Daily Papers

Over the past three decades, numerous controllers have been developed to regulate complex chemical processes, but they have certain limitations. Traditional PI/PID controllers often require customized tuning for various set-point scenarios. On the other hand, MPC frameworks involve resource-intensive steps, and the utilization of black-box machine learning (ML) models can lead to issues such as local minima and infeasibility. Thus, there is a need for an alternative controller paradigm that combines the simplicity of a PI controller with the grade-to-grade (G2G) transferability of an MPC approach. To this end, we developed a novel LSTM controller (LSTMc) as a model-free data-driven controller framework. The LSTMc considers an augmented input tensor that incorporates information on state evolution and error dynamics for the current and previous W time steps, to predict the manipulated input at the next step (u_{t+1}). To demonstrate LSTMc, batch crystallization of dextrose was taken as a representative case study. The desired output for set-point tracking was the mean crystal size (L), with the manipulated input being the jacket temperature (T_j). Extensive training data, encompassing 7000+ different operating conditions, was compiled to ensure comprehensive training of LSTMc across a wide state space region. For comparison, we also designed a PI controller and an LSTM-MPC for different set-point tracking cases. The results consistently showed that LSTMc achieved the lowest set-point deviation (<2\%), three times lower than the MPC. Remarkably, LSTMc maintained this superior performance across all set points, even when sensor measurements contained noise levels of 10\% to 15\%. In summary, by effectively leveraging process data and utilizing sequential ML models, LSTMc offers a superior controller design approach.

In this work, we study an integrated fault detection and classification framework called FARM for fast, accurate, and robust online chemical process monitoring. The FARM framework integrates the latest advancements in statistical process control (SPC) for monitoring nonparametric and heterogeneous data streams with novel data analysis approaches based on Riemannian geometry together in a hierarchical framework for online process monitoring. We conduct a systematic evaluation of the FARM monitoring framework using the Tennessee Eastman Process (TEP) dataset. Results show that FARM performs competitively against state-of-the-art process monitoring algorithms by achieving a good balance among fault detection rate (FDR), fault detection speed (FDS), and false alarm rate (FAR). Specifically, FARM achieved an average FDR of 96.97% while also outperforming benchmark methods in successfully detecting hard-to-detect faults that are previously known, including Faults 3, 9 and 15, with FDRs being 97.08%, 96.30% and 95.99%, respectively. In terms of FAR, our FARM framework allows practitioners to customize their choice of FAR, thereby offering great flexibility. Moreover, we report a significant improvement in average fault classification accuracy during online monitoring from 61% to 82% when leveraging Riemannian geometric analysis, and further to 84.5% when incorporating additional features from SPC. This illustrates the synergistic effect of integrating fault detection and classification in a holistic, hierarchical monitoring framework.

Text-to-image generation with visual autoregressive~(VAR) models has recently achieved impressive advances in generation fidelity and inference efficiency. While control mechanisms have been explored for diffusion models, enabling precise and flexible control within VAR paradigm remains underexplored. To bridge this critical gap, in this paper, we introduce ScaleWeaver, a novel framework designed to achieve high-fidelity, controllable generation upon advanced VAR models through parameter-efficient fine-tuning. The core module in ScaleWeaver is the improved MMDiT block with the proposed Reference Attention module, which efficiently and effectively incorporates conditional information. Different from MM Attention, the proposed Reference Attention module discards the unnecessary attention from imagerightarrowcondition, reducing computational cost while stabilizing control injection. Besides, it strategically emphasizes parameter reuse, leveraging the capability of the VAR backbone itself with a few introduced parameters to process control information, and equipping a zero-initialized linear projection to ensure that control signals are incorporated effectively without disrupting the generative capability of the base model. Extensive experiments show that ScaleWeaver delivers high-quality generation and precise control while attaining superior efficiency over diffusion-based methods, making ScaleWeaver a practical and effective solution for controllable text-to-image generation within the visual autoregressive paradigm. Code and models will be released.

Optimal operation of chemical processes is vital for energy, resource, and cost savings in chemical engineering. The problem of optimal operation can be tackled with reinforcement learning, but traditional reinforcement learning methods face challenges due to hard constraints related to quality and safety that must be strictly satisfied, and the large amount of required training data. Chemical processes often cannot provide sufficient experimental data, and while detailed dynamic models can be an alternative, their complexity makes it computationally intractable to generate the needed data. Optimal control methods, such as model predictive control, also struggle with the complexity of the underlying dynamic models. Consequently, many chemical processes rely on manually defined operation recipes combined with simple linear controllers, leading to suboptimal performance and limited flexibility. In this work, we propose a novel approach that leverages expert knowledge embedded in operation recipes. By using reinforcement learning to optimize the parameters of these recipes and their underlying linear controllers, we achieve an optimized operation recipe. This method requires significantly less data, handles constraints more effectively, and is more interpretable than traditional reinforcement learning methods due to the structured nature of the recipes. We demonstrate the potential of our approach through simulation results of an industrial batch polymerization reactor, showing that it can approach the performance of optimal controllers while addressing the limitations of existing methods.

Complex problem solving (CPS) with large language models (LLMs) is often framed as a matter of stronger reasoning or longer generation. Yet early-step error amplification, prompt brittleness, and failures to revise incorrect commitments are difficult to explain by missing knowledge or expressive capacity alone. This survey interprets CPS as a sequential estimation-and-decision problem over a latent solution state. A controller maintains a belief about an unobserved solution trajectory, updates it as noisy intermediate evidence arrives, and decides whether to commit, verify, branch, roll back, or abstain to minimize expected loss. Reasoning supplies candidate transitions and interpretations, whereas process control shapes and evaluates those proposals and regulates subsequent transitions and observations. Within this framework, we organize existing methods around five components: explicit state representation, transition structuring, validation and constraint enforcement, search and rollback, and uncertainty management. We also interpret evaluation metrics according to the statistical quantities they estimate. The framework further yields a diagnostic hypothesis: interventions should be most effective when they target the error or uncertainty component implicated by an observed failure. We distinguish systematic, stochastic, and irreducible error together with epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty, and call this alignment problem-control fit and its failure control mismatch. For example, additional sampling may reduce sampling variability while leaving a shared systematic error unchanged. This perspective clarifies what current methods estimate and control, what remains uncontrolled, and why reliable validation, targeted recovery, calibrated uncertainty, and matched-budget evaluation are central open problems.

This study addresses the challenge of controlling a complex, multi-parameter technological process -- pectin hydrolysis--extraction -- using machine learning methods. The experimental foundation is a unique database comprising 1,000 laboratory experiments conducted under controlled conditions on seven types of plant raw material with four variable process factors (temperature 85--130 C, pressure 0.9--2.2 atm, holding time 3--10 min, pH 1.5--2.0). Four output characteristics were recorded: pectin yield, galacturonic acid content, molecular weight, and degree of esterification. To solve the multi-task regression problem, 11 algorithms were trained and compared: regularised linear models, ensemble methods (Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, XGBoost, CatBoost, Extra Trees), k-nearest neighbours, support vector regression, and a multilayer perceptron. The best results were demonstrated by CatBoost (average R-squared approximately 0.946 after hyperparameter optimisation). Feature importance analysis revealed the dominant role of the raw material type (63.6% of total importance), followed by temperature and holding time. The developed pipeline was exported in a production-ready format and deployed as an interactive web interface. The findings demonstrate that ensemble methods combined with rigorous statistical analysis and interpretable AI significantly reduce the need for physical experiments and form the basis for intelligent pectin production control.

Social simulation offers the social sciences an experimental instrument that the real world cannot supply, and generative agents have transformed it by acting as silicon samples that unite agent-based modeling with real behavioral data. Existing platforms verify collective behavior, align simulated populations with real societies in cross-sections, and employ autonomous agents for the research process. However, two social science requirements remain without systematic support: intervention in the content of a simulation and the researcher's control over the process that produces it. We present SocioVerse2, which extends SocioVerse 1.0 into a human-AI co-evolutionary paradigm built from two loops and one infrastructure. The longitudinal simulation loop simulates the target population with evolving environments and forks counterfactual branches via interventions. The controllable research loop takes the study itself as an editable state and updates state versions via controllable editing. The social science agentic infrastructure carries both loops through composable skills with researcher checkpoints, a population service over five persona pools, and an environment service over 21 real-world signal sources with point-in-time guarantees. We validate SocioVerse2 across three case families and seven case studies, from reproducing canonical agent-based models to modeling policy processes on real records and nowcasting macro-economic indices beyond the response model's knowledge cutoff. With the human-AI co-evolutionary paradigm, these cases go beyond system demonstrations to become substantive studies that investigate frontier questions in their respective disciplines. Code, data services, and a workbench are released as open-source resources.

Many production processes are characterized by numerous and complex cause-and-effect relationships. Since they are only partially known they pose a challenge to effective process control. In this work we present how Structural Equation Models can be used for deriving cause-and-effect relationships from the combination of prior knowledge and process data in the manufacturing domain. Compared to existing applications, we do not assume linear relationships leading to more informative results.

Agentic AI coding systems can inspect repositories, plan implementation steps, edit files, call tools, run tests, and submit pull requests. These capabilities make software and hardware development faster in some settings, but current evidence does not support the simple claim that autonomous code generation automatically improves engineering outcomes. Controlled studies report productivity gains in some enterprise tasks, slowdowns in mature open-source work, moderate but heterogeneous meta-analytic effects, and persistent failures in repository setup, dependency handling, permission gating, and hardware verification. This paper argues that the central problem is no longer prompt engineering; it is engineering process control. It synthesizes evidence from agentic software engineering, GitHub-scale adoption studies, repository-level agent configuration, productivity trials, issue-resolution benchmarks, and hardware/RTL verification research. It proposes Agentic Agile-V, a process framework that uses Agile-V as the lifecycle backbone and a task-level SCOPE-V loop - Specify, Constrain, Orchestrate, Prove, Evolve, and Verify - to convert conversational intent into structured engineering artifacts and acceptance evidence. The paper contributes: (i) a taxonomy of minimum input artifacts for agentic software, firmware, and hardware work; (ii) a conversation-to-contract gate that separates exploratory dialogue from implementation; (iii) risk-adaptive feature, bug-fix, testing, and hardware workflows; and (iv) an evidence-bundle acceptance model for agent-generated artifacts. The paper concludes that agentic AI does not eliminate engineering discipline; it increases the value of requirements, constraints, traceability, independent verification, and human approval.

Addressing the critical theme of recycling electronic waste (E-waste), this contribution is dedicated to developing advanced automated data processing pipelines as a basis for decision-making and process control. Aligning with the broader goals of the circular economy and the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), our work leverages non-invasive analysis methods utilizing RGB and hyperspectral imaging data to provide both quantitative and qualitative insights into the E-waste stream composition for optimizing recycling efficiency. In this paper, we introduce 'PCB-Vision'; a pioneering RGB-hyperspectral printed circuit board (PCB) benchmark dataset, comprising 53 RGB images of high spatial resolution paired with their corresponding high spectral resolution hyperspectral data cubes in the visible and near-infrared (VNIR) range. Grounded in open science principles, our dataset provides a comprehensive resource for researchers through high-quality ground truths, focusing on three primary PCB components: integrated circuits (IC), capacitors, and connectors. We provide extensive statistical investigations on the proposed dataset together with the performance of several state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, including U-Net, Attention U-Net, Residual U-Net, LinkNet, and DeepLabv3+. By openly sharing this multi-scene benchmark dataset along with the baseline codes, we hope to foster transparent, traceable, and comparable developments of advanced data processing across various scientific communities, including, but not limited to, computer vision and remote sensing. Emphasizing our commitment to supporting a collaborative and inclusive scientific community, all materials, including code, data, ground truth, and masks, will be accessible at https://github.com/hifexplo/PCBVision.

Anomaly Detection (AD) focuses on detecting samples that differ from the standard pattern, making it a vital tool in process control. Logical anomalies may appear visually normal yet violate predefined constraints on object presence, arrangement, or quantity, depending on reasoning and explainability. We introduce LogicQA, a framework that enhances AD by providing industrial operators with explanations for logical anomalies. LogicQA compiles automatically generated questions into a checklist and collects responses to identify violations of logical constraints. LogicQA is training-free, annotation-free, and operates in a few-shot setting. We achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) Logical AD performance on public benchmarks, MVTec LOCO AD, with an AUROC of 87.6 percent and an F1-max of 87.0 percent along with the explanations of anomalies. Also, our approach has shown outstanding performance on semiconductor SEM corporate data, further validating its effectiveness in industrial applications.

Diffusion models are rapidly redefining 3D anomaly detection in point cloud data. As 3D sensing becomes integral to modern manufacturing, reliable anomaly detection is essential for high-throughput quality assurance and process control. Yet practical deployment on resource-constrained, latency-critical systems remains limited. Existing methods are often computationally prohibitive or unreliable in complex, unmasked regions, and diffusion pipelines are inherently bottlenecked by iterative denoising. In this work, we address this bottleneck by reformulating reconstructionbased anomaly detection through consistency learning, enabling direct prediction of anomaly-free geometry in one or two network evaluations. We further introduce a novel hybrid loss formulation that explicitly enforces reconstruction toward clean data. This design substantially reduces inference cost, achieving up to 80x faster runtime than the current state-of-the-art method, without GPU acceleration, while preserving strong detection performance. It outperforms R3D-AD on Anomaly-ShapeNet with 76.20% I-AUROC and remains competitive on Real3DAD with 72.80% I-AUROC, enabling efficient, low-latency anomaly detection on resource-constrained platforms, including drones, smart industrial cameras, and other edge devices.

Language models have the ability to perform in-context learning (ICL), allowing them to flexibly adapt their behavior based on context. This contrasts with in-weights learning, where information is statically encoded in model parameters from iterated observations of the data. Despite this apparent ability to learn in-context, language models are known to struggle when faced with unseen or rarely seen tokens. Hence, we study structural in-context learning, which we define as the ability of a model to execute in-context learning on arbitrary tokens -- so called because the model must generalize on the basis of e.g. sentence structure or task structure, rather than semantic content encoded in token embeddings. An ideal model would be able to do both: flexibly deploy in-weights operations (in order to robustly accommodate ambiguous or unknown contexts using encoded semantic information) and structural in-context operations (in order to accommodate novel tokens). We study structural in-context algorithms in a simple part-of-speech setting using both practical and toy models. We find that active forgetting, a technique that was recently introduced to help models generalize to new languages, forces models to adopt structural in-context learning solutions. Finally, we introduce temporary forgetting, a straightforward extension of active forgetting that enables one to control how much a model relies on in-weights vs. in-context solutions. Importantly, temporary forgetting allows us to induce a dual process strategy where in-context and in-weights solutions coexist within a single model.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external memory systems to accumulate experience across tasks. Yet nearly all existing approaches, from graph-structured memories to reflective insight stores, access memory through fixed, hand-designed heuristics. We argue that this static view of memory is a core bottleneck for agentic learning because optimal memory behavior is fundamentally context-dependent. The early stages of the tasks, benefit from minimal retrieval because memory is sparse; recurring goal types benefit from plan reuse rather than generic nearest-neighbor lookup; stuck agents benefit from re-retrieval with alternative queries; and across long task streams, the memory store itself must be consolidated and pruned to remain useful. We present Memory as a Controlled Process (MemCon), a framework that models memory operations as a Markov Decision Process and learns an online policy that adaptively decides when, what, and how much to retrieve, when to inject a distilled plan, and when to consolidate or forget. MemCon is backend-agnostic: it wraps any existing memory implementation, learns from task-by-task binary feedback with no pretraining and no additional LLM calls, and uses a lightweight tabular contextual bandit with UCB exploration that converges within tens of tasks. Across 6 benchmarks, 3 agent frameworks, and 3 LLM backbones, MemCon consistently outperforms multiple memory baselines by up to 15.2 points in task success while reducing token consumption by 5--20%.

