To build a generalizable Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model with strong reasoning ability, a common strategy is to first train a specialist VLA on robot demonstrations to acquire reliable manipulation skills, and then incorporate mixed annotated robot data together with multimodal data to restore broader reasoning capabilities. However, we observe that the resulting reasoning VLA often suffers from degraded action performance compared to the specialist model before fine-tuning, a phenomenon we refer to as action degeneration. To address this issue, we propose DualVLA, which enhances action performance through carefully designed post-training while still preserving reasoning capability. We first introduce a dual-layer data pruning method that removes redundant embodied reasoning, preventing it from adversely influencing action learning. To further strengthen action generation, we design a dual-teacher adaptive distillation strategy that assigns different supervision signals to different data domains while maintaining reasoning ability. To fill the evaluation gap for generalist VLAs, we also propose VLA Score, which decouples VLA capability into reasoning, intention, action, and alignment dimensions for a more fine-grained assessment. Experiments show that DualVLA achieves an average success rate of 61.0 in SimplerEnv and an average score of 65.4 across eight competitive multimodal benchmarks, demonstrating a stronger balance between precise action execution and multimodal understanding. Project Website: https://costaliya.github.io/DualVLA/.

Assessing resection margins is central to pathological specimen evaluation and has profound implications for patient outcomes. Current practice employs physical inking, which is applied variably, and cautery artifacts can obscure the true margin on histological sections. We present a virtual inking network (VIN) that autonomously localizes the surgical cut surface on whole-slide images, reducing reliance on inks and standardizing margin-focused review. VIN uses a frozen foundation model as the feature extractor and a compact two-layer multilayer perceptron trained for patch-level classification of cautery-consistent features. The dataset comprised 120 hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained slides from 12 human tonsil tissue blocks, resulting in ~2 TB of uncompressed raw image data, where a board-certified pathologist provided boundary annotations. In blind testing with 20 slides from previously unseen blocks, VIN produced coherent margin overlays that qualitatively aligned with expert annotations across serial sections. Quantitatively, region-level accuracy was ~73.3% across the test set, with errors largely confined to limited areas that did not disrupt continuity of the whole-slide margin map. These results indicate that VIN captures cautery-related histomorphology and can provide a reproducible, ink-free margin delineation suitable for integration into routine digital pathology workflows and for downstream measurement of margin distances.

To reliably navigate ever-shifting real-world environments, agents must grapple with incomplete knowledge and adapt their behavior through experience. However, current evaluations largely focus on tasks that leave no ambiguity, and do not measure agents' ability to adaptively learn and reason through the experiences they accrued. We exemplify the need for this in-context experiential learning in a product recommendation context, where agents must navigate shifting customer preferences and product landscapes through natural language dialogue. We curate a benchmark for experiential learning and active exploration (BELA) that combines (1) rich real-world products from Amazon, (2) a diverse collection of user personas to represent heterogeneous yet latent preferences, and (3) a LLM user simulator powered by the persona to create rich interactive trajectories. We observe that current frontier models struggle to meaningfully improve across episodes, underscoring the need for agentic systems with strong in-context learning capabilities.

Dimensionality reduction algorithms like principal component analysis (PCA) are workhorses of machine learning and neuroscience, but each has well-known limitations. Variants of PCA are simple and interpretable, but not flexible enough to capture nonlinear data manifold structure. More flexible approaches have other problems: autoencoders are generally difficult to interpret, and graph-embedding-based methods can produce pathological distortions in manifold geometry. Motivated by these shortcomings, we propose a variational framework that casts dimensionality reduction algorithms as solutions to an optimal manifold embedding problem. By construction, this framework permits nonlinear embeddings, allowing its solutions to be more flexible than PCA. Moreover, the variational nature of the framework has useful consequences for interpretability: each solution satisfies a set of partial differential equations, and can be shown to reflect symmetries of the embedding objective. We discuss these features in detail and show that solutions can be analytically characterized in some cases. Interestingly, one special case exactly recovers PCA.

