of the mechanisms by which an AI system is built, evaluated, and improved. This paper treats MetaAI not as a mature paradigm, but as a working term for a human-seeded, AI-expanded development pattern in which the design space itself becomes a target of modification. We propose an operational evidence framework with four criteria: inspectable target system, meta-level modifier, feedback-directed selection, and recursive continuation. We then map public systems, including Darwin Goedel Machine (DGM), STOP, Goedel Agent, and ShinkaEvolve, ...

Large reasoning models (LRMs) often improve math and coding performance, but their effect on instruction following is unclear. We study IFEval with Qwen3 models (1.7B-32B), using same-weights Thinking ON/OFF controls; four Hunyuan models provide directional cross-family support. Aggregate pass-rate changes are small (-0.55 to -3.52 pp), yet 10-20% of prompts switch between pass and fail across modes, suggesting that thinking changes the pattern of errors--some prompts improve while others worsen--rather than uniformly degrading performance. Under a post-hoc Qwen3-derived grouping, constraint ...

Long-context language model inference is bottlenecked by memory, as the KV cache grows with context length. Recent techniques to compress the KV cache fall short: they either degrade model quality substantially or require considerable time and compute to compress a single long prompt. Furthermore, many methods require the input to fit within the target model's context window, and are generally incompatible with modern production inference engines. Encoder-decoder compressors, which map a long token sequence to a shorter sequence of latent embeddings consumed by a decoder, are an appealing alt...

Muon has recently emerged as a state-of-the-art optimizer for pretraining Large Language Models (LLMs) and vision classifiers. Despite its efficiency advantage over Adam and SGD, the feature-learning advantage of Muon remains unclear. This paper investigates Muon's feature-learning advantage through the lens of robustness and transferability. First, by evaluating pretrained models on corrupted images and texts, we show that features learned by Muon are consistently more robust than those learned by Adam and SGD across different architectures, including transformers and Convolutional Neural Ne...

Despite remarkable progress in machine translation (MT), non-AI communities have raised growing concerns about MT systems, suggesting a noticeable gap between technical advancement and the needs of real-world users. For instance, while NLP researchers focus on benchmark performance, end users care about ethical concerns, trust, reliability, costs, and more. We argue that listening to various user communities is essential so that research efforts would be directed towards the problems that the communities care about. To this end, we present a large-scale analysis, for the first time, that inve...

Learned representations across models and modalities often exhibit striking structural similarities, suggesting shared underlying concept decompositions. However, concept alignment remains poorly defined: existing approaches optimize different objectives under the same terminology, obscuring what is actually aligned. We propose a unifying framework that decomposes alignment along two axes: what is aligned (representations vs. concepts) and at what level (instance-wise vs. distributional). This induces four corresponding properties -- instance-wise and distributional variants of translation an...

Multi-modal data management has emerged as a central research topic in the database community, spanning data integration, semantic query processing, and data quality assessment. Despite this growing interest, the community lacks large-scale, real-world datasets combining tables, text, and images. We present ArtiFact, a multi-modal cultural heritage dataset of 651045 museum records collected from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Rijksmuseum. We demonstrate the utility of ArtiFact through two downstream tasks. For cross-modal error detection, we introduce a ...

We study whether pretrained video foundation models encode intuitive-physics information in their frozen representations, and how this information varies across model families, layers, and probe types. Using frozen-feature probing on IntPhys2 and Minimal Video Pairs (MVP), we compare predictive joint-embedding models (V-JEPA), masked reconstruction models (VideoMAE), and a diffusion-based video generator (LTX-Video). V-JEPA achieves the strongest overall results across benchmarks, especially with probes that model temporal dynamics, while VideoMAE remains competitive and LTX-Video recovers we...

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) achieve strong results on visual reasoning benchmarks, but answer accuracy alone does not indicate whether a model relied on the correct visual evidence. This gap is particularly important in multi-view driving scenes used for autonomous driving, where a model can produce a plausible answer while grounding it in the wrong camera view. We introduce a multi-view visual question answering benchmark for evaluating evidence-source identification: given six synchronized NuScenes views and a question, the model must identify the supporting camera view and ans...

Foundation models (FMs) are increasingly used as backbones for downstream tasks across language, vision, time-series, and multimodal applications. Yet existing model-serving systems deploy each customized task as an independent model instance, thereby replicating heavyweight backbones, wasting accelerator memory, and losing opportunities to amortize batching and loading costs. This paper presents FMplex, a serving system that treats FM backbones as a virtualization substrate for deployment sharing. FMplex presents each task with a virtual foundation model (vFM), a logically private FM instanc...

Differential equations play a critical role in scientific discovery because they provide a mathematical framework to describe the behaviour of physical phenomena. As a promising alternative to traditional first principles, data-driven differential equation discovery has attracted increasing attention for its ability to infer governing laws directly from experimental or simulated data, especially when the underlying physics is unclear. However, the field has expanded rapidly along diverse methodological directions, particularly with the emergence of AI-based approaches, and still lacks a clear...

Ensuring the reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs) under distribution drift requires inference-time adaptation. While inference-time alignment methods such as Best-of-$N$ and rejection sampling are widely used, they frame the task as a sampling-intensive, reward-guided search, leading to two key limitations: their performance is bounded by the base model's generation quality, and their reliance on imperfect reward models makes them vulnerable to reward hacking. To address these challenges, we introduce Gradient-Guided Reward Optimization (GGRO), a lightweight inference-time method that ...

3D object detection is the backbone of perception for automated vehicles (AV) and broader intelligent transportation systems applications. Long-range detection is challenging because sensing evidence is sparse; yet this ``long-range'' scenario is routine in traffic. Although >30m is often labeled long-range in computer vision, on roadways it affords only approx. 1-2s for perception and decision-making. Under such extreme sparsity, two core challenges arise. First, early multimodal fusion tends to discard sparsity information and inject noise from empty or falsely occupied cells, degrading lon...