Diffusion models have exhibited impressive prowess in the text-to-image task. Recent methods add image-level structure controls, e.g., edge and depth maps, to manipulate the generation process together with text prompts to obtain desired images. This controlling process is globally operated on the entire image, which limits the flexibility of control regions. In this paper, we explore a novel and practical task setting: local control. It focuses on controlling specific local region according to user-defined image conditions, while the remaining regions are only conditioned by the original text prompt. However, it is non-trivial to achieve local conditional controlling. The naive manner of directly adding local conditions may lead to the local control dominance problem, which forces the model to focus on the controlled region and neglect object generation in other regions. To mitigate this problem, we propose Regional Discriminate Loss to update the noised latents, aiming at enhanced object generation in non-control regions. Furthermore, the proposed Focused Token Response suppresses weaker attention scores which lack the strongest response to enhance object distinction and reduce duplication. Lastly, we adopt Feature Mask Constraint to reduce quality degradation in images caused by information differences across the local control region. All proposed strategies are operated at the inference stage. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can synthesize high-quality images aligned with the text prompt under local control conditions.

As generative models become ubiquitous, there is a critical need for fine-grained control over the generation process. Yet, while controlled generation methods from prompting to fine-tuning proliferate, a fundamental question remains unanswered: are these models truly controllable in the first place? In this work, we provide a theoretical framework to formally answer this question. Framing human-model interaction as a control process, we propose a novel algorithm to estimate the controllable sets of models in a dialogue setting. Notably, we provide formal guarantees on the estimation error as a function of sample complexity: we derive probably-approximately correct bounds for controllable set estimates that are distribution-free, employ no assumptions except for output boundedness, and work for any black-box nonlinear control system (i.e., any generative model). We empirically demonstrate the theoretical framework on different tasks in controlling dialogue processes, for both language models and text-to-image generation. Our results show that model controllability is surprisingly fragile and highly dependent on the experimental setting. This highlights the need for rigorous controllability analysis, shifting the focus from simply attempting control to first understanding its fundamental limits.

Diffusion models achieve strong performance in text-to-image generation, but they can still produce unsafe content. Training-free safety guidance offers a practical inference-time alternative that intervenes during sampling without modifying model weights. However, many existing safeguards still rely on a coupled safety-control chain. In this chain, the same unsafe condition simultaneously specifies what should be avoided, indicates the current unsafe signal, constructs the intervention, and determines when that intervention remains active. This coupling can work when unsafe factors are explicit, but becomes less reliable once harmful and benign semantics are entangled in the current generation state, often leaving residual unsafe content or unnecessarily degrading benign-generation quality or prompt fidelity. We address this problem with Decoupled Safety Control (DSC), a plug-in safety-control algorithm for training-free safety guidance. DSC reformulates training-free safety guidance as an explicit state-dependent control process, so the executed intervention is determined from the current generation state rather than inherited directly from a single unsafe condition. Experiments on standard safety benchmarks show that DSC improves representative latent- and text-space safeguards, achieving stronger unsafe-content suppression while preserving benign-generation quality and maintaining efficient inference.

Recent remarkable advances in large-scale text-to-image diffusion models have inspired a significant breakthrough in text-to-3D generation, pursuing 3D content creation solely from a given text prompt. However, existing text-to-3D techniques lack a crucial ability in the creative process: interactively control and shape the synthetic 3D contents according to users' desired specifications (e.g., sketch). To alleviate this issue, we present the first attempt for text-to-3D generation conditioning on the additional hand-drawn sketch, namely Control3D, which enhances controllability for users. In particular, a 2D conditioned diffusion model (ControlNet) is remoulded to guide the learning of 3D scene parameterized as NeRF, encouraging each view of 3D scene aligned with the given text prompt and hand-drawn sketch. Moreover, we exploit a pre-trained differentiable photo-to-sketch model to directly estimate the sketch of the rendered image over synthetic 3D scene. Such estimated sketch along with each sampled view is further enforced to be geometrically consistent with the given sketch, pursuing better controllable text-to-3D generation. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our proposal can generate accurate and faithful 3D scenes that align closely with the input text prompts and sketches.

Existing interpolation methods use pre-trained video diffusion priors to generate intermediate frames between sparsely sampled keyframes. In the absence of 3D geometric guidance, these methods struggle to produce plausible results for complex, articulated human motions and offer limited control over the synthesized dynamics. In this paper, we introduce PoseFuse3D Keyframe Interpolator (PoseFuse3D-KI), a novel framework that integrates 3D human guidance signals into the diffusion process for Controllable Human-centric Keyframe Interpolation (CHKI). To provide rich spatial and structural cues for interpolation, our PoseFuse3D, a 3D-informed control model, features a novel SMPL-X encoder that transforms 3D geometry and shape into the 2D latent conditioning space, alongside a fusion network that integrates these 3D cues with 2D pose embeddings. For evaluation, we build CHKI-Video, a new dataset annotated with both 2D poses and 3D SMPL-X parameters. We show that PoseFuse3D-KI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on CHKI-Video, achieving a 9% improvement in PSNR and a 38% reduction in LPIPS. Comprehensive ablations demonstrate that our PoseFuse3D model improves interpolation fidelity.

Photography is the art of painting with light, yet nighttime scenes are shaped by competing degradations: intense flares obscure scene structure, while photon-limited regions collapse into noise. Conventional approaches address these factors in isolation, overlooking the fact that these degradations are fundamentally entangled. To bridge this gap, we introduce LUCID, a unified framework that reframes nighttime restoration as a continuous and controllable process rather than a fixed correction. We decompose nighttime restoration into two cooperative components: a flare disentanglement module that lifts the 'curtain' of optical artifacts to provide reliable structural guidance, and a diffusion-driven module that leverages generative priors to reconstruct clean and well-exposed imagery. Crucially, LUCID introduces explicit controllability through a novel four-mode training strategy, enabling users to steer the restoration process via classifier-free guidance (CFG) and allowing selective control over light sources and their associated flare and ghosting artifacts, while also supporting high dynamic range (HDR) reconstruction through continuous exposure control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LUCID consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across diverse real-world nighttime scenarios.

This work investigates the integration of spatially aligned aerial imagery into perception tasks for automated vehicles (AVs). As a central contribution, we present AID4AD, a publicly available dataset that augments the nuScenes dataset with high-resolution aerial imagery precisely aligned to its local coordinate system. The alignment is performed using SLAM-based point cloud maps provided by nuScenes, establishing a direct link between aerial data and nuScenes local coordinate system. To ensure spatial fidelity, we propose an alignment workflow that corrects for localization and projection distortions. A manual quality control process further refines the dataset by identifying a set of high-quality alignments, which we publish as ground truth to support future research on automated registration. We demonstrate the practical value of AID4AD in two representative tasks: in online map construction, aerial imagery serves as a complementary input that improves the mapping process; in motion prediction, it functions as a structured environmental representation that replaces high-definition maps. Experiments show that aerial imagery leads to a 15-23% improvement in map construction accuracy and a 2% gain in trajectory prediction performance. These results highlight the potential of aerial imagery as a scalable and adaptable source of environmental context in automated vehicle systems, particularly in scenarios where high-definition maps are unavailable, outdated, or costly to maintain. AID4AD, along with evaluation code and pretrained models, is publicly released to foster further research in this direction: https://github.com/DriverlessMobility/AID4AD.

Large language models excel at instruction-following in English, but their performance in low-resource languages like Thai remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks often rely on translations, missing cultural and domain-specific nuances needed for real-world use. We present WangchanThaiInstruct, a human-authored Thai dataset for evaluation and instruction tuning, covering four professional domains and seven task types. Created through a multi-stage quality control process with annotators, domain experts, and AI researchers, WangchanThaiInstruct supports two studies: (1) a zero-shot evaluation showing performance gaps on culturally and professionally specific tasks, and (2) an instruction tuning study with ablations isolating the effect of native supervision. Models fine-tuned on WangchanThaiInstruct outperform those using translated data in both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks. These findings underscore the need for culturally and professionally grounded instruction data to improve LLM alignment in low-resource, linguistically diverse settings.

The vast and underexplored ocean plays a critical role in regulating global climate and supporting marine biodiversity, yet artificial intelligence has so far delivered limited impact in this domain due to a fundamental data bottleneck. Specifically, ocean data are highly fragmented across disparate sources and inherently exhibit multi-modal, high-noise, and weakly labeled characteristics, lacking unified schemas and semantic alignment. Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in general domains, their application to ocean science remains severely constrained by the absence of large-scale, well-aligned multimodal datasets tailored to marine environments. To bridge this gap, we introduce OceanPile, a large-scale multimodal corpus designed for ocean foundation models. It comprises three key components: OceanCorpus, a unified collection integrating sonar data, underwater imagery, marine science visuals, and scientific text from diverse authoritative sources; OceanInstruction, a high-quality instruction dataset synthesized via a novel pipeline guided by a hierarchical Ocean Concept Knowledge Graph; and OceanBenchmark, a manually curated evaluation benchmark for rigorous assessment. We establish a multi-stage quality control process to ensure scientific validity and alignment across modalities. Experimental validation demonstrates significant performance improvements for models trained on our data. All datasets are publicly released to advance the field of marine artificial intelligence and empower domain-specific MLLMs.

We introduce AraMS-28k, the largest publicly released line-level dataset of genuine historical Arabic manuscripts, comprising 14 books, 3,043 pages, and 28,600 annotated text lines (27,971 main-text, 629 margin). Thirteen books are hand-copied manuscripts spanning three script traditions -- Naskh, Ruq'ah, and Maghrebi -- and one is a lithographed printed edition included to broaden format diversity. Each line is labelled as main-text or margin, and margin lines that have an unambiguous attachment point in the main text are further annotated with an insertion anchor, recovering the manuscript's true non-linear reading order at line-level granularity -- to our knowledge the first such annotation released for a historical Arabic manuscript corpus. Because reference transcriptions are fully vocalised while manuscript hands are typically undiacritised, we release both the raw diacritised transcription and a diacritic-normalised counterpart for every line. The dataset was constructed with RefLAM, a reference-grounded annotation pipeline that aligns multimodal-LLM OCR against independently sourced clean transcriptions and routes every line through human review, combining automatic verification with expert oversight. We describe the construction and quality-control process, present the annotation schema, report dataset statistics at both the corpus and per-book level, and provide baseline HTR results using Kraken and HATFormer, including a cross-script generalisation gradient from in-distribution pages to fully unseen books. AraMS-28k is released with page images, line-level annotations, and fixed train/val/test splits under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 to support reproducible research on Arabic manuscript recognition, layout analysis, and reading-order recovery.

We introduce anticipation: a method for constructing a controllable generative model of a temporal point process (the event process) conditioned asynchronously on realizations of a second, correlated process (the control process). We achieve this by interleaving sequences of events and controls, such that controls appear following stopping times in the event sequence. This work is motivated by problems arising in the control of symbolic music generation. We focus on infilling control tasks, whereby the controls are a subset of the events themselves, and conditional generation completes a sequence of events given the fixed control events. We train anticipatory infilling models using the large and diverse Lakh MIDI music dataset. These models match the performance of autoregressive models for prompted music generation, with the additional capability to perform infilling control tasks, including accompaniment. Human evaluators report that an anticipatory model produces accompaniments with similar musicality to even music composed by humans over a 20-second clip.

This paper presents LLM4SecHW, a novel framework for hardware debugging that leverages domain specific Large Language Model (LLM). Despite the success of LLMs in automating various software development tasks, their application in the hardware security domain has been limited due to the constraints of commercial LLMs and the scarcity of domain specific data. To address these challenges, we propose a unique approach to compile a dataset of open source hardware design defects and their remediation steps, utilizing version control data. This dataset provides a substantial foundation for training machine learning models for hardware. LLM4SecHW employs fine tuning of medium sized LLMs based on this dataset, enabling the identification and rectification of bugs in hardware designs. This pioneering approach offers a reference workflow for the application of fine tuning domain specific LLMs in other research areas. We evaluate the performance of our proposed system on various open source hardware designs, demonstrating its efficacy in accurately identifying and correcting defects. Our work brings a new perspective on automating the quality control process in hardware design.

New LLM evaluation benchmarks are important to align with the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we present Chinese SimpleQA, the first comprehensive Chinese benchmark to evaluate the factuality ability of language models to answer short questions, and Chinese SimpleQA mainly has five properties (i.e., Chinese, Diverse, High-quality, Static, Easy-to-evaluate). Specifically, first, we focus on the Chinese language over 6 major topics with 99 diverse subtopics. Second, we conduct a comprehensive quality control process to achieve high-quality questions and answers, where the reference answers are static and cannot be changed over time. Third, following SimpleQA, the questions and answers are very short, and the grading process is easy-to-evaluate based on OpenAI API. Based on Chinese SimpleQA, we perform a comprehensive evaluation on the factuality abilities of existing LLMs. Finally, we hope that Chinese SimpleQA could guide the developers to better understand the Chinese factuality abilities of their models and facilitate the growth of foundation models.

The rapid evolution of generative AI necessitates robust safety evaluations. However, current safety datasets are predominantly English-centric, failing to capture specific risks in non-English, socio-cultural contexts such as Korean, and are often limited to the text modality. To address this gap, we introduce AssurAI, a new quality-controlled Korean multimodal dataset for evaluating the safety of generative AI. First, we define a taxonomy of 35 distinct AI risk factors, adapted from established frameworks by a multidisciplinary expert group to cover both universal harms and relevance to the Korean socio-cultural context. Second, leveraging this taxonomy, we construct and release AssurAI, a large-scale Korean multimodal dataset comprising 11,480 instances across text, image, video, and audio. Third, we apply the rigorous quality control process used to ensure data integrity, featuring a two-phase construction (i.e., expert-led seeding and crowdsourced scaling), triple independent annotation, and an iterative expert red-teaming loop. Our pilot study validates AssurAI's effectiveness in assessing the safety of recent LLMs. We release AssurAI to the public to facilitate the development of safer and more reliable generative AI systems for the Korean community.

Semantically consistent cross-domain image translation facilitates the generation of training data by transferring labels across different domains, making it particularly useful for plant trait identification in agriculture. However, existing generative models struggle to maintain object-level accuracy when translating images between domains, especially when domain gaps are significant. In this work, we introduce AGILE (Attention-Guided Image and Label Translation for Efficient Cross-Domain Plant Trait Identification), a diffusion-based framework that leverages optimized text embeddings and attention guidance to semantically constrain image translation. AGILE utilizes pretrained diffusion models and publicly available agricultural datasets to improve the fidelity of translated images while preserving critical object semantics. Our approach optimizes text embeddings to strengthen the correspondence between source and target images and guides attention maps during the denoising process to control object placement. We evaluate AGILE on cross-domain plant datasets and demonstrate its effectiveness in generating semantically accurate translated images. Quantitative experiments show that AGILE enhances object detection performance in the target domain while maintaining realism and consistency. Compared to prior image translation methods, AGILE achieves superior semantic alignment, particularly in challenging cases where objects vary significantly or domain gaps are substantial.

