Surface electromyography (sEMG) at the wrists could enable natural, keyboard-free text entry, yet the state-of-the-art emg2qwertybaseline still misrecognizes 51.8% of characters zero-shot on unseen users and 7.0% after user-specific fine-tuning. We trace much of these errors to mismatched cross-user signal statistics, fragile reliance on high-order feature dependencies, and the absence of architectural inductive biases aligned with the bilateral nature of typing. To address these issues, we introduce three simple modifications: (i) Rolling Time Normalization which adaptively aligns input distributions across users; (ii) Aggressive Channel Masking, which encourages reliance on low-order feature combinations more likely to generalize across users; and (iii) a Split-and-Share encoder that processes each hand independently with weight-shared streams to reflect the bilateral symmetry of the neuromuscular system. Combined with a five-fold reduction in spectral resolution (33 6 frequency bands), these components yield a compact Splitand-Share model, SplashNet-mini, which uses only the parameters and 0.6 the FLOPs of the baseline while reducing character error rate (CER) to 36.4% zero-shot and 5.9% after fine-tuning. An upscaled variant, SplashNet ( parameters, 1.15 FLOPs of the baseline), further lowers error to 35.7% and 5.5%, representing 31% and 21% relative improvements in the zero-shot and finetuned settings, respectively. SplashNet therefore establishes a new state-of-the-art without requiring additional data.

We study the fundamental question of how informative a dataset is for solving a given decision-making task. In our setting, the dataset provides partial information about unknown parameters that influence task outcomes. Focusing on linear programs, we characterize when a dataset is sufficient to recover an optimal decision, given an uncertainty set on the cost vector. Our main contribution is a sharp geometric characterization that identifies the directions of the cost vector that matter for optimality, relative to the task constraints and uncertainty set. We further develop a practical algorithm that, for a given task, constructs a minimal or least-costly sufficient dataset. Our results reveal that small, well-chosen datasets can often fully determine optimal decisions--offering a principled foundation for task-aware data selection.

We propose the first framework capable of computing a 4D spatio-temporal grid of video architecture.

While visual autoregressive modeling (VAR) strategies have shed light on image generation with the autoregressive models, their potential for segmentation, a task that requires precise low-level spatial perception, remains unexplored. Inspired by the multi-scale modeling of classic Mask2Former-based models, we propose SegVAR, a novel framework that rethinks segmentation as a conditional autoregressive mask generation problem. This is achieved by replacing the discriminative learning with the latent learning process. Specifically, our method incorporates three core components: (1) an image encoder generating latent priors from input images, (2) a spatial-aware seglat (a latent expression of segmentation mask) encoder that maps segmentation masks into discrete latent tokens using a location-sensitive color mapping to distinguish instances, and (3) a decoder reconstructing masks from these latents. A multi-stage training strategy is introduced: first learning seglat representations via image-seglat joint training, then refining latent transformations, and finally aligning image-encoder-derived latents with seglat distributions. Experiments show Seg-VAR outperforms previous discriminative and generative methods on various segmentation tasks and validation benchmarks. By framing segmentation as a sequential hierarchical prediction task, Seg-VAR opens new avenues for integrating autoregressive reasoning into spatial-aware vision systems.

Open-vocabulary querying in 3D space is crucial for enabling more intelligent perception in applications such as robotics, autonomous systems, and augmented reality. However, most existing methods rely on 2D pixel-level parsing, leading to multi-view inconsistencies and poor 3D object retrieval. Moreover, they are limited to static scenes and struggle with dynamic scenes due to the complexities of motion modeling. In this paper, we propose Segment then Splat, a 3D-aware open vocabulary segmentation approach for both static and dynamic scenes based on Gaussian Splatting. Segment then Splat reverses the long-established approach of "segmentation after reconstruction" by dividing Gaussians into distinct object sets before reconstruction.

