Daily Papers

While current skeleton action recognition models demonstrate impressive performance on large-scale datasets, their adaptation to new application scenarios remains challenging. These challenges are particularly pronounced when facing new action categories, diverse performers, and varied skeleton layouts, leading to significant performance degeneration. Additionally, the high cost and difficulty of collecting skeleton data make large-scale data collection impractical. This paper studies one-shot and limited-scale learning settings to enable efficient adaptation with minimal data. Existing approaches often overlook the rich mutual information between labeled samples, resulting in sub-optimal performance in low-data scenarios. To boost the utility of labeled data, we identify the variability among performers and the commonality within each action as two key attributes. We present SkeletonX, a lightweight training pipeline that integrates seamlessly with existing GCN-based skeleton action recognizers, promoting effective training under limited labeled data. First, we propose a tailored sample pair construction strategy on two key attributes to form and aggregate sample pairs. Next, we develop a concise and effective feature aggregation module to process these pairs. Extensive experiments are conducted on NTU RGB+D, NTU RGB+D 120, and PKU-MMD with various GCN backbones, demonstrating that the pipeline effectively improves performance when trained from scratch with limited data. Moreover, it surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods in the one-shot setting, with only 1/10 of the parameters and much fewer FLOPs. The code and data are available at: https://github.com/zzysteve/SkeletonX

Vision-language pre-training (VLP) offers unique advantages for surgery by aligning language with surgical videos, enabling workflow understanding and transfer across tasks without relying on expert-labeled datasets. However, progress in surgical VLP remains constrained by the limited scale, procedural diversity, semantic quality, and hierarchical structure of existing datasets. In this work, we present SurgLaVi, the largest and most diverse surgical vision-language dataset to date, comprising nearly 240k clip-caption pairs from more than 200 procedures, and comprising hierarchical levels at phase-, step-, and task-level. At the core of SurgLaVi lies a fully automated pipeline that systematically generates fine-grained transcriptions of surgical videos and segments them into coherent procedural units. To ensure high-quality annotations, it applies dual-modality filtering to remove irrelevant and noisy samples. Within this framework, the resulting captions are enriched with contextual detail, producing annotations that are both semantically rich and easy to interpret. To ensure accessibility, we release SurgLaVi-eta, an open-source derivative of 113k clip-caption pairs constructed entirely from public data, which is over four times larger than existing surgical VLP datasets. To demonstrate the value of SurgLaVi datasets, we introduce SurgCLIP, a CLIP-style video-text contrastive framework with dual encoders, as a representative base model. SurgCLIP achieves consistent improvements across phase, step, action, and tool recognition, surpassing prior state-of-the-art methods, often by large margins. These results validate that large-scale, semantically rich, and hierarchically structured datasets directly translate into stronger and more generalizable representations, establishing SurgLaVi as a key resource for developing surgical foundation models.

Recent 3D generation models typically rely on limited-scale 3D `gold-labels' or 2D diffusion priors for 3D content creation. However, their performance is upper-bounded by constrained 3D priors due to the lack of scalable learning paradigms. In this work, we present See3D, a visual-conditional multi-view diffusion model trained on large-scale Internet videos for open-world 3D creation. The model aims to Get 3D knowledge by solely Seeing the visual contents from the vast and rapidly growing video data -- You See it, You Got it. To achieve this, we first scale up the training data using a proposed data curation pipeline that automatically filters out multi-view inconsistencies and insufficient observations from source videos. This results in a high-quality, richly diverse, large-scale dataset of multi-view images, termed WebVi3D, containing 320M frames from 16M video clips. Nevertheless, learning generic 3D priors from videos without explicit 3D geometry or camera pose annotations is nontrivial, and annotating poses for web-scale videos is prohibitively expensive. To eliminate the need for pose conditions, we introduce an innovative visual-condition - a purely 2D-inductive visual signal generated by adding time-dependent noise to the masked video data. Finally, we introduce a novel visual-conditional 3D generation framework by integrating See3D into a warping-based pipeline for high-fidelity 3D generation. Our numerical and visual comparisons on single and sparse reconstruction benchmarks show that See3D, trained on cost-effective and scalable video data, achieves notable zero-shot and open-world generation capabilities, markedly outperforming models trained on costly and constrained 3D datasets. Please refer to our project page at: https://vision.baai.ac.cn/see3d

Large Language Models (LLMs) have witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years, prompting the exploration of tool learning, which integrates LLMs with external tools to address diverse real-world challenges. Assessing the capability of LLMs to utilise tools necessitates large-scale and stable benchmarks. However, previous works relied on either hand-crafted online tools with limited scale, or large-scale real online APIs suffering from instability of API status. To address this problem, we introduce StableToolBench, a benchmark evolving from ToolBench, proposing a virtual API server and stable evaluation system. The virtual API server contains a caching system and API simulators which are complementary to alleviate the change in API status. Meanwhile, the stable evaluation system designs solvable pass and win rates using GPT-4 as the automatic evaluator to eliminate the randomness during evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate the stability of StableToolBench, and further discuss the effectiveness of API simulators, the caching system, and the evaluator system.

In the last three years, the largest dense deep learning models have grown over 1000x to reach hundreds of billions of parameters, while the GPU memory has only grown by 5x (16 GB to 80 GB). Therefore, the growth in model scale has been supported primarily though system innovations that allow large models to fit in the aggregate GPU memory of multiple GPUs. However, we are getting close to the GPU memory wall. It requires 800 NVIDIA V100 GPUs just to fit a trillion parameter model for training, and such clusters are simply out of reach for most data scientists. In addition, training models at that scale requires complex combinations of parallelism techniques that puts a big burden on the data scientists to refactor their model. In this paper we present ZeRO-Infinity, a novel heterogeneous system technology that leverages GPU, CPU, and NVMe memory to allow for unprecedented model scale on limited resources without requiring model code refactoring. At the same time it achieves excellent training throughput and scalability, unencumbered by the limited CPU or NVMe bandwidth. ZeRO-Infinity can fit models with tens and even hundreds of trillions of parameters for training on current generation GPU clusters. It can be used to fine-tune trillion parameter models on a single NVIDIA DGX-2 node, making large models more accessible. In terms of training throughput and scalability, it sustains over 25 petaflops on 512 NVIDIA V100 GPUs(40% of peak), while also demonstrating super linear scalability. An open source implementation of ZeRO-Infinity is available through DeepSpeed, a deep learning optimization library that makes distributed training easy, efficient, and effective.

For many tasks, state-of-the-art results have been achieved with Transformer-based architectures, resulting in a paradigmatic shift in practices from the use of task-specific architectures to the fine-tuning of pre-trained language models. The ongoing trend consists in training models with an ever-increasing amount of data and parameters, which requires considerable resources. It leads to a strong search to improve resource efficiency based on algorithmic and hardware improvements evaluated only for English. This raises questions about their usability when applied to small-scale learning problems, for which a limited amount of training data is available, especially for under-resourced languages tasks. The lack of appropriately sized corpora is a hindrance to applying data-driven and transfer learning-based approaches with strong instability cases. In this paper, we establish a state-of-the-art of the efforts dedicated to the usability of Transformer-based models and propose to evaluate these improvements on the question-answering performances of French language which have few resources. We address the instability relating to data scarcity by investigating various training strategies with data augmentation, hyperparameters optimization and cross-lingual transfer. We also introduce a new compact model for French FrALBERT which proves to be competitive in low-resource settings.

In text-driven 3D scene generation, object layout serves as a crucial intermediate representation that bridges high-level language instructions with detailed geometric output. It not only provides a structural blueprint for ensuring physical plausibility but also supports semantic controllability and interactive editing. However, the learning capabilities of current 3D indoor layout generation models are constrained by the limited scale, diversity, and annotation quality of existing datasets. To address this, we introduce M3DLayout, a large-scale, multi-source dataset for 3D indoor layout generation. M3DLayout comprises 15,080 layouts and over 258k object instances, integrating three distinct sources: real-world scans, professional CAD designs, and procedurally generated scenes. Each layout is paired with detailed structured text describing global scene summaries, relational placements of large furniture, and fine-grained arrangements of smaller items. This diverse and richly annotated resource enables models to learn complex spatial and semantic patterns across a wide variety of indoor environments. To assess the potential of M3DLayout, we establish a benchmark using a text-conditioned diffusion model. Experimental results demonstrate that our dataset provides a solid foundation for training layout generation models. Its multi-source composition enhances diversity, notably through the Inf3DLayout subset which provides rich small-object information, enabling the generation of more complex and detailed scenes. We hope that M3DLayout can serve as a valuable resource for advancing research in text-driven 3D scene synthesis.

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is a complex task that aims to retrieve images based on a multimodal query. Typical training data consists of triplets containing a reference image, a textual description of desired modifications, and the target image, which are expensive and time-consuming to acquire. The scarcity of CIR datasets has led to zero-shot approaches utilizing synthetic triplets or leveraging vision-language models (VLMs) with ubiquitous web-crawled image-caption pairs. However, these methods have significant limitations: synthetic triplets suffer from limited scale, lack of diversity, and unnatural modification text, while image-caption pairs hinder joint embedding learning of the multimodal query due to the absence of triplet data. Moreover, existing approaches struggle with complex and nuanced modification texts that demand sophisticated fusion and understanding of vision and language modalities. We present CoLLM, a one-stop framework that effectively addresses these limitations. Our approach generates triplets on-the-fly from image-caption pairs, enabling supervised training without manual annotation. We leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate joint embeddings of reference images and modification texts, facilitating deeper multimodal fusion. Additionally, we introduce Multi-Text CIR (MTCIR), a large-scale dataset comprising 3.4M samples, and refine existing CIR benchmarks (CIRR and Fashion-IQ) to enhance evaluation reliability. Experimental results demonstrate that CoLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple CIR benchmarks and settings. MTCIR yields competitive results, with up to 15% performance improvement. Our refined benchmarks provide more reliable evaluation metrics for CIR models, contributing to the advancement of this important field.

Despite the widespread adoption of transformers in medical applications, the exploration of multi-scale learning through transformers remains limited, while hierarchical representations are considered advantageous for computer-aided medical diagnosis. We propose a novel hierarchical transformer model that adeptly integrates the feature extraction capabilities of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with the advanced representational potential of Vision Transformers (ViTs). Addressing the lack of inductive biases and dependence on extensive training datasets in ViTs, our model employs a CNN backbone to generate hierarchical visual representations. These representations are adapted for transformer input through an innovative patch tokenization process, preserving the inherited multi-scale inductive biases. We also introduce a scale-wise attention mechanism that directly captures intra-scale and inter-scale associations. This mechanism complements patch-wise attention by enhancing spatial understanding and preserving global perception, which we refer to as local and global attention, respectively. Our model significantly outperforms baseline models in terms of classification accuracy, demonstrating its efficiency in bridging the gap between Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs). The components are designed as plug-and-play for different CNN architectures and can be adapted for multiple applications. The code is available at https://github.com/xiaoyatang/DuoFormer.git.

Investigating the reasoning abilities of transformer models, and discovering new challenging tasks for them, has been a topic of much interest. Recent studies have found these models to be surprisingly strong at performing deductive reasoning over formal logical theories expressed in natural language. A shortcoming of these studies, however, is that they do not take into account that logical theories, when sampled uniformly at random, do not necessarily lead to hard instances. We propose a new methodology for creating challenging algorithmic reasoning datasets that focus on natural language satisfiability (NLSat) problems. The key idea is to draw insights from empirical sampling of hard propositional SAT problems and from complexity-theoretic studies of language. This methodology allows us to distinguish easy from hard instances, and to systematically increase the complexity of existing reasoning benchmarks such as RuleTaker. We find that current transformers, given sufficient training data, are surprisingly robust at solving the resulting NLSat problems of substantially increased difficulty. They also exhibit some degree of scale-invariance - the ability to generalize to problems of larger size and scope. Our results, however, reveal important limitations too: a careful sampling of training data is crucial for building models that generalize to larger problems, and transformer models' limited scale-invariance suggests they are far from learning robust deductive reasoning algorithms.

Recent advances of reasoning models, exemplified by OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek's R1, highlight the significant potential of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to enhance the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, replicating these advancements across diverse domains remains challenging due to limited methodological transparency. In this work, we present two-Staged history-Resampling Policy Optimization (SRPO), which successfully surpasses the performance of DeepSeek-R1-Zero-32B on the AIME24 and LiveCodeBench benchmarks. SRPO achieves this using the same base model as DeepSeek (i.e. Qwen2.5-32B) and relies solely on RL, without prior Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Building upon Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), we introduce two key methodological innovations: (1) a two-stage cross-domain training paradigm designed to balance the development of mathematical reasoning and coding proficiency, and (2) History Resampling (HR), a technique to address ineffective samples. Our comprehensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach, dedicating to offer valuable insights into scaling LLM reasoning capabilities across diverse tasks.