Predicting how genetic perturbations change cellular state is a core problem for building controllable models of gene regulation. Perturbations targeting the same gene can produce different transcriptional responses depending on their genomic locus, including different transcription start sites and regulatory elements. Gene-level perturbation models collapse these distinct interventions into the same representation. We introduce STRAND, a generative model that predicts single-cell transcriptional responses by conditioning on regulatory DNA sequence. STRAND represents a perturbation by encoding the sequence at its genomic locus and uses this representation to parameterize a conditional transport process from control to perturbed cell states. Representing perturbations by sequence, rather than by a fixed set of gene identifiers, supports zero-shot inference at loci not seen during training and expands inference-time genomic coverage from ~1.5% for gene-level single-cell foundation models to ~95% of the genome. We evaluate STRAND on CRISPR perturbation datasets in K562, Jurkat, and RPE1 cells. STRAND improves discrimination scores by up to 33% in low-sample regimes, achieves the best average rank on unseen gene perturbation benchmarks, and improves transfer to novel cell lines by up to 0.14 in Pearson correlation. Ablations isolate the gains to sequence conditioning and transport, and case studies show that STRAND resolves functionally alternative transcription start sites missed by gene-level models.

Parallel reasoning improves the accuracy and robustness of large reasoning models by exploring multiple solution paths, but its computational cost grows with reasoning depth and branch count. Existing methods for managing these parallel paths typically rely on final-answer consensus, local token confidence, or isolated intermediate probes. However, these signals are often delayed, weakly tied to actual reasoning progress, or too noisy for dynamic, branch-level control. To address these limitations, we introduce ParaTempo, a training-free asynchronous parallel reasoning framework. ParaTempo is driven by temporal confidence, a branch-local measure of answer-space convergence. Each branch is periodically probed for a tentative answer probability distribution, and temporal confidence quantifies how sharply the recent intermediate probes concentrate on a dominant answer. Once sufficient evidence has accumulated, ParaTempo drives its entire control process from this single signal: low-confidence branches are pruned, branches that persistently commit to their dominant answer are retired early, freed computation is reallocated by forking new branches, and generation stops globally once the confidence-weighted vote concentrates. Without requiring synchronization among reasoning trajectories, ParaTempo adaptively allocates computation based on branch-level convergence. Experiments on challenging mathematical and scientific reasoning benchmarks show that ParaTempo reduces average latency by 21.8-32.2% and total token usage by 18.1-30.3% while maintaining competitive accuracy. Moreover, temporal confidence exhibits stronger temporal stability and predictive power for future branch convergence than token-level and instantaneous signals.

We present DiffusionBERT, a new generative masked language model based on discrete diffusion models. Diffusion models and many pre-trained language models have a shared training objective, i.e., denoising, making it possible to combine the two powerful models and enjoy the best of both worlds. On the one hand, diffusion models offer a promising training strategy that helps improve the generation quality. On the other hand, pre-trained denoising language models (e.g., BERT) can be used as a good initialization that accelerates convergence. We explore training BERT to learn the reverse process of a discrete diffusion process with an absorbing state and elucidate several designs to improve it. First, we propose a new noise schedule for the forward diffusion process that controls the degree of noise added at each step based on the information of each token. Second, we investigate several designs of incorporating the time step into BERT. Experiments on unconditional text generation demonstrate that DiffusionBERT achieves significant improvement over existing diffusion models for text (e.g., D3PM and Diffusion-LM) and previous generative masked language models in terms of perplexity and BLEU score.

In this work, we introduce OmniGen, a new diffusion model for unified image generation. Unlike popular diffusion models (e.g., Stable Diffusion), OmniGen no longer requires additional modules such as ControlNet or IP-Adapter to process diverse control conditions. OmniGenis characterized by the following features: 1) Unification: OmniGen not only demonstrates text-to-image generation capabilities but also inherently supports other downstream tasks, such as image editing, subject-driven generation, and visual-conditional generation. Additionally, OmniGen can handle classical computer vision tasks by transforming them into image generation tasks, such as edge detection and human pose recognition. 2) Simplicity: The architecture of OmniGen is highly simplified, eliminating the need for additional text encoders. Moreover, it is more user-friendly compared to existing diffusion models, enabling complex tasks to be accomplished through instructions without the need for extra preprocessing steps (e.g., human pose estimation), thereby significantly simplifying the workflow of image generation. 3) Knowledge Transfer: Through learning in a unified format, OmniGen effectively transfers knowledge across different tasks, manages unseen tasks and domains, and exhibits novel capabilities. We also explore the model's reasoning capabilities and potential applications of chain-of-thought mechanism. This work represents the first attempt at a general-purpose image generation model, and there remain several unresolved issues. We will open-source the related resources at https://github.com/VectorSpaceLab/OmniGen to foster advancements in this field.

Reasoning-specialized language models show large performance gains over base models, yet the internal changes responsible for improved multi-step reasoning remain poorly understood. It is unclear whether reasoning fine-tuning improves local token-level competence or globally reorganizes how models structure inference over time. We address this question by modeling Chain-of-Thought reasoning as a switching dynamical system (SDS), in which internal representations evolve under discrete latent policy states. Our framework combines time-aware contrastive representation learning with discrete regime discovery to recover latent policies from activation trajectories. Across four benchmarks and model scales from 1.5B to 32B parameters, reasoning-fine-tuned models exhibit richer latent-policy organization than their base counterparts, characterized by more differentiated transition structure and model-dependent changes in state utilization, persistence, and mixing. The recovered regimes exhibit functional specialization aligned with distinct reasoning stages, and extensive controls confirm that their structure is not explained by correctness, representation learning, or modeling priors, but depends on the coherent temporal organization of reasoning trajectories. Causal interventions further show that the regimes are functionally meaningful: state-swap ablations reduce one-step predictive fit, while transplanting reasoning dynamics into base models improves performance on challenging reasoning problems. Finally, SDS-guided pruning of failure-prone reasoning prefixes outperforms self-consistency in 11 of 12 model-dataset settings, with gains of up to 12.5 percentage points. Together, our results suggest that reasoning fine-tuning globally reorganizes latent dynamics, offering a new lens for mechanistic analysis and process-level control of reasoning models.

Recent advances in 3D generation have improved the fidelity and geometric details of synthesized 3D assets. However, due to the inherent ambiguity of single-view observations and the lack of robust global structural priors caused by limited 3D training data, the unseen regions generated by existing models are often stochastic and difficult to control, which may sometimes fail to align with user intentions or produce implausible geometries. In this paper, we propose Know3D, a novel framework that incorporates rich knowledge from multimodal large language models into 3D generative processes via latent hidden-state injection, enabling language-controllable generation of the back-view for 3D assets. We utilize a VLM-diffusion-based model, where the VLM is responsible for semantic understanding and guidance. The diffusion model acts as a bridge that transfers semantic knowledge from the VLM to the 3D generation model. In this way, we successfully bridge the gap between abstract textual instructions and the geometric reconstruction of unobserved regions, transforming the traditionally stochastic back-view hallucination into a semantically controllable process, demonstrating a promising direction for future 3D generation models.

Recent years have witnessed tremendous interest in deep learning on graph-structured data. Due to the high cost of collecting labeled graph-structured data, domain adaptation is important to supervised graph learning tasks with limited samples. However, current graph domain adaptation methods are generally adopted from traditional domain adaptation tasks, and the properties of graph-structured data are not well utilized. For example, the observed social networks on different platforms are controlled not only by the different crowd or communities but also by the domain-specific policies and the background noise. Based on these properties in graph-structured data, we first assume that the graph-structured data generation process is controlled by three independent types of latent variables, i.e., the semantic latent variables, the domain latent variables, and the random latent variables. Based on this assumption, we propose a disentanglement-based unsupervised domain adaptation method for the graph-structured data, which applies variational graph auto-encoders to recover these latent variables and disentangles them via three supervised learning modules. Extensive experimental results on two real-world datasets in the graph classification task reveal that our method not only significantly outperforms the traditional domain adaptation methods and the disentangled-based domain adaptation methods but also outperforms the state-of-the-art graph domain adaptation algorithms.

Human annotation is the empirical foundation of much NLP research, from dataset construction to model evaluation, but papers often leave unclear who produced the annotations and how the annotation process was controlled. We provide the first large-scale, task-level audit of human annotation reporting across major NLP venues, asking which annotation details are documented, which are missing, and how reporting varies across time, topic, venue, and intended use of human judgment. We introduce a unified taxonomy of annotation-reporting practices and validate an LLM-assisted extraction pipeline against Annotated-gold, a human-adjudicated gold standard of 41 papers and 72 annotation tasks, where the best model reaches human-comparable agreement with adjudicated labels, with Krippendorff's alpha of 0.606 versus 0.585 for human-human agreement. Using this pipeline, we construct Annotated-llm, a dataset covering ACL-venue papers from 2018-2025, with 2,667 extracted annotation tasks from 1,603 papers, and find that papers frequently report operational details such as recruitment strategies, annotator expertise, and annotation volume, but often omit details needed to assess annotation validity, including training, language proficiency, compensation, socio-demographics, adjudication, and agreement values, especially in model-evaluation studies. Our results show that annotation reporting in NLP has improved over time but remains uneven, and they establish a scalable framework and bare-minimum reporting recommendations for making human annotation more reliable, reproducible, and interpretable.

Existing benchmarks for LLM coding agents primarily evaluate final outcomes. While useful for measuring overall capability, these metrics provide limited visibility and often miss defects that arise during execution. We present ProcCtrlBench, a benchmark for execution-process evaluation in LLM coding agents. ProcCtrlBench organizes recurrent execution defects into a reusable ontology covering 11 defect types in 4 categories, and evaluates agent trajectories through standardized process evidence rather than final outcomes alone. To support comparison across heterogeneous agents, ProcCtrlBench standardizes raw logs into a unified trajectory representation and reports calibrated scorecards over process-level findings. In addition, ProcCtrlBench uses control preservation as a way to quantify execution-process quality, capturing whether execution remains interpretable, interruptible, correctable, reversible, and able to hand back authority when needed. We evaluate ProcCtrlBench on 200 cases sampled from three benchmarks: AndroidBench, TerminalBench, and SWE-bench-Verified. Results show that ProcCtrlBench can be instantiated with useful reliability, provides more stable semantics than direct thresholding, and reveals meaningful differences in execution quality that are often overlooked by conventional outcome-based evaluation.

Industry 4.0 has revolutionized manufacturing by driving digitalization and shifting the paradigm toward additive manufacturing (AM). Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), a key AM technology, enables the creation of highly customized, cost-effective products with minimal material waste through layer-by-layer extrusion, posing a significant challenge to traditional subtractive methods. However, the susceptibility of material extrusion techniques to errors often requires expert intervention to detect and mitigate defects that can severely compromise product quality. While automated error detection and machine learning models exist, their generalizability across diverse 3D printer setups, firmware, and sensors is limited, and deep learning methods require extensive labeled datasets, hindering scalability and adaptability. To address these challenges, we present a process monitoring and control framework that leverages pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) alongside 3D printers to detect and address printing defects. The LLM evaluates print quality by analyzing images captured after each layer or print segment, identifying failure modes and querying the printer for relevant parameters. It then generates and executes a corrective action plan. We validated the effectiveness of the proposed framework in identifying defects by comparing it against a control group of engineers with diverse AM expertise. Our evaluation demonstrated that LLM-based agents not only accurately identify common 3D printing errors, such as inconsistent extrusion, stringing, warping, and layer adhesion, but also effectively determine the parameters causing these failures and autonomously correct them without any need for human intervention.

Patient data from real-world clinical practice often suffers from data scarcity and long-tail imbalances, leading to biased outcomes or algorithmic unfairness. This study addresses these challenges by generating lesion-containing image-segmentation pairs from lesion-free images. Previous efforts in medical imaging synthesis have struggled with separating lesion information from background, resulting in low-quality backgrounds and limited control over the synthetic output. Inspired by diffusion-based image inpainting, we propose LeFusion, a lesion-focused diffusion model. By redesigning the diffusion learning objectives to focus on lesion areas, we simplify the learning process and improve control over the output while preserving high-fidelity backgrounds by integrating forward-diffused background contexts into the reverse diffusion process. Additionally, we tackle two major challenges in lesion texture synthesis: 1) multi-peak and 2) multi-class lesions. We introduce two effective strategies: histogram-based texture control and multi-channel decomposition, enabling the controlled generation of high-quality lesions in difficult scenarios. Furthermore, we incorporate lesion mask diffusion, allowing control over lesion size, location, and boundary, thus increasing lesion diversity. Validated on 3D cardiac lesion MRI and lung nodule CT datasets, LeFusion-generated data significantly improves the performance of state-of-the-art segmentation models, including nnUNet and SwinUNETR. Code and model are available at https://github.com/M3DV/LeFusion.

Manipulation of facial images to meet specific controls such as pose, expression, and lighting, also known as face rigging, is a complex task in computer vision. Existing methods are limited by their reliance on image datasets, which necessitates individual-specific fine-tuning and limits their ability to retain fine-grained identity and semantic details, reducing practical usability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce ControlFace, a novel face rigging method conditioned on 3DMM renderings that enables flexible, high-fidelity control. We employ a dual-branch U-Nets: one, referred to as FaceNet, captures identity and fine details, while the other focuses on generation. To enhance control precision, the control mixer module encodes the correlated features between the target-aligned control and reference-aligned control, and a novel guidance method, reference control guidance, steers the generation process for better control adherence. By training on a facial video dataset, we fully utilize FaceNet's rich representations while ensuring control adherence. Extensive experiments demonstrate ControlFace's superior performance in identity preservation and control precision, highlighting its practicality. Please see the project website: https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/ControlFace/.

Image watermark techniques provide an effective way to assert ownership, deter misuse, and trace content sources, which has become increasingly essential in the era of large generative models. A critical attribute of watermark techniques is their robustness against various manipulations. In this paper, we introduce a watermark removal approach capable of effectively nullifying the state of the art watermarking techniques. Our primary insight involves regenerating the watermarked image starting from a clean Gaussian noise via a controllable diffusion model, utilizing the extracted semantic and spatial features from the watermarked image. The semantic control adapter and the spatial control network are specifically trained to control the denoising process towards ensuring image quality and enhancing consistency between the cleaned image and the original watermarked image. To achieve a smooth trade-off between watermark removal performance and image consistency, we further propose an adjustable and controllable regeneration scheme. This scheme adds varying numbers of noise steps to the latent representation of the watermarked image, followed by a controlled denoising process starting from this noisy latent representation. As the number of noise steps increases, the latent representation progressively approaches clean Gaussian noise, facilitating the desired trade-off. We apply our watermark removal methods across various watermarking techniques, and the results demonstrate that our methods offer superior visual consistency/quality and enhanced watermark removal performance compared to existing regeneration approaches.

