While commendable progress has been made in user-centric research on mobile assistive systems for blind and low-vision (BLV) individuals, references that directly inform robot navigation design remain rare. To bridge this gap, we conducted a comprehensive human study involving interviews with 26 guide dog handlers, four white cane users, nine guide dog trainers, and one O\&M trainer, along with 15+ hours of observing guide dog-assisted walking. After de-identification, we open-sourced the dataset to promote human-centered development and informed decision-making for assistive systems for BLV people. Building on insights from this formative study, we developed GuideNav, a vision-only, teach-and-repeat navigation system. Inspired by how guide dogs are trained and assist their handlers, GuideNav autonomously repeats a path demonstrated by a sighted person using a robot. Specifically, the system constructs a topological representation of the taught route, integrates visual place recognition with temporal filtering, and employs a relative pose estimator to compute navigation actions - all without relying on costly, heavy, power-hungry sensors such as LiDAR. In field tests, GuideNav consistently achieved kilometer-scale route following across five outdoor environments, maintaining reliability despite noticeable scene variations between teach and repeat runs. A user study with 3 guide dog handlers and 1 guide dog trainer further confirmed the system's feasibility, marking (to our knowledge) the first demonstration of a quadruped mobile system retrieving a path in a manner comparable to guide dogs.

Recurrent neural architectures such as LSTM and GRU remain widely used in sequence modeling, but they continue to face two core limitations: redundant gate-specific parameters and reduced ability to retain information across long temporal distances. This paper introduces the Quantum-Leap LSTM (QL-LSTM), a recurrent architecture designed to address both challenges through two independent components. The Parameter-Shared Unified Gating mechanism replaces all gate-specific transformations with a single shared weight matrix, reducing parameters by approximately 48 percent while preserving full gating behavior. The Hierarchical Gated Recurrence with Additive Skip Connections component adds a multiplication-free pathway that improves long-range information flow and reduces forget-gate degradation. We evaluate QL-LSTM on sentiment classification using the IMDB dataset with extended document lengths, comparing it to LSTM, GRU, and BiLSTM reference models. QL-LSTM achieves competitive accuracy while using substantially fewer parameters. Although the PSUG and HGR-ASC components are more efficient per time step, the current prototype remains limited by the inherent sequential nature of recurrent models and therefore does not yet yield wall-clock speed improvements without further kernel-level optimization.

Pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), \textit{e.g.} CLIP, have become essential tools in multimodal transfer learning. However, fine-tuning VLMs in few-shot scenarios poses significant challenges in balancing task-specific adaptation and generalization in the obtained model. Meanwhile, current researches have predominantly focused on prompt-based adaptation methods, leaving adapter-based approaches underexplored and revealing notable performance gaps. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel Reconstruction-based Multimodal Adapter (RMAdapter), which leverages a dual-branch architecture. Unlike conventional single-branch adapters, RMAdapter consists of: (1) an adaptation branch that injects task-specific knowledge through parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and (2) a reconstruction branch that preserves general knowledge by reconstructing latent space features back into the original feature space. This design facilitates a dynamic balance between general and task-specific knowledge. Importantly, although RMAdapter introduces an additional reconstruction branch, it is carefully optimized to remain lightweight. By computing reconstruction loss locally at each layer and sharing projection modules, the overall computational overhead is kept minimal. A consistency constraint is also incorporated to better regulate the trade-off between discriminability and generalization. We comprehensively evaluate the effectiveness of RMAdapter on three representative tasks: generalization to new categories, generalization to new target datasets, and domain generalization. Without relying on data augmentation or duplicate prompt designs, our RMAdapter consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across all evaluation metrics.

Modern extensible compiler frameworks-such as MLIR-enable rapid creation of domain-specific language dialects. This flexibility, however, makes correctness harder to ensure as the same extensibility that accelerates development also complicates maintaining the testing infrastructure. Extensible languages require automated test generation that is both dialect-agnostic (works across dialects without manual adaptation) and dialect-effective (targets dialect-specific features to find bugs). Existing approaches typically sacrifice one of these goals by either requiring manually constructed seed corpora for each dialect, or by failing to be effective. We present a dialect-agnostic and dialect-effective grammar-based and coverage-guided fuzzing approach for extensible compilers that combines two key insights from existing work: (i) the grammars of dialects, which already encode the structural and type constraints, can often be extracted automatically from the dialect specification; and (ii) these grammars can be used in combination with pre-trained large language models to automatically generate representative and diverse seed inputs from the full dialect space without requiring any manual input or training data. These seeds can then be used to bootstrap coverage-guided fuzzers. We built this approach into a tool, Germinator. When evaluated on six MLIR projects spanning 91 dialects, Germinator generated seeds improve line coverage by 10-120% over grammar-based baselines. We compare against grammar-based baselines because they are the only class of existing automatic seed generators that can be applied uniformly across MLIR's heterogeneous dialect ecosystem. Germinator discovers 88 previously unknown bugs (40 confirmed), including 23 in dialects with no prior automated test generators, demonstrating effective and controllable testing of low-resource dialects at scale.

