Partial observability is a notorious challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), due to the need to learn complex, history-dependent policies. Recent empirical successes have used -- which leverages availability of latent state information during training (e.g., from a simulator) to learn and imitate the optimal latent, Markovian policy -- to disentangle the task of ''learning to see'' from ''learning to act''. While expert distillation is more computationally efficient than RL without latent state information, it also has well-documented failure modes. In this paper -- through a simple but instructive theoretical model called the, and controlled experiments on challenging simulated locomotion tasks -- we investigate the algorithmic trade-off between privileged expert distillation and standard RL without privileged information.

We introduce, a novel method for reconstructing relightable, high-resolution head avatars that can be rendered from novel viewpoints at interactive rates. Therefore, we propose a new low-cost light stage capture setup, tailored specifically towards capturing faces. Using this setup, we collect a novel dataset consisting of diverse multi-view sequences of numerous subjects under varying illumination conditions and facial expressions. By leveraging our new dataset, we introduce a new relightable avatar representation based on 3D Gaussian primitives that we animate with a parametric head model and an expression-dependent dynamics module. We propose a new hybrid neural shading approach, combining a neural diffuse BRDF with an analytical specular term. Our method reconstructs disentangled materials from our dynamic light stage recordings and enables all-frequency relighting of our avatars with both point lights and environment maps. In addition, our avatars can easily be animated and controlled from monocular videos. We validate our approach in extensive experiments on our dataset, where we consistently outperform existing state-of-the-art methods in relighting and reenactment by a significant margin.

Existing approaches either neglect dependencies, leading to overly conservative predictions, or rely solely on data-driven estimations, failing to capture the rich topological structure of the network. To address these challenges, we propose Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Conformal Inference (STACI), a novel framework that integrates network topology and temporal dynamics into the conformal prediction framework. STACI introduces a topology-aware nonconformity score that respects directional flow constraints and dynamically adjusts prediction sets to account for temporal distributional shifts. We provide theoretical guarantees on the validity of our approach and demonstrate its superior performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Our results show that STACI effectively balances prediction efficiency and coverage, outperforming existing conformal prediction methods for stream networks.

We introduce FlowMixer, a single-layer neural architecture that leverages constrained matrix operations to model structured spatiotemporal patterns with enhanced interpretability. FlowMixer incorporates non-negative matrix mixing layers within a reversible mapping framework--applying transforms before mixing and their inverses afterward. This shape-preserving design enables a Kronecker-Koopman eigenmodes framework that bridges statistical learning with dynamical systems theory, providing interpretable spatiotemporal patterns and facilitating direct algebraic manipulation of prediction horizons without retraining. The architecture's semi-group property enables this single layer to mathematically represent any depth through composition, eliminating depth search entirely. Extensive experiments across diverse domains demonstrate FlowMixer's long-horizon forecasting capabilities while effectively modeling physical phenomena such as chaotic attractors and turbulent flows. Our results achieve performance matching state-of-the-art methods while offering superior interpretability through directly extractable eigenmodes. This work suggests that architectural constraints can simultaneously maintain competitive performance and enhance mathematical interpretability in neural forecasting systems.

Speculative Decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by employing a small draft model to generate predictions, which are then verified by a larger target model. The effectiveness of SD hinges on the alignment between these models, which is typically enhanced by Knowledge Distillation (KD). However, conventional KD methods aim to minimize the KL divergence between the draft and target models across all tokens, a goal that is misaligned with the true objective of SD, which is to maximize token acceptance rate. Therefore, draft models often struggle to fully assimilate the target model's knowledge due to capacity constraints, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this challenge, we propose AdaSPEC, a novel method that incorporates selective token filtering into the KD process. AdaSPEC utilizes a reference model to identify and filter out difficult-to-fit tokens, enabling the distillation of a draft model that better aligns with the target model on simpler tokens. This approach improves the overall token acceptance rate without compromising generation quality. We evaluate AdaSPEC across diverse tasks, including arithmetic reasoning, instruction-following, coding, and summarization, using model configurations of 31M/1.4B