Human visual reasoning is governed by active vision, a process where metacognitive control drives top-down goal-directed attention, dynamically routing foveal focus toward task-relevant details while maintaining peripheral awareness of the global scene. In contrast, modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) process visual information passively, relying on the static accumulation of massive token contexts that dilute spatial reasoning and induce linguistic hallucinations. Here we propose the following paradigm shift: GazeVLM, a multimodal architecture that internalizes this metacognitive oversight over its deployment of attention resources directly into the reasoning loop. By empowering the VLM to autonomously generate gaze tokens (<LOOK>), GazeVLM establishes a top-down control mechanism over its own causal attention mask. The model dynamically dictates its focal intent, triggering a continuous suppression bias that dampens irrelevant visual features, implementing spatial selective attention and simulating foveal fixation. Once local reasoning concludes, the bias lifts, seamlessly restoring the global view. This architecture enables the model to fluidly transition between global spatial awareness and localized focal reasoning without relying on external agentic contraptions like cropping tools, or inflating the context window with additional visual tokens derived from localized visual patches. Trained with a bespoke Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) procedure that rewards valid grounding, our 4B-parameter GazeVLM delivers strong high-resolution multimodal reasoning performance, surpassing state-of-the-art VLMs in its parameter class by nearly 4% and agentic multimodal pipelines built around thinking with images by more than 5% on HRBench-4k and HRBench-8k.

Large language models improve final-answer accuracy through extended chain-of-thought reasoning, but often spend tokens inefficiently and offer little inference-time control. Existing efficient reasoning methods control thinking length by shortening, early-stopping, or compressing traces, leaving how the model thinks implicit. In this paper, we propose Agentic Chain-of-Thought Steering (ACTS), which formulates reasoning steering as a Markov decision process where a controller agent adaptively steers a frozen reasoner during inference. At each step, the controller observes the reasoning trace and remaining thinking budget, then issues a steering action consisting of a reasoning strategy and a steering phrase that initiates the next reasoner step. This enables budget-aware strategy control for efficient reasoning while preserving the reasoner's generation continuity. We initialize the controller agent from our constructed synthetic steering trajectories with multi-budget augmentation, and further optimize it via reinforcement learning with budget-conditioned reward shaping. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show that ACTS matches full-thinking performance with substantial token savings, and enables controllable accuracy-efficiency trade-offs across different reasoners and tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/Andree-9/ACTS.

Achieving robust, human-like whole-body control on humanoid robots for agile, contact-rich behaviors remains a central challenge, demanding heavy per-skill engineering and a brittle process of tuning controllers. We introduce ZEST (Zero-shot Embodied Skill Transfer), a streamlined motion-imitation framework that trains policies via reinforcement learning from diverse sources -- high-fidelity motion capture, noisy monocular video, and non-physics-constrained animation -- and deploys them to hardware zero-shot. ZEST generalizes across behaviors and platforms while avoiding contact labels, reference or observation windows, state estimators, and extensive reward shaping. Its training pipeline combines adaptive sampling, which focuses training on difficult motion segments, and an automatic curriculum using a model-based assistive wrench, together enabling dynamic, long-horizon maneuvers. We further provide a procedure for selecting joint-level gains from approximate analytical armature values for closed-chain actuators, along with a refined model of actuators. Trained entirely in simulation with moderate domain randomization, ZEST demonstrates remarkable generality. On Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid, ZEST learns dynamic, multi-contact skills (e.g., army crawl, breakdancing) from motion capture. It transfers expressive dance and scene-interaction skills, such as box-climbing, directly from videos to Atlas and the Unitree G1. Furthermore, it extends across morphologies to the Spot quadruped, enabling acrobatics, such as a continuous backflip, through animation. Together, these results demonstrate robust zero-shot deployment across heterogeneous data sources and embodiments, establishing ZEST as a scalable interface between biological movements and their robotic counterparts.

This paper presents a modeling effort to explore the underlying physics of temperature evolution during additive friction stir deposition (AFSD) by a human-AI teaming approach. AFSD is an emerging solid-state additive manufacturing technology that deposits materials without melting. However, both process modeling and modeling of the AFSD tool are at an early stage. In this paper, a human-AI teaming approach is proposed to combine models based on first principles with AI. The resulting human-informed machine learning method, denoted as AFSD-Physics, can effectively learn the governing equations of temperature evolution at the tool and the build from in-process measurements. Experiments are designed and conducted to collect in-process measurements for the deposition of aluminum 7075 with a total of 30 layers. The acquired governing equations are physically interpretable models with low computational cost and high accuracy. Model predictions show good agreement with the measurements. Experimental validation with new process parameters demonstrates the model's generalizability and potential for use in tool temperature control and process optimization.

Text irregularities pose significant challenges to scene text recognizers. Thin-Plate Spline (TPS)-based rectification is widely regarded as an effective means to deal with them. Currently, the calculation of TPS transformation parameters purely depends on the quality of regressed text borders. It ignores the text content and often leads to unsatisfactory rectified results for severely distorted text. In this work, we introduce TPS++, an attention-enhanced TPS transformation that incorporates the attention mechanism to text rectification for the first time. TPS++ formulates the parameter calculation as a joint process of foreground control point regression and content-based attention score estimation, which is computed by a dedicated designed gated-attention block. TPS++ builds a more flexible content-aware rectifier, generating a natural text correction that is easier to read by the subsequent recognizer. Moreover, TPS++ shares the feature backbone with the recognizer in part and implements the rectification at feature-level rather than image-level, incurring only a small overhead in terms of parameters and inference time. Experiments on public benchmarks show that TPS++ consistently improves the recognition and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy. Meanwhile, it generalizes well on different backbones and recognizers. Code is at https://github.com/simplify23/TPS_PP.

Generating music from text descriptions is a user-friendly mode since the text is a relatively easy interface for user engagement. While some approaches utilize texts to control music audio generation, editing musical elements in generated audio is challenging for users. In contrast, symbolic music offers ease of editing, making it more accessible for users to manipulate specific musical elements. In this paper, we propose MuseCoco, which generates symbolic music from text descriptions with musical attributes as the bridge to break down the task into text-to-attribute understanding and attribute-to-music generation stages. MuseCoCo stands for Music Composition Copilot that empowers musicians to generate music directly from given text descriptions, offering a significant improvement in efficiency compared to creating music entirely from scratch. The system has two main advantages: Firstly, it is data efficient. In the attribute-to-music generation stage, the attributes can be directly extracted from music sequences, making the model training self-supervised. In the text-to-attribute understanding stage, the text is synthesized and refined by ChatGPT based on the defined attribute templates. Secondly, the system can achieve precise control with specific attributes in text descriptions and offers multiple control options through attribute-conditioned or text-conditioned approaches. MuseCoco outperforms baseline systems in terms of musicality, controllability, and overall score by at least 1.27, 1.08, and 1.32 respectively. Besides, there is a notable enhancement of about 20% in objective control accuracy. In addition, we have developed a robust large-scale model with 1.2 billion parameters, showcasing exceptional controllability and musicality.

There have been many successful implementations of neural style transfer in recent years. In most of these works, the stylization process is confined to the pixel domain. However, we argue that this representation is unnatural because paintings usually consist of brushstrokes rather than pixels. We propose a method to stylize images by optimizing parameterized brushstrokes instead of pixels and further introduce a simple differentiable rendering mechanism. Our approach significantly improves visual quality and enables additional control over the stylization process such as controlling the flow of brushstrokes through user input. We provide qualitative and quantitative evaluations that show the efficacy of the proposed parameterized representation.

Pixel-based reinforcement learning agents often fail under purely visual distribution shift even when latent dynamics and rewards are unchanged, but existing benchmarks entangle multiple sources of shift and hinder systematic analysis. We introduce KAGE-Env, a JAX-native 2D platformer that factorizes the observation process into independently controllable visual axes while keeping the underlying control problem fixed. By construction, varying a visual axis affects performance only through the induced state-conditional action distribution of a pixel policy, providing a clean abstraction for visual generalization. Building on this environment, we define KAGE-Bench, a benchmark of six known-axis suites comprising 34 train-evaluation configuration pairs that isolate individual visual shifts. Using a standard PPO-CNN baseline, we observe strong axis-dependent failures, with background and photometric shifts often collapsing success, while agent-appearance shifts are comparatively benign. Several shifts preserve forward motion while breaking task completion, showing that return alone can obscure generalization failures. Finally, the fully vectorized JAX implementation enables up to 33M environment steps per second on a single GPU, enabling fast and reproducible sweeps over visual factors. Code: https://avanturist322.github.io/KAGEBench/.

Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) learns goal-conditioned policies from static pre-collected datasets. However, accurate value estimation remains a challenge due to the limited coverage of the state-action space. Recent physics-informed approaches have sought to address this by imposing physical and geometric constraints on the value function through regularization defined over first-order partial differential equations (PDEs), such as the Eikonal equation. However, these formulations can often be ill-posed in complex, high-dimensional environments. In this work, we propose a physics-informed regularization derived from the viscosity solution of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation. By providing a physics-based inductive bias, our approach grounds the learning process in optimal control theory, explicitly regularizing and bounding updates during value iterations. Furthermore, we leverage the Feynman-Kac theorem to recast the PDE solution as an expectation, enabling a tractable Monte Carlo estimation of the objective that avoids numerical instability in higher-order gradients. Experiments demonstrate that our method improves geometric consistency, making it broadly applicable to navigation and high-dimensional, complex manipulation tasks. Open-source codes are available at https://github.com/HrishikeshVish/phys-fk-value-GCRL.

The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has intensified the requirement for reliable safety evaluation to uncover model vulnerabilities. To this end, numerous LLM safety evaluation benchmarks are proposed. However, existing benchmarks generally rely on labor-intensive manual curation, which causes excessive time and resource consumption. They also exhibit significant redundancy and limited difficulty. To alleviate these problems, we introduce SafetyFlow, the first agent-flow system designed to automate the construction of LLM safety benchmarks. SafetyFlow can automatically build a comprehensive safety benchmark in only four days without any human intervention by orchestrating seven specialized agents, significantly reducing time and resource cost. Equipped with versatile tools, the agents of SafetyFlow ensure process and cost controllability while integrating human expertise into the automatic pipeline. The final constructed dataset, SafetyFlowBench, contains 23,446 queries with low redundancy and strong discriminative power. Our contribution includes the first fully automated benchmarking pipeline and a comprehensive safety benchmark. We evaluate the safety of 49 advanced LLMs on our dataset and conduct extensive experiments to validate our efficacy and efficiency.

Training modern neural networks is increasingly fragile, with rare but severe destabilizing updates often causing irreversible divergence or silent performance degradation. Existing optimization methods primarily rely on preventive mechanisms embedded within the optimizer, offering limited ability to detect and recover from instability once it occurs. We introduce a supervisory runtime stability framework that treats optimization as a controlled stochastic process. By isolating an innovation signal derived from secondary measurements, such as validation probes, the framework enables automatic detection and recovery from destabilizing updates without modifying the underlying optimizer. We provide theoretical runtime safety guarantees that formalize bounded degradation and recovery. Our implementation incurs minimal overhead and is compatible with memory-constrained training settings.

Inference-time guided sampling steers state-of-the-art diffusion and flow models without fine-tuning by interpreting the generation process as a controllable trajectory. This provides a simple and flexible way to inject external constraints (e.g., cost functions or pre-trained verifiers) for controlled generation. However, existing methods often fail when composing multiple constraints simultaneously, which leads to deviations from the true data manifold. In this work, we identify root causes of this off-manifold drift and find that the approximation error scales severely with gradient misalignment. Building on these findings, we propose Conflict-Aware Additive Guidance (g^car), a lightweight and learnable method, which actively rectifies off-manifold drift by dynamically detecting and resolving gradient conflicts. We validate g^car across diverse domains, ranging from synthetic datasets and image editing to generative decision-making for planning and control. Our results demonstrate that g^car effectively rectifies off-manifold drift, surpassing baselines in generation fidelity while using light compute. Code is available at https://github.com/yuxuehui/CAR-guidance.

To stabilize the periodic operation of a chemical reactor the oscillation period should be determined precisely in real time. The method discussed in the paper is based on adaptive sampling of the state variable with the use of chaotic mapping to itself. It enables precise determination of the oscillation period in real time and could be used for a proper control system, that can successfully control the process and maintain the oscillation period at a set level. The method was applied to a tank reactor and tubular reactor with recycle.

Large language models (LLMs) equipped with retrieval--the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) paradigm--should combine their parametric knowledge with external evidence, yet in practice they often hallucinate, over-trust noisy snippets, or ignore vital context. We introduce TCR (Transparent Conflict Resolution), a plug-and-play framework that makes this decision process observable and controllable. TCR (i) disentangles semantic match and factual consistency via dual contrastive encoders, (ii) estimates self-answerability to gauge confidence in internal memory, and (iii) feeds the three scalar signals to the generator through a lightweight soft-prompt with SNR-based weighting. Across seven benchmarks TCR improves conflict detection (+5-18 F1), raises knowledge-gap recovery by +21.4 pp and cuts misleading-context overrides by -29.3 pp, while adding only 0.3% parameters. The signals align with human judgements and expose temporal decision patterns.

Diffusion Transformers have become a powerful backbone for text-to-image generation, but their layered and cross-modal generation process makes safety control fundamentally different from prompt-level filtering or output-level detection. Harmful semantics may be weakly expressed in text representations, progressively bound to visual latents, and finally entangled with rendering dynamics. As a result, safety steering at a fixed layer can be unstable, and a steering mechanism learned from known risks may not transfer reliably to a shifted target risk domain. We propose SafeDIG, a safety steering framework that formulates DiT safety adaptation as position-aware sparse feature transfer. SafeDIG first constructs Sparse Autoencoders over functionally distinct DiT intervention positions and uses robustness-aware pre-training routing to prioritize intervention sites that are expected to remain stable under source-target risk shift. It then separates transferable safety features from domain-specific activation geometry by freezing the SAE encoder as a reusable sparse safety dictionary and adapting only the decoder to the target-domain activation manifold. During inference, SafeDIG combines Blend and Repel operations to steer unsafe activations toward transferred safety manifolds or away from harmful sparse directions. Experiments on FLUX.1 Dev and Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large show that SafeDIG consistently reduces target-domain and overall unsafe generation rates while preserving source-domain safety and image quality.

Text-to-image (T2I) models can produce visually compelling images, yet they remain limited on open-world tasks that require complex semantic understanding, multi-step reasoning, and the integration of external world knowledge. Existing efforts introduce agent capabilities into image generation, but they either prescribe a fixed workflow or place only a subset of the open-world image generation process under agent control. Consequently, reasoning, tool invocation, and image generation are not coordinated by a single policy. We propose ToolArtist, a fully agentic image generation model obtained by post-training a Unified Multimodal Model (UMM). ToolArtist dynamically orchestrates reasoning, external tool use, and native image generation within one unified policy. During Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), we equip a teacher agent with search tools alongside an image-generation tool. We then convert the collected trajectories into a UMM compatible format, where the image-generation tool is concealed while the resulting generated images are retained. During Reinforcement Learning (RL), we develop an agentic RL infrastructure for UMMs and introduce Reason-Act-Draw GRPO (RAD-GRPO), which uses complementary intent and quality rewards to jointly optimize the model. Experiments show that placing the entire open-world image-generation process under an agent policy consistently outperforms approaches with fixed pipelines or only partially agent-controlled components. We release the training data and the complete post-training infrastructure.