Virtual try-on (VTON) transfers a target clothing image to a reference person, where clothing fidelity is a key requirement for downstream e-commerce applications. However, existing VTON methods still fall short in high-fidelity try-on due to the conflict between the high diversity of dressing styles (\eg clothes occluded by pants or distorted by posture) and the limited paired data for training. In this work, we propose a novel framework Boosted Virtual Try-on (BVTON) to leverage the large-scale unpaired learning for high-fidelity try-on. Our key insight is that pseudo try-on pairs can be reliably constructed from vastly available fashion images. Specifically, 1) we first propose a compositional canonicalizing flow that maps on-model clothes into pseudo in-shop clothes, dubbed canonical proxy. Each clothing part (sleeves, torso) is reversely deformed into an in-shop-like shape to compositionally construct the canonical proxy. 2) Next, we design a layered mask generation module that generates accurate semantic layout by training on canonical proxy. We replace the in-shop clothes used in conventional pipelines with the derived canonical proxy to boost the training process. 3) Finally, we propose an unpaired try-on synthesizer by constructing pseudo training pairs with randomly misaligned on-model clothes, where intricate skin texture and clothes boundaries can be generated. Extensive experiments on high-resolution (1024times768) datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. Notably, BVTON shows great generalizability and scalability to various dressing styles and data sources.

The objective of continual learning (CL) is to learn tasks sequentially without retraining on earlier tasks. However, when subjected to CL, traditional neural networks exhibit catastrophic forgetting and limited generalization. To overcome these problems, we introduce a novel method called 'Gate and Obstruct Network' (GateON). GateON combines learnable gating of activity and online estimation of parameter relevance to safeguard crucial knowledge from being overwritten. Our method generates partially overlapping pathways between tasks which permits forward and backward transfer during sequential learning. GateON addresses the issue of network saturation after parameter fixation by a re-activation mechanism of fixed neurons, enabling large-scale continual learning. GateON is implemented on a wide range of networks (fully-connected, CNN, Transformers), has low computational complexity, effectively learns up to 100 MNIST learning tasks, and achieves top-tier results for pre-trained BERT in CL-based NLP tasks.

Recent foundational language models have shown state-of-the-art performance in many NLP tasks in zero- and few-shot settings. An advantage of these models over more standard approaches based on fine-tuning is the ability to understand instructions written in natural language (prompts), which helps them generalise better to different tasks and domains without the need for specific training data. This makes them suitable for addressing text classification problems for domains with limited amounts of annotated instances. However, existing research is limited in scale and lacks understanding of how text generation models combined with prompting techniques compare to more established methods for text classification such as fine-tuning masked language models. In this paper, we address this research gap by performing a large-scale evaluation study for 16 text classification datasets covering binary, multiclass, and multilabel problems. In particular, we compare zero- and few-shot approaches of large language models to fine-tuning smaller language models. We also analyse the results by prompt, classification type, domain, and number of labels. In general, the results show how fine-tuning smaller and more efficient language models can still outperform few-shot approaches of larger language models, which have room for improvement when it comes to text classification.

Small molecules are essential to drug discovery, and graph-language models hold promise for learning molecular properties and functions from text. However, existing molecule-text datasets are limited in scale and informativeness, restricting the training of generalizable multimodal models. We present MolTextNet, a dataset of 2.5 million high-quality molecule-text pairs designed to overcome these limitations. To construct it, we propose a synthetic text generation pipeline that integrates structural features, computed properties, bioactivity data, and synthetic complexity. Using GPT-4o-mini, we create structured descriptions for 2.5 million molecules from ChEMBL35, with text over 10 times longer than prior datasets. MolTextNet supports diverse downstream tasks, including property prediction and structure retrieval. Pretraining CLIP-style models with Graph Neural Networks and ModernBERT on MolTextNet yields improved performance, highlighting its potential for advancing foundational multimodal modeling in molecular science. Our dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/liuganghuggingface/moltextnet.

The ability to estimate the quality of scientific papers is central to how both humans and AI systems will advance scientific knowledge in the future. However, existing LLM-based estimation methods suffer from high inference cost, whereas the faster direct score regression approach is limited by scale inconsistencies. We present NAIPv2, a debiased and efficient framework for paper quality estimation. NAIPv2 employs pairwise learning within domain-year groups to reduce inconsistencies in reviewer ratings and introduces the Review Tendency Signal (RTS) as a probabilistic integration of reviewer scores and confidences. To support training and evaluation, we further construct NAIDv2, a large-scale dataset of 24,276 ICLR submissions enriched with metadata and detailed structured content. Trained on pairwise comparisons but enabling efficient pointwise prediction at deployment, NAIPv2 achieves state-of-the-art performance (78.2% AUC, 0.432 Spearman), while maintaining scalable, linear-time efficiency at inference. Notably, on unseen NeurIPS submissions, it further demonstrates strong generalization, with predicted scores increasing consistently across decision categories from Rejected to Oral. These findings establish NAIPv2 as a debiased and scalable framework for automated paper quality estimation, marking a step toward future scientific intelligence systems. Code and dataset are released at https://sway.cloud.microsoft/Pr42npP80MfPhvj8.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of recalling multilingual factual knowledge present in their pretraining data. However, most studies evaluate only the final model, leaving the development of factual recall and crosslingual consistency throughout pretraining largely unexplored. In this work, we trace how factual recall and crosslingual consistency evolve during pretraining, focusing on OLMo-7B as a case study. We find that both accuracy and consistency improve over time for most languages. We show that this improvement is primarily driven by the fact frequency in the pretraining corpus: more frequent facts are more likely to be recalled correctly, regardless of language. Yet, some low-frequency facts in non-English languages can still be correctly recalled. Our analysis reveals that these instances largely benefit from crosslingual transfer of their English counterparts -- an effect that emerges predominantly in the early stages of pretraining. We pinpoint two distinct pathways through which multilingual factual knowledge acquisition occurs: (1) frequency-driven learning, which is dominant and language-agnostic, and (2) crosslingual transfer, which is limited in scale and typically constrained to relation types involving named entities. We release our code and data to facilitate further research at https://github.com/cisnlp/multilingual-fact-tracing.

Obtaining large pre-trained models that can be fine-tuned to new tasks with limited annotated samples has remained an open challenge for medical imaging data. While pre-trained deep networks on ImageNet and vision-language foundation models trained on web-scale data are prevailing approaches, their effectiveness on medical tasks is limited due to the significant domain shift between natural and medical images. To bridge this gap, we introduce LVM-Med, the first family of deep networks trained on large-scale medical datasets. We have collected approximately 1.3 million medical images from 55 publicly available datasets, covering a large number of organs and modalities such as CT, MRI, X-ray, and Ultrasound. We benchmark several state-of-the-art self-supervised algorithms on this dataset and propose a novel self-supervised contrastive learning algorithm using a graph-matching formulation. The proposed approach makes three contributions: (i) it integrates prior pair-wise image similarity metrics based on local and global information; (ii) it captures the structural constraints of feature embeddings through a loss function constructed via a combinatorial graph-matching objective; and (iii) it can be trained efficiently end-to-end using modern gradient-estimation techniques for black-box solvers. We thoroughly evaluate the proposed LVM-Med on 15 downstream medical tasks ranging from segmentation and classification to object detection, and both for the in and out-of-distribution settings. LVM-Med empirically outperforms a number of state-of-the-art supervised, self-supervised, and foundation models. For challenging tasks such as Brain Tumor Classification or Diabetic Retinopathy Grading, LVM-Med improves previous vision-language models trained on 1 billion masks by 6-7% while using only a ResNet-50.

Recent studies have shown that code language models at scale demonstrate significant performance gains on downstream tasks, i.e., code generation. However, most of the existing works on code representation learning train models at a hundred million parameter scale using very limited pretraining corpora. In this work, we fuel code representation learning with a vast amount of code data via a two-stage pretraining scheme. We first train the encoders via a mix that leverages both randomness in masking language modeling and the structure aspect of programming language. We then enhance the representations via contrastive learning with hard negative and hard positive constructed in an unsupervised manner. We establish an off-the-shelf encoder model that persistently outperforms the existing models on a wide variety of downstream tasks by large margins. To comprehend the factors contributing to successful code representation learning, we conduct detailed ablations and share our findings on (i) a customized and effective token-level denoising scheme for source code; (ii) the importance of hard negatives and hard positives; (iii) how the proposed bimodal contrastive learning boost the cross-lingual semantic search performance; and (iv) how the pretraining schemes decide the downstream task performance scales with the model size.

Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) mark a major shift in robot learning. They replace specialized architectures and task-tailored components of expert policies with large-scale data collection and setup-specific fine-tuning. In this machine learning-focused workflow that is centered around models and scalable training, traditional robotics software frameworks become a bottleneck, while robot simulations offer only limited support for transitioning from and to real-world experiments. In this work, we close this gap by introducing Robot Control Stack (RCS), a lean ecosystem designed from the ground up to support research in robot learning with large-scale generalist policies. At its core, RCS features a modular and easily extensible layered architecture with a unified interface for simulated and physical robots, facilitating sim-to-real transfer. Despite its minimal footprint and dependencies, it offers a complete feature set, enabling both real-world experiments and large-scale training in simulation. Our contribution is twofold: First, we introduce the architecture of RCS and explain its design principles. Second, we evaluate its usability and performance along the development cycle of VLA and RL policies. Our experiments also provide an extensive evaluation of Octo, OpenVLA, and Pi Zero on multiple robots and shed light on how simulation data can improve real-world policy performance. Our code, datasets, weights, and videos are available at: https://robotcontrolstack.github.io/

Current monocular 3D detectors are held back by the limited diversity and scale of real-world datasets. While data augmentation certainly helps, it's particularly difficult to generate realistic scene-aware augmented data for outdoor settings. Most current approaches to synthetic data generation focus on realistic object appearance through improved rendering techniques. However, we show that where and how objects are positioned is just as crucial for training effective 3D monocular detectors. The key obstacle lies in automatically determining realistic object placement parameters - including position, dimensions, and directional alignment when introducing synthetic objects into actual scenes. To address this, we introduce MonoPlace3D, a novel system that considers the 3D scene content to create realistic augmentations. Specifically, given a background scene, MonoPlace3D learns a distribution over plausible 3D bounding boxes. Subsequently, we render realistic objects and place them according to the locations sampled from the learned distribution. Our comprehensive evaluation on two standard datasets KITTI and NuScenes, demonstrates that MonoPlace3D significantly improves the accuracy of multiple existing monocular 3D detectors while being highly data efficient.

Learning long-term spatial-temporal features are critical for many video analysis tasks. However, existing video segmentation methods predominantly rely on static image segmentation techniques, and methods capturing temporal dependency for segmentation have to depend on pretrained optical flow models, leading to suboptimal solutions for the problem. End-to-end sequential learning to explore spatialtemporal features for video segmentation is largely limited by the scale of available video segmentation datasets, i.e., even the largest video segmentation dataset only contains 90 short video clips. To solve this problem, we build a new large-scale video object segmentation dataset called YouTube Video Object Segmentation dataset (YouTube-VOS). Our dataset contains 4,453 YouTube video clips and 94 object categories. This is by far the largest video object segmentation dataset to our knowledge and has been released at http://youtube-vos.org. We further evaluate several existing state-of-the-art video object segmentation algorithms on this dataset which aims to establish baselines for the development of new algorithms in the future.

Modern Earth observation (EO) increasingly leverages deep learning to harness the scale and diversity of satellite imagery across sensors and regions. While recent foundation models have demonstrated promising generalization across EO tasks, many remain limited by the scale, geographical coverage, and spectral diversity of their training data, factors critical for learning globally transferable representations. In this work, we introduce TerraFM, a scalable self-supervised learning model that leverages globally distributed Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 imagery, combined with large spatial tiles and land-cover aware sampling to enrich spatial and semantic coverage. By treating sensing modalities as natural augmentations in our self-supervised approach, we unify radar and optical inputs via modality-specific patch embeddings and adaptive cross-attention fusion. Our training strategy integrates local-global contrastive learning and introduces a dual-centering mechanism that incorporates class-frequency-aware regularization to address long-tailed distributions in land cover.TerraFM achieves strong generalization on both classification and segmentation tasks, outperforming prior models on GEO-Bench and Copernicus-Bench. Our code and pretrained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/TerraFM .

Navigating complex urban environments using natural language instructions poses significant challenges for embodied agents, including noisy language instructions, ambiguous spatial references, diverse landmarks, and dynamic street scenes. Current visual navigation methods are typically limited to simulated or off-street environments, and often rely on precise goal formats, such as specific coordinates or images. This limits their effectiveness for autonomous agents like last-mile delivery robots navigating unfamiliar cities. To address these limitations, we introduce UrbanNav, a scalable framework that trains embodied agents to follow free-form language instructions in diverse urban settings. Leveraging web-scale city walking videos, we develop an scalable annotation pipeline that aligns human navigation trajectories with language instructions grounded in real-world landmarks. UrbanNav encompasses over 1,500 hours of navigation data and 3 million instruction-trajectory-landmark triplets, capturing a wide range of urban scenarios. Our model learns robust navigation policies to tackle complex urban scenarios, demonstrating superior spatial reasoning, robustness to noisy instructions, and generalization to unseen urban settings. Experimental results show that UrbanNav significantly outperforms existing methods, highlighting the potential of large-scale web video data to enable language-guided, real-world urban navigation for embodied agents.