We introduce FLEXOLMO, a new class of language models (LMs) that supports (1) distributed training without data sharing, where different model parameters are independently trained on closed datasets, and (2) data-flexible inference, where these parameters along with their associated data can be flexibly included or excluded from model inferences with no further training. FLEXOLMO employs a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture where each expert is trained independently on closed datasets and later integrated through a new domain-informed routing without any joint training. FLEXOLMO is trained on FLEXMIX, a corpus we curate comprising publicly available datasets alongside seven domain-specific sets, representing realistic approximations of closed sets. We evaluate models with up to 37 billion parameters (20 billion active) on 31 diverse downstream tasks. We show that a general expert trained on public data can be effectively combined with independently trained experts from other data owners, leading to an average 41% relative improvement while allowing users to opt out of certain data based on data licensing or permission requirements. Our approach also outperforms prior model merging methods by 10.1% on average and surpasses the standard MoE trained without data restrictions using the same training FLOPs. Altogether, this research presents a solution for both data owners and researchers in regulated industries with sensitive or protected data. FLEXOLMO enables benefiting from closed data while respecting data owners' preferences by keeping their data local and supporting fine-grained control of data access during inference.

Post-training plays a crucial role in refining and aligning large language models to meet specific tasks and human preferences. While recent advancements in posttraining techniques, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), leverage increased sampling with relative reward scoring to achieve superior performance, these methods often suffer from training instability that limits their practical adoption.

Time-series anomaly detection is critical for ensuring safety in high-stakes applications, where robustness is a fundamental requirement rather than a mere performance metric. Addressing the vulnerability of these systems to adversarial manipulation is therefore essential. Existing defenses are largely heuristic or provide certified robustness only under ℓp-norm constraints, which are incompatible with time-series data. In particular, ℓp-norm fails to capture the intrinsic temporal structure in time series, causing small temporal distortions to significantly alter the ℓp-norm measures. Instead, the similarity metric Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is more suitable and widely adopted in the time-series domain, as DTW accounts for temporal alignment and remains robust to temporal variations. To date, however, there has been no certifiable robustness result in this metric that provides guarantees. In this work, we introduce the first DTW-certified robust defense in time-series anomaly detection by adapting the randomized smoothing paradigm. We develop this certificate by bridging the ℓp-norm to DTW distance through a lower-bound transformation.

Reward modeling, crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, is often bottlenecked by the high cost of preference data. Existing textual data synthesis methods are computationally expensive. We propose a novel framework LENS for synthesizing preference data directly in the LLM's latent embedding space. Our method employs a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to learn a structured latent representation of response embeddings. By performing controlled perturbations in this latent space and decoding back to the embedding space, we efficiently generate diverse, semantically consistent synthetic preference pairs, bypassing costly text generation and annotation. We provide theoretical guarantees that our synthesized pairs approximately preserve original preference ordering and improve reward model generalization. Empirically, our latent-space synthesis significantly outperforms text-based augmentation on standard benchmarks, achieving superior results while being 18 faster in generation and using a 16,000 smaller model. Our work offers a scalable and effective alternative for enhancing reward modeling through efficient data augmentation.

Gradient-based algorithms are a cornerstone of artificial neural network training, yet it remains unclear whether biological neural networks use similar gradientbased strategies during learning. Experiments often discover a diversity of synaptic plasticity rules, but whether these amount to an approximation to gradient descent is unclear. Here we investigate a previously overlooked possibility: that learning dynamics may include fundamentally non-gradient "curl"-like components while still being able to effectively optimize a loss function. Curl terms naturally emerge in networks with inhibitory-excitatory connectivity or Hebbian/anti-Hebbian plasticity, resulting in learning dynamics that cannot be framed as gradient descent on any objective. To investigate the impact of these curl terms, we analyze feedforward networks within an analytically tractable student-teacher framework, systematically introducing non-gradient dynamics through neurons exhibiting rule-flipped plasticity.