Can a language model read the quality of its ongoing computation, and can an external intervention turn that readout into better outcomes? We test both questions in a frozen 2.6B looped transformer, Ouro-RLTT. On GSM8K, a strict pre-answer probe excludes the answer region and gold value yet predicts success: hidden states plus length/log-probability features reach AUROC 0.797 versus 0.731 for those surface features alone (increment +0.066; task-clustered 95% CI [+0.021,+0.112]; 170 tasks). On Horizon Logic, a prospectively extended task-disjoint study gives an increment of +0.111 (CI [+0.056,+0.169]), independently replicated on the new cohort (+0.095) and robust to an adversarial malformed-sibling shortcut. Recurrence also moves candidate-quality readability to progressively earlier physical depth; the trend replicates across the Ouro family and qualitatively in out-of-family Huginn, although their transfer geometry differs. The readout converts into validated decision-level gains. Hidden-state-based scores improve risk-coverage over shortcut-only scores in four sealed selective-prediction arms, and terminal selection beats matched random even when every candidate is well formed (27/32 correct selections versus 64.8% expected; p = 0.0086). Generative control does not convert: directional steering is negative, a branch screen is bounded, and exact-compute loop allocation and minimal LoRA direction-binding detect no gain. These tests run through bit-exact branch/carry/prune machinery over Ouro's 192-slot recurrent cache, including a suffix-recompute splice saving up to 88% of per-branch layer passes. We call this decision-usable but not generatively controllable property operational proto-introspection. All load-bearing values use source-item-disjoint splits and antisymmetrized pairwise evaluation.

Stage lighting plays an essential role in live music performances, influencing the engaging experience of both musicians and audiences. Given the high costs associated with hiring or training professional lighting engineers, Automatic Stage Lighting Control (ASLC) has gained increasing attention. However, most existing approaches only classify music into limited categories and map them to predefined light patterns, resulting in formulaic and monotonous outcomes that lack rationality. To address this issue, this paper presents an end-to-end solution that directly learns from experienced lighting engineers -- Skip-BART. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to conceptualize ASLC as a generative task rather than merely a classification problem. Our method modifies the BART model to take audio music as input and produce light hue and value (intensity) as output, incorporating a novel skip connection mechanism to enhance the relationship between music and light within the frame grid.We validate our method through both quantitative analysis and an human evaluation, demonstrating that Skip-BART outperforms conventional rule-based methods across all evaluation metrics and shows only a limited gap compared to real lighting engineers.Specifically, our method yields a p-value of 0.72 in a statistical comparison based on human evaluations with human lighting engineers, suggesting that the proposed approach closely matches human lighting engineering performance. To support further research, we have made our self-collected dataset, code, and trained model parameters available at https://github.com/RS2002/Skip-BART .

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various applications by generating outputs based on given prompts. However, achieving the desired output requires iterative prompt refinement. This paper presents a novel approach that draws parallels between the iterative prompt optimization process in LLMs and feedback control systems. We iteratively refine the prompt by treating the deviation between the LLM output and the desired result as an error term until the output criteria are met. This process is akin to a feedback control system, where the LLM, despite being non-linear and non-deterministic, is managed using principles from linear feedback control systems. We explore the application of different types of controllers within this framework, providing a mathematical foundation for integrating linear feedback control mechanisms with LLMs.

Makeup transfer is a process of transferring the makeup style from a reference image to the source images, while preserving the source images' identities. This technique is highly desirable and finds many applications. However, existing methods lack fine-level control of the makeup style, making it challenging to achieve high-quality results when dealing with large spatial misalignments. To address this problem, we propose a novel Spatial Alignment and Region-Adaptive normalization method (SARA) in this paper. Our method generates detailed makeup transfer results that can handle large spatial misalignments and achieve part-specific and shade-controllable makeup transfer. Specifically, SARA comprises three modules: Firstly, a spatial alignment module that preserves the spatial context of makeup and provides a target semantic map for guiding the shape-independent style codes. Secondly, a region-adaptive normalization module that decouples shape and makeup style using per-region encoding and normalization, which facilitates the elimination of spatial misalignments. Lastly, a makeup fusion module blends identity features and makeup style by injecting learned scale and bias parameters. Experimental results show that our SARA method outperforms existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on two public datasets.

Existing 2D-lifting-based 3D editing methods often encounter challenges related to inconsistency, stemming from the lack of view-consistent 2D editing models and the difficulty of ensuring consistent editing across multiple views. To address these issues, we propose C3Editor, a controllable and consistent 2D-lifting-based 3D editing framework. Given an original 3D representation and a text-based editing prompt, our method selectively establishes a view-consistent 2D editing model to achieve superior 3D editing results. The process begins with the controlled selection of a ground truth (GT) view and its corresponding edited image as the optimization target, allowing for user-defined manual edits. Next, we fine-tune the 2D editing model within the GT view and across multiple views to align with the GT-edited image while ensuring multi-view consistency. To meet the distinct requirements of GT view fitting and multi-view consistency, we introduce separate LoRA modules for targeted fine-tuning. Our approach delivers more consistent and controllable 2D and 3D editing results than existing 2D-lifting-based methods, outperforming them in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.

Speech-based analysis offers a scalable and non-invasive approach for detecting cognitive decline, yet progress has been constrained by the limited availability of clinically validated datasets collected under realistic conditions. We introduce PROCESS-2, a large-scale speech dataset designed to support research on automatic assessment of cognitive impairment from spontaneous and task-oriented speech. The dataset comprises recordings from 200 healthy controls, 150 mild cognitive impairment, and 50 dementia diagnoses collected using the CognoMemory digital assessment platform. Each participant completed a single assessment session, including picture description and verbal fluency tasks, accompanied by manually verified transcripts and participant-level metadata. PROCESS-2 contains approximately 21 hours of speech audio with predefined train/test partitions. Comprehensive technical validation evaluated demographic balance, clinical consistency, recording stability, embedding-space structure, and reproducible baseline modelling performance, demonstrating clinically meaningful group separation and stable performance across modelling approaches while preserving real-world conversational variability. PROCESS-2 is released under controlled access via Hugging Face to enable responsible reuse while protecting participant privacy, providing a reproducible benchmark resource for speech-based cognitive assessment research.

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used for complex information-extraction tasks, yet it remains unclear whether agentic components such as reflection and memory lead to observable and controllable improvements over fixed LLM workflows. We study this question through conference-paper dataset extraction, where a system must identify datasets mentioned in scholarly PDFs and produce structured records. We compare a fixed workflow baseline with reflective agent variants and specify an optimized agent condition (S2) that extends the same task with richer PDF tools and dynamic tool selection. Our evaluation emphasizes process-level behavior--including tool execution, retries, reflection, memory use, runtime, and failure recovery--while treating extraction coverage and field completeness as secondary outcome measures. The paper characterizes when agentic mechanisms change system behavior, whether these changes improve task completion, and how the observed failure modes motivate an optimized agent design under the same evaluation harness.

Learning predictive models from observations using deep neural networks (DNNs) is a promising new approach to many real-world planning and control problems. However, common DNNs are too unstructured for effective planning, and current control methods typically rely on extensive sampling or local gradient descent. In this paper, we propose a new framework for integrated model learning and predictive control that is amenable to efficient optimization algorithms. Specifically, we start with a ReLU neural model of the system dynamics and, with minimal losses in prediction accuracy, we gradually sparsify it by removing redundant neurons. This discrete sparsification process is approximated as a continuous problem, enabling an end-to-end optimization of both the model architecture and the weight parameters. The sparsified model is subsequently used by a mixed-integer predictive controller, which represents the neuron activations as binary variables and employs efficient branch-and-bound algorithms. Our framework is applicable to a wide variety of DNNs, from simple multilayer perceptrons to complex graph neural dynamics. It can efficiently handle tasks involving complicated contact dynamics, such as object pushing, compositional object sorting, and manipulation of deformable objects. Numerical and hardware experiments show that, despite the aggressive sparsification, our framework can deliver better closed-loop performance than existing state-of-the-art methods.

Research on video generation has recently made tremendous progress, enabling high-quality videos to be generated from text prompts or images. Adding control to the video generation process is an important goal moving forward and recent approaches that condition video generation models on camera trajectories make strides towards it. Yet, it remains challenging to generate a video of the same scene from multiple different camera trajectories. Solutions to this multi-video generation problem could enable large-scale 3D scene generation with editable camera trajectories, among other applications. We introduce collaborative video diffusion (CVD) as an important step towards this vision. The CVD framework includes a novel cross-video synchronization module that promotes consistency between corresponding frames of the same video rendered from different camera poses using an epipolar attention mechanism. Trained on top of a state-of-the-art camera-control module for video generation, CVD generates multiple videos rendered from different camera trajectories with significantly better consistency than baselines, as shown in extensive experiments. Project page: https://collaborativevideodiffusion.github.io/.

Virtual try-on methods based on diffusion models achieve realistic try-on effects. They use an extra reference network or an additional image encoder to process multiple conditional image inputs, which adds complexity pre-processing and additional computational costs. Besides, they require more than 25 inference steps, bringing longer inference time. In this work, with the development of diffusion transformer (DiT), we rethink the necessity of additional reference network or image encoder and introduce MC-VTON, which leverages DiT's intrinsic backbone to seamlessly integrate minimal conditional try-on inputs. Compared to existing methods, the superiority of MC-VTON is demonstrated in four aspects: (1) Superior detail fidelity. Our DiT-based MC-VTON exhibits superior fidelity in preserving fine-grained details. (2) Simplified network and inputs. We remove any extra reference network or image encoder. We also remove unnecessary conditions like the long prompt, pose estimation, human parsing, and depth map. We require only the masked person image and the garment image. (3) Parameter-efficient training. To process the try-on task, we fine-tune the FLUX.1-dev with only 39.7M additional parameters (0.33% of the backbone parameters). (4) Less inference steps. We apply distillation diffusion on MC-VTON and only need 8 steps to generate a realistic try-on image, with only 86.8M additional parameters (0.72% of the backbone parameters). Experiments show that MC-VTON achieves superior qualitative and quantitative results with fewer condition inputs, trainable parameters, and inference steps than baseline methods.

This paper addresses the limitations of current humanoid robot control frameworks, which primarily rely on reactive mechanisms and lack autonomous interaction capabilities due to data scarcity. We propose Humanoid-VLA, a novel framework that integrates language understanding, egocentric scene perception, and motion control, enabling universal humanoid control. Humanoid-VLA begins with language-motion pre-alignment using non-egocentric human motion datasets paired with textual descriptions, allowing the model to learn universal motion patterns and action semantics. We then incorporate egocentric visual context through a parameter efficient video-conditioned fine-tuning, enabling context-aware motion generation. Furthermore, we introduce a self-supervised data augmentation strategy that automatically generates pseudoannotations directly derived from motion data. This process converts raw motion sequences into informative question-answer pairs, facilitating the effective use of large-scale unlabeled video data. Built upon whole-body control architectures, extensive experiments show that Humanoid-VLA achieves object interaction and environment exploration tasks with enhanced contextual awareness, demonstrating a more human-like capacity for adaptive and intelligent engagement.

Despite significant advancements in natural language generation, controlling language models to produce texts with desired attributes remains a formidable challenge. In this work, we introduce RSA-Control, a training-free controllable text generation framework grounded in pragmatics. RSA-Control directs the generation process by recursively reasoning between imaginary speakers and listeners, enhancing the likelihood that target attributes are correctly interpreted by listeners amidst distractors. Additionally, we introduce a self-adjustable rationality parameter, which allows for automatic adjustment of control strength based on context. Our experiments, conducted with two task types and two types of language models, demonstrate that RSA-Control achieves strong attribute control while maintaining language fluency and content consistency. Our code is available at https://github.com/Ewanwong/RSA-Control.

Manually creating 3D environments for AR/VR applications is a complex process requiring expert knowledge in 3D modeling software. Pioneering works facilitate this process by generating room meshes conditioned on textual style descriptions. Yet, many of these automatically generated 3D meshes do not adhere to typical room layouts, compromising their plausibility, e.g., by placing several beds in one bedroom. To address these challenges, we present ControlRoom3D, a novel method to generate high-quality room meshes. Central to our approach is a user-defined 3D semantic proxy room that outlines a rough room layout based on semantic bounding boxes and a textual description of the overall room style. Our key insight is that when rendered to 2D, this 3D representation provides valuable geometric and semantic information to control powerful 2D models to generate 3D consistent textures and geometry that aligns well with the proxy room. Backed up by an extensive study including quantitative metrics and qualitative user evaluations, our method generates diverse and globally plausible 3D room meshes, thus empowering users to design 3D rooms effortlessly without specialized knowledge.

Text-guided image editing has recently experienced rapid development. However, simultaneously performing multiple editing actions on a single image, such as background replacement and specific subject attribute changes, while maintaining consistency between the subject and the background remains challenging. In this paper, we propose LayerDiffusion, a semantic-based layered controlled image editing method. Our method enables non-rigid editing and attribute modification of specific subjects while preserving their unique characteristics and seamlessly integrating them into new backgrounds. We leverage a large-scale text-to-image model and employ a layered controlled optimization strategy combined with layered diffusion training. During the diffusion process, an iterative guidance strategy is used to generate a final image that aligns with the textual description. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in generating highly coherent images that closely align with the given textual description. The edited images maintain a high similarity to the features of the input image and surpass the performance of current leading image editing methods. LayerDiffusion opens up new possibilities for controllable image editing.

Referenced-based scene stylization that edits the appearance based on a content-aligned reference image is an emerging research area. Starting with a pretrained neural radiance field (NeRF), existing methods typically learn a novel appearance that matches the given style. Despite their effectiveness, they inherently suffer from time-consuming volume rendering, and thus are impractical for many real-time applications. In this work, we propose ReGS, which adapts 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for reference-based stylization to enable real-time stylized view synthesis. Editing the appearance of a pretrained 3DGS is challenging as it uses discrete Gaussians as 3D representation, which tightly bind appearance with geometry. Simply optimizing the appearance as prior methods do is often insufficient for modeling continuous textures in the given reference image. To address this challenge, we propose a novel texture-guided control mechanism that adaptively adjusts local responsible Gaussians to a new geometric arrangement, serving for desired texture details. The proposed process is guided by texture clues for effective appearance editing, and regularized by scene depth for preserving original geometric structure. With these novel designs, we show ReGs can produce state-of-the-art stylization results that respect the reference texture while embracing real-time rendering speed for free-view navigation.