The solar wind, a continuous stream of charged particles from the Sun's corona, shapes the heliosphere and impacts space systems near Earth. Variations such as high-speed streams and coronal mass ejections can disrupt satellites, power grids, and communications, making accurate modeling essential for space weather forecasting. While 3D magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) models are used to simulate and investigate these variations in the solar wind, they tend to be computationally expensive, limiting their usefulness in investigating the impacts of boundary condition uncertainty. In this work, we develop a surrogate for steady state solar wind modeling, using a Spherical Fourier Neural Operator (SFNO). We compare our model to a previously developed numerical surrogate for this task called HUX, and we show that the SFNO achieves comparable or better performance across several metrics. Though HUX retains advantages in physical smoothness, this underscores the need for improved evaluation criteria rather than a flaw in SFNO. As a flexible and trainable approach, SFNO enables efficient real-time forecasting and can improve with more data. The source code and more visual results are available at https://github.com/rezmansouri/solarwind-sfno-velocity.

Traditional psychological models of belief revision focus on face-to-face interactions, but with the rise of social media, more effective models are needed to capture belief revision at scale, in this rich text-based online discourse. Here, we use a hybrid approach, utilizing large language models (LLMs) to develop a model that predicts successful persuasion using features derived from psychological experiments. Our approach leverages LLM generated ratings of features previously examined in the literature to build a random forest classification model that predicts whether a message will result in belief change. Of the eight features tested, \textit{epistemic emotion} and \textit{willingness to share} were the top-ranking predictors of belief change in the model. Our findings provide insights into the characteristics of persuasive messages and demonstrate how LLMs can enhance models of successful persuasion based on psychological theory. Given these insights, this work has broader applications in fields such as online influence detection and misinformation mitigation, as well as measuring the effectiveness of online narratives.

Dynamic sleep mode optimization (SMO) in millimeter-wave (mmWave) networks is essential for maximizing energy efficiency (EE) under stringent quality-of-service (QoS) constraints. However, existing optimization and reinforcement learning (RL)-based approaches rely on aggregated, static base station (BS) traffic models that fail to capture non-stationary traffic dynamics and suffer from prohibitively large state-action spaces, limiting their real-world deployment. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (MARL) framework employing a Double Deep Q-Network (DDQN), referred to as MARL-DDQN, for adaptive SMO in a 3D urban environment using a time-varying and community-based user equipment (UE) mobility model. Unlike conventional single-agent RL, the proposed MARL-DDQN enables scalable, distributed decision-making with minimal signaling overhead. A realistic BS power consumption model and beamforming are integrated to accurately quantify EE, while QoS is uniquely defined in terms of throughput. The proposed method adaptively learns SMO policies to maximize EE while mitigating inter-cell interference and ensuring throughput fairness. Extensive simulations demonstrate that MARL-DDQN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art SM strategies, including the All On, iterative QoS-aware load-based (IT-QoS-LB), MARL-DDPG, and MARL-PPO, achieving up to 0. 60 Mbit/Joule EE, 8. 5 Mbps 10th-percentile throughput, and satisfying QoS constraints 95 % of the time under dynamic network scenarios. I. Introduction The exponential growth in mobile data demand has necessitated increased spectrum availability and accelerated the expansion of cellular network infrastructure. To address the limitations of the sub-6 GHz spectrum, millimeter wave (mmWave) communications, operating within the 30-300 GHz band, have emerged as a key enabler in fifth-generation (5G) networks. With significantly larger bandwidth availability, mmWave technology presents a viable solution to spectrum scarcity challenges [1]. However, mmWave signals suffer from high propagation loss, atmospheric absorption, and susceptibility to blockages, which severely limit coverage and reliability. To address coverage and growing capacity demands, 5G networks rely on densification, deploying numerous low-power mmWave BSs with inter-site distances of a few hundred meters [1]. These BSs utilize large antenna arrays to enable beamforming and spatial multiplexing, often relying on hybrid analog-digital precoding to reduce hardware complexity [2]. However, the RF chain remains a major source of power consumption, particularly the Analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and digital-to-analog converters (DACs), whose power scales with sampling rate. Due to the higher frequencies and wider bandwidths of mmWave systems, these components require significantly higher sampling rates than sub-6 GHz systems [3], resulting in substantial energy demands.