Court simulation bridges legal education and judicial practice, yet human-based simulations are costly and difficult to scale. Large language models (LLMs) offer a scalable alternative, but existing court-simulation research mainly focuses on criminal cases. Civil litigation is more common in practice and harder to simulate because its claims, liability, and remedies are more flexible. We present a multi-agent court simulation framework for Chinese civil cases. The framework organizes role-based interaction through a five-stage civil trial procedure and integrates memory module and statute re...

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies provide strong priors for language-conditioned manipulation, but remain brittle in off-nominal states requiring targeted recovery. We propose ReCoVLA -- a failure-conditioned residual recovery framework that keeps a pretrained VLA policy frozen, uses an external vision-language model (VLM) to infer the failure mode and recovery stage, and compiles a structured reward from task-relevant components. Rather than using the VLM to generate actions or rewards directly, ReCoVLA uses it as a semantic reward selector: it predicts a recovery descriptor and reward m...

When running marketing campaigns, retailers must decide which products to promote and which users to target. These decisions are inherently coupled: effective campaigns match users and items with strong mutual affinity into non-overlapping groups of predefined sizes. However, existing approaches assume predefined campaign structure or decouple item selection from user assignment, and cannot discover campaign groupings directly from joint interaction patterns. We therefore formalize this campaign problem as auto-targeting: jointly selecting users and items to construct multiple disjoint campai...

The rapid expansion of AI globally has led to the proliferation of energy-intensive hyperscale data centres (DCs), making them as a structurally challenging component in power system planning and operation. Using a spatially explicit optimisation model of Europe across 21 AI growth scenarios, we systematically quantify additional demand, capacity requirements, emissions, and operational impacts of DCs. Results indicate that AI could drive 73-723 TWh of extra demand by 2050, risking cumulative emissions overshoots of 67-181 MtCO2 between 2030 and 2050. Our analysis indicates that after 2030, t...

Multi-turn LLM agents interleave model calls with external tool invocations, shifting serving from stateless request processing to stateful program execution. Serving these workloads requires scheduling, KV-cache management, and routing policies that use program-level context, including turn dependencies, tool-induced gaps, and reusable KV state. Evaluating such policies directly on real systems is costly, since each design point may require dedicated accelerator time across arrival rates, model scales, serving-instance counts, and memory hierarchies. Simulation offers a scalable alternative,...

Cooperative object transportation is essential in numerous domains, including industrial to domestic services. A popular transportation strategy is to carry objects on top of multi-robot systems. The corresponding task is typically solved by decomposing it into three interconnected subproblems: formation control, cooperative navigation, and collision avoidance. A particular challenge posed by real-world objects is their potentially arbitrary shape and non-uniform mass distribution, necessitating robot formations that securely support the object. In this work, we address the challenge of patte...

Interpretability increasingly treats groups of components, not individual units, as the basic object, and proposes to find them by clustering co-activation statistics. We ask whether such a cheap signal actually identifies an attention-head circuit. Adapting a sparse-autoencoder clustering recipe to attention heads -- but validating by causal ablation rather than reconstruction -- we cluster heads and then run a closure test: ablate the discovered community and compare per-example damage to matched-random controls. Across two dense 1B-scale models (Pythia 1B, OLMo 1B) and two input distributi...

Foundation models offer a promising route to compress multi-modal physiological signals into compact representations of human health, with broad applications across sleep medicine, cardiology, neurology and other healthcare domains. Existing models have typically been trained with masked-reconstruction or contrastive objectives. However, masked reconstruction may be poorly suited to the stochastic nature of these signals, while contrastive approaches rely on positive-pair definitions despite the semantic invariances of physiological signals being poorly understood. In this work, we show that ...

Writing Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) is a high-labor, knowledge-intensive document burden; English-language research has demonstrated that generative AI can significantly reduce drafting time, yet automated IEP generation in Traditional Chinese remains virtually unexplored due to domain data scarcity, strict privacy regulations, and the absence of local evaluation benchmarks. We propose a low-resource fine-tuning pipeline centered on Corpus-Grounded Feature Diffusion (CGFD): (1) 25 dual-expert high-score seed transcripts are selected via a tau threshold with flag-aware score caps;...

Conditional generators provide a natural tool for controllable generation, including settings where the desired condition is a new composition of observed attributes or experimental factors. In many applications, especially in scientific domains, such models are attractive to explore conditions for which real samples are rare, expensive, or not yet observed. However, this creates a circularity for evaluation: standard conditional quality metrics require a reference target distribution, but in the extrapolative regime that distribution is unavailable by definition. We address this problem with...

Medical language models (LMs) can memorize and reproduce protected health information, but privacy evaluations often focus on recovery of training text rather than disclosure under realistic threat models. We introduce a clinically grounded framework that evaluates leakage along a graded axis of adversarial access, ranging from publicly inferable demographics to leaked note fragments. At each tier, we measure verbatim memorization of patient-specific text and semantic leakage of sensitive diagnoses. Applying the framework to an LM pretrained on 378k clinical notes, we find that routine encoun...

AI minidramas (also known as fruit dramas) are short, algorithmically distributed generative AI video series featuring anthropomorphized characters that have recently emerged as a widespread phenomenon on social media platforms. This paper argues that despite their seemingly innocuous aesthetic, these videos reproduce deeply gendered narrative structures in which female characters are systematically associated with moral transgression, sexual betrayal, and reproductive capacity, and that several plots also encode the logic of racialization, i.e., the process by which visible bodily difference...