To benchmark a model's long-form factuality in open domains, we first use GPT -4 to generate LongFact, a prompt set comprising thousands of questions spanning 38 topics. We then propose that LLM agents can be used as automated evaluators for long-form factuality through a method which we call Search-Augmented Factuality Evaluator (SAFE).

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various artificial intelligence problems. However, they fail to plan reliably, even when prompted with a detailed definition of the planning task. Attempts to improve their planning capabilities, such as chain-of-thought prompting, fine-tuning, and explicit "reasoning" still yield incorrect plans and usually fail to generalize to larger tasks. In this paper, we show how to use LLMs to generate correct plans, even for out-of-distribution tasks of increasing size. For a given planning domain, we ask an LLM to generate several domain-dependent heuristic functions in the form of Python code, evaluate them on a set of training tasks within a greedy best-first search, and choose the strongest one. The resulting LLM-generated heuristics solve many more unseen test tasks than state-of-the-art domain-independent heuristics for classical planning. They are even competitive with the strongest learning algorithm for domain-dependent planning. These findings are especially remarkable given that our proof-of-concept implementation is based on an unoptimized Python planner and the baselines all build upon highly optimized C++ code. In some domains, the LLM-generated heuristics expand fewer states than the baselines, revealing that they are not only efficiently computable, but sometimes even more informative than the state-of-the-art heuristics. Overall, our results show that sampling a set of planning heuristic function programs can significantly improve the planning capabilities of LLMs.

While Generative Adversarial Nets (GANs) and Diffusion Models (DMs) have achieved impressive results in natural image synthesis, their core strengths - creativity and realism - can be detrimental in medical applications, where accuracy and fidelity are paramount. These models instead risk introducing hallucinations and replication of unwanted acquisition noise. Here, we propose YODA (You Only Denoise once - or Average), a 2.5D diffusion-based framework for medical image translation (MIT). Consistent with DM theory, we find that conventional diffusion sampling stochastically replicates noise. To mitigate this, we draw and average multiple samples, akin to physical signal averaging. As this effectively approximates the DM's expected value, we term this Expectation-Approximation (ExpA) sampling. We additionally propose regression sampling YODA, which retains the initial DM prediction and omits iterative refinement to produce noise-free images in a single step. Across five diverse multi-modal datasets - including multi-contrast brain MRI and pelvic MRI-CT - we demonstrate that regression sampling is not only substantially more efficient but also matches or exceeds image quality of full diffusion sampling even with ExpA. Our results reveal that iterative refinement solely enhances perceptual realism without benefiting information translation, which we confirm in relevant downstream tasks. YODA outperforms eight state-of-the-art DMs and GANs and challenges the presumed superiority of DMs and GANs over computationally cheap regression models for high-quality MIT. Furthermore, we show that YODA-translated images are interchangeable with, or even superior to, physical acquisitions for several medical applications.

Recently, leveraging pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) for building vision-language-action (VLA) models has emerged as a promising approach to effective robot manipulation learning. However, only few methods incorporate 3D signals into VLMs for action prediction, and they do not fully leverage the spatial structure inherent in 3D data, leading to low sample efficiency. In this paper, we introduce BridgeVLA, a novel 3D VLA model that (1) projects 3D inputs to multiple 2D images, ensuring input alignment with the VLM backbone, and (2) utilizes 2D heatmaps for action prediction, unifying the input and output spaces within a consistent 2D image space. In addition, we propose a scalable pre-training method that equips the VLM backbone with the capability to predict 2D heatmaps before downstream policy learning. Extensive experiments show the proposed method is able to learn 3D manipulation efficiently and effectively. BridgeVLA outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods across three simulation benchmarks. In RLBench, it improves the average success rate from 81.4% to 88.2%. In COLOSSEUM, it demonstrates significantly better performance in challenging generalization settings, boosting the average success rate from 56.7% to 64.0%. In GemBench, it surpasses all the comparing baseline methods in terms of average success rate. In real-robot experiments, BridgeVLA outperforms a state-of-the-art baseline method by 32% on average. It generalizes robustly in multiple out-of-distribution settings, including visual disturbances and unseen instructions. Remarkably, it is able to achieve a success rate of 96.8% on 10+ tasks with only 3 trajectories per task, highlighting its extraordinary sample efficiency. Project Website:https://bridgevla.github.io/

PaI methods manage to find trainable subnetworks that outperform random pruning, their performance in terms of both accuracy and computational reduction is far from satisfactory compared to post-training pruning and the understanding of PaI is missing.