MRI-based brain age estimation models aim to assess a subject's biological brain age based on information, such as neuroanatomical features. Various factors, including neurodegenerative diseases, can accelerate brain aging and measuring this phenomena could serve as a potential biomarker for clinical applications. While deep learning (DL)-based regression has recently attracted major attention, existing approaches often fail to capture the continuous nature of neuromorphological changes, potentially resulting in sub-optimal feature representation and results. To address this, we propose to use supervised contrastive learning with the recent Rank-N-Contrast (RNC) loss to estimate brain age based on widely used T1w structural MRI for the first time and leverage Grad-RAM to visually explain regression results. Experiments show that our proposed method achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) of 4.27 years and an $R^2$ of 0.93 with a limited dataset of training samples, significantly outperforming conventional deep regression with the same ResNet backbone while performing better or comparably with the state-of-the-art methods with significantly larger training data. Furthermore, Grad-RAM revealed more nuanced features related to age regression with the RNC loss than conventional deep regression. As an exploratory study, we employed the proposed method to estimate the gap between the biological and chronological brain ages in Alzheimer's Disease and Parkinson's disease patients, and revealed the correlation between the brain age gap and disease severity, demonstrating its potential as a biomarker in neurodegenerative disorders.

Virtual fixtures (VFs) improve precision in teleoperation but often ``fight'' the user, inflating mental workload and eroding the sense of agency. We propose Soft-Nash Virtual Fixtures, a game-theoretic shared-control policy that softens the classic two-player linear-quadratic (LQ) Nash solution by inflating the fixture's effort weight with a single, interpretable scalar parameter $τ$. This yields a continuous dial on controller assertiveness: $τ=0$ recovers a hard, performance-focused Nash / virtual fixture controller, while larger $τ$ reduce gains and pushback, yet preserve the equilibrium structure and continuity of closed-loop stability. We derive Soft-Nash from both a KL-regularized trust-region and a maximum-entropy viewpoint, obtaining a closed-form robot best response that shrinks authority and aligns the fixture with the operator's input as $τ$ grows. We implement Soft-Nash on a 6-DoF haptic device in 3D tracking task ($n=12$). Moderate softness ($τ\approx 1-3$, especially $τ=2$) maintains tracking error statistically indistinguishable from a tuned classic VF while sharply reducing controller-user conflict, lowering NASA-TLX workload, and increasing Sense of Agency (SoAS). A composite BalancedScore that combines normalized accuracy and non-fighting behavior peaks near $τ=2-3$. These results show that a one-parameter Soft-Nash policy can preserve accuracy while improving comfort and perceived agency, providing a practical and interpretable pathway to personalized shared control in haptics and teleoperation.

In federated learning (FL), models must \emph{converge quickly} under tight communication budgets while \emph{generalizing} across non-IID client distributions. These twin requirements have naturally led to two widely used techniques: client/server \emph{momentum} to accelerate progress, and \emph{sharpness-aware minimization} (SAM) to prefer flat solutions. However, simply combining momentum and SAM leaves two structural issues unresolved in non-IID FL. We identify and formalize two failure modes: \emph{local-global curvature misalignment} (local SAM directions need not reflect the global loss geometry) and \emph{momentum-echo oscillation} (late-stage instability caused by accumulated momentum). To our knowledge, these failure modes have not been jointly articulated and addressed in the FL literature. We propose \textbf{FedWMSAM} to address both failure modes. First, we construct a momentum-guided global perturbation from server-aggregated momentum to align clients' SAM directions with the global descent geometry, enabling a \emph{single-backprop} SAM approximation that preserves efficiency. Second, we couple momentum and SAM via a cosine-similarity adaptive rule, yielding an early-momentum, late-SAM two-phase training schedule. We provide a non-IID convergence bound that \emph{explicitly models the perturbation-induced variance} $σ_ρ^2=σ^2+(Lρ)^2$ and its dependence on $(S, K, R, N)$ on the theory side. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple datasets and model architectures, and the results validate the effectiveness, adaptability, and robustness of our method, demonstrating its superiority in addressing the optimization challenges of Federated Learning. Our code is available at https://github.com/Huang-Yongzhi/NeurlPS_FedWMSAM.