Knowledge distillation is a technique to imitate a performance that a deep learning model has, but reduce the size on another model. It applies the outputs of a model to train another model having comparable accuracy. These two distinct models are similar to the way information is delivered in human society, with one acting as the "teacher" and the other as the "student". Softmax plays a role in comparing logits generated by models with each other by converting probability distributions. It delivers the logits of a teacher to a student with compression through a parameter named temperature. Tuning this variable reinforces the distillation performance. Although only this parameter helps with the interaction of logits, it is not clear how temperatures promote information transfer. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to calculate the temperature. Our method only refers to the maximum logit generated by a teacher model, which reduces computational time against state-of-the-art methods. Our method shows a promising result in different student and teacher models on a standard benchmark dataset. Algorithms using temperature can obtain the improvement by plugging in this dynamic approach. Furthermore, the approximation of the distillation process converges to a correlation of logits by both models. This reinforces the previous argument that the distillation conveys the relevance of logits. We report that this approximating algorithm yields a higher temperature compared to the commonly used static values in testing.

Quadrupeds have gained rapid advancement in their capability of traversing across complex terrains. The adoption of deep Reinforcement Learning (RL), transformers and various knowledge transfer techniques can greatly reduce the sim-to-real gap. However, the classical teacher-student framework commonly used in existing locomotion policies requires a pre-trained teacher and leverages the privilege information to guide the student policy. With the implementation of large-scale models in robotics controllers, especially transformers-based ones, this knowledge distillation technique starts to show its weakness in efficiency, due to the requirement of multiple supervised stages. In this paper, we propose Unified Locomotion Transformer (ULT), a new transformer-based framework to unify the processes of knowledge transfer and policy optimization in a single network while still taking advantage of privilege information. The policies are optimized with reinforcement learning, next state-action prediction, and action imitation, all in just one training stage, to achieve zero-shot deployment. Evaluation results demonstrate that with ULT, optimal teacher and student policies can be obtained at the same time, greatly easing the difficulty in knowledge transfer, even with complex transformer-based models.

The integration of Agentic AI into scientific discovery marks a new frontier in research automation. These AI systems, capable of reasoning, planning, and autonomous decision-making, are transforming how scientists perform literature review, generate hypotheses, conduct experiments, and analyze results. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of Agentic AI for scientific discovery, categorizing existing systems and tools, and highlighting recent progress across fields such as chemistry, biology, and materials science. We discuss key evaluation metrics, implementation frameworks, and commonly used datasets to offer a detailed understanding of the current state of the field. Finally, we address critical challenges, such as literature review automation, system reliability, and ethical concerns, while outlining future research directions that emphasize human-AI collaboration and enhanced system calibration. The rapid advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs) (Touvron et al., 2023; Anil et al., 2023; Achiam et al., 2023) have opened a new era in scientific discovery, with Agentic AI systems (Kim et al., 2024; Guo et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2024; Abramovich et al., 2024) emerging as powerful tools for automating complex research workflows. Unlike traditional AI, Agentic AI systems are designed to operate with a high degree of autonomy, allowing them to independently perform tasks such as hypothesis generation, literature review, experimental design, and data analysis. These systems have the potential to significantly accelerate scientific research, reduce costs, and expand access to advanced tools across various fields, including chemistry, biology, and materials science. Recent efforts have demonstrated the potential of LLM-driven agents in supporting researchers with tasks such as literature reviews, experimentation, and report writing. Prominent frameworks, including LitSearch (Ajith et al., 2024), ResearchArena (Kang & Xiong, 2024), SciLitLLM (Li et al., 2024c), CiteME (Press et al., 2024), ResearchAgent (Baek et al., 2024) and Agent Laboratory (Schmidgall et al., 2025), have made strides in automating general research workflows, such as citation management, document discovery, and academic survey generation. However, these systems often lack the domain-specific focus and compliance-driven rigor essential for fields like biomedical domain, where the structured assessment of literature is critical for evidence synthesis.

The recent advancements in noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices implementation allow us to study their application to real-life computational problems. However, hardware challenges are not the only ones that hinder our quantum computation capabilities. Software limitations are the other, less explored side of this medal. Using satellite image segmentation as a task example, we investigated how difficult it is to run a hybrid quantum-classical model on a real, publicly available quantum device. We also analyzed the costs of such endeavor and the change in quality of model.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks, but ensuring their safety and alignment with human values remains crucial. Current safety alignment methods, such as supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning-based approaches, can exhibit vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks and often result in shallow safety alignment, primarily focusing on preventing harmful content in the initial tokens of the generated output. While methods like resetting can help recover from unsafe generations by discarding previous tokens and restarting the generation process, they are not well-suited for addressing nuanced safety violations like toxicity that may arise within otherwise benign and lengthy generations. In this paper, we propose a novel backtracking method designed to address these limitations. Our method allows the model to revert to a safer generation state, not necessarily at the beginning, when safety violations occur during generation. This approach enables targeted correction of problematic segments without discarding the entire generated text, thereby preserving efficiency. We demonstrate that our method dramatically reduces toxicity appearing through the generation process with minimal impact to efficiency.