With the recent availability and affordability of commercial depth sensors and 3D scanners, an increasing number of 3D (i.e., RGBD, point cloud) datasets have been publicized to facilitate research in 3D computer vision. However, existing datasets either cover relatively small areas or have limited semantic annotations. Fine-grained understanding of urban-scale 3D scenes is still in its infancy. In this paper, we introduce SensatUrban, an urban-scale UAV photogrammetry point cloud dataset consisting of nearly three billion points collected from three UK cities, covering 7.6 km^2. Each point in the dataset has been labelled with fine-grained semantic annotations, resulting in a dataset that is three times the size of the previous existing largest photogrammetric point cloud dataset. In addition to the more commonly encountered categories such as road and vegetation, urban-level categories including rail, bridge, and river are also included in our dataset. Based on this dataset, we further build a benchmark to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art segmentation algorithms. In particular, we provide a comprehensive analysis and identify several key challenges limiting urban-scale point cloud understanding. The dataset is available at http://point-cloud-analysis.cs.ox.ac.uk.

Text representations using neural word embeddings have proven effective in many NLP applications. Recent researches adapt the traditional word embedding models to learn vectors of multiword expressions (concepts/entities). However, these methods are limited to textual knowledge bases (e.g., Wikipedia). In this paper, we propose a novel and simple technique for integrating the knowledge about concepts from two large scale knowledge bases of different structure (Wikipedia and Probase) in order to learn concept representations. We adapt the efficient skip-gram model to seamlessly learn from the knowledge in Wikipedia text and Probase concept graph. We evaluate our concept embedding models on two tasks: (1) analogical reasoning, where we achieve a state-of-the-art performance of 91% on semantic analogies, (2) concept categorization, where we achieve a state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets achieving categorization accuracy of 100% on one and 98% on the other. Additionally, we present a case study to evaluate our model on unsupervised argument type identification for neural semantic parsing. We demonstrate the competitive accuracy of our unsupervised method and its ability to better generalize to out of vocabulary entity mentions compared to the tedious and error prone methods which depend on gazetteers and regular expressions.

Pursuit-evasion (PE) problem is a critical challenge in multi-robot systems (MRS). While reinforcement learning (RL) has shown its promise in addressing PE tasks, research has primarily focused on single-target pursuit, with limited exploration of multi-target encirclement, particularly in large-scale settings. This paper proposes a Transformer-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning (TERL) framework for large-scale multi-target encirclement. By integrating a transformer-based policy network with target selection, TERL enables robots to adaptively prioritize targets and safely coordinate robots. Results show that TERL outperforms existing RL-based methods in terms of encirclement success rate and task completion time, while maintaining good performance in large-scale scenarios. Notably, TERL, trained on small-scale scenarios (15 pursuers, 4 targets), generalizes effectively to large-scale settings (80 pursuers, 20 targets) without retraining, achieving a 100% success rate.

The success of Transformer models has pushed the deep learning model scale to billions of parameters. Due to the limited memory resource of a single GPU, However, the best practice for choosing the optimal parallel strategy is still lacking, since it requires domain expertise in both deep learning and parallel computing. The Colossal-AI system addressed the above challenge by introducing a unified interface to scale your sequential code of model training to distributed environments. It supports parallel training methods such as data, pipeline, tensor, and sequence parallelism, as well as heterogeneous training methods integrated with zero redundancy optimizer. Compared to the baseline system, Colossal-AI can achieve up to 2.76 times training speedup on large-scale models.

Representation learning promises to unlock deep learning for the long tail of vision tasks without expensive labelled datasets. Yet, the absence of a unified evaluation for general visual representations hinders progress. Popular protocols are often too constrained (linear classification), limited in diversity (ImageNet, CIFAR, Pascal-VOC), or only weakly related to representation quality (ELBO, reconstruction error). We present the Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark (VTAB), which defines good representations as those that adapt to diverse, unseen tasks with few examples. With VTAB, we conduct a large-scale study of many popular publicly-available representation learning algorithms. We carefully control confounders such as architecture and tuning budget. We address questions like: How effective are ImageNet representations beyond standard natural datasets? How do representations trained via generative and discriminative models compare? To what extent can self-supervision replace labels? And, how close are we to general visual representations?

In NeRF, a critical problem is to effectively estimate the occupancy to guide empty-space skipping and point sampling. Grid-based methods work well for small-scale scenes. However, on large-scale scenes, they are limited by predefined bounding boxes, grid resolutions, and high memory usage for grid updates, and thus struggle to speed up training for large-scale, irregularly bounded and complex urban scenes without sacrificing accuracy. In this paper, we propose to learn a continuous and compact large-scale occupancy network, which can classify 3D points as occupied or unoccupied points. We train this occupancy network end-to-end together with the radiance field in a self-supervised manner by three designs. First, we propose a novel imbalanced occupancy loss to regularize the occupancy network. It makes the occupancy network effectively control the ratio of unoccupied and occupied points, motivated by the prior that most of 3D scene points are unoccupied. Second, we design an imbalanced architecture containing a large scene network and a small empty space network to separately encode occupied and unoccupied points classified by the occupancy network. This imbalanced structure can effectively model the imbalanced nature of occupied and unoccupied regions. Third, we design an explicit density loss to guide the occupancy network, making the density of unoccupied points smaller. As far as we know, we are the first to learn a continuous and compact occupancy of large-scale NeRF by a network. In our experiments, our occupancy network can quickly learn more compact, accurate and smooth occupancy compared to the occupancy grid. With our learned occupancy as guidance for empty space skipping on challenging large-scale benchmarks, our method consistently obtains higher accuracy compared to the occupancy grid, and our method can speed up state-of-the-art NeRF methods without sacrificing accuracy.

This paper is a technical report to share our experience and findings building a Korean and English bilingual multimodal model. While many of the multimodal datasets focus on English and multilingual multimodal research uses machine-translated texts, employing such machine-translated texts is limited to describing unique expressions, cultural information, and proper noun in languages other than English. In this work, we collect 1.1 billion image-text pairs (708 million Korean and 476 million English) and train a bilingual multimodal model named KELIP. We introduce simple yet effective training schemes, including MAE pre-training and multi-crop augmentation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that a model trained with such training schemes shows competitive performance in both languages. Moreover, we discuss multimodal-related research questions: 1) strong augmentation-based methods can distract the model from learning proper multimodal relations; 2) training multimodal model without cross-lingual relation can learn the relation via visual semantics; 3) our bilingual KELIP can capture cultural differences of visual semantics for the same meaning of words; 4) a large-scale multimodal model can be used for multimodal feature analogy. We hope that this work will provide helpful experience and findings for future research. We provide an open-source pre-trained KELIP.

Learning a generalist embodied agent capable of completing multiple tasks poses challenges, primarily stemming from the scarcity of action-labeled robotic datasets. In contrast, a vast amount of human videos exist, capturing intricate tasks and interactions with the physical world. Promising prospects arise for utilizing actionless human videos for pre-training and transferring the knowledge to facilitate robot policy learning through limited robot demonstrations. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework that leverages a unified discrete diffusion to combine generative pre-training on human videos and policy fine-tuning on a small number of action-labeled robot videos. We start by compressing both human and robot videos into unified video tokens. In the pre-training stage, we employ a discrete diffusion model with a mask-and-replace diffusion strategy to predict future video tokens in the latent space. In the fine-tuning stage, we harness the imagined future videos to guide low-level action learning trained on a limited set of robot data. Experiments demonstrate that our method generates high-fidelity future videos for planning and enhances the fine-tuned policies compared to previous state-of-the-art approaches with superior generalization ability. Our project website is available at https://video-diff.github.io/.

Visual information is central to conversation: body gestures and physical behaviour, for example, contribute to meaning that transcends words alone. To date, however, most neural conversational models are limited to just text. We introduce CHAMPAGNE, a generative model of conversations that can account for visual contexts. To train CHAMPAGNE, we collect and release YTD-18M, a large-scale corpus of 18M video-based dialogues. YTD-18M is constructed from web videos: crucial to our data collection pipeline is a pretrained language model that converts error-prone automatic transcripts to a cleaner dialogue format while maintaining meaning. Human evaluation reveals that YTD-18M is more sensible and specific than prior resources (MMDialog, 1M dialogues), while maintaining visual-groundedness. Experiments demonstrate that 1) CHAMPAGNE learns to conduct conversation from YTD-18M; and 2) when fine-tuned, it achieves state-of-the-art results on four vision-language tasks focused on real-world conversations. We release data, models, and code.

Compound figures, which are multi-panel composites containing diverse subfigures, are ubiquitous in biomedical literature, yet large-scale subfigure extraction remains largely unaddressed. Prior work on subfigure extraction has been limited in both dataset size and generalizability, leaving a critical open question: How does high-fidelity image-text alignment via large-scale subfigure extraction impact representation learning in vision-language models? We address this gap by introducing a scalable subfigure extraction pipeline based on transformer-based object detection, trained on a synthetic corpus of 500,000 compound figures, and achieving state-of-the-art performance on both ImageCLEF 2016 and synthetic benchmarks. Using this pipeline, we release OPEN-PMC-18M, a large-scale high quality biomedical vision-language dataset comprising 18 million clinically relevant subfigure-caption pairs spanning radiology, microscopy, and visible light photography. We train and evaluate vision-language models on our curated datasets and show improved performance across retrieval, zero-shot classification, and robustness benchmarks, outperforming existing baselines. We release our dataset, models, and code to support reproducible benchmarks and further study into biomedical vision-language modeling and representation learning.

R1-style Reinforcement Learning (RL) significantly enhances Large Language Models' reasoning capabilities, yet the mechanism behind rule-based RL remains unclear. We found that small-scale SFT has significant influence on RL but shows poor efficiency. To explain our observations, we propose an analytical framework and compare the efficiency of SFT and RL by measuring sample effect. Hypothetical analysis show that SFT efficiency is limited by training data. Guided by our analysis, we propose Re-distillation, a technique that fine-tunes pretrain model through small-scale distillation from the RL-trained policy. Experiments on Knight & Knave and MATH datasets demonstrate re-distillation's surprising efficiency: re-distilled models match RL performance with far fewer samples and less computation. Empirical verification shows that sample effect is a good indicator of performance improvements. As a result, on K&K dataset, our re-distilled Qwen2.5-1.5B model surpasses DeepSeek-V3-0324 with only 1K SFT samples. On MATH, Qwen2.5-1.5B fine-tuned with re-distilled 500 samples matches its instruct-tuned variant without RL. Our work explains several interesting phenomena in R1-style RL, shedding light on the mechanisms behind its empirical success. Code is available at: https://github.com/on1262/deep-reasoning

Crowd counting is a fundamental yet challenging task, which desires rich information to generate pixel-wise crowd density maps. However, most previous methods only used the limited information of RGB images and cannot well discover potential pedestrians in unconstrained scenarios. In this work, we find that incorporating optical and thermal information can greatly help to recognize pedestrians. To promote future researches in this field, we introduce a large-scale RGBT Crowd Counting (RGBT-CC) benchmark, which contains 2,030 pairs of RGB-thermal images with 138,389 annotated people. Furthermore, to facilitate the multimodal crowd counting, we propose a cross-modal collaborative representation learning framework, which consists of multiple modality-specific branches, a modality-shared branch, and an Information Aggregation-Distribution Module (IADM) to capture the complementary information of different modalities fully. Specifically, our IADM incorporates two collaborative information transfers to dynamically enhance the modality-shared and modality-specific representations with a dual information propagation mechanism. Extensive experiments conducted on the RGBT-CC benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework for RGBT crowd counting. Moreover, the proposed approach is universal for multimodal crowd counting and is also capable to achieve superior performance on the ShanghaiTechRGBD dataset. Finally, our source code and benchmark are released at {http://lingboliu.com/RGBT_Crowd_Counting.html}.

Enabling effective and efficient machine learning (ML) over large-scale graph data (e.g., graphs with billions of edges) can have a great impact on both industrial and scientific applications. However, existing efforts to advance large-scale graph ML have been largely limited by the lack of a suitable public benchmark. Here we present OGB Large-Scale Challenge (OGB-LSC), a collection of three real-world datasets for facilitating the advancements in large-scale graph ML. The OGB-LSC datasets are orders of magnitude larger than existing ones, covering three core graph learning tasks -- link prediction, graph regression, and node classification. Furthermore, we provide dedicated baseline experiments, scaling up expressive graph ML models to the massive datasets. We show that expressive models significantly outperform simple scalable baselines, indicating an opportunity for dedicated efforts to further improve graph ML at scale. Moreover, OGB-LSC datasets were deployed at ACM KDD Cup 2021 and attracted more than 500 team registrations globally, during which significant performance improvements were made by a variety of innovative techniques. We summarize the common techniques used by the winning solutions and highlight the current best practices in large-scale graph ML. Finally, we describe how we have updated the datasets after the KDD Cup to further facilitate research advances. The OGB-LSC datasets, baseline code, and all the information about the KDD Cup are available at https://ogb.stanford.edu/docs/lsc/ .

