Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation (MERC) aims to predict speakers' emotions by integrating textual, acoustic, and visual cues. Existing approaches either struggle to capture complex cross-modal interactions or experience gradient conflicts and unstable training when using deeper architectures. To address these issues, we propose Cross-Space Synergy (CSS), which couples a representation component with an optimization component. Synergistic Polynomial Fusion (SPF) serves the representation role, leveraging low-rank tensor factorization to efficiently capture high-order cross-modal interactions. Pareto Gradient Modulator (PGM) serves the optimization role, steering updates along Pareto-optimal directions across competing objectives to alleviate gradient conflicts and improve stability. Experiments show that CSS outperforms existing representative methods on IEMOCAP and MELD in both accuracy and training stability, demonstrating its effectiveness in complex multimodal scenarios.

Automatic 3D reconstruction of indoor spaces from 2D floor plans necessitates high-precision semantic segmentation of structural elements, particularly walls. However, existing methods often struggle with detecting thin structures and maintaining geometric precision. This study introduces MitUNet, a hybrid neural network combining a Mix-Transformer encoder and a U-Net decoder enhanced with spatial and channel attention blocks. Our approach, optimized with the Tversky loss function, achieves a balance between precision and recall, ensuring accurate boundary recovery. Experiments on the CubiCasa5k dataset and a proprietary regional dataset demonstrate MitUNet's superiority in generating structurally correct masks with high boundary accuracy, outperforming standard models. This tool provides a robust foundation for automated 3D reconstruction pipelines. To ensure reproducibility and facilitate future research, the source code and the proprietary regional dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/aliasstudio/mitunet and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17871079 respectively.

Measurement-induced entanglement (MIE) captures how local measurements generate long-range quantum correlations and drive dynamical phase transitions in many-body systems. Yet estimating MIE experimentally remains challenging: direct evaluation requires extensive post-selection over measurement outcomes, raising the question of whether MIE is accessible with only polynomial resources. We address this challenge by reframing MIE detection as a data-driven learning problem that assumes no prior knowledge of state preparation. Using measurement records alone, we train a neural network in a self-supervised manner to predict the uncertainty metric for MIE--the gap between upper and lower bounds of the average post-measurement bipartite entanglement. Applied to random circuits with one-dimensional all-to-all connectivity and two-dimensional nearest-neighbor coupling, our method reveals a learnability transition with increasing circuit depth: below a threshold, the uncertainty is small and decreases with polynomial measurement data and model parameters, while above it the uncertainty remains large despite increasing resources. We further verify this transition experimentally on current noisy quantum devices, demonstrating its robustness to realistic noise. These results highlight the power of data-driven approaches for learning MIE and delineate the practical limits of its classical learnability.

Medical phrase grounding (MPG) maps textual descriptions of radiological findings to corresponding image regions. These grounded reports are easier to interpret, especially for non-experts. Existing MPG systems mostly follow the referring expression comprehension (REC) paradigm and return exactly one bounding box per phrase. Real reports often violate this assumption. They contain multi-region findings, non-diagnostic text, and non-groundable phrases, such as negations or descriptions of normal anatomy. Motivated by this, we reformulate the task as generalised medical phrase grounding (GMPG), where each sentence is mapped to zero, one, or multiple scored regions. To realise this formulation, we introduce the first GMPG model: MedGrounder. We adopted a two-stage training regime: pre-training on report sentence--anatomy box alignment datasets and fine-tuning on report sentence--human annotated box datasets. Experiments on PadChest-GR and MS-CXR show that MedGrounder achieves strong zero-shot transfer and outperforms REC-style and grounded report generation baselines on multi-region and non-groundable phrases, while using far fewer human box annotations. Finally, we show that MedGrounder can be composed with existing report generators to produce grounded reports without retraining the generator.

Neural networks have shown remarkable success in supervised learning when trained on a single task using a fixed dataset. However, when neural networks are trained on a reinforcement learning task, their ability to continue learning from new experiences declines over time. This decline in learning ability is known as plasticity loss. To restore plasticity, prior work has explored periodically resetting the parameters of the learning network, a strategy that often improves overall performance. However, such resets come at the cost of a temporary drop in performance, which can be dangerous in real-world settings. To overcome this instability, we introduce AltNet, a reset-based approach that restores plasticity without performance degradation by leveraging twin networks. The use of twin networks anchors performance during resets through a mechanism that allows networks to periodically alternate roles: one network learns as it acts in the environment, while the other learns off-policy from the active network's interactions and a replay buffer. At fixed intervals, the active network is reset and the passive network, having learned from prior experiences, becomes the new active network. AltNet restores plasticity, improving sample efficiency and achieving higher performance, while avoiding performance drops that pose risks in safety-critical settings. We demonstrate these advantages in several high-dimensional control tasks from the DeepMind Control Suite, where AltNet outperforms various relevant baseline methods, as well as state-of-the-art reset-based techniques.