Natural Language Inference (NLI) tasks involving temporal inference remain challenging for pre-trained language models (LMs). Although various datasets have been created for this task, they primarily focus on English and do not address the need for resources in other languages. It is unclear whether current LMs realize the generalization capacity for temporal inference across languages. In this paper, we present Jamp, a Japanese NLI benchmark focused on temporal inference. Our dataset includes a range of temporal inference patterns, which enables us to conduct fine-grained analysis. To begin the data annotation process, we create diverse inference templates based on the formal semantics test suites. We then automatically generate diverse NLI examples by using the Japanese case frame dictionary and well-designed templates while controlling the distribution of inference patterns and gold labels. We evaluate the generalization capacities of monolingual/multilingual LMs by splitting our dataset based on tense fragments (i.e., temporal inference patterns). Our findings demonstrate that LMs struggle with specific linguistic phenomena, such as habituality, indicating that there is potential for the development of more effective NLI models across languages.

Video editing using diffusion models has achieved remarkable results in generating high-quality edits for videos. However, current methods often rely on large-scale pretraining, limiting flexibility for specific edits. First-frame-guided editing provides control over the first frame, but lacks flexibility over subsequent frames. To address this, we propose a mask-based LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) tuning method that adapts pretrained Image-to-Video (I2V) models for flexible video editing. Our approach preserves background regions while enabling controllable edits propagation. This solution offers efficient and adaptable video editing without altering the model architecture. To better steer this process, we incorporate additional references, such as alternate viewpoints or representative scene states, which serve as visual anchors for how content should unfold. We address the control challenge using a mask-driven LoRA tuning strategy that adapts a pre-trained image-to-video model to the editing context. The model must learn from two distinct sources: the input video provides spatial structure and motion cues, while reference images offer appearance guidance. A spatial mask enables region-specific learning by dynamically modulating what the model attends to, ensuring that each area draws from the appropriate source. Experimental results show our method achieves superior video editing performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Hand-object interaction (HOI) is fundamental for humans to express intent. Existing HOI generation research is predominantly confined to fixed grasping patterns, where control is tied to physical priors such as force closure or generic intent instructions, even when expressed through elaborate language. Such an overly general conditioning imposes a strong inductive bias for stable grasps, thus failing to capture the diversity of daily HOI. To address these limitations, we introduce Free-Form HOI Generation, which aims to generate controllable, diverse, and physically plausible HOI conditioned on fine-grained intent, extending HOI from grasping to free-form interactions, like pushing, poking, and rotating. To support this task, we construct WildO2, an in-the-wild diverse 3D HOI dataset, which includes diverse HOI derived from internet videos. Specifically, it contains 4.4k unique interactions across 92 intents and 610 object categories, each with detailed semantic annotations. Building on this dataset, we propose TOUCH, a three-stage framework centered on a multi-level diffusion model that facilitates fine-grained semantic control to generate versatile hand poses beyond grasping priors. This process leverages explicit contact modeling for conditioning and is subsequently refined with contact consistency and physical constraints to ensure realism. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate our method's ability to generate controllable, diverse, and physically plausible hand interactions representative of daily activities. The project page is https://guangyid.github.io/hoi123touch{here}.

Controlled text generation is very important for the practical use of language models because it ensures that the produced text includes only the desired attributes from a specific domain or dataset. Existing methods, however, are inapplicable to black-box models or suffer a significant trade-off between controlling the generated text and maintaining its fluency. This paper introduces the Score-based Progressive Editor (ScoPE), a novel approach designed to overcome these issues. ScoPE modifies the context at the token level during the generation process of a backbone language model. This modification guides the subsequent text to naturally include the target attributes. To facilitate this process, ScoPE employs a training objective that maximizes a target score, thoroughly considering both the ability to guide the text and its fluency. Experimental results on diverse controlled generation tasks demonstrate that ScoPE can effectively regulate the attributes of the generated text while fully utilizing the capability of the backbone large language models. Our codes are available at https://github.com/ysw1021/ScoPE.

We present a deep learning method for composite and task-driven motion control for physically simulated characters. In contrast to existing data-driven approaches using reinforcement learning that imitate full-body motions, we learn decoupled motions for specific body parts from multiple reference motions simultaneously and directly by leveraging the use of multiple discriminators in a GAN-like setup. In this process, there is no need of any manual work to produce composite reference motions for learning. Instead, the control policy explores by itself how the composite motions can be combined automatically. We further account for multiple task-specific rewards and train a single, multi-objective control policy. To this end, we propose a novel framework for multi-objective learning that adaptively balances the learning of disparate motions from multiple sources and multiple goal-directed control objectives. In addition, as composite motions are typically augmentations of simpler behaviors, we introduce a sample-efficient method for training composite control policies in an incremental manner, where we reuse a pre-trained policy as the meta policy and train a cooperative policy that adapts the meta one for new composite tasks. We show the applicability of our approach on a variety of challenging multi-objective tasks involving both composite motion imitation and multiple goal-directed control.

Language models can generate harmful and biased outputs and exhibit undesirable behavior according to a given cultural context. We propose a Process for Adapting Language Models to Society (PALMS) with Values-Targeted Datasets, an iterative process to significantly change model behavior by crafting and fine-tuning on a dataset that reflects a predetermined set of target values. We evaluate our process using three metrics: quantitative metrics with human evaluations that score output adherence to a target value, toxicity scoring on outputs; and qualitative metrics analyzing the most common word associated with a given social category. Through each iteration, we add additional training dataset examples based on observed shortcomings from evaluations. PALMS performs significantly better on all metrics compared to baseline and control models for a broad range of GPT-3 language model sizes without compromising capability integrity. We find that the effectiveness of PALMS increases with model size. We show that significantly adjusting language model behavior is feasible with a small, hand-curated dataset.

Generating rich and controllable motion is a pivotal challenge in video synthesis. We propose Boximator, a new approach for fine-grained motion control. Boximator introduces two constraint types: hard box and soft box. Users select objects in the conditional frame using hard boxes and then use either type of boxes to roughly or rigorously define the object's position, shape, or motion path in future frames. Boximator functions as a plug-in for existing video diffusion models. Its training process preserves the base model's knowledge by freezing the original weights and training only the control module. To address training challenges, we introduce a novel self-tracking technique that greatly simplifies the learning of box-object correlations. Empirically, Boximator achieves state-of-the-art video quality (FVD) scores, improving on two base models, and further enhanced after incorporating box constraints. Its robust motion controllability is validated by drastic increases in the bounding box alignment metric. Human evaluation also shows that users favor Boximator generation results over the base model.

A brain-computer interface (BCI) is a system that allows a person to communicate or control the surroundings without depending on the brain's normal output pathways of peripheral nerves and muscles. A lot of successful applications have arisen utilizing the advantages of BCI to assist disabled people with so-called assistive technology. Considering using BCI has fewer limitations and huge potential, this project has been proposed to control the movement of an electronic wheelchair via brain signals. The goal of this project is to help disabled people, especially paralyzed people suffering from motor disabilities, improve their life qualities. In order to realize the project stated above, Steady-State Visual Evoked Potential (SSVEP) is involved. It can be easily elicited in the visual cortical with the same frequency as the one is being focused by the subject. There are two important parts in this project. One is to process the EEG signals and another one is to make a visual stimulator using hardware. The EEG signals are processed in Matlab using the algorithm of Butterworth Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) bandpass filter (for preprocessing) and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) (for feature extraction). Besides, a harmonics-based classification method is proposed and applied in the classification part. Moreover, the design of the visual stimulator combines LEDs as flickers and LCDs as information displayers on one panel. Microcontrollers are employed to control the SSVEP visual stimuli panel. This project is evaluated by subjects with different races and ages. Experimental results show the system is easy to be operated and it can achieve approximately a minimum 1-second time delay. So it demonstrates that this SSVEP-based BCI-controlled wheelchair has a huge potential to be applied to disabled people in the future.

This study delves into the intricacies of synchronizing facial dynamics with multilingual audio inputs, focusing on the creation of visually compelling, time-synchronized animations through diffusion-based techniques. Diverging from traditional parametric models for facial animation, our approach, termed LinguaLinker, adopts a holistic diffusion-based framework that integrates audio-driven visual synthesis to enhance the synergy between auditory stimuli and visual responses. We process audio features separately and derive the corresponding control gates, which implicitly govern the movements in the mouth, eyes, and head, irrespective of the portrait's origin. The advanced audio-driven visual synthesis mechanism provides nuanced control but keeps the compatibility of output video and input audio, allowing for a more tailored and effective portrayal of distinct personas across different languages. The significant improvements in the fidelity of animated portraits, the accuracy of lip-syncing, and the appropriate motion variations achieved by our method render it a versatile tool for animating any portrait in any language.

Crafting a single, versatile physics-based controller that can breathe life into interactive characters across a wide spectrum of scenarios represents an exciting frontier in character animation. An ideal controller should support diverse control modalities, such as sparse target keyframes, text instructions, and scene information. While previous works have proposed physically simulated, scene-aware control models, these systems have predominantly focused on developing controllers that each specializes in a narrow set of tasks and control modalities. This work presents MaskedMimic, a novel approach that formulates physics-based character control as a general motion inpainting problem. Our key insight is to train a single unified model to synthesize motions from partial (masked) motion descriptions, such as masked keyframes, objects, text descriptions, or any combination thereof. This is achieved by leveraging motion tracking data and designing a scalable training method that can effectively utilize diverse motion descriptions to produce coherent animations. Through this process, our approach learns a physics-based controller that provides an intuitive control interface without requiring tedious reward engineering for all behaviors of interest. The resulting controller supports a wide range of control modalities and enables seamless transitions between disparate tasks. By unifying character control through motion inpainting, MaskedMimic creates versatile virtual characters. These characters can dynamically adapt to complex scenes and compose diverse motions on demand, enabling more interactive and immersive experiences.

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are extensively used in critical infrastructures ensuring efficient, reliable, and continuous operations. However, their increasing connectivity and addition of advanced features make them vulnerable to cyber threats, potentially leading to severe disruptions in essential services. In this context, honeypots play a vital role by acting as decoy targets within ICS networks, or on the Internet, helping to detect, log, analyze, and develop mitigations for ICS-specific cyber threats. Deploying ICS honeypots, however, is challenging due to the necessity of accurately replicating industrial protocols and device characteristics, a crucial requirement for effectively mimicking the unique operational behavior of different industrial systems. Moreover, this challenge is compounded by the significant manual effort required in also mimicking the control logic the PLC would execute, in order to capture attacker traffic aiming to disrupt critical infrastructure operations. In this paper, we propose LLMPot, a novel approach for designing honeypots in ICS networks harnessing the potency of Large Language Models (LLMs). LLMPot aims to automate and optimize the creation of realistic honeypots with vendor-agnostic configurations, and for any control logic, aiming to eliminate the manual effort and specialized knowledge traditionally required in this domain. We conducted extensive experiments focusing on a wide array of parameters, demonstrating that our LLM-based approach can effectively create honeypot devices implementing different industrial protocols and diverse control logic.

In reinforcement learning, agents collect state information and rewards through environmental interactions, essential for policy refinement. This process is notably time-consuming, especially in complex robotic simulations and real-world applications. Traditional algorithms usually re-engage with the environment after processing a single batch of samples, thereby failing to fully capitalize on historical data. However, frequently observed states, with reliable value estimates, require minimal updates; in contrast, rare observed states necessitate more intensive updates for achieving accurate value estimations. To address uneven sample utilization, we propose Novelty-guided Sample Reuse (NSR). NSR provides extra updates for infrequent, novel states and skips additional updates for frequent states, maximizing sample use before interacting with the environment again. Our experiments show that NSR improves the convergence rate and success rate of algorithms without significantly increasing time consumption. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ppksigs/NSR-DDPG-HER.

Robust control design for quantum systems has been recognized as a key task in the development of practical quantum technology. In this paper, we present a systematic numerical methodology of sampling-based learning control (SLC) for control design of quantum systems with uncertainties. The SLC method includes two steps of "training" and "testing". In the training step, an augmented system is constructed using artificial samples generated by sampling uncertainty parameters according to a given distribution. A gradient flow based learning algorithm is developed to find the control for the augmented system. In the process of testing, a number of additional samples are tested to evaluate the control performance where these samples are obtained through sampling the uncertainty parameters according to a possible distribution. The SLC method is applied to three significant examples of quantum robust control including state preparation in a three-level quantum system, robust entanglement generation in a two-qubit superconducting circuit and quantum entanglement control in a two-atom system interacting with a quantized field in a cavity. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the SLC approach even when uncertainties are quite large, and show its potential for robust control design of quantum systems.

Process Model Forecasting (PMF) aims to predict how the control-flow structure of a process evolves over time by modeling the temporal dynamics of directly-follows (DF) relations, complementing predictive process monitoring that focuses on single-case prefixes. Prior benchmarks show that machine learning and deep learning models provide only modest gains over statistical baselines, mainly due to the sparsity and heterogeneity of the DF time series. We investigate Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs), large pre-trained models for generic time series, as an alternative for PMF. Using DF time series derived from real-life event logs, we compare zero-shot use of TSFMs, without additional training, with fine-tuned variants adapted on PMF-specific data. TSFMs generally achieve lower forecasting errors (MAE and RMSE) than traditional and specialized models trained from scratch on the same logs, indicating effective transfer of temporal structure from non-process domains. While fine-tuning can further improve accuracy, the gains are often small and may disappear on smaller or more complex datasets, so zero-shot use remains a strong default. Our study highlights the generalization capability and data efficiency of TSFMs for process-related time series and, to the best of our knowledge, provides the first systematic evaluation of temporal foundation models for PMF.

We present a novel approach to face aging that addresses the limitations of current methods which treat aging as a global, homogeneous process. Existing techniques using GANs and diffusion models often condition generation on a reference image and target age, neglecting that facial regions age heterogeneously due to both intrinsic chronological factors and extrinsic elements like sun exposure. Our method leverages latent diffusion models to selectively age specific facial regions using local aging signs. This approach provides significantly finer-grained control over the generation process, enabling more realistic and personalized aging. We employ a latent diffusion refiner to seamlessly blend these locally aged regions, ensuring a globally consistent and natural-looking synthesis. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively achieves three key criteria for successful face aging: robust identity preservation, high-fidelity and realistic imagery, and a natural, controllable aging progression.

Given a database S and a natural language question Q, text-to-SQL systems aim to generate an SQL query that correctly answers Q when executed against S. Currently, popular text-to-SQL benchmarks mostly assume unrestricted access to S; in practice, however, user access is often restricted, e.g., through role-based access control (RBAC) policies. This leads to a potential disconnect between benchmarking results and real-world performance: an LLM with high benchmark scores might perform poorly in an access-controlled environment, by frequently violating RBAC, or rejecting a query q that could be answered with only permitted data in S. Motivated by this, we present a comprehensive text-to-SQL benchmarking framework with realistic RBAC constraints, which features an LLM-assisted workflow that augments existing text-to-SQL benchmarks with plausible user roles and access policies. To do so, we formulate the problem of role synthesis as a structured reasoning process over the database schema, in which the LLM first infers the application context from the schema, and then derives role responsibilities and access scopes consistent with this context. This process is audited by human-in-the-loop quality control, in which domain experts perform metric-guided screening on the generated roles. Besides the augmented dataset, the proposed framework also contains evaluation metrics that identify RBAC-specific failure modes, and disentangle SQL utility from access-control compliance. We apply the proposed framework to several widely-used benchmarks, and conduct a systematic empirical study of state-of-the-art text-to-SQL systems. The results show that many solutions (especially open-weight LLMs) with high benchmarking scores under an unrestricted setting suffer sharp performance degradation once access constraints are in place, due to frequent RBAC violations.