We have witnessed significant progress in deep learning-based 3D vision, ranging from neural radiance field (NeRF) based 3D representation learning to applications in novel view synthesis (NVS). However, existing scene-level datasets for deep learning-based 3D vision, limited to either synthetic environments or a narrow selection of real-world scenes, are quite insufficient. This insufficiency not only hinders a comprehensive benchmark of existing methods but also caps what could be explored in deep learning-based 3D analysis. To address this critical gap, we present DL3DV-10K, a large-scale scene dataset, featuring 51.2 million frames from 10,510 videos captured from 65 types of point-of-interest (POI) locations, covering both bounded and unbounded scenes, with different levels of reflection, transparency, and lighting. We conducted a comprehensive benchmark of recent NVS methods on DL3DV-10K, which revealed valuable insights for future research in NVS. In addition, we have obtained encouraging results in a pilot study to learn generalizable NeRF from DL3DV-10K, which manifests the necessity of a large-scale scene-level dataset to forge a path toward a foundation model for learning 3D representation. Our DL3DV-10K dataset, benchmark results, and models will be publicly accessible at https://dl3dv-10k.github.io/DL3DV-10K/.

Robust perception-action models should be learned from training data with diverse visual appearances and realistic behaviors, yet current approaches to deep visuomotor policy learning have been generally limited to in-situ models learned from a single vehicle or a simulation environment. We advocate learning a generic vehicle motion model from large scale crowd-sourced video data, and develop an end-to-end trainable architecture for learning to predict a distribution over future vehicle egomotion from instantaneous monocular camera observations and previous vehicle state. Our model incorporates a novel FCN-LSTM architecture, which can be learned from large-scale crowd-sourced vehicle action data, and leverages available scene segmentation side tasks to improve performance under a privileged learning paradigm.

Multilingual self-supervised learning (SSL) has often lagged behind state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods due to the expenses and complexity required to handle many languages. This further harms the reproducibility of SSL, which is already limited to few research groups due to its resource usage. We show that more powerful techniques can actually lead to more efficient pre-training, opening SSL to more research groups. We propose WavLabLM, which extends WavLM's joint prediction and denoising to 40k hours of data across 136 languages. To build WavLabLM, we devise a novel multi-stage pre-training method, designed to address the language imbalance of multilingual data. WavLabLM achieves comparable performance to XLS-R on ML-SUPERB with less than 10% of the training data, making SSL realizable with academic compute. We show that further efficiency can be achieved with a vanilla HuBERT Base model, which can maintain 94% of XLS-R's performance with only 3% of the data, 4 GPUs, and limited trials. We open-source all code and models in ESPnet.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) achieves great success in speech recognition, while limited exploration has been attempted for other speech processing tasks. As speech signal contains multi-faceted information including speaker identity, paralinguistics, spoken content, etc., learning universal representations for all speech tasks is challenging. To tackle the problem, we propose a new pre-trained model, WavLM, to solve full-stack downstream speech tasks. WavLM jointly learns masked speech prediction and denoising in pre-training. By this means, WavLM does not only keep the speech content modeling capability by the masked speech prediction, but also improves the potential to non-ASR tasks by the speech denoising. In addition, WavLM employs gated relative position bias for the Transformer structure to better capture the sequence ordering of input speech. We also scale up the training dataset from 60k hours to 94k hours. WavLM Large achieves state-of-the-art performance on the SUPERB benchmark, and brings significant improvements for various speech processing tasks on their representative benchmarks. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://aka.ms/wavlm.

Dictionary learning is a branch of signal processing and machine learning that aims at finding a frame (called dictionary) in which some training data admits a sparse representation. The sparser the representation, the better the dictionary. The resulting dictionary is in general a dense matrix, and its manipulation can be computationally costly both at the learning stage and later in the usage of this dictionary, for tasks such as sparse coding. Dictionary learning is thus limited to relatively small-scale problems. In this paper, inspired by usual fast transforms, we consider a general dictionary structure that allows cheaper manipulation, and propose an algorithm to learn such dictionaries --and their fast implementation-- over training data. The approach is demonstrated experimentally with the factorization of the Hadamard matrix and with synthetic dictionary learning experiments.

Models based on machine learning can enable accurate and fast molecular property predictions, which is of interest in drug discovery and material design. Various supervised machine learning models have demonstrated promising performance, but the vast chemical space and the limited availability of property labels make supervised learning challenging. Recently, unsupervised transformer-based language models pretrained on a large unlabelled corpus have produced state-of-the-art results in many downstream natural language processing tasks. Inspired by this development, we present molecular embeddings obtained by training an efficient transformer encoder model, MoLFormer, which uses rotary positional embeddings. This model employs a linear attention mechanism, coupled with highly distributed training, on SMILES sequences of 1.1 billion unlabelled molecules from the PubChem and ZINC datasets. We show that the learned molecular representation outperforms existing baselines, including supervised and self-supervised graph neural networks and language models, on several downstream tasks from ten benchmark datasets. They perform competitively on two others. Further analyses, specifically through the lens of attention, demonstrate that MoLFormer trained on chemical SMILES indeed learns the spatial relationships between atoms within a molecule. These results provide encouraging evidence that large-scale molecular language models can capture sufficient chemical and structural information to predict various distinct molecular properties, including quantum-chemical properties.

Developing large-scale foundational datasets is a critical milestone in advancing artificial intelligence (AI)-driven scientific innovation. However, unlike AI-mature fields such as natural language processing, materials science, particularly polymer research, has significantly lagged in developing extensive open datasets. This lag is primarily due to the high costs of polymer synthesis and property measurements, along with the vastness and complexity of the chemical space. This study presents PolyOmics, an omics-scale computational database generated through fully automated molecular dynamics simulation pipelines that provide diverse physical properties for over 10^5 polymeric materials. The PolyOmics database is collaboratively developed by approximately 260 researchers from 48 institutions to bridge the gap between academia and industry. Machine learning models pretrained on PolyOmics can be efficiently fine-tuned for a wide range of real-world downstream tasks, even when only limited experimental data are available. Notably, the generalisation capability of these simulation-to-real transfer models improve significantly as the size of the PolyOmics database increases, exhibiting power-law scaling. The emergence of scaling laws supports the "more is better" principle, highlighting the significance of ultralarge-scale computational materials data for improving real-world prediction performance. This unprecedented omics-scale database reveals vast unexplored regions of polymer materials, providing a foundation for AI-driven polymer science.

The generalization of learning-based high dynamic range (HDR) fusion is often limited by the availability of training data, as collecting large-scale HDR images from dynamic scenes is both costly and technically challenging. To address these challenges, we propose S2R-HDR, the first large-scale high-quality synthetic dataset for HDR fusion, with 24,000 HDR samples. Using Unreal Engine 5, we design a diverse set of realistic HDR scenes that encompass various dynamic elements, motion types, high dynamic range scenes, and lighting. Additionally, we develop an efficient rendering pipeline to generate realistic HDR images. To further mitigate the domain gap between synthetic and real-world data, we introduce S2R-Adapter, a domain adaptation designed to bridge this gap and enhance the generalization ability of models. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art HDR reconstruction performance. Dataset and code will be available at https://openimaginglab.github.io/S2R-HDR.

While deep learning has recently achieved great success on multi-view stereo (MVS), limited training data makes the trained model hard to be generalized to unseen scenarios. Compared with other computer vision tasks, it is rather difficult to collect a large-scale MVS dataset as it requires expensive active scanners and labor-intensive process to obtain ground truth 3D structures. In this paper, we introduce BlendedMVS, a novel large-scale dataset, to provide sufficient training ground truth for learning-based MVS. To create the dataset, we apply a 3D reconstruction pipeline to recover high-quality textured meshes from images of well-selected scenes. Then, we render these mesh models to color images and depth maps. To introduce the ambient lighting information during training, the rendered color images are further blended with the input images to generate the training input. Our dataset contains over 17k high-resolution images covering a variety of scenes, including cities, architectures, sculptures and small objects. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BlendedMVS endows the trained model with significantly better generalization ability compared with other MVS datasets. The dataset and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/YoYo000/BlendedMVS.

Molecular docking is a key computational tool utilized to predict the binding conformations of small molecules to protein targets, which is fundamental in the design of novel drugs. Despite recent advancements in geometric deep learning-based approaches leading to improvements in blind docking efficiency, these methods have encountered notable challenges, such as limited generalization performance on unseen proteins, the inability to concurrently address the settings of blind docking and site-specific docking, and the frequent occurrence of physical implausibilities such as inter-molecular steric clash. In this study, we introduce DeltaDock, a robust and versatile framework designed for efficient molecular docking to overcome these challenges. DeltaDock operates in a two-step process: rapid initial complex structures sampling followed by multi-scale iterative refinement of the initial structures. In the initial stage, to sample accurate structures with high efficiency, we develop a ligand-dependent binding site prediction model founded on large protein models and graph neural networks. This model is then paired with GPU-accelerated sampling algorithms. The sampled structures are updated using a multi-scale iterative refinement module that captures both protein-ligand atom-atom interactions and residue-atom interactions in the following stage. Distinct from previous geometric deep learning methods that are conditioned on the blind docking setting, DeltaDock demonstrates superior performance in both blind docking and site-specific docking settings. Comprehensive experimental results reveal that DeltaDock consistently surpasses baseline methods in terms of docking accuracy. Furthermore, it displays remarkable generalization capabilities and proficiency for predicting physically valid structures, thereby attesting to its robustness and reliability in various scenarios.

Fairness or equity in machine learning is profoundly important for societal well-being, but limited public datasets hinder its progress, especially in the area of medicine. It is undeniable that fairness in medicine is one of the most important areas for fairness learning's applications. Currently, no large-scale public medical datasets with 3D imaging data for fairness learning are available, while 3D imaging data in modern clinics are standard tests for disease diagnosis. In addition, existing medical fairness datasets are actually repurposed datasets, and therefore they typically have limited demographic identity attributes with at most three identity attributes of age, gender, and race for fairness modeling. To address this gap, we introduce our Eye Fairness dataset with 30,000 subjects (Harvard-EF) covering three major eye diseases including age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, and glaucoma affecting 380 million patients globally. Our Harvard-EF dataset includes both 2D fundus photos and 3D optical coherence tomography scans with six demographic identity attributes including age, gender, race, ethnicity, preferred language, and marital status. We also propose a fair identity scaling (FIS) approach combining group and individual scaling together to improve model fairness. Our FIS approach is compared with various state-of-the-art fairness learning methods with superior performance in the racial, gender, and ethnicity fairness tasks with 2D and 3D imaging data, which demonstrate the utilities of our Harvard-EF dataset for fairness learning. To facilitate fairness comparisons between different models, we propose performance-scaled disparity measures, which can be used to compare model fairness accounting for overall performance levels. The dataset and code are publicly accessible via https://ophai.hms.harvard.edu/datasets/harvard-ef30k.

Information on standing dead trees is important for understanding forest ecosystem functioning and resilience but has been lacking over large geographic regions. Climate change has caused large-scale tree mortality events that can remain undetected due to limited data. In this study, we propose a novel method for segmenting standing dead trees using aerial multispectral orthoimages. Because access to annotated datasets has been a significant problem in forest remote sensing due to the need for forest expertise, we introduce a method for domain transfer by leveraging domain adaptation to learn a transformation from a source domain X to target domain Y. In this Image-to-Image translation task, we aim to utilize available annotations in the target domain by pre-training a segmentation network. When images from a new study site without annotations are introduced (source domain X), these images are transformed into the target domain. Then, transfer learning is applied by inferring the pre-trained network on domain-adapted images. In addition to investigating the feasibility of current domain adaptation approaches for this objective, we propose a novel approach called the Attention-guided Domain Adaptation Network (ADA-Net) with enhanced contrastive learning. Accordingly, the ADA-Net approach provides new state-of-the-art domain adaptation performance levels outperforming existing approaches. We have evaluated the proposed approach using two datasets from Finland and the US. The USA images are converted to the Finland domain, and we show that the synthetic USA2Finland dataset exhibits similar characteristics to the Finland domain images. The software implementation is shared at https://github.com/meteahishali/ADA-Net. The data is publicly available at https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/meteahishali/aerial-imagery-for-standing-dead-tree-segmentation.

Log anomaly detection plays a critical role in ensuring the security and maintenance of modern software systems. At present, the primary approach for detecting anomalies in log data is through supervised anomaly detection. Nonetheless, existing supervised methods heavily rely on labeled data, which can be frequently limited in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised log anomaly detection method that combines the DQN algorithm from deep reinforcement learning, which is called DQNLog. DQNLog leverages a small amount of labeled data and a large-scale unlabeled dataset, effectively addressing the challenges of imbalanced data and limited labeling. This approach not only learns known anomalies by interacting with an environment biased towards anomalies but also discovers unknown anomalies by actively exploring the unlabeled dataset. Additionally, DQNLog incorporates a cross-entropy loss term to prevent model overestimation during Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). Our evaluation on three widely-used datasets demonstrates that DQNLog significantly improves recall rate and F1-score while maintaining precision, validating its practicality.