Traditional fault diagnosis methods struggle to handle fault data, with complex data characteristics such as high dimensions and large noise. Deep learning is a promising solution, which typically works well only when labeled fault data are available. To address these problems, a robust unsupervised fault diagnosis using machine learning is proposed in this paper. First, a special dimension reduction method for the high-dimensional fault data is designed. Second, the extracted features are enhanced by incorporating nonlinear information through the learning of a graph structure. Third, to alleviate the problem of reduced fault-diagnosis accuracy attributed to noise and outliers, $l_{2,1}$-norm and typicality-aware constraints are introduced from the perspective of model optimization, respectively. Finally, this paper provides comprehensive theoretical and experimental evidence supporting the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method. The experiments on both the benchmark Tennessee-Eastman process and a real hot-steel milling process show that the proposed method exhibits better robustness compared to other methods, maintaining high diagnostic accuracy even in the presence of outliers or noise.

Code-switching (CS), the alternation between two or more languages within a single conversation, presents significant challenges for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Existing Mandarin-English code-switching datasets often suffer from limitations in size, spontaneity, and the lack of full-length dialogue recordings with transcriptions, hindering the development of robust ASR models for real-world conversational scenarios. This paper introduces CS-Dialogue, a novel large-scale Mandarin-English code-switching speech dataset comprising 104 hours of spontaneous conversations from 200 speakers. Unlike previous datasets, CS-Dialogue provides full-length dialogue recordings with complete transcriptions, capturing naturalistic code-switching patterns in continuous speech. We describe the data collection and annotation processes, present detailed statistics of the dataset, and establish benchmark ASR performance using state-of-the-art models. Our experiments, using Transformer, Conformer, and Branchformer, demonstrate the challenges of code-switching ASR, and show that existing pre-trained models such as Whisper still have the space to improve. The CS-Dialogue dataset will be made freely available for all academic purposes.

In recent years, the exceptional performance of generative models in generative tasks has sparked significant interest in their integration into decision-making processes. Due to their ability to handle complex data distributions and their strong model capacity, generative models can be effectively incorporated into decision-making systems by generating trajectories that guide agents toward high-reward state-action regions or intermediate sub-goals. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the application of generative models in decision-making tasks. We classify seven fundamental types of generative models: energy-based models, generative adversarial networks, variational autoencoders, normalizing flows, diffusion models, generative flow networks, and autoregressive models. Regarding their applications, we categorize their functions into three main roles: controllers, modelers and optimizers, and discuss how each role contributes to decision-making. Furthermore, we examine the deployment of these models across five critical real-world decision-making scenarios. Finally, we summarize the strengths and limitations of current approaches and propose three key directions for advancing next-generation generative directive models: high-performance algorithms, large-scale generalized decision-making models, and self-evolving and adaptive models.

Machine Learning Force Fields (MLFFs) are a promising alternative to expensive ab initio quantum mechanical molecular simulations. Given the diversity of chemical spaces that are of interest and the cost of generating new data, it is important to understand how MLFFs generalize beyond their training distributions. In order to characterize and better understand distribution shifts in MLFFs, we conduct diagnostic experiments on chemical datasets, revealing common shifts that pose significant challenges, even for large foundation models trained on extensive data. Based on these observations, we hypothesize that current supervised training methods inadequately regularize MLFFs, resulting in overfitting and learning poor representations of out-of-distribution systems. We then propose two new methods as initial steps for mitigating distribution shifts for MLFFs. Our methods focus on test-time refinement strategies that incur minimal computational cost and do not use expensive ab initio reference labels. The first strategy, based on spectral graph theory, modifies the edges of test graphs to align with graph structures seen during training. Our second strategy improves representations for out-of-distribution systems at test-time by taking gradient steps using an auxiliary objective, such as a cheap physical prior. Our test-time refinement strategies significantly reduce errors on out-of-distribution systems, suggesting that MLFFs are capable of and can move towards modeling diverse chemical spaces, but are not being effectively trained to do so. Our experiments establish clear benchmarks for evaluating the generalization capabilities of the next generation of MLFFs. Our code is available at https://tkreiman.github.io/projects/mlff_distribution_shifts/.

Data heterogeneity is one of the major challenges in federated learning (FL), which results in substantial client variance and slow convergence. In this study, we propose a novel solution: decomposing a convolutional filter in FL into a linear combination of filter subspace elements, i.e., filter atoms. This simple technique transforms global filter aggregation in FL into aggregating filter atoms and their atom coefficients. The key advantage here involves mathematically generating numerous cross-terms by expanding the product of two weighted sums from filter atom and atom coefficient. These cross-terms effectively emulate many additional latent clients, significantly reducing model variance, which is validated by our theoretical analysis and empirical observation. Furthermore, our method permits different training schemes for filter atoms and atom coefficients for highly adaptive model personalization and communication efficiency. Empirical results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our filter decomposition technique substantially improves the accuracy of FL methods, confirming its efficacy in addressing data heterogeneity.