Sleep apnea is a serious sleep-related breathing disorder that is common and can impact health if left untreated. Currently the traditional method for screening and diagnosis is overnight polysomnography. Polysomnography is expensive and takes a lot of time, and is not practical for screening large groups of people. In this paper, we explored a more accessible option, using respiratory audio recordings to spot signs of apnea.We utilized 18 audio files.The approach involved converting breathing sounds into spectrograms, balancing the dataset by oversampling apnea segments, and applying class weights to reduce bias toward the majority class. The model reached a recall of 90.55 for apnea detection. Intentionally, prioritizing catching apnea events over general accuracy. Despite low precision,the high recall suggests potential as a low-cost screening tool that could be used at home or in basic clinical setups, potentially helping identify at-risk individuals much earlier.

We introduce the Convolutional Set Transformer (CST), a novel neural architecture designed to process image sets of arbitrary cardinality that are visually heterogeneous yet share high-level semantics - such as a common category, scene, or concept. Existing set-input networks, e.g., Deep Sets and Set Transformer, are limited to vector inputs and cannot directly handle 3D image tensors. As a result, they must be cascaded with a feature extractor, typically a CNN, which encodes images into embeddings before the set-input network can model inter-image relationships. In contrast, CST operates directly on 3D image tensors, performing feature extraction and contextual modeling simultaneously, thereby enabling synergies between the two processes. This design yields superior performance in tasks such as Set Classification and Set Anomaly Detection and further provides native compatibility with CNN explainability methods such as Grad-CAM, unlike competing approaches that remain opaque. Finally, we show that CSTs can be pre-trained on large-scale datasets and subsequently adapted to new domains and tasks through standard Transfer Learning schemes. To support further research, we release CST-15, a CST backbone pre-trained on ImageNet (https://github.com/chinefed/convolutional-set-transformer).

Hierarchical coarse-to-fine policy, where a coarse branch predicts a region of interest to guide a fine-grained action predictor, has demonstrated significant potential in robotic 3D manipulation tasks by especially enhancing sample efficiency and enabling more precise manipulation. However, even augmented with pre-trained models, these hierarchical policies still suffer from generalization issues. To enhance generalization to novel instructions and environment variations, we propose Coarse-to-fine Language-Aligned manipulation Policy (CLAP), a framework that integrates three key components: 1) task decomposition, 2) VLM fine-tuning for 3D keypoint prediction, and 3) 3D-aware representation. Through comprehensive experiments in simulation and on a real robot, we demonstrate its superior generalization capability. Specifically, on GemBench, a benchmark designed for evaluating generalization, our approach achieves a 12% higher average success rate than the SOT A method while using only 1/5 of the training trajectories. In real-world experiments, our policy, trained on only 10 demonstrations, successfully generalizes to novel instructions and environments. Robot learning, especially via imitation learning, has demonstrated promising success in enabling robots to solve complex 3D manipulation tasks (Intelligence et al., 2025; Liu et al., 2024). However, scaling these methods to a broader range of real-world applications (e.g., industrial, service, or home robotics) requires enhancing both (G1) their generalization to environment variations, and (G2) their skill compositional generalization.

While diffusion language models (DLMs) have achieved competitive performance in text generation, improving their reasoning ability with reinforcement learning remains an active research area. Here, we introduce d2, a reasoning framework tailored for masked DLMs. Central to our framework is a new policy gradient algorithm that relies on properties of masking to accurately estimate the likelihoods of sampling trajectories. Our estimators trade off computation for approximation accuracy in an analytically tractable manner, and are particularly effective for DLMs that support any-order likelihood estimation. We characterize and study this property in popular DLMs and show that it is key for efficient diffusion-based reasoning. Empirically, d2 significantly improves over previous diffusion reasoning frameworks using only RL (without relying on supervised fine-tuning), and sets a new state-of-the-art performance for DLMs on logical reasoning tasks (Countdown and Sudoku) and math reasoning benchmarks (GSM8K and MATH500).