Large language models can solve new tasks without task-specific fine-tuning. This ability, also known as in-context learning (ICL), is considered an emergent ability and is primarily seen in large language models with billions of parameters. This study investigates if such emergent properties are strictly tied to model size or can be demonstrated by smaller models trained on reduced-scale data. To explore this, we simplify pre-training data and pre-train 36 causal language models with parameters varying from 1 million to 165 million parameters. We show that models trained on this simplified pre-training data demonstrate enhanced zero-shot capabilities across various tasks in simplified language, achieving performance comparable to that of pre-trained models six times larger on unrestricted language. This suggests that downscaling the language allows zero-shot learning capabilities to emerge in models with limited size. Additionally, we find that these smaller models pre-trained on simplified data demonstrate a power law relationship between the evaluation loss and the three scaling factors: compute, dataset size, and model size.

Whole-heart segmentation from CT and MRI scans is crucial for cardiovascular disease analysis, yet existing methods struggle with modality-specific biases and the need for extensive labeled datasets. To address these challenges, we propose a foundation model for whole-heart segmentation using a self-supervised learning (SSL) framework based on a student-teacher architecture. Our model is pretrained on a large, unlabeled dataset of CT and MRI scans, leveraging the xLSTM backbone to capture long-range spatial dependencies and complex anatomical structures in 3D medical images. By incorporating multi-modal pretraining, our approach ensures strong generalization across both CT and MRI modalities, mitigating modality-specific variations and improving segmentation accuracy in diverse clinical settings. The use of large-scale unlabeled data significantly reduces the dependency on manual annotations, enabling robust performance even with limited labeled data. We further introduce an xLSTM-UNet-based architecture for downstream whole-heart segmentation tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness on few-label CT and MRI datasets. Our results validate the robustness and adaptability of the proposed model, highlighting its potential for advancing automated whole-heart segmentation in medical imaging.

Imitation learning from human demonstrations is an effective means to teach robots manipulation skills. But data acquisition is a major bottleneck in applying this paradigm more broadly, due to the amount of cost and human effort involved. There has been significant interest in imitation learning for bimanual dexterous robots, like humanoids. Unfortunately, data collection is even more challenging here due to the challenges of simultaneously controlling multiple arms and multi-fingered hands. Automated data generation in simulation is a compelling, scalable alternative to fuel this need for data. To this end, we introduce DexMimicGen, a large-scale automated data generation system that synthesizes trajectories from a handful of human demonstrations for humanoid robots with dexterous hands. We present a collection of simulation environments in the setting of bimanual dexterous manipulation, spanning a range of manipulation behaviors and different requirements for coordination among the two arms. We generate 21K demos across these tasks from just 60 source human demos and study the effect of several data generation and policy learning decisions on agent performance. Finally, we present a real-to-sim-to-real pipeline and deploy it on a real-world humanoid can sorting task. Videos and more are at https://dexmimicgen.github.io/

The presence of unhealthy nodes in cloud infrastructure signals the potential failure of machines, which can significantly impact the availability and reliability of cloud services, resulting in negative customer experiences. Effectively addressing unhealthy node mitigation is therefore vital for sustaining cloud system performance. This paper introduces Deoxys, a causal inference engine tailored to recommending mitigation actions for unhealthy node in cloud systems to minimize virtual machine downtime and interruptions during unhealthy events. It employs double machine learning combined with causal forest to produce precise and reliable mitigation recommendations based solely on limited observational data collected from the historical unhealthy events. To enhance the causal inference model, Deoxys further incorporates a policy fallback mechanism based on model uncertainty and action overriding mechanisms to (i) improve the reliability of the system, and (ii) strike a good tradeoff between downtime reduction and resource utilization, thereby enhancing the overall system performance. After deploying Deoxys in a large-scale cloud infrastructure at Microsoft, our observations demonstrate that Deoxys significantly reduces average VM downtime by 53% compared to a legacy policy, while leading to 49.5% lower VM interruption rate. This substantial improvement enhances the reliability and stability of cloud platforms, resulting in a seamless customer experience.

Impressive performance on point cloud semantic segmentation has been achieved by fully-supervised methods with large amounts of labelled data. As it is labour-intensive to acquire large-scale point cloud data with point-wise labels, many attempts have been made to explore learning 3D point cloud segmentation with limited annotations. Active learning is one of the effective strategies to achieve this purpose but is still under-explored. The most recent methods of this kind measure the uncertainty of each pre-divided region for manual labelling but they suffer from redundant information and require additional efforts for region division. This paper aims at addressing this issue by developing a hierarchical point-based active learning strategy. Specifically, we measure the uncertainty for each point by a hierarchical minimum margin uncertainty module which considers the contextual information at multiple levels. Then, a feature-distance suppression strategy is designed to select important and representative points for manual labelling. Besides, to better exploit the unlabelled data, we build a semi-supervised segmentation framework based on our active strategy. Extensive experiments on the S3DIS and ScanNetV2 datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves 96.5% and 100% performance of fully-supervised baseline with only 0.07% and 0.1% training data, respectively, outperforming the state-of-the-art weakly-supervised and active learning methods. The code will be available at https://github.com/SmiletoE/HPAL.

Existing person re-identification models often have low generalizability, which is mostly due to limited availability of large-scale labeled data in training. However, labeling large-scale training data is very expensive and time-consuming, while large-scale synthetic dataset shows promising value in learning generalizable person re-identification models. Therefore, in this paper a novel and practical person re-identification task is proposed,i.e. how to use labeled synthetic dataset and unlabeled real-world dataset to train a universal model. In this way, human annotations are no longer required, and it is scalable to large and diverse real-world datasets. To address the task, we introduce a framework with high generalizability, namely DomainMix. Specifically, the proposed method firstly clusters the unlabeled real-world images and selects the reliable clusters. During training, to address the large domain gap between two domains, a domain-invariant feature learning method is proposed, which introduces a new loss,i.e. domain balance loss, to conduct an adversarial learning between domain-invariant feature learning and domain discrimination, and meanwhile learns a discriminative feature for person re-identification. This way, the domain gap between synthetic and real-world data is much reduced, and the learned feature is generalizable thanks to the large-scale and diverse training data. Experimental results show that the proposed annotation-free method is more or less comparable to the counterpart trained with full human annotations, which is quite promising. In addition, it achieves the current state of the art on several person re-identification datasets under direct cross-dataset evaluation.

Access to large, diverse RGB-D datasets is critical for training RGB-D scene understanding algorithms. However, existing datasets still cover only a limited number of views or a restricted scale of spaces. In this paper, we introduce Matterport3D, a large-scale RGB-D dataset containing 10,800 panoramic views from 194,400 RGB-D images of 90 building-scale scenes. Annotations are provided with surface reconstructions, camera poses, and 2D and 3D semantic segmentations. The precise global alignment and comprehensive, diverse panoramic set of views over entire buildings enable a variety of supervised and self-supervised computer vision tasks, including keypoint matching, view overlap prediction, normal prediction from color, semantic segmentation, and region classification.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for robotic manipulation. Despite substantial progress enabled by large-scale pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT), these models face two fundamental challenges: (i) the scarcity and high cost of large-scale human-operated robotic trajectories required for SFT scaling, and (ii) limited generalization to tasks involving distribution shift. Recent breakthroughs in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) demonstrate that reinforcement learning (RL) can dramatically enhance step-by-step reasoning capabilities, raising a natural question: Can RL similarly improve the long-horizon step-by-step action planning of VLA? In this work, we introduce SimpleVLA-RL, an efficient RL framework tailored for VLA models. Building upon veRL, we introduce VLA-specific trajectory sampling, scalable parallelization, multi-environment rendering, and optimized loss computation. When applied to OpenVLA-OFT, SimpleVLA-RL achieves SoTA performance on LIBERO and even outperforms pi_0 on RoboTwin 1.0\&2.0 with the exploration-enhancing strategies we introduce. SimpleVLA-RL not only reduces dependence on large-scale data and enables robust generalization, but also remarkably surpasses SFT in real-world tasks. Moreover, we identify a novel phenomenon ``pushcut'' during RL training, wherein the policy discovers previously unseen patterns beyond those seen in the previous training process. Github: https://github.com/PRIME-RL/SimpleVLA-RL

Recent research has focused on enhancing the capability of smaller models through imitation learning, drawing on the outputs generated by large foundation models (LFMs). A number of issues impact the quality of these models, ranging from limited imitation signals from shallow LFM outputs; small scale homogeneous training data; and most notably a lack of rigorous evaluation resulting in overestimating the small model's capability as they tend to learn to imitate the style, but not the reasoning process of LFMs. To address these challenges, we develop Orca (We are working with our legal team to publicly release a diff of the model weights in accordance with LLaMA's release policy to be published at https://aka.ms/orca-lm), a 13-billion parameter model that learns to imitate the reasoning process of LFMs. Orca learns from rich signals from GPT-4 including explanation traces; step-by-step thought processes; and other complex instructions, guided by teacher assistance from ChatGPT. To promote this progressive learning, we tap into large-scale and diverse imitation data with judicious sampling and selection. Orca surpasses conventional state-of-the-art instruction-tuned models such as Vicuna-13B by more than 100% in complex zero-shot reasoning benchmarks like Big-Bench Hard (BBH) and 42% on AGIEval. Moreover, Orca reaches parity with ChatGPT on the BBH benchmark and shows competitive performance (4 pts gap with optimized system message) in professional and academic examinations like the SAT, LSAT, GRE, and GMAT, both in zero-shot settings without CoT; while trailing behind GPT-4. Our research indicates that learning from step-by-step explanations, whether these are generated by humans or more advanced AI models, is a promising direction to improve model capabilities and skills.

Sequential learning paradigms pose challenges for gradient-based deep learning due to difficulties incorporating new data and retaining prior knowledge. While Gaussian processes elegantly tackle these problems, they struggle with scalability and handling rich inputs, such as images. To address these issues, we introduce a technique that converts neural networks from weight space to function space, through a dual parameterization. Our parameterization offers: (i) a way to scale function-space methods to large data sets via sparsification, (ii) retention of prior knowledge when access to past data is limited, and (iii) a mechanism to incorporate new data without retraining. Our experiments demonstrate that we can retain knowledge in continual learning and incorporate new data efficiently. We further show its strengths in uncertainty quantification and guiding exploration in model-based RL. Further information and code is available on the project website.

We introduce VisTA, a new reinforcement learning framework that empowers visual agents to dynamically explore, select, and combine tools from a diverse library based on empirical performance. Existing methods for tool-augmented reasoning either rely on training-free prompting or large-scale fine-tuning; both lack active tool exploration and typically assume limited tool diversity, and fine-tuning methods additionally demand extensive human supervision. In contrast, VisTA leverages end-to-end reinforcement learning to iteratively refine sophisticated, query-specific tool selection strategies, using task outcomes as feedback signals. Through Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), our framework enables an agent to autonomously discover effective tool-selection pathways without requiring explicit reasoning supervision. Experiments on the ChartQA, Geometry3K, and BlindTest benchmarks demonstrate that VisTA achieves substantial performance gains over training-free baselines, especially on out-of-distribution examples. These results highlight VisTA's ability to enhance generalization, adaptively utilize diverse tools, and pave the way for flexible, experience-driven visual reasoning systems.

Time series foundation models (TSFMs) offer strong zero-shot forecasting via large-scale pre-training, yet fine-tuning remains critical for boosting performance in domains with limited public data. With the growing number of TSFMs, efficiently identifying the best model for downstream fine-tuning becomes increasingly challenging. In this work, we introduce TimeTic, a transferability estimation framework that recasts model selection as an in-context-learning problem: given observations on known (source) datasets, it predicts how a TSFM will perform after fine-tuning on a downstream (target) dataset. TimeTic flexibly organizes the observed model-data relationships as contextual information, allowing it to adapt seamlessly to various test-time scenarios. Leveraging the natural tabular structure formed by dataset meta-features, model characteristics, and fine-tuned performance, we employ tabular foundation models to serve as in-context learners. We further introduce a novel model characterization based on entropy evolution across model layers, capturing embedding-space distinctions and enabling TimeTic to generalize across arbitrary model sets. We establish a comprehensive benchmark for transferability estimation including 10 datasets, 10 foundation models, and 3 forecasting tasks. On this benchmark, TimeTic's estimation demonstrates strong alignment with actual fine-tuned performance for previously unseen datasets, achieving a mean rank correlation of approximately 0.6 and a 30% improvement compared to using zero-shot performance as the transferability score.

Missions to small celestial bodies rely heavily on optical feature tracking for characterization of and relative navigation around the target body. While deep learning has led to great advancements in feature detection and description, training and validating data-driven models for space applications is challenging due to the limited availability of large-scale, annotated datasets. This paper introduces AstroVision, a large-scale dataset comprised of 115,970 densely annotated, real images of 16 different small bodies captured during past and ongoing missions. We leverage AstroVision to develop a set of standardized benchmarks and conduct an exhaustive evaluation of both handcrafted and data-driven feature detection and description methods. Next, we employ AstroVision for end-to-end training of a state-of-the-art, deep feature detection and description network and demonstrate improved performance on multiple benchmarks. The full benchmarking pipeline and the dataset will be made publicly available to facilitate the advancement of computer vision algorithms for space applications.