In human cognition theory, human thinking is governed by two systems: the fast and intuitive System 1 and the slower but more deliberative System 2. Recent studies have shown that incorporating System 2 process into Transformers including large language models (LLMs), significantly enhances their reasoning capabilities. Nevertheless, models that purely resemble System 2 thinking require substantially higher computational costs and are much slower to respond. To address this challenge, we present Dualformer, a single Transformer model that seamlessly integrates both the fast and slow reasoning modes. Dualformer is obtained by training on data with randomized reasoning traces, where different parts of the traces are dropped during training. The dropping strategies are specifically tailored according to the trace structure, analogous to analyzing our thinking process and creating shortcuts with patterns. At inference time, our model can be configured to output only the solutions (fast mode) or both the reasoning chain and the final solution (slow mode), or automatically decide which mode to engage (auto mode). In all cases, Dualformer outperforms the corresponding baseline models in both performance and computational efficiency: (1) in slow mode, Dualformer optimally solves unseen 30 x 30 maze navigation tasks 97.6% of the time, surpassing the Searchformer (trained on data with complete reasoning traces) baseline performance of 93.3%, while only using 45.5% fewer reasoning steps; (2) in fast mode, Dualformer completes those tasks with an 80% optimal rate, significantly outperforming the Solution-Only model (trained on solution-only data), which has an optimal rate of only 30%. For math problems, our techniques have also achieved improved performance with LLM fine-tuning, showing its generalization beyond task-specific models.

Re-orchestration is the process of adapting a music piece for a different set of instruments. By altering the original instrumentation, the orchestrator often modifies the musical texture while preserving a recognizable melodic line and ensures that each part is playable within the technical and expressive capabilities of the chosen instruments. In this work, we propose METEOR, a model for generating Melody-aware Texture-controllable re-Orchestration with a Transformer-based variational auto-encoder (VAE). This model performs symbolic instrumental and textural music style transfers with a focus on melodic fidelity and controllability. We allow bar- and track-level controllability of the accompaniment with various textural attributes while keeping a homophonic texture. With both subjective and objective evaluations, we show that our model outperforms style transfer models on a re-orchestration task in terms of generation quality and controllability. Moreover, it can be adapted for a lead sheet orchestration task as a zero-shot learning model, achieving performance comparable to a model specifically trained for this task.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been widely adopted to augment large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge for knowledge-intensive tasks. However, its effectiveness is often undermined by the presence of noisy (i.e., low-quality) retrieved passages. Enhancing LLMs' robustness to such noise is critical for improving the reliability of RAG systems. Recent advances have equipped LLMs with strong reasoning and self-reflection capabilities, allowing them to identify and correct errors in their reasoning process. Inspired by this ability, we propose Passage Injection-a simple yet effective method that explicitly incorporates retrieved passages into LLMs' reasoning process, aiming to enhance the model's ability to recognize and resist noisy passages. We validate Passage Injection under general RAG settings using BM25 as the retriever. Experiments on four reasoning-enhanced LLMs across four factual QA datasets demonstrate that Passage Injection significantly improves overall RAG performance. Further analysis on two noisy retrieval settings-random noise, where the model is provided irrelevant passages, and counterfactual noise, where it is given misleading passages-shows that Passage Injection consistently improves robustness. Controlled experiments confirm that Passage Injection can also effectively leverage helpful passages. These findings suggest that incorporating passages in LLMs' reasoning process is a promising direction for building more robust RAG systems. The code can be found here{https://github.com/mh-tang/Passage-Injection}.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a powerful paradigm for optimizing large language models (LLMs) to handle complex reasoning tasks. A core challenge in this process lies in managing policy entropy, which reflects the balance between exploration and exploitation during training. Existing methods, such as proximal policy optimization (PPO) and its variants, discard valuable gradient signals from low-probability tokens due to the clipping mechanism. We systematically analyze the entropy dynamics and reveal that these clipped tokens play a critical yet overlooked role in regulating entropy evolution. We propose Controlling Entropy via Gradient-Preserving Policy Optimization (CE-GPPO), a novel algorithm that reintroduces gradients from clipped tokens in native PPO in a gentle and bounded manner. By controlling the magnitude of gradients from tokens outside the clipping interval, CE-GPPO is able to achieve an exploration-exploitation trade-off. We provide theoretical justification and empirical evidence showing that CE-GPPO effectively mitigates entropy instability. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that CE-GPPO consistently outperforms strong baselines across different model scales.

Diffusion-based approaches have recently achieved strong results in face swapping, offering improved visual quality over traditional GAN-based methods. However, even state-of-the-art models often suffer from fine-grained artifacts and poor identity preservation, particularly under challenging poses and expressions. A key limitation of existing approaches is their failure to meaningfully leverage 3D facial structure, which is crucial for disentangling identity from pose and expression. In this work, we propose DiffSwap++, a novel diffusion-based face-swapping pipeline that incorporates 3D facial latent features during training. By guiding the generation process with 3D-aware representations, our method enhances geometric consistency and improves the disentanglement of facial identity from appearance attributes. We further design a diffusion architecture that conditions the denoising process on both identity embeddings and facial landmarks, enabling high-fidelity and identity-preserving face swaps. Extensive experiments on CelebA, FFHQ, and CelebV-Text demonstrate that DiffSwap++ outperforms prior methods in preserving source identity while maintaining target pose and expression. Additionally, we introduce a biometric-style evaluation and conduct a user study to further validate the realism and effectiveness of our approach. Code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/WestonBond/DiffSwapPP

This paper proposes an approach to analyze an event log of a business process in order to generate case-level recommendations of treatments that maximize the probability of a given outcome. Users classify the attributes in the event log into controllable and non-controllable, where the former correspond to attributes that can be altered during an execution of the process (the possible treatments). We use an action rule mining technique to identify treatments that co-occur with the outcome under some conditions. Since action rules are generated based on correlation rather than causation, we then use a causal machine learning technique, specifically uplift trees, to discover subgroups of cases for which a treatment has a high causal effect on the outcome after adjusting for confounding variables. We test the relevance of this approach using an event log of a loan application process and compare our findings with recommendations manually produced by process mining experts.

Large language models (LLMs) trained on unfiltered corpora inherently risk retaining sensitive information, necessitating selective knowledge unlearning for regulatory compliance and ethical safety. However, existing parameter-modifying methods face fundamental limitations: high computational costs, uncontrollable forgetting boundaries, and strict dependency on model weight access. These constraints render them impractical for closed-source models, yet current non-invasive alternatives remain unsystematic and reliant on empirical experience. To address these challenges, we propose the Controllable Alignment Prompting for Unlearning (CAP) framework, an end-to-end prompt-driven unlearning paradigm. CAP decouples unlearning into a learnable prompt optimization process via reinforcement learning, where a prompt generator collaborates with the LLM to suppress target knowledge while preserving general capabilities selectively. This approach enables reversible knowledge restoration through prompt revocation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAP achieves precise, controllable unlearning without updating model parameters, establishing a dynamic alignment mechanism that overcomes the transferability limitations of prior methods.

The Italian legislative process is documented in detailed parliamentary records hosted in institutional websites. However, much of this information is available only as unstructured text, limiting its systematic reuse. We applied a controlled, systematic LLM-based extraction procedure, validated against manually annotated records, to convert these texts into ordered and dated events including, e.g., bill introduction, committee examination, plenary examination, and approval. The resulting dataset reconstructs the procedural histories of all 5346 Italian laws enacted between 1985 and 2026, spanning parliamentary terms IX to XIX, for overall 101413 events. Each event records the activity, date, and chamber, with additional procedural details where available. The dataset supports research in the emerging fields of computational legal and legislative studies, potentially combined with process-oriented data science methods to examine procedural paths and legislative timing across parliamentary terms.

Controllable video generation has gained significant attention in recent years. However, two main limitations persist: Firstly, most existing works focus on either text, image, or trajectory-based control, leading to an inability to achieve fine-grained control in videos. Secondly, trajectory control research is still in its early stages, with most experiments being conducted on simple datasets like Human3.6M. This constraint limits the models' capability to process open-domain images and effectively handle complex curved trajectories. In this paper, we propose DragNUWA, an open-domain diffusion-based video generation model. To tackle the issue of insufficient control granularity in existing works, we simultaneously introduce text, image, and trajectory information to provide fine-grained control over video content from semantic, spatial, and temporal perspectives. To resolve the problem of limited open-domain trajectory control in current research, We propose trajectory modeling with three aspects: a Trajectory Sampler (TS) to enable open-domain control of arbitrary trajectories, a Multiscale Fusion (MF) to control trajectories in different granularities, and an Adaptive Training (AT) strategy to generate consistent videos following trajectories. Our experiments validate the effectiveness of DragNUWA, demonstrating its superior performance in fine-grained control in video generation. The homepage link is https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/dragnuwa/

Within recent approaches to text-to-video (T2V) generation, achieving controllability in the synthesized video is often a challenge. Typically, this issue is addressed by providing low-level per-frame guidance in the form of edge maps, depth maps, or an existing video to be altered. However, the process of obtaining such guidance can be labor-intensive. This paper focuses on enhancing controllability in video synthesis by employing straightforward bounding boxes to guide the subject in various ways, all without the need for neural network training, finetuning, optimization at inference time, or the use of pre-existing videos. Our algorithm, TrailBlazer, is constructed upon a pre-trained (T2V) model, and easy to implement. The subject is directed by a bounding box through the proposed spatial and temporal attention map editing. Moreover, we introduce the concept of keyframing, allowing the subject trajectory and overall appearance to be guided by both a moving bounding box and corresponding prompts, without the need to provide a detailed mask. The method is efficient, with negligible additional computation relative to the underlying pre-trained model. Despite the simplicity of the bounding box guidance, the resulting motion is surprisingly natural, with emergent effects including perspective and movement toward the virtual camera as the box size increases.

While Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models excel at generating visually appealing images of individual instances, they struggle to accurately position and control the features generation of multiple instances. The Layout-to-Image (L2I) task was introduced to address the positioning challenges by incorporating bounding boxes as spatial control signals, but it still falls short in generating precise instance features. In response, we propose the Instance Feature Generation (IFG) task, which aims to ensure both positional accuracy and feature fidelity in generated instances. To address the IFG task, we introduce the Instance Feature Adapter (IFAdapter). The IFAdapter enhances feature depiction by incorporating additional appearance tokens and utilizing an Instance Semantic Map to align instance-level features with spatial locations. The IFAdapter guides the diffusion process as a plug-and-play module, making it adaptable to various community models. For evaluation, we contribute an IFG benchmark and develop a verification pipeline to objectively compare models' abilities to generate instances with accurate positioning and features. Experimental results demonstrate that IFAdapter outperforms other models in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

In recent years there have been remarkable breakthroughs in image-to-video generation. However, the 3D consistency and camera controllability of generated frames have remained unsolved. Recent studies have attempted to incorporate camera control into the generation process, but their results are often limited to simple trajectories or lack the ability to generate consistent videos from multiple distinct camera paths for the same scene. To address these limitations, we introduce Cavia, a novel framework for camera-controllable, multi-view video generation, capable of converting an input image into multiple spatiotemporally consistent videos. Our framework extends the spatial and temporal attention modules into view-integrated attention modules, improving both viewpoint and temporal consistency. This flexible design allows for joint training with diverse curated data sources, including scene-level static videos, object-level synthetic multi-view dynamic videos, and real-world monocular dynamic videos. To our best knowledge, Cavia is the first of its kind that allows the user to precisely specify camera motion while obtaining object motion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Cavia surpasses state-of-the-art methods in terms of geometric consistency and perceptual quality. Project Page: https://ir1d.github.io/Cavia/

The current reinforcement learning framework focuses exclusively on performance, often at the expense of efficiency. In contrast, biological control achieves remarkable performance while also optimizing computational energy expenditure and decision frequency. We propose a Decision Bounded Markov Decision Process (DB-MDP), that constrains the number of decisions and computational energy available to agents in reinforcement learning environments. Our experiments demonstrate that existing reinforcement learning algorithms struggle within this framework, leading to either failure or suboptimal performance. To address this, we introduce a biologically-inspired, Temporally Layered Architecture (TLA), enabling agents to manage computational costs through two layers with distinct time scales and energy requirements. TLA achieves optimal performance in decision-bounded environments and in continuous control environments, it matches state-of-the-art performance while utilizing a fraction of the compute cost. Compared to current reinforcement learning algorithms that solely prioritize performance, our approach significantly lowers computational energy expenditure while maintaining performance. These findings establish a benchmark and pave the way for future research on energy and time-aware control.

Existing approaches for controlling text-to-image diffusion models, while powerful, do not allow for explicit 3D object-centric control, such as precise control of object orientation. In this work, we address the problem of multi-object orientation control in text-to-image diffusion models. This enables the generation of diverse multi-object scenes with precise orientation control for each object. The key idea is to condition the diffusion model with a set of orientation-aware compass tokens, one for each object, along with text tokens. A light-weight encoder network predicts these compass tokens taking object orientation as the input. The model is trained on a synthetic dataset of procedurally generated scenes, each containing one or two 3D assets on a plain background. However, direct training this framework results in poor orientation control as well as leads to entanglement among objects. To mitigate this, we intervene in the generation process and constrain the cross-attention maps of each compass token to its corresponding object regions. The trained model is able to achieve precise orientation control for a) complex objects not seen during training and b) multi-object scenes with more than two objects, indicating strong generalization capabilities. Further, when combined with personalization methods, our method precisely controls the orientation of the new object in diverse contexts. Our method achieves state-of-the-art orientation control and text alignment, quantified with extensive evaluations and a user study.

LA-RCS (LLM-agent-based robot control system) is a sophisticated robot control system designed to autonomously plan, work, and analyze the external environment based on user requirements by utilizing LLM-Agent. Utilizing a dual-agent framework, LA-RCS generates plans based on user requests, observes the external environment, executes the plans, and modifies the plans as needed to adapt to changes in the external conditions. Additionally, LA-RCS interprets natural language commands by the user and converts them into commands compatible with the robot interface so that the robot can execute tasks and meet user requests properly. During his process, the system autonomously evaluates observation results, provides feedback on the tasks, and executes commands based on real-time environmental monitoring, significantly reducing the need for user intervention in fulfilling requests. We categorized the scenarios that LA-RCS needs to perform into four distinct types and conducted a quantitative assessment of its performance in each scenario. The results showed an average success rate of 90 percent, demonstrating the system capability to fulfill user requests satisfactorily. For more extensive results, readers can visit our project page: https://la-rcs.github.io

Algorithms increasingly serve as information mediators--from social media feeds and targeted advertising to the increasing ubiquity of LLMs. This engenders a joint process where agents combine private, algorithmically-mediated signals with learning from peers to arrive at decisions. To study such settings, we introduce a model of controlled sequential social learning in which an information-mediating planner (e.g. an LLM) controls the information structure of agents while they also learn from the decisions of earlier agents. The planner may seek to improve social welfare (altruistic planner) or to induce a specific action the planner prefers (biased planner). Our framework presents a new optimization problem for social learning that combines dynamic programming with decentralized action choices and Bayesian belief updates. We prove the convexity of the value function and characterize the optimal policies of altruistic and biased planners, which attain desired tradeoffs between the costs they incur and the payoffs they earn from induced agent choices. Notably, in some regimes the biased planner intentionally obfuscates the agents' signals. Even under stringent transparency constraints--information parity with individuals, no lying or cherry-picking, and full observability--we show that information mediation can substantially shift social welfare in either direction. We complement our theory with simulations in which LLMs act as both planner and agents. Notably, the LLM planner in our simulations exhibits emergent strategic behavior in steering public opinion that broadly mirrors the trends predicted, though key deviations suggest the influence of non-Bayesian reasoning consistent with the cognitive patterns of both humans and LLMs trained on human-like data. Together, we establish our framework as a tractable basis for studying the impact and regulation of LLM information mediators.