This paper introduces CryptoBench, the first expert-curated, dynamic benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate the real-world capabilities of Large Language Model (LLM) agents in the uniquely demanding and fast-paced cryptocurrency domain. Unlike general-purpose agent benchmarks for search and prediction, professional crypto analysis presents specific challenges: \emph{extreme time-sensitivity}, \emph{a highly adversarial information environment}, and the critical need to synthesize data from \emph{diverse, specialized sources}, such as on-chain intelligence platforms and real-time Decentralized Finance (DeFi) dashboards. CryptoBench thus serves as a much more challenging and valuable scenario for LLM agent assessment. To address these challenges, we constructed a live, dynamic benchmark featuring 50 questions per month, expertly designed by crypto-native professionals to mirror actual analyst workflows. These tasks are rigorously categorized within a four-quadrant system: Simple Retrieval, Complex Retrieval, Simple Prediction, and Complex Prediction. This granular categorization enables a precise assessment of an LLM agent's foundational data-gathering capabilities alongside its advanced analytical and forecasting skills. Our evaluation of ten LLMs, both directly and within an agentic framework, reveals a performance hierarchy and uncovers a failure mode. We observe a \textit{retrieval-prediction imbalance}, where many leading models, despite being proficient at data retrieval, demonstrate a pronounced weakness in tasks requiring predictive analysis. This highlights a problematic tendency for agents to appear factually grounded while lacking the deeper analytical capabilities to synthesize information.

Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) faces two major design bottlenecks: crafting dense reward functions and constructing curricula that avoid local optima in high-dimensional, non-stationary environments. Existing approaches rely on fixed heuristics or use Large Language Models (LLMs) directly in the control loop, which is costly and unsuitable for real-time systems. We propose MAESTRO (Multi-Agent Environment Shaping through Task and Reward Optimization), a framework that moves the LLM outside the execution loop and uses it as an offline training architect. MAESTRO introduces two generative components: (i) a semantic curriculum generator that creates diverse, performance-driven traffic scenarios, and (ii) an automated reward synthesizer that produces executable Python reward functions adapted to evolving curriculum difficulty. These components guide a standard MARL backbone (MADDPG) without increasing inference cost at deployment. We evaluate MAESTRO on large-scale traffic signal control (Hangzhou, 16 intersections) and conduct controlled ablations. Results show that combining LLM-generated curricula with LLM-generated reward shaping yields improved performance and stability. Across four seeds, the full system achieves +4.0% higher mean return (163.26 vs. 156.93) and 2.2% better risk-adjusted performance (Sharpe 1.53 vs. 0.70) over a strong curriculum baseline. These findings highlight LLMs as effective high-level designers for cooperative MARL training.

Multi-agent systems play a central role in area coverage tasks across search-and-rescue, environmental monitoring, and precision agriculture. Achieving non-uniform coverage, where spatial priorities vary across the domain, requires coordinating agents while respecting dynamic and communication constraints. Density-driven approaches can distribute agents according to a prescribed reference density, but existing methods do not ensure connectivity. This limitation often leads to communication loss, reduced coordination, and degraded coverage performance. This letter introduces a connectivity-preserving extension of the Density-Driven Optimal Control (D2OC) framework. The coverage objective, defined using the Wasserstein distance between the agent distribution and the reference density, admits a convex quadratic program formulation. Communication constraints are incorporated through a smooth connectivity penalty, which maintains strict convexity, supports distributed implementation, and preserves inter-agent communication without imposing rigid formations. Simulation studies show that the proposed method consistently maintains connectivity, improves convergence speed, and enhances non-uniform coverage quality compared with density-driven schemes that do not incorporate explicit connectivity considerations.

Phonotrauma refers to vocal fold tissue damage resulting from exposure to forces during voicing. It occurs on a continuum from mild to severe, and treatment options can vary based on severity. Assessment of severity involves a clinician's expert judgment, which is costly and can vary widely in reliability. In this work, we present the first method for automatically classifying phonotrauma severity from vocal fold images. To account for the ordinal nature of the labels, we adopt a widely used ordinal regression framework. To account for label uncertainty, we propose a novel modification to ordinal regression loss functions that enables them to operate on soft labels reflecting annotator rating distributions. Our proposed soft ordinal regression method achieves predictive performance approaching that of clinical experts, while producing well-calibrated uncertainty estimates. By providing an automated tool for phonotrauma severity assessment, our work can enable large-scale studies of phonotrauma, ultimately leading to improved clinical understanding and patient care.

LLMscape is an interactive installation that investigates how humans and AI construct meaning under shared conditions of uncertainty. Within a mutable, projection-mapped landscape, human participants reshape the world and engage with multiple AI agents, each developing incomplete and provisional accounts of their environment. Exhibited in Shanghai and continually evolving, the work positions AI not as deterministic tools but as embodied co-witnesses to an unstable world, examining the parallels between human and artificial meaning-making and inviting reflection on our shared epistemic limits.