Two-dimensional (2D) Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, particularly Heteronuclear Single Quantum Coherence (HSQC) spectroscopy, plays a critical role in elucidating molecular structures, interactions, and electronic properties. However, accurately interpreting 2D NMR data remains labor-intensive and error-prone, requiring highly trained domain experts, especially for complex molecules. Machine Learning (ML) holds significant potential in 2D NMR analysis by learning molecular representations and recognizing complex patterns from data. However, progress has been limited by the lack of large-scale and high-quality annotated datasets. In this work, we introduce 2DNMRGym, the first annotated experimental dataset designed for ML-based molecular representation learning in 2D NMR. It includes over 22,000 HSQC spectra, along with the corresponding molecular graphs and SMILES strings. Uniquely, 2DNMRGym adopts a surrogate supervision setup: models are trained using algorithm-generated annotations derived from a previously validated method and evaluated on a held-out set of human-annotated gold-standard labels. This enables rigorous assessment of a model's ability to generalize from imperfect supervision to expert-level interpretation. We provide benchmark results using a series of 2D and 3D GNN and GNN transformer models, establishing a strong foundation for future work. 2DNMRGym supports scalable model training and introduces a chemically meaningful benchmark for evaluating atom-level molecular representations in NMR-guided structural tasks. Our data and code is open-source and available on Huggingface and Github.

Global climate models (GCMs) are the main tools for understanding and predicting climate change. However, due to limited numerical resolutions, these models suffer from major structural uncertainties; e.g., they cannot resolve critical processes such as small-scale eddies in atmospheric and oceanic turbulence. Thus, such small-scale processes have to be represented as a function of the resolved scales via closures (parametrization). The accuracy of these closures is particularly important for capturing climate extremes. Traditionally, such closures are based on heuristics and simplifying assumptions about the unresolved physics. Recently, supervised-learned closures, trained offline on high-fidelity data, have been shown to outperform the classical physics-based closures. However, this approach requires a significant amount of high-fidelity training data and can also lead to instabilities. Reinforcement learning is emerging as a potent alternative for developing such closures as it requires only low-order statistics and leads to stable closures. In Scientific Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (SMARL) computational elements serve a dual role of discretization points and learning agents. We leverage SMARL and fundamentals of turbulence physics to learn closures for prototypes of atmospheric and oceanic turbulence. The policy is trained using only the enstrophy spectrum, which is nearly invariant and can be estimated from a few high-fidelity samples (these few samples are far from enough for supervised/offline learning). We show that these closures lead to stable low-resolution simulations that, at a fraction of the cost, can reproduce the high-fidelity simulations' statistics, including the tails of the probability density functions. The results demonstrate the high potential of SMARL for closure modeling for GCMs, especially in the regime of scarce data and indirect observations.

New astronomical tasks are often related to earlier tasks for which labels have already been collected. We adapt the contrastive framework BYOL to leverage those labels as a pretraining task while also enforcing augmentation invariance. For large-scale pretraining, we introduce GZ-Evo v0.1, a set of 96.5M volunteer responses for 552k galaxy images plus a further 1.34M comparable unlabelled galaxies. Most of the 206 GZ-Evo answers are unknown for any given galaxy, and so our pretraining task uses a Dirichlet loss that naturally handles unknown answers. GZ-Evo pretraining, with or without hybrid learning, improves on direct training even with plentiful downstream labels (+4% accuracy with 44k labels). Our hybrid pretraining/contrastive method further improves downstream accuracy vs. pretraining or contrastive learning, especially in the low-label transfer regime (+6% accuracy with 750 labels).

Understanding entailment and contradiction is fundamental to understanding natural language, and inference about entailment and contradiction is a valuable testing ground for the development of semantic representations. However, machine learning research in this area has been dramatically limited by the lack of large-scale resources. To address this, we introduce the Stanford Natural Language Inference corpus, a new, freely available collection of labeled sentence pairs, written by humans doing a novel grounded task based on image captioning. At 570K pairs, it is two orders of magnitude larger than all other resources of its type. This increase in scale allows lexicalized classifiers to outperform some sophisticated existing entailment models, and it allows a neural network-based model to perform competitively on natural language inference benchmarks for the first time.

We study joint video and language (VL) pre-training to enable cross-modality learning and benefit plentiful downstream VL tasks. Existing works either extract low-quality video features or learn limited text embedding, while neglecting that high-resolution videos and diversified semantics can significantly improve cross-modality learning. In this paper, we propose a novel High-resolution and Diversified VIdeo-LAnguage pre-training model (HD-VILA) for many visual tasks. In particular, we collect a large dataset with two distinct properties: 1) the first high-resolution dataset including 371.5k hours of 720p videos, and 2) the most diversified dataset covering 15 popular YouTube categories. To enable VL pre-training, we jointly optimize the HD-VILA model by a hybrid Transformer that learns rich spatiotemporal features, and a multimodal Transformer that enforces interactions of the learned video features with diversified texts. Our pre-training model achieves new state-of-the-art results in 10 VL understanding tasks and 2 more novel text-to-visual generation tasks. For example, we outperform SOTA models with relative increases of 40.4% R@1 in zero-shot MSR-VTT text-to-video retrieval task and 55.4% in high-resolution dataset LSMDC. The learned VL embedding is also effective in generating visually pleasing and semantically relevant results in text-to-visual editing and super-resolution tasks.

Machine learning-based computer-generated holography (ML-CGH) has advanced rapidly in recent years, yet progress is constrained by the limited availability of high-quality, large-scale hologram datasets. To address this, we present KOREATECH-CGH, a publicly available dataset comprising 6,000 pairs of RGB-D images and complex holograms across resolutions ranging from 256*256 to 2048*2048, with depth ranges extending to the theoretical limits of the angular spectrum method for wide 3D scene coverage. To improve hologram quality at large depth ranges, we introduce amplitude projection, a post-processing technique that replaces amplitude components of hologram wavefields at each depth layer while preserving phase. This approach enhances reconstruction fidelity, achieving 27.01 dB PSNR and 0.87 SSIM, surpassing a recent optimized silhouette-masking layer-based method by 2.03 dB and 0.04 SSIM, respectively. We further validate the utility of KOREATECH-CGH through experiments on hologram generation and super-resolution using state-of-the-art ML models, confirming its applicability for training and evaluating next-generation ML-CGH systems.

In this paper, we propose the LoRA of Change (LoC) framework for image editing with visual instructions, i.e., before-after image pairs. Compared to the ambiguities, insufficient specificity, and diverse interpretations of natural language, visual instructions can accurately reflect users' intent. Building on the success of LoRA in text-based image editing and generation, we dynamically learn an instruction-specific LoRA to encode the "change" in a before-after image pair, enhancing the interpretability and reusability of our model. Furthermore, generalizable models for image editing with visual instructions typically require quad data, i.e., a before-after image pair, along with query and target images. Due to the scarcity of such quad data, existing models are limited to a narrow range of visual instructions. To overcome this limitation, we introduce the LoRA Reverse optimization technique, enabling large-scale training with paired data alone. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our model produces high-quality images that align with user intent and support a broad spectrum of real-world visual instructions.

We present SignCLIP, which re-purposes CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) to project spoken language text and sign language videos, two classes of natural languages of distinct modalities, into the same space. SignCLIP is an efficient method of learning useful visual representations for sign language processing from large-scale, multilingual video-text pairs, without directly optimizing for a specific task or sign language which is often of limited size. We pretrain SignCLIP on Spreadthesign, a prominent sign language dictionary consisting of ~500 thousand video clips in up to 44 sign languages, and evaluate it with various downstream datasets. SignCLIP discerns in-domain signing with notable text-to-video/video-to-text retrieval accuracy. It also performs competitively for out-of-domain downstream tasks such as isolated sign language recognition upon essential few-shot prompting or fine-tuning. We analyze the latent space formed by the spoken language text and sign language poses, which provides additional linguistic insights. Our code and models are openly available.

Federated learning (FL) emerges as a decentralized learning framework which trains models from multiple distributed clients without sharing their data to preserve privacy. Recently, large-scale pre-trained models (e.g., Vision Transformer) have shown a strong capability of deriving robust representations. However, the data heterogeneity among clients, the limited computation resources, and the communication bandwidth restrict the deployment of large-scale models in FL frameworks. To leverage robust representations from large-scale models while enabling efficient model personalization for heterogeneous clients, we propose a novel personalized FL framework of client-specific Prompt Generation (pFedPG), which learns to deploy a personalized prompt generator at the server for producing client-specific visual prompts that efficiently adapts frozen backbones to local data distributions. Our proposed framework jointly optimizes the stages of personalized prompt adaptation locally and personalized prompt generation globally. The former aims to train visual prompts that adapt foundation models to each client, while the latter observes local optimization directions to generate personalized prompts for all clients. Through extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, we show that our pFedPG is favorable against state-of-the-art personalized FL methods under various types of data heterogeneity, allowing computation and communication efficient model personalization.

Despite the considerable progress in automatic abdominal multi-organ segmentation from CT/MRI scans in recent years, a comprehensive evaluation of the models' capabilities is hampered by the lack of a large-scale benchmark from diverse clinical scenarios. Constraint by the high cost of collecting and labeling 3D medical data, most of the deep learning models to date are driven by datasets with a limited number of organs of interest or samples, which still limits the power of modern deep models and makes it difficult to provide a fully comprehensive and fair estimate of various methods. To mitigate the limitations, we present AMOS, a large-scale, diverse, clinical dataset for abdominal organ segmentation. AMOS provides 500 CT and 100 MRI scans collected from multi-center, multi-vendor, multi-modality, multi-phase, multi-disease patients, each with voxel-level annotations of 15 abdominal organs, providing challenging examples and test-bed for studying robust segmentation algorithms under diverse targets and scenarios. We further benchmark several state-of-the-art medical segmentation models to evaluate the status of the existing methods on this new challenging dataset. We have made our datasets, benchmark servers, and baselines publicly available, and hope to inspire future research. Information can be found at https://amos22.grand-challenge.org.

Universal source separation targets at separating the audio sources of an arbitrary mix, removing the constraint to operate on a specific domain like speech or music. Yet, the potential of universal source separation is limited because most existing works focus on mixes with predominantly sound events, and small training datasets also limit its potential for supervised learning. Here, we study a single general audio source separation (GASS) model trained to separate speech, music, and sound events in a supervised fashion with a large-scale dataset. We assess GASS models on a diverse set of tasks. Our strong in-distribution results show the feasibility of GASS models, and the competitive out-of-distribution performance in sound event and speech separation shows its generalization abilities. Yet, it is challenging for GASS models to generalize for separating out-of-distribution cinematic and music content. We also fine-tune GASS models on each dataset and consistently outperform the ones without pre-training. All fine-tuned models (except the music separation one) obtain state-of-the-art results in their respective benchmarks.

We present XLand-MiniGrid, a suite of tools and grid-world environments for meta-reinforcement learning research inspired by the diversity and depth of XLand and the simplicity and minimalism of MiniGrid. XLand-Minigrid is written in JAX, designed to be highly scalable, and can potentially run on GPU or TPU accelerators, democratizing large-scale experimentation with limited resources. To demonstrate the generality of our library, we have implemented some well-known single-task environments as well as new meta-learning environments capable of generating 10^8 distinct tasks. We have empirically shown that the proposed environments can scale up to 2^{13} parallel instances on the GPU, reaching tens of millions of steps per second.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated strong potential in training large language models (LLMs) capable of complex reasoning for real-world problem solving. More recently, RL has been leveraged to create sophisticated LLM-based search agents that adeptly combine reasoning with search engine use. While the use of RL for training search agents is promising, the optimal design of such agents remains not fully understood. In particular, key factors -- such as (1) reward formulation, (2) the choice and characteristics of the underlying LLM, and (3) the role of the search engine in the RL process -- require further investigation. In this work, we conduct comprehensive empirical studies to systematically investigate these and offer actionable insights. We highlight several key findings: format rewards are effective in improving final performance, whereas intermediate retrieval rewards have limited impact; the scale and initialization of the LLM (general-purpose vs. reasoning-specialized) significantly influence RL outcomes; and the choice of search engine plays a critical role in shaping RL training dynamics and the robustness of the trained agent during inference. These establish important guidelines for successfully building and deploying LLM-based search agents in real-world applications. Code is available at https://github.com/PeterGriffinJin/Search-R1.

