T o address the trade-off between robustness and performance for robust VLM, we observe that function words could incur vulnerability of VLMs against cross-modal adversarial attacks, and propose Function-word De-Attention (FDA) accordingly to mitigate the impact of function words. Similar to differential amplifiers, our FDA calculates the original and the function-word cross-attention within attention heads, and differentially subtracts the latter from the former for more aligned and robust VLMs. Comprehensive experiments include 2 SOTA baselines under 6 different attacks on 2 downstream tasks, 3 datasets, and 3 models. Overall, our FDA yields an average 18/13/53% ASR drop with only 0.2/0.3/0.6% performance drops on the 3 tested models on retrieval, and a 90% ASR drop with a 0.3% performance gain on visual grounding. W e demonstrate the scalability, generalization, and zero-shot performance of FDA experimentally, as well as in-depth ablation studies and analysis. Code will be made publicly available.

For centuries, khalasi (Gujarati for sailor) have skillfully harnessed ocean currents to navigate vast waters with minimal effort. Emulating this intuition in autonomous systems remains a significant challenge, particularly for Autonomous Surface Vehicles tasked with long duration missions under strict energy budgets. In this work, we present a learning-based approach for energy-efficient surface vehicle navigation in vortical flow fields, where partial observability often undermines traditional path-planning methods. We present an end to end reinforcement learning framework based on Soft Actor Critic that learns flow-aware navigation policies using only local velocity measurements. Through extensive evaluation across diverse and dynamically rich scenarios, our method demonstrates substantial energy savings and robust generalization to previously unseen flow conditions, offering a promising path toward long term autonomy in ocean environments. The navigation paths generated by our proposed approach show an improvement in energy conservation 30 to 50 percent compared to the existing state of the art techniques.

State-of-the-art multi-robot kinodynamic motion planners struggle to handle more than a few robots due to high computational burden, which limits their scalability and results in slow planning time. In this work, we combine the scalability and speed of modern multi-agent path finding (MAPF) algorithms with the dynamic-awareness of kinodynamic planners to address these limitations. To this end, we propose discontinuity-Bounded LaCAM (db-LaCAM), a planner that utilizes a precomputed set of motion primitives that respect robot dynamics to generate horizon-length motion sequences, while allowing a user-defined discontinuity between successive motions. The planner db-LaCAM is resolution-complete with respect to motion primitives and supports arbitrary robot dynamics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that db-LaCAM scales efficiently to scenarios with up to 50 robots, achieving up to ten times faster runtime compared to state-of-the-art planners, while maintaining comparable solution quality. The approach is validated in both 2D and 3D environments with dynamics such as the unicycle and 3D double integrator. We demonstrate the safe execution of trajectories planned with db-LaCAM in two distinct physical experiments involving teams of flying robots and car-with-trailer robots.

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes embedded in personal and professional relationships, a new kind of power imbalance emerges from asymmetric memory capabilities. Human relationships have historically relied on mutual forgetting, the natural tendency for both parties to forget details over time, as a foundation for psychological safety, forgiveness, and identity change. By contrast, AI systems can record, store, and recombine interaction histories at scale, often indefinitely. We introduce Memory Power Asymmetry (MPA): a structural power imbalance that arises when one relationship partner (typically an AI-enabled firm) possesses a substantially superior capacity to record, retain, retrieve, and integrate the shared history of the relationship, and can selectively deploy that history in ways the other partner (the human) cannot. Drawing on research in human memory, power-dependence theory, AI architecture, and consumer vulnerability, we develop a conceptual framework with four dimensions of MPA (persistence, accuracy, accessibility, integration) and four mechanisms by which memory asymmetry is translated into power (strategic memory deployment, narrative control, dependence asymmetry, vulnerability accumulation). We theorize downstream consequences at individual, relational/firm, and societal levels, formulate boundary-conditioned propositions, and articulate six design principles for restoring a healthier balance of memory in human-AI relationships (e.g., forgetting by design, contextual containment, symmetric access to records). Our analysis positions MPA as a distinct construct relative to information asymmetry, privacy, surveillance, and customer relationship management, and argues that protecting mutual forgetting, or at least mutual control over memory, should become a central design and policy goal in the AI age.

We revisit the $(f,g)$-clustering problem that we introduced in a recent work [SODA'25], and which subsumes fundamental clustering problems such as $k$-Center, $k$-Median, Min-Sum of Radii, and Min-Load $k$-Clustering. This problem assigns each of the $k$ clusters a cost determined by the monotone, symmetric norm $f$ applied to the vector distances in the cluster, and aims at minimizing the norm $g$ applied to the vector of cluster costs. Previously, we focused on certain special cases for which we designed constant-factor approximation algorithms. Our bounds for more general settings left, however, large gaps to the known bounds for the basic problems they capture. In this work, we provide a clearer picture of the approximability of these more general settings. First, we design an $O(\log^2 n)$-approximation algorithm for $(f, L_{1})$-clustering for any $f$. This improves upon our previous $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{n})$-approximation. Second, we provide an $O(k)$-approximation for the general $(f,g)$-clustering problem, which improves upon our previous $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{kn})$-approximation algorithm and matches the best-known upper bound for Min-Load $k$-Clustering. We then design an approximation algorithm for $(f,g)$-clustering that interpolates, up to polylog factors, between the best known bounds for $k$-Center, $k$-Median, Min-Sum of Radii, Min-Load $k$-Clustering, (Top, $L_{1}$)-clustering, and $(L_{\infty},g)$-clustering based on a newly defined parameter of $f$ and $g$.