We propose TLoRA, a novel tri-matrix low-rank adaptation method that decomposes weight updates into three matrices: two fixed random matrices and one trainable matrix, combined with a learnable, layer-wise scaling factor. This tri-matrix design enables TLoRA to achieve highly efficient parameter adaptation while introducing minimal additional computational overhead. Through extensive experiments on the GLUE benchmark, we demonstrate that TLoRA achieves comparable performance to existing low-rank methods such as LoRA and adapter-based techniques, while requiring significantly fewer trainable parameters. Analyzing the adaptation dynamics, we observe that TLoRA exhibits Gaussian-like weight distributions, stable parameter norms, and scaling factor variability across layers, further highlighting its expressive power and adaptability. Additionally, we show that TLoRA closely resembles LoRA in its eigenvalue distributions, parameter norms, and cosine similarity of updates, underscoring its ability to effectively approximate LoRA's adaptation behavior. Our results establish TLoRA as a highly efficient and effective fine-tuning method for LLMs, offering a significant step forward in resource-efficient model adaptation.

Understanding sentiment in complex textual expressions remains a fundamental challenge in affective computing. To address this, we propose a Dynamic Fusion Learning Model (DyFuLM), a multimodal framework designed to capture both hierarchical semantic representations and fine-grained emotional nuances. DyFuLM introduces two key moodules: a Hierarchical Dynamic Fusion module that adaptively integrates multi-level features, and a Gated Feature Aggregation module that regulates cross-layer information ffow to achieve balanced representation learning. Comprehensive experiments on multi-task sentiment datasets demonstrate that DyFuLM achieves 82.64% coarse-grained and 68.48% fine-grained accuracy, yielding the lowest regression errors (MAE = 0.0674, MSE = 0.0082) and the highest R^2 coefficient of determination (R^2= 0.6903). Furthermore, the ablation study validates the effectiveness of each module in DyFuLM. When all modules are removed, the accuracy drops by 0.91% for coarse-grained and 0.68% for fine-grained tasks. Keeping only the gated fusion module causes decreases of 0.75% and 0.55%, while removing the dynamic loss mechanism results in drops of 0.78% and 0.26% for coarse-grained and fine-grained sentiment classification, respectively. These results demonstrate that each module contributes significantly to feature interaction and task balance. Overall, the experimental findings further validate that DyFuLM enhances sentiment representation and overall performance through effective hierarchical feature fusion.

PPO has been widely adopted for training large language models (LLMs) at the token level in multi-turn dialogue and reasoning tasks. However, its performance is often unstable and prone to collapse. Through empirical analysis, we identify two main sources of instability in this setting: (1)~token-level importance sampling, which is misaligned with the natural granularity of multi-turn environments that have distinct turn-level stages, and (2) inaccurate advantage estimates from off-policy samples, where the critic has not learned to evaluate certain state-action pairs, resulting in high-variance gradients and unstable updates. To address these challenges, we introduce two complementary stabilization techniques: (1) turn-level importance sampling, which aligns optimization with the natural structure of multi-turn reasoning, and (2) clipping-bias correction, which normalizes gradients by downweighting unreliable, highly off-policy samples. Depending on how these components are combined, we obtain three variants: Turn-PPO (turn-level sampling only), S-PPO (clipping-bias correction applied to token-level PPO), and ST-PPO (turn-level sampling combined with clipping-bias correction). In our experiments, we primarily study ST-PPO and S-PPO, which together demonstrate how the two stabilization mechanisms address complementary sources of instability. Experiments on multi-turn search tasks across general QA, multi-hop QA, and medical multiple-choice QA benchmarks show that ST-PPO and S-PPO consistently prevent the performance collapses observed in large-model training, maintain lower clipping ratios throughout optimization, and achieve higher task performance than standard token-level PPO. These results demonstrate that combining turn-level importance sampling with clipping-bias correction provides a practical and scalable solution for stabilizing multi-turn LLM agent training.

We propose a self-supervised machine learning (SSML) framework for multi-fidelity learning and extended predictive soil spectroscopy based on latent space embeddings. A self-supervised representation was pretrained with the large MIR spectral library and the Variational Autoencoder algorithm to obtain a compressed latent space for generating spectral embeddings. At this stage, only unlabeled spectral data were used, allowing us to leverage the full spectral database and the availability of scan repeats for augmented training. We also leveraged and froze the trained MIR decoder for a spectrum conversion task by plugging it into a NIR encoder to learn the mapping between NIR and MIR spectra in an attempt to leverage the predictive capabilities contained in the large MIR library with a low cost portable NIR scanner. This was achieved by using a smaller subset of the KSSL library with paired NIR and MIR spectra. Downstream machine learning models were then trained to map between original spectra, predicted spectra, and latent space embeddings for nine soil properties. The performance of was evaluated independently of the KSSL training data using a gold-standard test set, along with regression goodness-of-fit metrics. Compared to baseline models, the proposed SSML and its embeddings yielded similar or better accuracy in all soil properties prediction tasks. Predictions derived from the spectrum conversion (NIR to MIR) task did not match the performance of the original MIR spectra but were similar or superior to predictive performance of NIR-only models, suggesting the unified spectral latent space can effectively leverage the larger and more diverse MIR dataset for prediction of soil properties not well represented in current NIR libraries.

OFUGLB outperforms or is at par with prior algorithms for logistic bandits.