Understanding the 3D structures of protein multimers is crucial, as they play a vital role in regulating various cellular processes. It has been empirically confirmed that the multimer structure prediction~(MSP) can be well handled in a step-wise assembly fashion using provided dimer structures and predicted protein-protein interactions~(PPIs). However, due to the biological gap in the formation of dimers and larger multimers, directly applying PPI prediction techniques can often cause a poor generalization to the MSP task. To address this challenge, we aim to extend the PPI knowledge to multimers of different scales~(i.e., chain numbers). Specifically, we propose \textsc{PromptMSP}, a pre-training and Prompt tuning framework for Multimer Structure Prediction. First, we tailor the source and target tasks for effective PPI knowledge learning and efficient inference, respectively. We design PPI-inspired prompt learning to narrow the gaps of two task formats and generalize the PPI knowledge to multimers of different scales. We provide a meta-learning strategy to learn a reliable initialization of the prompt model, enabling our prompting framework to effectively adapt to limited data for large-scale multimers. Empirically, we achieve both significant accuracy (RMSD and TM-Score) and efficiency improvements compared to advanced MSP models. The code, data and checkpoints are released at https://github.com/zqgao22/PromptMSP.

Explicit decomposition modeling, which involves breaking down complex tasks into more straightforward and often more interpretable sub-tasks, has long been a central theme in developing robust and interpretable NLU systems. However, despite the many datasets and resources built as part of this effort, the majority have small-scale annotations and limited scope, which is insufficient to solve general decomposition tasks. In this paper, we look at large-scale intermediate pre-training of decomposition-based transformers using distant supervision from comparable texts, particularly large-scale parallel news. We show that with such intermediate pre-training, developing robust decomposition-based models for a diverse range of tasks becomes more feasible. For example, on semantic parsing, our model, DecompT5, improves 20% to 30% on two datasets, Overnight and TORQUE, over the baseline language model. We further use DecompT5 to build a novel decomposition-based QA system named DecompEntail, improving over state-of-the-art models, including GPT-3, on both HotpotQA and StrategyQA by 8% and 4%, respectively.

Model-based reconstruction employing the time separation technique (TST) was found to improve dynamic perfusion imaging of the liver using C-arm cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT). To apply TST using prior knowledge extracted from CT perfusion data, the liver should be accurately segmented from the CT scans. Reconstructions of primary and model-based CBCT data need to be segmented for proper visualisation and interpretation of perfusion maps. This research proposes Turbolift learning, which trains a modified version of the multi-scale Attention UNet on different liver segmentation tasks serially, following the order of the trainings CT, CBCT, CBCT TST - making the previous trainings act as pre-training stages for the subsequent ones - addressing the problem of limited number of datasets for training. For the final task of liver segmentation from CBCT TST, the proposed method achieved an overall Dice scores of 0.874pm0.031 and 0.905pm0.007 in 6-fold and 4-fold cross-validation experiments, respectively - securing statistically significant improvements over the model, which was trained only for that task. Experiments revealed that Turbolift not only improves the overall performance of the model but also makes it robust against artefacts originating from the embolisation materials and truncation artefacts. Additionally, in-depth analyses confirmed the order of the segmentation tasks. This paper shows the potential of segmenting the liver from CT, CBCT, and CBCT TST, learning from the available limited training data, which can possibly be used in the future for the visualisation and evaluation of the perfusion maps for the treatment evaluation of liver diseases.

While multimodal conversation agents are gaining importance in several domains such as retail, travel etc., deep learning research in this area has been limited primarily due to the lack of availability of large-scale, open chatlogs. To overcome this bottleneck, in this paper we introduce the task of multimodal, domain-aware conversations, and propose the MMD benchmark dataset. This dataset was gathered by working in close coordination with large number of domain experts in the retail domain. These experts suggested various conversations flows and dialog states which are typically seen in multimodal conversations in the fashion domain. Keeping these flows and states in mind, we created a dataset consisting of over 150K conversation sessions between shoppers and sales agents, with the help of in-house annotators using a semi-automated manually intense iterative process. With this dataset, we propose 5 new sub-tasks for multimodal conversations along with their evaluation methodology. We also propose two multimodal neural models in the encode-attend-decode paradigm and demonstrate their performance on two of the sub-tasks, namely text response generation and best image response selection. These experiments serve to establish baseline performance and open new research directions for each of these sub-tasks. Further, for each of the sub-tasks, we present a `per-state evaluation' of 9 most significant dialog states, which would enable more focused research into understanding the challenges and complexities involved in each of these states.

Recent advances in autoregressive (AR) models have demonstrated their potential to rival diffusion models in image synthesis. However, for complex spatially-conditioned generation, current AR approaches rely on fine-tuning the pre-trained model, leading to significant training costs. In this paper, we propose the Efficient Control Model (ECM), a plug-and-play framework featuring a lightweight control module that introduces control signals via a distributed architecture. This architecture consists of context-aware attention layers that refine conditional features using real-time generated tokens, and a shared gated feed-forward network (FFN) designed to maximize the utilization of its limited capacity and ensure coherent control feature learning. Furthermore, recognizing the critical role of early-stage generation in determining semantic structure, we introduce an early-centric sampling strategy that prioritizes learning early control sequences. This approach reduces computational cost by lowering the number of training tokens per iteration, while a complementary temperature scheduling during inference compensates for the resulting insufficient training of late-stage tokens. Extensive experiments on scale-based AR models validate that our method achieves high-fidelity and diverse control over image generation, surpassing existing baselines while significantly improving both training and inference efficiency.

Neural network pruning is an essential technique for reducing the size and complexity of deep neural networks, enabling large-scale models on devices with limited resources. However, existing pruning approaches heavily rely on training data for guiding the pruning strategies, making them ineffective for federated learning over distributed and confidential datasets. Additionally, the memory- and computation-intensive pruning process becomes infeasible for recourse-constrained devices in federated learning. To address these challenges, we propose FedTiny, a distributed pruning framework for federated learning that generates specialized tiny models for memory- and computing-constrained devices. We introduce two key modules in FedTiny to adaptively search coarse- and finer-pruned specialized models to fit deployment scenarios with sparse and cheap local computation. First, an adaptive batch normalization selection module is designed to mitigate biases in pruning caused by the heterogeneity of local data. Second, a lightweight progressive pruning module aims to finer prune the models under strict memory and computational budgets, allowing the pruning policy for each layer to be gradually determined rather than evaluating the overall model structure. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of FedTiny, which outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, particularly when compressing deep models to extremely sparse tiny models. FedTiny achieves an accuracy improvement of 2.61% while significantly reducing the computational cost by 95.91% and the memory footprint by 94.01% compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Pre-trained models have proved to be powerful in enhancing task-oriented dialog systems. However, current pre-training methods mainly focus on enhancing dialog understanding and generation tasks while neglecting the exploitation of dialog policy. In this paper, we propose GALAXY, a novel pre-trained dialog model that explicitly learns dialog policy from limited labeled dialogs and large-scale unlabeled dialog corpora via semi-supervised learning. Specifically, we introduce a dialog act prediction task for policy optimization during pre-training and employ a consistency regularization term to refine the learned representation with the help of unlabeled dialogs. We also implement a gating mechanism to weigh suitable unlabeled dialog samples. Empirical results show that GALAXY substantially improves the performance of task-oriented dialog systems, and achieves new state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets: In-Car, MultiWOZ2.0 and MultiWOZ2.1, improving their end-to-end combined scores by 2.5, 5.3 and 5.5 points, respectively. We also show that GALAXY has a stronger few-shot ability than existing models under various low-resource settings.

Recent progress in robot learning has been driven by large-scale datasets and powerful visuomotor policy architectures, yet policy robustness remains limited by the substantial cost of collecting diverse demonstrations, particularly for spatial generalization in manipulation tasks. To reduce repetitive data collection, we present Real2Edit2Real, a framework that generates new demonstrations by bridging 3D editability with 2D visual data through a 3D control interface. Our approach first reconstructs scene geometry from multi-view RGB observations with a metric-scale 3D reconstruction model. Based on the reconstructed geometry, we perform depth-reliable 3D editing on point clouds to generate new manipulation trajectories while geometrically correcting the robot poses to recover physically consistent depth, which serves as a reliable condition for synthesizing new demonstrations. Finally, we propose a multi-conditional video generation model guided by depth as the primary control signal, together with action, edge, and ray maps, to synthesize spatially augmented multi-view manipulation videos. Experiments on four real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that policies trained on data generated from only 1-5 source demonstrations can match or outperform those trained on 50 real-world demonstrations, improving data efficiency by up to 10-50x. Moreover, experimental results on height and texture editing demonstrate the framework's flexibility and extensibility, indicating its potential to serve as a unified data generation framework.

Observational astronomy relies on visual feature identification to detect critical astrophysical phenomena. While machine learning (ML) increasingly automates this process, models often struggle with generalization in large-scale surveys due to the limited representativeness of labeled datasets -- whether from simulations or human annotation -- a challenge pronounced for rare yet scientifically valuable objects. To address this, we propose a conditional diffusion model to synthesize realistic galaxy images for augmenting ML training data. Leveraging the Galaxy Zoo 2 dataset which contains visual feature -- galaxy image pairs from volunteer annotation, we demonstrate that our model generates diverse, high-fidelity galaxy images closely adhere to the specified morphological feature conditions. Moreover, this model enables generative extrapolation to project well-annotated data into unseen domains and advancing rare object detection. Integrating synthesized images into ML pipelines improves performance in standard morphology classification, boosting completeness and purity by up to 30\% across key metrics. For rare object detection, using early-type galaxies with prominent dust lane features ( sim0.1\% in GZ2 dataset) as a test case, our approach doubled the number of detected instances from 352 to 872, compared to previous studies based on visual inspection. This study highlights the power of generative models to bridge gaps between scarce labeled data and the vast, uncharted parameter space of observational astronomy and sheds insight for future astrophysical foundation model developments. Our project homepage is available at https://galaxysd-webpage.streamlit.app/.

Chord progressions encapsulate important information about music, pertaining to its structure and conveyed emotions. They serve as the backbone of musical composition, and in many cases, they are the sole information required for a musician to play along and follow the music. Despite their importance, chord progressions as a data domain remain underexplored. There is a lack of large-scale datasets suitable for deep learning applications, and limited research exploring chord progressions as an input modality. In this work, we present Chordonomicon, a dataset of over 666,000 songs and their chord progressions, annotated with structural parts, genre, and release date - created by scraping various sources of user-generated progressions and associated metadata. We demonstrate the practical utility of the Chordonomicon dataset for classification and generation tasks, and discuss its potential to provide valuable insights to the research community. Chord progressions are unique in their ability to be represented in multiple formats (e.g. text, graph) and the wealth of information chords convey in given contexts, such as their harmonic function . These characteristics make the Chordonomicon an ideal testbed for exploring advanced machine learning techniques, including transformers, graph machine learning, and hybrid systems that combine knowledge representation and machine learning.

With the rapid increase in the amount of public code repositories, developers maintain a great desire to retrieve precise code snippets by using natural language. Despite existing deep learning based approaches(e.g., DeepCS and MMAN) have provided the end-to-end solutions (i.e., accepts natural language as queries and shows related code fragments retrieved directly from code corpus), the accuracy of code search in the large-scale repositories is still limited by the code representation (e.g., AST) and modeling (e.g., directly fusing the features in the attention stage). In this paper, we propose a novel learnable deep Graph for Code Search (calleddeGraphCS), to transfer source code into variable-based flow graphs based on the intermediate representation technique, which can model code semantics more precisely compared to process the code as text directly or use the syntactic tree representation. Furthermore, we propose a well-designed graph optimization mechanism to refine the code representation, and apply an improved gated graph neural network to model variable-based flow graphs. To evaluate the effectiveness of deGraphCS, we collect a large-scale dataset from GitHub containing 41,152 code snippets written in C language, and reproduce several typical deep code search methods for comparison. Besides, we design a qualitative user study to verify the practical value of our approach. The experimental results have shown that deGraphCS can achieve state-of-the-art performances, and accurately retrieve code snippets satisfying the needs of the users.

It has been shown that traditional deep learning methods for electronic microscopy segmentation usually suffer from low transferability when samples and annotations are limited, while large-scale vision foundation models are more robust when transferring between different domains but facing sub-optimal improvement under fine-tuning. In this work, we present a new few-shot domain adaptation framework SAMDA, which combines the Segment Anything Model(SAM) with nnUNet in the embedding space to achieve high transferability and accuracy. Specifically, we choose the Unet-based network as the "expert" component to learn segmentation features efficiently and design a SAM-based adaptation module as the "generic" component for domain transfer. By amalgamating the "generic" and "expert" components, we mitigate the modality imbalance in the complex pre-training knowledge inherent to large-scale Vision Foundation models and the challenge of transferability inherent to traditional neural networks. The effectiveness of our model is evaluated on two electron microscopic image datasets with different modalities for mitochondria segmentation, which improves the dice coefficient on the target domain by 6.7%. Also, the SAM-based adaptor performs significantly better with only a single annotated image than the 10-shot domain adaptation on nnUNet. We further verify our model on four MRI datasets from different sources to prove its generalization ability.

