Segment matching is an important intermediate task in computer vision that establishes correspondences between semantically or geometrically coherent regions across images. Unlike keypoint matching, which focuses on localized features, segment matching captures structured regions, offering greater robustness to occlusions, lighting variations, and viewpoint changes. In this paper, we leverage the spatial understanding of 3D foundation models to tackle wide-baseline segment matching, a challenging setting involving extreme viewpoint shifts. We propose an architecture that uses the inductive bias of these 3D foundation models to match segments across image pairs with up to 180 rotation. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including the SAM2 video propagator and local feature matching methods, by up to 30% on the AUPRC metric, on ScanNet++ and Replica datasets. We further demonstrate benefits of the proposed model on relevant downstream tasks, including 3D instance mapping and object-relative navigation.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a powerful tool for economic research, enabling large-scale simulation and policy optimization. However, applying AI effectively requires simulation platforms for scalable training and evaluation--yet existing environments remain limited to simplified, narrowly scoped tasks, falling short of capturing complex economic challenges such as demographic shifts, multigovernment coordination, and large-scale agent interactions. To address this gap, we introduce EconGym, a scalable and modular testbed that connects diverse economic tasks with AI algorithms. Grounded in rigorous economic modeling, EconGym implements 11 heterogeneous role types (e.g., households, firms, banks, governments), their interaction mechanisms, and agent models with well-defined observations, actions, and rewards. Users can flexibly compose economic roles with diverse agent algorithms to simulate rich multi-agent trajectories across 25+ economic tasks for AI-driven policy learning and analysis. Experiments show that EconGym supports diverse and cross-domain tasks--such as coordinating fiscal, pension, and monetary policies--and enables benchmarking across AI, economic methods, and hybrids. Results indicate that richer task composition and algorithm diversity expand the policy space, while AI agents guided by classical economic methods perform best in complex settings.

Graph-based recommender systems have achieved remarkable effectiveness by modeling high-order interactions between users and items. However, such approaches are significantly undermined by popularity bias, which distorts the interaction graph's structure--referred to as topology bias. This leads to overrepresentation of popular items, thereby reinforcing biases and fairness issues through the user-system feedback loop. Despite attempts to study this effect, most prior work focuses on the embedding or gradient level bias, overlooking how topology bias fundamentally distorts the message passing process itself. We bridge this gap by providing an empirical and theoretical analysis from a Dirichlet energy perspective, revealing that graph message passing inherently amplifies topology bias and consistently benefits highly connected nodes. To address these limitations, we propose Test-time Simplicial Propagation (TSP), which extends message passing to higher-order simplicial complexes. By incorporating richer structures beyond pairwise connections, TSP mitigates harmful topology bias and substantially improves the representation and recommendation of long-tail items during inference. Extensive experiments across five real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach in mitigating topology bias and enhancing recommendation quality. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/sotaagi/TSP.

Spatial transcriptomics technologies can be used to align transcriptomes with histopathological morphology, presenting exciting new opportunities for biomolecular discovery. Using spatial transcriptomic gene expression and corresponding histology data, we construct a novel framework, GeneFlow, to map single-and multi-cell gene expression onto paired cellular images. By combining an attentionbased RNA encoder with a conditional UNet guided by rectified flow, we generate high-resolution images with different staining methods (e.g., H&E, DAPI) to highlight various cellular/ tissue structures. Rectified flow with high-order ODE solvers creates a continuous, bijective mapping between expression and image manifolds, addressing the many-to-one relationship inherent in this problem. Our method enables the generation of realistic cellular morphology features and spatially resolved intercellular interactions under genetic or chemical perturbations. This enables minimally invasive disease diagnosis by revealing dysregulated patterns in imaging phenotypes. Our rectified flow based method outperforms diffusion methods and baselines in all experiments.

Real-world datasets are often a combination of unobserved subpopulations that follow distinct causal generating processes. In an observational study, for example, participants may fall into unknown groups that either (a) respond effectively to a drug, or (b) show no response due to drug resistance. Not accounting for such heterogeneity then risks biased estimates of drug effectiveness. In this work, we formulate this setting through a causal mixture model, in which the data-generating process of each variable depends on latent group membership (a or b).

