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On Conditional Stochastic Interpolation for Generative Nonlinear Sufficient Dimension Reduction

Xu, Shuntuo, Yu, Zhou, Huang, Jian

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Identifying low-dimensional sufficient structures in nonlinear sufficient dimension reduction (SDR) has long been a fundamental yet challenging problem. Most existing methods lack theoretical guarantees of exhaustiveness in identifying lower dimensional structures, either at the population level or at the sample level. We tackle this issue by proposing a new method, generative sufficient dimension reduction (GenSDR), which leverages modern generative models. We show that GenSDR is able to fully recover the information contained in the central $σ$-field at both the population and sample levels. In particular, at the sample level, we establish a consistency property for the GenSDR estimator from the perspective of conditional distributions, capitalizing on the distributional learning capabilities of deep generative models. Moreover, by incorporating an ensemble technique, we extend GenSDR to accommodate scenarios with non-Euclidean responses, thereby substantially broadening its applicability. Extensive numerical results demonstrate the outstanding empirical performance of GenSDR and highlight its strong potential for addressing a wide range of complex, real-world tasks.


Multimodal Generative Flows for LHC Jets

Faroughy, Darius A., Opper, Manfred, Ojeda, Cesar

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Generative modeling of high-energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) offers a data-driven route to simulations, anomaly detection, among other applications. A central challenge lies in the hybrid nature of particle-cloud data: each particle carries continuous kinematic features and discrete quantum numbers such as charge and flavor. We introduce a transformer-based multimodal flow that extends flow-matching with a continuous-time Markov jump bridge to jointly model LHC jets with both modalities. Trained on CMS Open Data, our model can generate high fidelity jets with realistic kinematics, jet substructure and flavor composition.


IONext: Unlocking the Next Era of Inertial Odometry

Zhang, Shanshan, Zhang, Qi, Wang, Siyue, Wen, Tianshui, Wu, Liqin, Zhou, Ziheng, Hong, Xuemin, Peng, Ao, Zheng, Lingxiang, Yang, Yu

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Researchers have increasingly adopted Transformer-based models for inertial odometry. While Transformers excel at modeling long-range dependencies, their limited sensitivity to local, fine-grained motion variations and lack of inherent inductive biases often hinder localization accuracy and generalization. Recent studies have shown that incorporating large-kernel convolutions and Transformer-inspired architectural designs into CNN can effectively expand the receptive field, thereby improving global motion perception. Motivated by these insights, we propose a novel CNN-based module called the Dual-wing Adaptive Dynamic Mixer (DADM), which adaptively captures both global motion patterns and local, fine-grained motion features from dynamic inputs. This module dynamically generates selective weights based on the input, enabling efficient multi-scale feature aggregation. To further improve temporal modeling, we introduce the Spatio-Temporal Gating Unit (STGU), which selectively extracts representative and task-relevant motion features in the temporal domain. This unit addresses the limitations of temporal modeling observed in existing CNN approaches. Built upon DADM and STGU, we present a new CNN-based inertial odometry backbone, named Next Era of Inertial Odometry (IONext). Extensive experiments on six public datasets demonstrate that IONext consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) Transformer- and CNN-based methods. For instance, on the RNIN dataset, IONext reduces the average ATE by 10% and the average RTE by 12% compared to the representative model iMOT.


Tethered Multi-Robot Systems in Marine Environments

Buchholz, Markus, Carlucho, Ignacio, Grimaldi, Michele, Petillot, Yvan R.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper introduces a novel simulation framework for evaluating motion control in tethered multi-robot systems within dynamic marine environments. Specifically, it focuses on the coordinated operation of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) and an Autonomous Surface Vehicle(ASV). The framework leverages GazeboSim, enhanced with realistic marine environment plugins and ArduPilots SoftwareIn-The-Loop (SITL) mode, to provide a high-fidelity simulation platform. A detailed tether model, combining catenary equations and physical simulation, is integrated to accurately represent the dynamic interactions between the vehicles and the environment. This setup facilitates the development and testing of advanced control strategies under realistic conditions, demonstrating the frameworks capability to analyze complex tether interactions and their impact on system performance.


The Teens Are Taking Waymos Now

WIRED

Are the kids all right? They're in Waymos, at least, now that the self-driving car company has begun to allow Arizona teenagers in the Phoenix area to ride by themselves through special "teen" accounts. Eventually, the teen service, open to 14- to 17-year-olds, could come to all of the markets in the US where Waymo operates its robot taxis, the company says: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta, and soon, Miami and Washington, DC. In a country where so much of the transportation system depends on access to cars--and where many people, including those too young to have a drivers' license, are limited in what they can do and where they can go because of it--the move both promises and threatens to reorder young adult life. The concept of robot cars still scare plenty, but Waymo says its customers' enthusiasm for their self-driving cars has a lot to do with quelling fears.


