Self-play constitutes a fundamental paradigm for autonomous skill acquisition, whereby agents iteratively enhance their capabilities through self-directed environmental exploration (Silver et al., 2018). Conventional self-play frameworks exploit agent symmetry within zero-sum competitive settings (Balduzzi et al., 2019), yet this approach proves inadequate for open-ended learning scenarios characterized by inherent asymmetry. Human pedagogical systems exemplify asymmetric instructional frameworks wherein educators systematically construct challenges calibrated to individual learners' developmental trajectories (Bobbitt, 1918; Bengio et al., 2009). The principal challenge resides in operationalizing these asymmetric, adaptive pedagogical mechanisms within artificial systems capable of autonomously synthesizing appropriate curricula without predetermined task hierarchies. Here we present Heterogeneous Adversarial Play (HAP), an adversarial Automatic Curriculum Learning (ACL) framework that formalizes teacher-student interactions as a minimax optimization wherein task-generating instructor and problem-solving learner co-evolve through adversarial dynamics. In contrast to prevailing ACL methodologies that employ static curricula or unidirectional task selection mechanisms, HAP establishes a bidirectional feedback system wherein instructors continuously recalibrate task complexity in response to real-time learner performance metrics. Experimental validation across multi-task learning domains demonstrates that our framework achieves performance parity with state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines while generating curricula that enhance learning efficacy in both artificial agents and human subjects.

Multi-bit quantization networks enable flexible deployment of deep neural networks by supporting multiple precision levels within a single model. However, existing approaches suffer from significant training overhead as full-dataset updates are repeated for each supported bit-width, resulting in a cost that scales linearly with the number of precisions. Additionally, extra fine-tuning stages are often required to support additional or intermediate precision options, further compounding the overall training burden. To address this issue, we propose two techniques that greatly reduce the training overhead without compromising model utility: (i) Weight bias correction enables shared batch normalization and eliminates the need for fine-tuning by neutralizing quantization-induced bias across bit-widths and aligning activation distributions; and (ii) Bit-wise coreset sampling strategy allows each child model to train on a compact, informative subset selected via gradient-based importance scores by exploiting the implicit knowledge transfer phenomenon. Experiments on CIFAR-10/100, TinyImageNet, and ImageNet-1K with both ResNet and ViT architectures demonstrate that our method achieves competitive or superior accuracy while reducing training time up to 7.88 . Our code is released at this link.

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents frequently suffer from neuronal activity loss, which impairs their ability to adapt to new data and learn continually. A common method to quantify and address this issue is the τ-dormant neuron ratio, which uses activation statistics to measure the expressive ability of neurons. While effective for simple MLP-based agents, this approach loses statistical power in more complex architectures. To address this, we argue that in advanced RL agents, maintaining a neuron's learning capacity, its ability to adapt via gradient updates, is more critical than preserving its expressive ability. Based on this insight, we shift the statistical objective from activations to gradients, and introduce GraMa (Gradient Magnitude Neural Activity Metric), a lightweight, architecture-agnostic metric for quantifying neuron-level learning capacity. We show that GraMaeffectively reveals persistent neuron inactivity across diverse architectures, including residual networks, diffusion models, and agents with varied activation functions. Moreover, resetting neurons guided by GraMa (ReGraMa) consistently improves learning performance across multiple deep RL algorithms and benchmarks, such as MuJoCo and the DeepMind Control Suite. We make our code available2.

Sign Language Video Generation (SLVG) seeks to generate identity-preserving sign language videos from spoken language texts. Existing methods primarily rely on the single coarse condition (e.g., skeleton sequences) as the intermediary to bridge the translation model and the video generation model, which limits both the naturalness and expressiveness of the generated videos. To overcome these limitations, we propose SignViP, a novel SLVG framework that incorporates multiple fine-grained conditions for improved generation fidelity. Rather than directly translating error-prone high-dimensional conditions, SignViP adopts a discrete tokenization paradigm to integrate and represent fine-grained conditions (i.e., fine-grained poses and 3D hands). SignViP contains three core components.

Federated Continual Learning (FCL) aims to enable sequential privacy-preserving model training on streams of incoming data that vary in edge devices by preserving previous knowledge while adapting to new data. Current FCL literature focuses on restricted data privacy and access to previously seen data while imposing no constraints on the training overhead. This is unreasonable for FCL applications in real-world scenarios, where edge devices are primarily constrained by resources such as storage, computational budget, and label rate. We revisit this problem with a large-scale benchmark and analyze the performance of state-of-the-art FCL approaches under different resource-constrained settings. Various typical FCL techniques and six datasets in two incremental learning scenarios (Class-IL and Domain-IL) are involved in our experiments. Through extensive experiments amounting to a total of over 1,000+ GPU hours, we find that, under limited resource-constrained settings, existing FCL approaches, with no exception, fail to achieve the expected performance. Our conclusions are consistent in the sensitivity analysis. This suggests that most existing FCL methods are particularly too resource-dependent for real-world deployment. Moreover, we study the performance of typical FCL techniques with resource constraints and shed light on future research directions in FCL.

