With the rise of deep learning, there is a fundamental change in visual SLAM algorithms toward developing different modules trained as end-to-end pipelines. However, regardless of the implementation domain, visual SLAM's performance is subject to diverse environmental challenges, such as dynamic elements in outdoor environments, harsh imaging conditions in underwater environments, or blurriness in high-speed setups. These environmental challenges need to be identified to study the real-world viability of SLAM implementations. Motivated by the aforementioned challenges, this paper surveys the current state of visual SLAM algorithms according to the two main frameworks: geometry-based and learning-based SLAM. First, we introduce a general formulation of the SLAM pipeline that includes most of the implementations in the literature. Second, those implementations are classified and surveyed for geometry and learning-based SLAM. After that, environment-specific challenges are formulated to enable experimental evaluation of the resilience of different visual SLAM classes to varying imaging conditions. We address two significant issues in surveying visual SLAM, providing (1) a consistent classification of visual SLAM pipelines and (2) a robust evaluation of their performance under different deployment conditions. Finally, we give our take on future opportunities for visual SLAM implementations.

Recent advancements in deep learning have shown significant potential for classifying retinal diseases using color fundus images. However, existing works predominantly rely exclusively on image data, lack interpretability in their diagnostic decisions, and treat medical professionals primarily as annotators for ground truth labeling. To fill this gap, we implement two key strategies: extracting interpretable concepts of retinal diseases using the knowledge base of GPT models and incorporating these concepts as a language component in prompt-learning to train vision-language (VL) models with both fundus images and their associated concepts. Our method not only improves retinal disease classification but also enriches few-shot and zero-shot detection (novel disease detection), while offering the added benefit of concept-based model interpretability. Our extensive evaluation across two diverse retinal fundus image datasets illustrates substantial performance gains in VL-model based few-shot methodologies through our concept integration approach, demonstrating an average improvement of approximately 5.8\% and 2.7\% mean average precision for 16-shot learning and zero-shot (novel class) detection respectively. Our method marks a pivotal step towards interpretable and efficient retinal disease recognition for real-world clinical applications.

Predicting clinical outcomes from preclinical data is essential for identifying safe and effective drug combinations. Current models rely on structural or target-based features to identify high-efficacy, low-toxicity drug combinations. However, these approaches fail to incorporate the multimodal data necessary for accurate, clinically-relevant predictions. Here, we introduce MADRIGAL, a multimodal AI model that learns from structural, pathway, cell viability, and transcriptomic data to predict drug combination effects across 953 clinical outcomes and 21842 compounds, including combinations of approved drugs and novel compounds in development. MADRIGAL uses a transformer bottleneck module to unify preclinical drug data modalities while handling missing data during training and inference--a major challenge in multimodal learning. It outperforms single-modality methods and state-of-the-art models in predicting adverse drug interactions. MADRIGAL performs virtual screening of anticancer drug combinations and supports polypharmacy management for type II diabetes and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH). It identifies transporter-mediated drug interactions. MADRIGAL predicts resmetirom, the first and only FDA-approved drug for MASH, among therapies with the most favorable safety profile. It supports personalized cancer therapy by integrating genomic profiles from cancer patients. Using primary acute myeloid leukemia samples and patient-derived xenograft models, it predicts the efficacy of personalized drug combinations. Integrating MADRIGAL with a large language model allows users to describe clinical outcomes in natural language, improving safety assessment by identifying potential adverse interactions and toxicity risks. MADRIGAL provides a multimodal approach for designing combination therapies with improved predictive accuracy and clinical relevance.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models demonstrate remarkable potential for generalizable robotic manipulation. The performance of VLA models can be improved by integrating with action chunking, a critical technique for effective control. However, action chunking linearly scales up action dimensions in VLA models with increased chunking sizes. This reduces the inference efficiency. To tackle this problem, we propose PD-VLA, the first parallel decoding framework for VLA models integrated with action chunking. Our framework reformulates autoregressive decoding as a nonlinear system solved by parallel fixed-point iterations. This approach preserves model performance with mathematical guarantees while significantly improving decoding speed. In addition, it enables training-free acceleration without architectural changes, as well as seamless synergy with existing acceleration techniques. Extensive simulations validate that our PD-VLA maintains competitive success rates while achieving 2.52 times execution frequency on manipulators (with 7 degrees of freedom) compared with the fundamental VLA model. Furthermore, we experimentally identify the most effective settings for acceleration. Finally, real-world experiments validate its high applicability across different tasks.

Natural language interaction with agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI), driven by Large Language Models (LLMs), is expected to remain a dominant paradigm in the near future. While humans instinctively align their communication with mental states -- an ability known as Theory of Mind (ToM), current LLM powered systems exhibit significant limitations in this regard. This study examines the extent to which open source language models (LLaMA) can capture and preserve ToM related information and how effectively it contributes to consistent ToM reasoning in generated responses. We further investigate whether explicit manipulation of ToM related components, such as beliefs, desires, and intentions, can enhance response alignment. Experiments on two LLaMA 3 variants demonstrate that incorporating ToM informed alignment improves response quality, achieving win rates of 67 and 63 percent for the 3B and 8B models, respectively. These findings highlight the potential of ToM driven strategies to improve alignment in LLM based conversational agents.

