--Dynamic and contact-rich object manipulation, such as striking, snatching, or hammering, remains challenging for robotic systems due to hardware limitations. Most existing robots are constrained by high-inertia design, limited compliance, and reliance on expensive torque sensors. T o address this, we introduce ARMADA (Affordable Robot for Manipulation and Dynamic Actions), a 6 degrees-of-freedom bimanual robot designed for dynamic manipulation research. ARMADA combines low-inertia, back-drivable actuators with a lightweight design, using readily available components and 3D-printed links for ease of assembly in research labs. The entire system, including both arms, is built for just $6,100. Each arm achieves speeds up to 6.16m/s, almost twice that of most collaborative robots, with a comparable payload of 2.5kg. We demonstrate ARMADA can perform dynamic manipulation like snatching, hammering, and bimanual throwing in real-world environments. We also showcase its effectiveness in reinforcement learning (RL) by training a non-prehensile manipulation policy in simulation and transferring it zero-shot to the real world, as well as human motion shadowing for dynamic bimanual object throwing. ARMADA is fully open-sourced with detailed assembly instructions, CAD models, URDFs, simulation, and learning codes. We highly recommend viewing the supplementary video at https://sites.google.com/view/im2-humanoid-arm. I NTRODUCTION Humans use a rich set of action repertoire to manipulate objects: we not only pick-and-place objects but also toss laundry, slide a box, snatch a pen, hammer a nail, otherwise arXiv:2502.16908v1 In contrast, most manipulators today are limited to picking, where a robot simply grasps an object to resist the frictional force. While kinematic pick-and-place is sufficient for static, controlled tasks, dynamic manipulation is necessary for building an effective general-purpose robot.

Standard language model evaluations can fail to capture risks that emerge only at deployment scale. For example, a model may produce safe responses during a small-scale beta test, yet reveal dangerous information when processing billions of requests at deployment. To remedy this, we introduce a method to forecast potential risks across orders of magnitude more queries than we test during evaluation. We make forecasts by studying each query's elicitation probability -- the probability the query produces a target behavior -- and demonstrate that the largest observed elicitation probabilities predictably scale with the number of queries. We find that our forecasts can predict the emergence of diverse undesirable behaviors -- such as assisting users with dangerous chemical synthesis or taking power-seeking actions -- across up to three orders of magnitude of query volume. Our work enables model developers to proactively anticipate and patch rare failures before they manifest during large-scale deployments.

X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) is a powerful technique to probe the electronic and structural properties of materials. With the rapid growth in both the volume and complexity of XAS datasets driven by advancements in synchrotron radiation facilities, there is an increasing demand for advanced computational tools capable of efficiently analyzing large-scale data. To address these needs, we introduce XASDAML,a flexible, machine learning based framework that integrates the entire data-processing workflow-including dataset construction for spectra and structural descriptors, data filtering, ML modeling, prediction, and model evaluation-into a unified platform. Additionally, it supports comprehensive statistical analysis, leveraging methods such as principal component analysis and clustering to reveal potential patterns and relationships within large datasets. Each module operates independently, allowing users to modify or upgrade modules in response to evolving research needs or technological advances. Moreover, the platform provides a user-friendly interface via Jupyter Notebook, making it accessible to researchers at varying levels of expertise. The versatility and effectiveness of XASDAML are exemplified by its application to a copper dataset, where it efficiently manages large and complex data, supports both supervised and unsupervised machine learning models, provides comprehensive statistics for structural descriptors, generates spectral plots, and accurately predicts coordination numbers and bond lengths. Furthermore, the platform streamlining the integration of XAS with machine learning and lowering the barriers to entry for new users.

The Kolmogorov-Arnold Theorem (KAT), or more generally, the Kolmogorov Superposition Theorem (KST), establishes that any non-linear multivariate function can be exactly represented as a finite superposition of non-linear univariate functions. Unlike the universal approximation theorem, which provides only an approximate representation without guaranteeing a fixed network size, KST offers a theoretically exact decomposition. The Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) was introduced as a trainable model to implement KAT, and recent advancements have adapted KAN using concepts from modern neural networks. However, KAN struggles to effectively model physical systems that require inherent equivariance or invariance to $E(3)$ transformations, a key property for many scientific and engineering applications. In this work, we propose a novel extension of KAT and KAN to incorporate equivariance and invariance over $O(n)$ group actions, enabling accurate and efficient modeling of these systems. Our approach provides a unified approach that bridges the gap between mathematical theory and practical architectures for physical systems, expanding the applicability of KAN to a broader class of problems.