Contrary to common belief, we show that gradient ascent-based unconstrained optimization methods frequently fail to perform machine unlearning, a phenomenon we attribute to the inherent statistical dependence between the forget and retain data sets. This dependence, which can manifest itself even as simple correlations, undermines the misconception that these sets can be independently manipulated during unlearning. We provide empirical and theoretical evidence showing these methods often fail precisely due to this overlooked relationship. For random forget sets, this dependence means that degrading forget set metrics (which, for the oracle, should mirror test set metrics) inevitably harms overall test performance. Going beyond random sets, we consider logistic regression as an instructive example where a critical failure mode emerges: inter-set dependence causes gradient descentascent iterations to progressively diverge from the oracle. Strikingly, these methods can converge to solutions that are not only far from the oracle but are potentially even further from it than the original model itself, rendering the unlearning process actively detrimental. A toy example further illustrates how this dependence can trap models in inferior local minima, inescapable via finetuning. Our findings highlight that the presence of such statistical dependencies, even when manifest only as correlations, can be sufficient for ascent-based unlearning to fail. Our theoretical insights are corroborated by experiments on complex neural networks, demonstrating that these methods do not perform as expected in practice due to this unaddressed statistical interplay.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in tasks requiring multimodal understanding. However, recent studies indicate that LVLMs are more vulnerable than LLMs to unsafe inputs and prone to generating harmful content. Existing defense strategies primarily include fine-tuning, input sanitization, and output intervention. Although these approaches provide a certain level of protection, they tend to be resource-intensive and struggle to effectively counter sophisticated attack techniques. To tackle such issues, we propose One-head Defense (Oh Defense), a novel yet simple approach utilizing LVLMs' internal safety capabilities. Through systematic analysis of the attention mechanisms, we discover that LVLMs' safety capabilities are concentrated within specific attention heads that respond differently to safe or unsafe inputs. Further exploration reveals that a single critical attention head can effectively serve as a safety guard, providing a strong discriminative signal that amplifies the model's inherent safety capabilities. Hence, the Oh Defense requires no additional training or external modules, making it computationally efficient while effectively reactivating suppressed safety mechanisms. Extensive experiments across diverse LVLM architectures and unsafe datasets validate our approach, i.e., the Oh Defense achieves near-perfect defense success rates (> 98%) for unsafe inputs while maintaining low false positive rates (< 5%) for safe content.

Long-horizon video-audio reasoning and fine-grained pixel understanding impose conflicting requirements on omnimodal models: dense temporal coverage demands many low-resolution frames, whereas precise grounding calls for highresolution inputs. We tackle this trade-off with a two-system architecture: a Global Reasoning System selects informative keyframes and rewrites the task at low spatial cost, while a Detail Understanding System performs pixel-level grounding on the selected high-resolution snippets. Because "optimal" keyframe selection and reformulation are ambiguous and hard to supervise, we formulate them as a reinforcement-learning (RL) problem and present Omni-R1, an end-to-end RL framework built on Group Relative Policy Optimization. Omni-R1 trains the Global Reasoning System through hierarchical rewards obtained via online collaboration with the Detail Understanding System, requiring only one epoch of RL on small task splits. Experiments on two challenging benchmarks, Referring Audio-Visual Segmentation (RefAVS) and Reasoning Video Object Segmentation (REVOS), show that Omni-R1 not only surpasses strong supervised baselines but also outperforms specialized state-of-the-art models, while substantially improving out-of-domain generalization and mitigating multimodal hallucination. Our results demonstrate the first successful application of RL to large-scale omnimodal reasoning and highlight a scalable path toward universally foundation models.

However, the interpretability of the alignment component remains uninvestigated due to the difficulty in mapping the semantics of multi-modal representations into a unified concept set. To address this problem, we propose VL-SAE, a sparse autoencoder that encodes vision-language representations into its hidden activations. Each neuron in its hidden layer correlates to a concept represented by semantically similar images and texts, thereby interpreting these representations with a unified concept set. To establish the neuron-concept correlation, we encourage semantically similar representations to exhibit consistent neuron activations during self-supervised training. First, to measure the semantic similarity of multi-modal representations, we perform their alignment in an explicit form based on cosine similarity. Second, we construct the VL-SAE with a distance-based encoder and two modality-specific decoders to ensure the activation consistency of semantically similar representations. Experiments across multiple VLMs (e.g., CLIP, LLaVA) demonstrate the superior capability of VL-SAE in interpreting and enhancing the vision-language alignment. For interpretation, the alignment between vision and language representations can be understood by comparing their semantics with concepts. For enhancement, the alignment can be strengthened by aligning vision-language representations at the concept level, contributing to performance improvements in downstream tasks, including zero-shot image classification and hallucination elimination.

AVROBUSTBENCH comprises four audio-visual benchmark datasets, AUDIOSET-2C, VGGSOUND-2C, KINETICS-2C, and EPICKITCHENS-2C, each incorporating 75 bimodal audio-visual corruptions that are co-occurring and correlated. Through extensive evaluations, we observe that state-of-the-art supervised and severity self-supervised increases.