Rethinking Machine Unlearning in Image Generation Models

Liu, Renyang, Feng, Wenjie, Zhang, Tianwei, Zhou, Wei, Cheng, Xueqi, Ng, See-Kiong

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

With the surge and widespread application of image generation models, data privacy and content safety have become major concerns and attracted great attention from users, service providers, and policymakers. Machine unlearning (MU) is recognized as a cost-effective and promising means to address these challenges. Despite some advancements, image generation model unlearning (IGMU) still faces remarkable gaps in practice, e.g., unclear task discrimination and unlearning guidelines, lack of an effective evaluation framework, and unreliable evaluation metrics. These can hinder the understanding of unlearning mechanisms and the design of practical unlearning algorithms. We perform exhaustive assessments over existing state-of-the-art unlearning algorithms and evaluation standards, and discover several critical flaws and challenges in IGMU tasks. Driven by these limitations, we make several core contributions, to facilitate the comprehensive understanding, standardized categorization, and reliable evaluation of IGMU. Specifically, (1) We design CatIGMU, a novel hierarchical task categorization framework. It provides detailed implementation guidance for IGMU, assisting in the design of unlearning algorithms and the construction of testbeds. (2) We introduce EvalIGMU, a comprehensive evaluation framework. It includes reliable quantitative metrics across five critical aspects. (3) We construct DataIGM, a high-quality unlearning dataset, which can be used for extensive evaluations of IGMU, training content detectors for judgment, and benchmarking the state-of-the-art unlearning algorithms. With EvalIGMU and DataIGM, we discover that most existing IGMU algorithms cannot handle the unlearning well across different evaluation dimensions, especially for preservation and robustness. Code and models are available at https://github.com/ryliu68/IGMU.


FamilyTool: A Multi-hop Personalized Tool Use Benchmark

Wang, Yuxin, Guo, Yiran, Zheng, Yining, Yin, Zhangyue, Chen, Shuo, Yang, Jie, Chen, Jiajun, Li, Yuan, Huang, Xuanjing, Qiu, Xipeng

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The integration of tool learning with Large Language Models (LLMs) has expanded their capabilities in handling complex tasks by leveraging external tools. However, existing benchmarks for tool learning inadequately address critical real-world personalized scenarios, particularly those requiring multi-hop reasoning and inductive knowledge adaptation in dynamic environments. To bridge this gap, we introduce FamilyTool, a novel benchmark grounded in a family-based knowledge graph (KG) that simulates personalized, multi-hop tool use scenarios. FamilyTool, including base and extended datasets, challenges LLMs with queries spanning from 1 to 4 relational hops (e.g., inferring familial connections and preferences) and 2 to 6 hops respectively, and incorporates an inductive KG setting where models must adapt to unseen user preferences and relationships without re-training, a common limitation in prior approaches that compromises generalization. We further propose KGETool: a simple KG-augmented evaluation pipeline to systematically assess LLMs' tool use ability in these settings. Experiments reveal significant performance gaps in state-of-the-art LLMs, with accuracy dropping sharply as hop complexity increases and inductive scenarios exposing severe generalization deficits. These findings underscore the limitations of current LLMs in handling personalized, evolving real-world contexts and highlight the urgent need for advancements in tool-learning frameworks. FamilyTool serves as a critical resource for evaluating and advancing LLM agents' reasoning, adaptability, and scalability in complex, dynamic environments. Code and dataset are available at \href{https://github.com/yxzwang/FamilyTool}{https://github.com/yxzwang/FamilyTool}.


American Panopticon

The Atlantic - Technology

If you have tips about DOGE and its data collection, you can contact Ian and Charlie on Signal at @ibogost.47 and @cwarzel.92. If you were tasked with building a panopticon, your design might look a lot like the information stores of the U.S. federal government--a collection of large, complex agencies, each making use of enormous volumes of data provided by or collected from citizens. The federal government is a veritable cosmos of information, made up of constellations of databases: The IRS gathers comprehensive financial and employment information from every taxpayer; the Department of Labor maintains the National Farmworker Jobs Program (NFJP) system, which collects the personal information of many workers; the Department of Homeland Security amasses data about the movements of every person who travels by air commercially or crosses the nation's borders; the Drug Enforcement Administration tracks license plates scanned on American roads. More obscure agencies, such as the recently gutted Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, keep records of corporate trade secrets, credit reports, mortgage information, and other sensitive data, including lists of people who have fallen on financial hardship. A fragile combination of decades-old laws, norms, and jungly bureaucracy has so far prevented repositories such as these from assembling into a centralized American surveillance state. But that appears to be changing. Since Donald Trump's second inauguration, Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency have systematically gained access to sensitive data across the federal government, and in ways that people in several agencies have described to us as both dangerous and disturbing.


A New Way to Fix the Housing Crisis

Slate

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Two decades ago, the fire marshal in Glendale, Arizona, was concerned that the elevators in a new stadium wouldn't be large enough to accommodate a 7-foot stretcher held flat. Tilting a stretcher to make it fit in the cab, the marshal worried, might jeopardize the treatment of a patient with a back injury. Maybe our elevators should be bigger, he thought. The marshal put this idea to the International Code Council, the organization that governs the construction of American buildings. After minor feedback and minimal research (the marshal measured three stretchers in the Phoenix area), the suggestion was incorporated into the ICC's model code.


Non-cooperative Stochastic Target Encirclement by Anti-synchronization Control via Range-only Measurement

Liu, Fen, Yuan, Shenghai, Meng, Wei, Su, Rong, Xie, Lihua

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper investigates the stochastic moving target encirclement problem in a realistic setting. In contrast to typical assumptions in related works, the target in our work is non-cooperative and capable of escaping the circle containment by boosting its speed to maximum for a short duration. Considering the extreme environment, such as GPS denial, weight limit, and lack of ground guidance, two agents can only rely on their onboard single-modality perception tools to measure the distances to the target. The distance measurement allows for creating a position estimator by providing a target position-dependent variable. Furthermore, the construction of the unique distributed anti-synchronization controller (DASC) can guarantee that the two agents track and encircle the target swiftly. The convergence of the estimator and controller is rigorously evaluated using the Lyapunov technique. A real-world UAV-based experiment is conducted to illustrate the performance of the proposed methodology in addition to a simulated Matlab numerical sample. Our video demonstration can be found in the URL https://youtu.be/JXu1gib99yQ.