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents in multi-agent systems, and promising coordination has been demonstrated in handling complex tasks under predefined roles and scripted workflows. However, significant challenges remain in open-ended environments, where agents are inherently self-interested and explicit coordination guidelines are absent. In such scenarios, misaligned incentives frequently lead to social dilemmas and inefficient collective outcomes. Inspired by how human societies tackle similar coordination challenges--through temporary collaborations like employment or subcontracting--a cooperative workflow \textbf{Shapley-Coop} is proposed. This workflow enables self-interested Large Language Model (LLM) agents to engage in emergent collaboration by using a fair credit allocation mechanism to ensure each agent's contributions are appropriately recognized and rewarded. Shapley-Coop introduces structured negotiation protocols and Shapley-inspired reasoning to estimate agents' marginal contributions, thereby enabling effective task-time coordination and equitable post-task outcome redistribution. This results in effective coordination that fosters collaboration while preserving agent autonomy, through a rational pricing mechanism that encourages cooperative behavior. Evaluated in two multi-agent games and a software engineering simulation, Shapley-Coop consistently enhances LLM agent collaboration and facilitates equitable outcome redistribution, accurately reflecting individual contributions during the task execution process.

Membership inference tests aim to determine whether a particular data point was included in a language model's training set. However, recent works have shown that such tests often fail under the strict definition of membership based on exact matching, and have suggested relaxing this definition to include semantic neighbors as members as well. In this work, we show that membership inference tests are still under this relaxation - it is possible to poison the training dataset in a way that causes the test to produce incorrect predictions for a target point. We theoretically reveal a trade-off between a test's accuracy and its robustness to poisoning. We also present a concrete instantiation of this poisoning attack and empirically validate its effectiveness. Our results show that it can degrade the performance of existing tests to well below random.

Text-to-image diffusion models have shown an impressive ability to generate high-quality images from input textual descriptions/prompts.

We introduce Time-Conditioned Contraction Matching (TCCM), a novel method for semi-supervised anomaly detection in tabular data. TCCM is inspired by flow matching, a recent generative modeling framework that learns velocity fields between probability distributions and has shown strong performance compared to diffusion models and generative adversarial networks. Instead of directly applying flow matching as originally formulated, TCCM builds on its core idea--learning velocity fields between distributions--but simplifies the framework by predicting a time-conditioned contraction vector toward a fixed target (the origin) at each sampled time step. This design offers three key advantages: (1) a lightweight and scalable training objective that removes the need for solving ordinary differential equations during training and inference; (2) an efficient scoring strategy called one time-step deviation, which quantifies deviation from expected contraction behavior in a single forward pass, addressing the inference bottleneck of existing continuous-time models such as DTE (a diffusion-based model with leading anomaly detection accuracy but heavy inference cost); and (3) explainability and provable robustness, as the learned velocity field operates directly in input space, making the anomaly score inherently feature-wise attributable; moreover, the score function is Lipschitz-continuous with respect to the input, providing theoretical guarantees under small perturbations. Extensive experiments on the ADBench benchmark show that TCCM strikes a favorable balance between detection accuracy and inference cost, outperforming state-of-the-art methods--especially on high-dimensional and large-scale datasets.

Spatial location and molecular interactions have long been linked to the connectivity patterns of neural circuits. Yet, at the macroscale of human brain networks, the interplay between spatial position, gene expression, and connectivity remains incompletely understood. Recent efforts to map the human transcriptome and connectome have yielded spatially resolved brain atlases, however modeling the relationship between high-dimensional transcriptomic data and connectivity while accounting for inherent spatial confounds presents a significant challenge. In this paper, we present the first deep learning approaches for predicting whole-brain functional connectivity from gene expression and regional spatial coordinates, including our proposed Spatiomolecular Transformer (SMT). SMT explicitly models biological context by tokenizing genes based on their transcription start site (TSS) order to capture multi-scale genomic organization, and incorporating regional 3D spatial location via a dedicated context [CLS] token within its multi-head self-attention mechanism. We rigorously benchmark context-aware neural networks, including SMT and a single-gene resolution Multilayer-Perceptron (MLP), to established rules-based and bilinear methods. Crucially, to ensure that learned relationships in any model are not mere artifacts of spatial proximity, we introduce novel spatiomolecular null maps preserving key transcriptomic autocorrelation structure. Context-aware neural networks outperform linear methods, significantly exceed our stringent null map estimates, and generalize across diverse connectomic datasets and parcellation resolutions. Together, these findings demonstrate a strong, predictable link between the spatial distributions of gene expression and functional brain network architecture, and establish a rigorously validated deep learning framework for decoding this relationship.