A shared goal of several machine learning communities like continual learning, meta-learning and transfer learning, is to design algorithms and models that efficiently and robustly adapt to unseen tasks. An even more ambitious goal is to build models that never stop adapting, and that become increasingly more efficient through time by suitably transferring the accrued knowledge. Beyond the study of the actual learning algorithm and model architecture, there are several hurdles towards our quest to build such models, such as the choice of learning protocol, metric of success and data needed to validate research hypotheses. In this work, we introduce the Never-Ending VIsual-classification Stream (NEVIS'22), a benchmark consisting of a stream of over 100 visual classification tasks, sorted chronologically and extracted from papers sampled uniformly from computer vision proceedings spanning the last three decades. The resulting stream reflects what the research community thought was meaningful at any point in time, and it serves as an ideal test bed to assess how well models can adapt to new tasks, and do so better and more efficiently as time goes by. Despite being limited to classification, the resulting stream has a rich diversity of tasks from OCR, to texture analysis, scene recognition, and so forth. The diversity is also reflected in the wide range of dataset sizes, spanning over four orders of magnitude. Overall, NEVIS'22 poses an unprecedented challenge for current sequential learning approaches due to the scale and diversity of tasks, yet with a low entry barrier as it is limited to a single modality and well understood supervised learning problems. Moreover, we provide a reference implementation including strong baselines and an evaluation protocol to compare methods in terms of their trade-off between accuracy and compute.

Few-shot image generation (FSIG) aims to learn to generate new and diverse samples given an extremely limited number of samples from a domain, e.g., 10 training samples. Recent work has addressed the problem using transfer learning approach, leveraging a GAN pretrained on a large-scale source domain dataset and adapting that model to the target domain based on very limited target domain samples. Central to recent FSIG methods are knowledge preserving criteria, which aim to select a subset of source model's knowledge to be preserved into the adapted model. However, a major limitation of existing methods is that their knowledge preserving criteria consider only source domain/source task, and they fail to consider target domain/adaptation task in selecting source model's knowledge, casting doubt on their suitability for setups of different proximity between source and target domain. Our work makes two contributions. As our first contribution, we re-visit recent FSIG works and their experiments. Our important finding is that, under setups which assumption of close proximity between source and target domains is relaxed, existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods which consider only source domain/source task in knowledge preserving perform no better than a baseline fine-tuning method. To address the limitation of existing methods, as our second contribution, we propose Adaptation-Aware kernel Modulation (AdAM) to address general FSIG of different source-target domain proximity. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method consistently achieves SOTA performance across source/target domains of different proximity, including challenging setups when source and target domains are more apart. Project Page: https://yunqing-me.github.io/AdAM/

Large-scale pretraining and instruction tuning have been successful for training general-purpose language models with broad competencies. However, extending to general-purpose vision-language models is challenging due to the distributional diversity in visual inputs. A recent line of work explores vision-language instruction tuning, taking inspiration from the Query Transformer (QFormer) approach proposed in BLIP-2 models for bridging frozen modalities. However, these approaches rely heavily on large-scale multi-modal pretraining for representation learning before eventual finetuning, incurring a huge computational overhead, poor scaling, and limited accessibility. To that end, we propose a more efficient method for QFormer-based vision-language alignment and demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategy compared to existing baselines in improving the efficiency of vision-language pretraining.

Building learning agents that can progressively learn and accumulate knowledge is the core goal of the continual learning (CL) research field. Unfortunately, training a model on new data usually compromises the performance on past data. In the CL literature, this effect is referred to as catastrophic forgetting (CF). CF has been largely studied, and a plethora of methods have been proposed to address it on short sequences of non-overlapping tasks. In such setups, CF always leads to a quick and significant drop in performance in past tasks. Nevertheless, despite CF, recent work showed that SGD training on linear models accumulates knowledge in a CL regression setup. This phenomenon becomes especially visible when tasks reoccur. We might then wonder if DNNs trained with SGD or any standard gradient-based optimization accumulate knowledge in such a way. Such phenomena would have interesting consequences for applying DNNs to real continual scenarios. Indeed, standard gradient-based optimization methods are significantly less computationally expensive than existing CL algorithms. In this paper, we study the progressive knowledge accumulation (KA) in DNNs trained with gradient-based algorithms in long sequences of tasks with data re-occurrence. We propose a new framework, SCoLe (Scaling Continual Learning), to investigate KA and discover that catastrophic forgetting has a limited effect on DNNs trained with SGD. When trained on long sequences with data sparsely re-occurring, the overall accuracy improves, which might be counter-intuitive given the CF phenomenon. We empirically investigate KA in DNNs under various data occurrence frequencies and propose simple and scalable strategies to increase knowledge accumulation in DNNs.

Despite being the workhorse of deep learning, the backpropagation algorithm is no panacea. It enforces sequential layer updates, thus preventing efficient parallelization of the training process. Furthermore, its biological plausibility is being challenged. Alternative schemes have been devised; yet, under the constraint of synaptic asymmetry, none have scaled to modern deep learning tasks and architectures. Here, we challenge this perspective, and study the applicability of Direct Feedback Alignment to neural view synthesis, recommender systems, geometric learning, and natural language processing. In contrast with previous studies limited to computer vision tasks, our findings show that it successfully trains a large range of state-of-the-art deep learning architectures, with performance close to fine-tuned backpropagation. At variance with common beliefs, our work supports that challenging tasks can be tackled in the absence of weight transport.

3D reassembly is a challenging spatial intelligence task with broad applications across scientific domains. While large-scale synthetic datasets have fueled promising learning-based approaches, their generalizability to different domains is limited. Critically, it remains uncertain whether models trained on synthetic datasets can generalize to real-world fractures where breakage patterns are more complex. To bridge this gap, we propose GARF, a generalizable 3D reassembly framework for real-world fractures. GARF leverages fracture-aware pretraining to learn fracture features from individual fragments, with flow matching enabling precise 6-DoF alignments. At inference time, we introduce one-step preassembly, improving robustness to unseen objects and varying numbers of fractures. In collaboration with archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, and ornithologists, we curate Fractura, a diverse dataset for vision and learning communities, featuring real-world fracture types across ceramics, bones, eggshells, and lithics. Comprehensive experiments have shown our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets, achieving 82.87\% lower rotation error and 25.15\% higher part accuracy. This sheds light on training on synthetic data to advance real-world 3D puzzle solving, demonstrating its strong generalization across unseen object shapes and diverse fracture types.

The last decade has witnessed many successes of deep learning-based models for industry-scale recommender systems. These models are typically trained offline in a batch manner. While being effective in capturing users' past interactions with recommendation platforms, batch learning suffers from long model-update latency and is vulnerable to system biases, making it hard to adapt to distribution shift and explore new items or user interests. Although online learning-based approaches (e.g., multi-armed bandits) have demonstrated promising theoretical results in tackling these challenges, their practical real-time implementation in large-scale recommender systems remains limited. First, the scalability of online approaches in servicing a massive online traffic while ensuring timely updates of bandit parameters poses a significant challenge. Additionally, exploring uncertainty in recommender systems can easily result in unfavorable user experience, highlighting the need for devising intricate strategies that effectively balance the trade-off between exploitation and exploration. In this paper, we introduce Online Matching: a scalable closed-loop bandit system learning from users' direct feedback on items in real time. We present a hybrid "offline + online" approach for constructing this system, accompanied by a comprehensive exposition of the end-to-end system architecture. We propose Diag-LinUCB -- a novel extension of the LinUCB algorithm -- to enable distributed updates of bandits parameter in a scalable and timely manner. We conduct live experiments in YouTube and show that Online Matching is able to enhance the capabilities of fresh content discovery and item exploration in the present platform.

With the success of machine learning (ML) applied to climate reaching further every day, emulators have begun to show promise not only for weather but for multi-year time scales in the atmosphere. Similar work for the ocean remains nascent, with state-of-the-art limited to models running for shorter time scales or only for regions of the globe. In this work, we demonstrate high-skill global emulation for surface ocean fields over 5-8 years of model rollout, accurately representing modes of variability for two different ML architectures (ConvNext and Transformers). In addition, we address the outstanding question of generalization, an essential consideration if the end-use of emulation is to model warming scenarios outside of the model training data. We show that 1) generalization is not an intrinsic feature of a data-driven emulator, 2) fine-tuning the emulator on only small amounts of additional data from a distribution similar to the test set can enable the emulator to perform well in a warmed climate, and 3) the forced emulators are robust to noise in the forcing.

Automatic indoor layout generation has attracted increasing attention due to its potential in interior design, virtual environment construction, and embodied AI. Existing methods fall into two categories: prompt-driven approaches that leverage proprietary LLM services (e.g., GPT APIs) and learning-based methods trained on layout data upon diffusion-based models. Prompt-driven methods often suffer from spatial inconsistency and high computational costs, while learning-based methods are typically constrained by coarse relational graphs and limited datasets, restricting their generalization to diverse room categories. In this paper, we revisit LLM-based indoor layout generation and present 3D-SynthPlace, a large-scale dataset that combines synthetic layouts generated via a 'GPT synthesize, Human inspect' pipeline, upgraded from the 3D-Front dataset. 3D-SynthPlace contains nearly 17,000 scenes, covering four common room types -- bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bathroom -- enriched with diverse objects and high-level spatial annotations. We further introduce OptiScene, a strong open-source LLM optimized for indoor layout generation, fine-tuned based on our 3D-SynthPlace dataset through our two-stage training. For the warum-up stage I, we adopt supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which is taught to first generate high-level spatial descriptions then conditionally predict concrete object placements. For the reinforcing stage II, to better align the generated layouts with human design preferences, we apply multi-turn direct preference optimization (DPO), which significantly improving layout quality and generation success rates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OptiScene outperforms traditional prompt-driven and learning-based baselines. Moreover, OptiScene shows promising potential in interactive tasks such as scene editing and robot navigation.

State-of-the-art machine learning methods exhibit limited compositional generalization. At the same time, there is a lack of realistic benchmarks that comprehensively measure this ability, which makes it challenging to find and evaluate improvements. We introduce a novel method to systematically construct such benchmarks by maximizing compound divergence while guaranteeing a small atom divergence between train and test sets, and we quantitatively compare this method to other approaches for creating compositional generalization benchmarks. We present a large and realistic natural language question answering dataset that is constructed according to this method, and we use it to analyze the compositional generalization ability of three machine learning architectures. We find that they fail to generalize compositionally and that there is a surprisingly strong negative correlation between compound divergence and accuracy. We also demonstrate how our method can be used to create new compositionality benchmarks on top of the existing SCAN dataset, which confirms these findings.

Agentic reinforcement learning increasingly relies on experience-driven scaling, yet real-world environments remain non-adaptive, limited in coverage, and difficult to scale. World models offer a potential way to improve learning efficiency through simulated experience, but it remains unclear whether large language models can reliably serve this role and under what conditions they meaningfully benefit agents. We study these questions in text-based environments, which provide a controlled setting to reinterpret language modeling as next-state prediction under interaction. We introduce a three-level framework for evaluating LLM-based world models: (i) fidelity and consistency, (ii) scalability and robustness, and (iii) agent utility. Across five representative environments, we find that sufficiently trained world models maintain coherent latent state, scale predictably with data and model size, and improve agent performance via action verification, synthetic trajectory generation, and warm-starting reinforcement learning. Meanwhile, these gains depend critically on behavioral coverage and environment complexity, delineating clear boundry on when world modeling effectively supports agent learning.

Despite the growing interest in replicating the scaled success of large language models (LLMs) in industrial search and recommender systems, most existing industrial efforts remain limited to transplanting Transformer architectures, which bring only incremental improvements over strong Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRMs). From a first principle perspective, the breakthroughs of LLMs stem not only from their architectures but also from two complementary mechanisms: context engineering, which enriches raw input queries with contextual cues to better elicit model capabilities, and multi-step reasoning, which iteratively refines model outputs through intermediate reasoning paths. However, these two mechanisms and their potential to unlock substantial improvements remain largely underexplored in industrial ranking systems. In this paper, we propose OnePiece, a unified framework that seamlessly integrates LLM-style context engineering and reasoning into both retrieval and ranking models of industrial cascaded pipelines. OnePiece is built on a pure Transformer backbone and further introduces three key innovations: (1) structured context engineering, which augments interaction history with preference and scenario signals and unifies them into a structured tokenized input sequence for both retrieval and ranking; (2) block-wise latent reasoning, which equips the model with multi-step refinement of representations and scales reasoning bandwidth via block size; (3) progressive multi-task training, which leverages user feedback chains to effectively supervise reasoning steps during training. OnePiece has been deployed in the main personalized search scenario of Shopee and achieves consistent online gains across different key business metrics, including over +2% GMV/UU and a +2.90% increase in advertising revenue.

Tactile exploration plays a crucial role in understanding object structures for fundamental robotics tasks such as grasping and manipulation. However, efficiently exploring such objects using tactile sensors is challenging, primarily due to the large-scale unknown environments and limited sensing coverage of these sensors. To this end, we present AcTExplore, an active tactile exploration method driven by reinforcement learning for object reconstruction at scales that automatically explores the object surfaces in a limited number of steps. Through sufficient exploration, our algorithm incrementally collects tactile data and reconstructs 3D shapes of the objects as well, which can serve as a representation for higher-level downstream tasks. Our method achieves an average of 95.97% IoU coverage on unseen YCB objects while just being trained on primitive shapes. Project Webpage: https://prg.cs.umd.edu/AcTExplore