This work introduces a single-range-aided navigation observer that reconstructs the full state of a rigid body using only an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), a body-frame vector measurement (e.g., magnetometer), and a distance measurement from a fixed anchor point. The design first formulates an extended linear time-varying (LTV) system to estimate body-frame position, body-frame velocity, and the gravity direction. The recovered gravity direction, combined with the body-frame vector measurement, is then used to reconstruct the full orientation on $\mathrm{SO}(3)$, resulting in a cascaded observer architecture. Almost Global Asymptotic Stability (AGAS) of the cascaded design is established under a uniform observability condition, ensuring robustness to sensor noise and trajectory variations. Simulation studies on three-dimensional trajectories demonstrate accurate estimation of position, velocity, and orientation, highlighting single-range aiding as a lightweight and effective modality for autonomous navigation.

This paper develops a unified perspective on several stochastic optimal control formulations through the lens of Kullback-Leibler regularization. We propose a central problem that separates the KL penalties on policies and transitions, assigning them independent weights, thereby generalizing the standard trajectory-level KL-regularization commonly used in probabilistic and KL-regularized control. This generalized formulation acts as a generative structure allowing to recover various control problems. These include the classical Stochastic Optimal Control (SOC), Risk-Sensitive Optimal Control (RSOC), and their policy-based KL-regularized counterparts. The latter we refer to as soft-policy SOC and RSOC, facilitating alternative problems with tractable solutions. Beyond serving as regularized variants, we show that these soft-policy formulations majorize the original SOC and RSOC problem. This means that the regularized solution can be iterated to retrieve the original solution. Furthermore, we identify a structurally synchronized case of the risk-seeking soft-policy RSOC formulation, wherein the policy and transition KL-regularization weights coincide. Remarkably, this specific setting gives rise to several powerful properties such as a linear Bellman equation, path integral solution, and, compositionality, thereby extending these computationally favourable properties to a broad class of control problems.

Purpose: The Unadjusted Langevin Algorithm (ULA) in combination with diffusion models can generate high quality MRI reconstructions with uncertainty estimation from highly undersampled k-space data. However, sampling methods such as diffusion posterior sampling or likelihood annealing suffer from long reconstruction times and the need for parameter tuning. The purpose of this work is to develop a robust sampling algorithm with fast convergence. Theory and Methods: In the reverse diffusion process used for sampling the posterior, the exact likelihood is multiplied with the diffused prior at all noise scales. To overcome the issue of slow convergence, preconditioning is used. The method is trained on fastMRI data and tested on retrospectively undersampled brain data of a healthy volunteer. Results: For posterior sampling in Cartesian and non-Cartesian accelerated MRI the new approach outperforms annealed sampling in terms of reconstruction speed and sample quality. Conclusion: The proposed exact likelihood with preconditioning enables rapid and reliable posterior sampling across various MRI reconstruction tasks without the need for parameter tuning.

In this article, we present a framework for designing neural networks that remain consistent with the underlying principles of agent-based models. We begin by highlighting the limitations of standard neural differential equations in modeling complex systems, where physical invariants (like energy) are often absent but other constraints (like mass conservation, information locality, bounded rationality) must be enforced. To address this, we introduce Agent-Based-Model informed Neural Networks (ABM-NNs), which leverage restricted graph neural networks and hierarchical decomposition to learn interpretable, structure-preserving dynamics. We validate the framework across three case studies of increasing complexity: (i) a Generalized Lotka-Volterra system, where we recover ground-truth parameters from short trajectories in presence of interventions; (ii) a graph-based SIR contagion model, where our method outperforms state-of-the-art graph learning baselines (GCN, GraphSAGE, Graph Transformer) in out-of-sample forecasting and noise robustness; and (iii) a real-world macroeconomic model of the ten largest economies, where we learn coupled GDP dynamics from empirical data and demonstrate counterfactual analysis for policy interventions.

Modern Large Language Models achieve impressive reasoning capabilities with long Chain of Thoughts, but they incur substantial computational cost during inference, and this motivates techniques to improve the performance-cost ratio. Among these techniques, Speculative Decoding accelerates inference by employing a fast but inaccurate draft model to autoregressively propose tokens, which are then verified in parallel by a more capable target model. However, due to unnecessary rejections caused by token mismatches in semantically equivalent steps, traditional token-level Speculative Decoding struggles in reasoning tasks. Although recent works have shifted to step-level semantic verification, which improve efficiency by accepting or rejecting entire reasoning steps, existing step-level methods still regenerate many rejected steps with little improvement, wasting valuable target compute. To address this challenge, we propose Arbitrage, a novel step-level speculative generation framework that routes generation dynamically based on the relative advantage between draft and target models. Instead of applying a fixed acceptance threshold, Arbitrage uses a lightweight router trained to predict when the target model is likely to produce a meaningfully better step. This routing approximates an ideal Arbitrage Oracle that always chooses the higher-quality step, achieving near-optimal efficiency-accuracy trade-offs. Across multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks, Arbitrage consistently surpasses prior step-level Speculative Decoding baselines, reducing inference latency by up to $\sim2\times$ at matched accuracy.