Diffusion models have become popular for policy learning in robotics due to their ability to capture high-dimensional and multimodal distributions. However, diffusion policies are stochastic and typically trained offline, limiting their ability to handle unseen and dynamic conditions where novel constraints not represented in the training data must be satisfied. To overcome this limitation, we propose diffusion predictive control with constraints (DPCC), an algorithm for diffusion-based control with explicit state and action constraints that can deviate from those in the training data. DPCC incorporates model-based projections into the denoising process of a trained trajectory diffusion model and uses constraint tightening to account for model mismatch. This allows us to generate constraint-satisfying, dynamically feasible, and goal-reaching trajectories for predictive control. We show through simulations of a robot manipulator that DPCC outperforms existing methods in satisfying novel test-time constraints while maintaining performance on the learned control task.

Existing feedforward subject-driven video customization methods mainly study single-subject scenarios due to the difficulty of constructing multi-subject training data pairs. Another challenging problem that how to use the signals such as depth, mask, camera, and text prompts to control and edit the subject in the customized video is still less explored. In this paper, we first propose a data construction pipeline, VideoCus-Factory, to produce training data pairs for multi-subject customization from raw videos without labels and control signals such as depth-to-video and mask-to-video pairs. Based on our constructed data, we develop an Image-Video Transfer Mixed (IVTM) training with image editing data to enable instructive editing for the subject in the customized video. Then we propose a diffusion Transformer framework, OmniVCus, with two embedding mechanisms, Lottery Embedding (LE) and Temporally Aligned Embedding (TAE). LE enables inference with more subjects by using the training subjects to activate more frame embeddings. TAE encourages the generation process to extract guidance from temporally aligned control signals by assigning the same frame embeddings to the control and noise tokens. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Video demos are at our project page: https://caiyuanhao1998.github.io/project/OmniVCus/. Our code will be released at https://github.com/caiyuanhao1998/Open-OmniVCus

In recent years, trace generation has emerged as a significant challenge within the Process Mining community. Deep Learning (DL) models have demonstrated accuracy in reproducing the features of the selected processes. However, current DL generative models are limited in their ability to adapt the learned distributions to generate data samples based on specific conditions or attributes. This limitation is particularly significant because the ability to control the type of generated data can be beneficial in various contexts, enabling a focus on specific behaviours, exploration of infrequent patterns, or simulation of alternative 'what-if' scenarios. In this work, we address this challenge by introducing a conditional model for process data generation based on a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE). Conditional models offer control over the generation process by tuning input conditional variables, enabling more targeted and controlled data generation. Unlike other domains, CVAE for process mining faces specific challenges due to the multiperspective nature of the data and the need to adhere to control-flow rules while ensuring data variability. Specifically, we focus on generating process executions conditioned on control flow and temporal features of the trace, allowing us to produce traces for specific, identified sub-processes. The generated traces are then evaluated using common metrics for generative model assessment, along with additional metrics to evaluate the quality of the conditional generation

Reducing latency and energy consumption is critical to improving the efficiency of memory systems in modern computing. This work introduces ReLMXEL (Reinforcement Learning for Memory Controller with Explainable Energy and Latency Optimization), a explainable multi-agent online reinforcement learning framework that dynamically optimizes memory controller parameters using reward decomposition. ReLMXEL operates within the memory controller, leveraging detailed memory behavior metrics to guide decision-making. Experimental evaluations across diverse workloads demonstrate consistent performance gains over baseline configurations, with refinements driven by workload-specific memory access behaviour. By incorporating explainability into the learning process, ReLMXEL not only enhances performance but also increases the transparency of control decisions, paving the way for more accountable and adaptive memory system designs.

This paper unravels the potential of sketches for diffusion models, addressing the deceptive promise of direct sketch control in generative AI. We importantly democratise the process, enabling amateur sketches to generate precise images, living up to the commitment of "what you sketch is what you get". A pilot study underscores the necessity, revealing that deformities in existing models stem from spatial-conditioning. To rectify this, we propose an abstraction-aware framework, utilising a sketch adapter, adaptive time-step sampling, and discriminative guidance from a pre-trained fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval model, working synergistically to reinforce fine-grained sketch-photo association. Our approach operates seamlessly during inference without the need for textual prompts; a simple, rough sketch akin to what you and I can create suffices! We welcome everyone to examine results presented in the paper and its supplementary. Contributions include democratising sketch control, introducing an abstraction-aware framework, and leveraging discriminative guidance, validated through extensive experiments.

Current co-speech motion generation approaches usually focus on upper body gestures following speech contents only, while lacking supporting the elaborate control of synergistic full-body motion based on text prompts, such as talking while walking. The major challenges lie in 1) the existing speech-to-motion datasets only involve highly limited full-body motions, making a wide range of common human activities out of training distribution; 2) these datasets also lack annotated user prompts. To address these challenges, we propose SynTalker, which utilizes the off-the-shelf text-to-motion dataset as an auxiliary for supplementing the missing full-body motion and prompts. The core technical contributions are two-fold. One is the multi-stage training process which obtains an aligned embedding space of motion, speech, and prompts despite the significant distributional mismatch in motion between speech-to-motion and text-to-motion datasets. Another is the diffusion-based conditional inference process, which utilizes the separate-then-combine strategy to realize fine-grained control of local body parts. Extensive experiments are conducted to verify that our approach supports precise and flexible control of synergistic full-body motion generation based on both speeches and user prompts, which is beyond the ability of existing approaches.

This paper derives necessary optimality conditions for free end-time optimal control problems governed by sweeping process dynamics. In contrast to classical optimal control problems, the presence of the normal cone term in the state equation introduces discontinuities with respect to the state variable and prevents the standard Lipschitz regularity assumptions typically used in optimal control theory. As a result, both the analysis of trajectories and the formulation of optimality conditions require refined tools. We address problems with general endpoint constraints and time-dependent data, considering both the case in which the dynamics are Lipschitz continuous in time and the more challenging setting of merely measurable time dependence. Special attention is devoted to the additional transversality conditions associated with the free end-time variable. In the Lipschitz case, these conditions are expressed in terms of a function of bounded variation that coincides almost everywhere with the maximized Hamiltonian. In the measurable case, we show that a suitable interpretation can be obtained via the notions of sub- and super-essential values of the maximized Hamiltonian, recently introduced in the literature, leading to strengthened transversality conditions. These conditions also involve an additional term reflecting the interaction between the costate arc and the normal cone to the moving set at the optimal endpoints. Our approach combines suitable perturbation techniques with a penalization method tailored to sweeping processes. The moving set is modelled as a finite intersection of inequality-defined sets satisfying suitable constraint qualifications, including a positive linear independence condition and a diagonal dominance property of the associated Gramian matrix. We also introduce a local version of the constraint qualification condition. Our results apply to a broad class of problems, including those involving unbounded moving sets such as polyhedra. The resulting optimality system extends and sharpens recent results for classical free end-time problems to the non-Lipschitz, discontinuous framework of sweeping processes. The relevance of the transversality conditions obtained in this article is illustrated through two simple examples.

We present ToTTo, an open-domain English table-to-text dataset with over 120,000 training examples that proposes a controlled generation task: given a Wikipedia table and a set of highlighted table cells, produce a one-sentence description. To obtain generated targets that are natural but also faithful to the source table, we introduce a dataset construction process where annotators directly revise existing candidate sentences from Wikipedia. We present systematic analyses of our dataset and annotation process as well as results achieved by several state-of-the-art baselines. While usually fluent, existing methods often hallucinate phrases that are not supported by the table, suggesting that this dataset can serve as a useful research benchmark for high-precision conditional text generation.

The development of text-to-video (T2V), i.e., generating videos with a given text prompt, has been significantly advanced in recent years. However, relying solely on text prompts often results in ambiguous frame composition due to spatial uncertainty. The research community thus leverages the dense structure signals, e.g., per-frame depth/edge sequences, to enhance controllability, whose collection accordingly increases the burden of inference. In this work, we present SparseCtrl to enable flexible structure control with temporally sparse signals, requiring only one or a few inputs, as shown in Figure 1. It incorporates an additional condition encoder to process these sparse signals while leaving the pre-trained T2V model untouched. The proposed approach is compatible with various modalities, including sketches, depth maps, and RGB images, providing more practical control for video generation and promoting applications such as storyboarding, depth rendering, keyframe animation, and interpolation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the generalization of SparseCtrl on both original and personalized T2V generators. Codes and models will be publicly available at https://guoyww.github.io/projects/SparseCtrl .

Image-based virtual try-on enables users to virtually try on different garments by altering original clothes in their photographs. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) dominate the research field in image-based virtual try-on, but have not resolved problems such as unnatural deformation of garments and the blurry generation quality. Recently, diffusion models have emerged with surprising performance across various image generation tasks. While the generative quality of diffusion models is impressive, achieving controllability poses a significant challenge when applying it to virtual try-on tasks and multiple denoising iterations limit its potential for real-time applications. In this paper, we propose Controllable Accelerated virtual Try-on with Diffusion Model called CAT-DM. To enhance the controllability, a basic diffusion-based virtual try-on network is designed, which utilizes ControlNet to introduce additional control conditions and improves the feature extraction of garment images. In terms of acceleration, CAT-DM initiates a reverse denoising process with an implicit distribution generated by a pre-trained GAN-based model. Compared with previous try-on methods based on diffusion models, CAT-DM not only retains the pattern and texture details of the in-shop garment but also reduces the sampling steps without compromising generation quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of CAT-DM against both GAN-based and diffusion-based methods in producing more realistic images and accurately reproducing garment patterns. Our code and models will be publicly released.

We introduce Motion-I2V, a novel framework for consistent and controllable image-to-video generation (I2V). In contrast to previous methods that directly learn the complicated image-to-video mapping, Motion-I2V factorizes I2V into two stages with explicit motion modeling. For the first stage, we propose a diffusion-based motion field predictor, which focuses on deducing the trajectories of the reference image's pixels. For the second stage, we propose motion-augmented temporal attention to enhance the limited 1-D temporal attention in video latent diffusion models. This module can effectively propagate reference image's feature to synthesized frames with the guidance of predicted trajectories from the first stage. Compared with existing methods, Motion-I2V can generate more consistent videos even at the presence of large motion and viewpoint variation. By training a sparse trajectory ControlNet for the first stage, Motion-I2V can support users to precisely control motion trajectories and motion regions with sparse trajectory and region annotations. This offers more controllability of the I2V process than solely relying on textual instructions. Additionally, Motion-I2V's second stage naturally supports zero-shot video-to-video translation. Both qualitative and quantitative comparisons demonstrate the advantages of Motion-I2V over prior approaches in consistent and controllable image-to-video generation.

Image-based virtual try-on (VTON), which aims to generate an outfitted image of a target human wearing an in-shop garment, is a challenging image-synthesis task calling for not only high fidelity of the outfitted human but also full preservation of garment details. To tackle this issue, we propose Outfitting over Try-on Diffusion (OOTDiffusion), leveraging the power of pretrained latent diffusion models and designing a novel network architecture for realistic and controllable virtual try-on. Without an explicit warping process, we propose an outfitting UNet to learn the garment detail features, and merge them with the target human body via our proposed outfitting fusion in the denoising process of diffusion models. In order to further enhance the controllability of our outfitting UNet, we introduce outfitting dropout to the training process, which enables us to adjust the strength of garment features through classifier-free guidance. Our comprehensive experiments on the VITON-HD and Dress Code datasets demonstrate that OOTDiffusion efficiently generates high-quality outfitted images for arbitrary human and garment images, which outperforms other VTON methods in both fidelity and controllability, indicating an impressive breakthrough in virtual try-on. Our source code is available at https://github.com/levihsu/OOTDiffusion.

LLM-based auto-annotators have become a key component of the LLM development process due to their cost-effectiveness and scalability compared to human-based evaluation. However, these auto-annotators can introduce complex biases that are hard to remove. Even simple, known confounders such as preference for longer outputs remain in existing automated evaluation metrics. We propose a simple regression analysis approach for controlling biases in auto-evaluations. As a real case study, we focus on reducing the length bias of AlpacaEval, a fast and affordable benchmark for chat LLMs that uses LLMs to estimate response quality. Despite being highly correlated with human preferences, AlpacaEval is known to favor models that generate longer outputs. We introduce a length-controlled AlpacaEval that aims to answer the counterfactual question: "What would the preference be if the model's and baseline's output had the same length?". To achieve this, we first fit a generalized linear model to predict the biased output of interest (auto-annotator preferences) based on the mediators we want to control for (length difference) and other relevant features. We then obtain length-controlled preferences by predicting preferences while conditioning the GLM with a zero difference in lengths. Length-controlling not only improves the robustness of the metric to manipulations in model verbosity, we also find that it increases the Spearman correlation with LMSYS' Chatbot Arena from 0.94 to 0.98. We release the code and leaderboard at https://tatsu-lab.github.io/alpaca_eval/ .

Diffusion models entangle content and style generation during the denoising process, leading to undesired content modification when directly applied to stylization tasks. Existing methods struggle to effectively control the diffusion model to meet the aesthetic-level requirements for stylization. In this paper, we introduce Artist, a training-free approach that aesthetically controls the content and style generation of a pretrained diffusion model for text-driven stylization. Our key insight is to disentangle the denoising of content and style into separate diffusion processes while sharing information between them. We propose simple yet effective content and style control methods that suppress style-irrelevant content generation, resulting in harmonious stylization results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method excels at achieving aesthetic-level stylization requirements, preserving intricate details in the content image and aligning well with the style prompt. Furthermore, we showcase the highly controllability of the stylization strength from various perspectives. Code will be released, project home page: https://DiffusionArtist.github.io

Training recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is a high-dimensional process that requires updating numerous parameters. Therefore, it is often difficult to pinpoint the underlying learning mechanisms. To address this challenge, we propose to gain mechanistic insights into the phenomenon of abrupt learning by studying RNNs trained to perform diverse short-term memory tasks. In these tasks, RNN training begins with an initial search phase. Following a long period of plateau in accuracy, the values of the loss function suddenly drop, indicating abrupt learning. Analyzing the neural computation performed by these RNNs reveals geometric restructuring (GR) in their phase spaces prior to the drop. To promote these GR events, we introduce a temporal consistency regularization that accelerates (bioplausible) training, facilitates attractor formation, and enables efficient learning in strongly connected networks. Our findings offer testable predictions for neuroscientists and emphasize the need for goal-agnostic secondary mechanisms to facilitate learning in biological and artificial networks.