Action segmentation is a core challenge in high-level video understanding, aiming to partition untrimmed videos into segments and assign each a label from a predefined action set. Existing methods primarily address single-person activities with fixed action sequences, overlooking multi-person scenarios. In this work, we pioneer textual reference-guided human action segmentation in multi-person settings, where a textual description specifies the target person for segmentation. We introduce the first dataset for Referring Human Action Segmentation, i.e., RHAS133, built from 133 movies and annotated with 137 fine-grained actions with 33h video data, together with textual descriptions for this new task. Benchmarking existing action segmentation methods on RHAS133 using VLM-based feature extractors reveals limited performance and poor aggregation of visual cues for the target person. To address this, we propose a holistic-partial aware Fourierconditioned diffusion framework, i.e., HopaDIFF, leveraging a novel cross-input gate attentional xLSTM to enhance holistic-partial long-range reasoning and a novel Fourier condition to introduce more fine-grained control to improve the action segmentation generation. HopaDIFF achieves state-of-the-art results on RHAS133 in diverse evaluation settings.

With the growing demand for deploying large language models (LLMs) across diverse applications, improving their inference efficiency is crucial for sustainable and democratized access. However, retraining LLMs to meet new user-specific requirements is prohibitively expensive and environmentally unsustainable. In this work, we propose a practical and scalable alternative: composing efficient hybrid language models from existing pre-trained models. Our approach, Zebra-Llama, introduces a family of 1B, 3B, and 8B hybrid models by combining State Space Models (SSMs) and Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) layers, using a refined initialization and post-training pipeline to efficiently transfer knowledge from pre-trained Transformers. Zebra-Llama achieves Transformer-level accuracy with near-SSM efficiency using only 7-11B training tokens (compared to trillions of tokens required for pre-training) and an 8B teacher. Moreover, Zebra-Llama dramatically reduces KV cache size--down to 3.9%, 2%, and 2.73% of the original for the 1B, 3B, and 8B variants, respectively--while preserving 100%, 100%, and >97% of average zero-shot performance on LMHarness tasks. Compared to models like MambaInLLaMA, X-EcoMLA, Minitron, and Llamba, Zebra-Llama consistently delivers competitive or superior accuracy while using significantly fewer tokens, smaller teachers, and vastly reduced KV cache memory.

Wellness influencers have stumbled onto a huge issue when it comes male fertility, though not every solution they're pitching is good advice. Supplements are "like a religion" for Pachi Paris, a 29-year-old from Miami who works in finance. So when he and his wife started trying to conceive last year, it felt only natural that he started taking pills meant to boost his fertility, to the tune of $250 per month. Six months later, "we found it odd that she's not pregnant yet," Paris said. "We both got a workup done, and it turns out that I was one that had some health issues going on with my sperm."

Recent advancements in diffusion policies have demonstrated promising performance in decision-making tasks. To align these policies with human preferences, a common approach is incorporating Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) into policy tuning. However, since preference data is practically collected from populations with different backgrounds, a key challenge lies in handling the inherent uncertainties in people's preferences during policy updates. To address this challenge, we propose the Diff-UAPA algorithm, designed for uncertainty-aware preference alignment in diffusion policies. Specifically, Diff-UAPA introduces a novel iterative preference alignment framework in which the diffusion policy adapts incrementally to preferences from different user groups. To accommodate this online learning paradigm, Diff-UAPA employs a maximum posterior objective, which aligns the diffusion policy with regret-based preferences under the guidance of an informative Beta prior. This approach enables direct optimization of the diffusion policy without specifying any reward functions, while effectively mitigating the influence of inconsistent preferences across different user groups. We conduct extensive experiments across both simulated and real-world robotics tasks, and diverse human preference configurations, demonstrating the robustness and reliability of Diff-UAPA in achieving effective preference alignment.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate advanced reasoning abilities, enabling robots to understand natural language instructions and generate high-level plans with appropriate grounding. However, LLM hallucinations present a significant challenge, often leading to overconfident yet potentially misaligned or unsafe plans. While researchers have explored uncertainty estimation to improve the reliability of LLM-based planning, existing studies have not sufficiently differentiated between epistemic and intrinsic uncertainty, limiting the effectiveness of uncertainty estimation. In this paper, we present Combined Uncertainty estimation for Reliable Embodied planning (CURE), which decomposes the uncertainty into epistemic and intrinsic uncertainty, each estimated separately. Furthermore, epistemic uncertainty is subdivided into task clarity and task familiarity for more accurate evaluation. The overall uncertainty assessments are obtained using random network distillation and multi-layer perceptron regression heads driven by LLM features.