In this paper, we present a thorough analysis of the impact of Large Language Models (LLMs) on Wikipedia, examining the evolution of Wikipedia through existing data and using simulations to explore potential risks. We begin by analyzing page views and article content to study Wikipedia's recent changes and assess the impact of LLMs. Subsequently, we evaluate how LLMs affect various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks related to Wikipedia, including machine translation and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Our findings and simulation results reveal that Wikipedia articles have been influenced by LLMs, with an impact of approximately 1%-2% in certain categories. If the machine translation benchmark based on Wikipedia is influenced by LLMs, the scores of the models may become inflated, and the comparative results among models might shift as well. Moreover, the effectiveness of RAG might decrease if the knowledge base becomes polluted by LLM-generated content. While LLMs have not yet fully changed Wikipedia's language and knowledge structures, we believe that our empirical findings signal the need for careful consideration of potential future risks.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit hallucinations (i.e., unfaithful or nonsensical information) when serving as AI assistants in various domains. Since hallucinations always come with truthful content in the LLM responses, previous factuality alignment methods that conduct response-level preference learning inevitably introduced noises during training. Therefore, this paper proposes a fine-grained factuality alignment method based on Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), called Mask-DPO. Incorporating sentence-level factuality as mask signals, Mask-DPO only learns from factually correct sentences in the preferred samples and prevents the penalty on factual contents in the not preferred samples, which resolves the ambiguity in the preference learning. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Mask-DPO can significantly improve the factuality of LLMs responses to questions from both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets, although these questions and their corresponding topics are unseen during training. Only trained on the ANAH train set, the score of Llama3.1-8B-Instruct on the ANAH test set is improved from 49.19% to 77.53%, even surpassing the score of Llama3.1-70B-Instruct (53.44%), while its FactScore on the out-of-domain Biography dataset is also improved from 30.29% to 39.39%. We further study the generalization property of Mask-DPO using different training sample scaling strategies and find that scaling the number of topics in the dataset is more effective than the number of questions. We provide a hypothesis of what factual alignment is doing with LLMs, on the implication of this phenomenon, and conduct proof-of-concept experiments to verify it. We hope the method and the findings pave the way for future research on scaling factuality alignment.

The #StopAsianHate (SAH) movement is a broad social movement against violence targeting Asians and Asian Americans, beginning in 2021 in response to racial discrimination related to COVID-19 and sparking worldwide conversation about anti-Asian hate. However, research on the online SAH movement has focused on English-speaking participants so the spread of the movement outside of the United States is largely unknown. In addition, there have been no long-term studies of SAH so the extent to which it has been successfully sustained over time is not well understood. We present an analysis of 6.5 million "#StopAsianHate" tweets from 2.2 million users all over the globe and spanning 60 different languages, constituting the first study of the non-English and transnational component of the online SAH movement. Using a combination of topic modeling, user modeling, and hand annotation, we identify and characterize the dominant discussions and users participating in the movement and draw comparisons of English versus non-English topics and users. We discover clear differences in events driving topics, where spikes in English tweets are driven by violent crimes in the US but spikes in non-English tweets are driven by transnational incidents of anti-Asian sentiment towards symbolic representatives of Asian nations. We also find that global K-pop fans were quick to adopt the SAH movement and, in fact, sustained it for longer than any other user group. Our work contributes to understanding the transnationality and evolution of the SAH movement, and more generally to exploring upward scale shift and public attention in large-scale multilingual online activism.

In the realm of Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS), the accurate assessment of students' knowledge states through Knowledge Tracing (KT) is crucial for personalized learning. However, due to data bias, $\textit{i.e.}$, the unbalanced distribution of question groups ($\textit{e.g.}$, concepts), conventional KT models are plagued by cognitive bias, which tends to result in cognitive underload for overperformers and cognitive overload for underperformers. More seriously, this bias is amplified with the exercise recommendations by ITS. After delving into the causal relations in the KT models, we identify the main cause as the confounder effect of students' historical correct rate distribution over question groups on the student representation and prediction score. Towards this end, we propose a Disentangled Knowledge Tracing (DisKT) model, which separately models students' familiar and unfamiliar abilities based on causal effects and eliminates the impact of the confounder in student representation within the model. Additionally, to shield the contradictory psychology ($\textit{e.g.}$, guessing and mistaking) in the students' biased data, DisKT introduces a contradiction attention mechanism. Furthermore, DisKT enhances the interpretability of the model predictions by integrating a variant of Item Response Theory. Experimental results on 11 benchmarks and 3 synthesized datasets with different bias strengths demonstrate that DisKT significantly alleviates cognitive bias and outperforms 16 baselines in evaluation accuracy.

Bin picking is a challenging robotic task due to occlusions and physical constraints that limit visual information for object recognition and grasping. Existing approaches often rely on known CAD models or prior object geometries, restricting generalization to novel or unknown objects. Other methods directly regress grasp poses from RGB-D data without object priors, but the inherent noise in depth sensing and the lack of object understanding make grasp synthesis and evaluation more difficult. Superquadrics (SQ) offer a compact, interpretable shape representation that captures the physical and graspability understanding of objects. However, recovering them from limited viewpoints is challenging, as existing methods rely on multiple perspectives for near-complete point cloud reconstruction, limiting their effectiveness in bin-picking. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{RGBSQGrasp}, a grasping framework that leverages superquadric shape primitives and foundation metric depth estimation models to infer grasp poses from a monocular RGB camera -- eliminating the need for depth sensors. Our framework integrates a universal, cross-platform dataset generation pipeline, a foundation model-based object point cloud estimation module, a global-local superquadric fitting network, and an SQ-guided grasp pose sampling module. By integrating these components, RGBSQGrasp reliably infers grasp poses through geometric reasoning, enhancing grasp stability and adaptability to unseen objects. Real-world robotic experiments demonstrate a 92\% grasp success rate, highlighting the effectiveness of RGBSQGrasp in packed bin-picking environments.