It has been 100 years since statistical process control (SPC) or statistical process monitoring (SPM) was first introduced for production processes and later applied to service, healthcare, and other industries. The techniques applied to SPM applications are mostly statistically oriented. Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have reinvigorated the imagination of adopting AI for SPM applications. This manuscript begins with a concise review of the historical development of the statistically based SPM methods. Next, this manuscript explores AI and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms and methods applied in various SPM applications, addressing quality characteristics of univariate, multivariate, profile, and image. These AI methods can be classified into the following categories: classification, pattern recognition, time series applications, and generative AI. Specifically, different kinds of neural networks, such as artificial neural networks (ANN), convolutional neural networks (CNN), recurrent neural networks (RNN), and generative adversarial networks (GAN), are among the most implemented AI methods impacting SPM. Finally, this manuscript outlines a couple of future directions that harness the potential of the Large Multimodal Model (LMM) for advancing SPM research and applications in complex systems. The ultimate objective is to transform statistical process monitoring (SPM) into smart process control (SMPC), where corrective actions are autonomously implemented to either prevent quality issues or restore process performance.

Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2025M OLS PECTRA: P RETRAINING 3D M OLECULAR R EP-RESENTATION WITHM ULTI-MODALE NERGYS PECTRA Liang Wang 1,2 Shaozhen Liu 1 Y u Rong 3 Deli Zhao 3 Qiang Liu 1,2 Shu Wu 1,2 Liang Wang 1,2 1 New Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR), State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems (MAIS), Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA) 2 School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences 3 DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group A BSTRACT Establishing the relationship between 3D structures and the energy states of molecular systems has proven to be a promising approach for learning 3D molecular representations. However, existing methods are limited to modeling the molecular energy states from classical mechanics. This limitation results in a significant oversight of quantum mechanical effects, such as quantized (discrete) energy level structures, which offer a more accurate estimation of molecular energy and can be experimentally measured through energy spectra. In this paper, we propose to utilize the energy spectra to enhance the pre-training of 3D molecular representations (MolSpectra), thereby infusing the knowledge of quantum mechanics into the molecular representations. Specifically, we propose SpecFormer, a multi-spectrum encoder for encoding molecular spectra via masked patch reconstruction. By further aligning outputs from the 3D encoder and spectrum encoder using a contrastive objective, we enhance the 3D encoder's understanding of molecules. Evaluations on public benchmarks reveal that our pre-trained representations surpass existing methods in predicting molecular properties and modeling dynamics. Given the scarcity of molecular property labels, self-supervised representation pre-training has been proposed and utilized to provide generalizable representations (Hu et al., 2020; Rong et al., 2020; Ma et al., 2024). In contrast to contrastive learning (Wang et al., 2022; Kim et al., 2022) and masked modeling (Hou et al., 2022; Liu et al., 2023c; Wang et al., 2024b) on 2D molecular graphs and molecular languages (e.g., SMILES), the design of pre-training strategies on 3D molecular geometries is more closely aligned with physical principles. Previous studies (Zaidi et al., 2023; Jiao et al., 2023) have guided representation learning through denoising processes on 3D molecular geometries, theoretically demonstrating that denoising 3D geometries is equivalent to learning molecular force fields, specifically the negative gradient of molecular potential energy with respect to position. Essentially, these studies reveal that establishing the relationship between 3D geometries and the energy states of molecular systems is an effective pathway to learn 3D molecular representations.

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) poses significant challenges, particularly due to issues of data contamination and the leakage of correct answers. To address these challenges, we introduce ThinkBench, a novel evaluation framework designed to evaluate LLMs' reasoning capability robustly. ThinkBench proposes a dynamic data generation method for constructing out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets and offers an OOD dataset that contains 2,912 samples drawn from reasoning tasks. ThinkBench unifies the evaluation of reasoning models and non-reasoning models. We evaluate 16 LLMs and 4 PRMs under identical experimental conditions and show that most of the LLMs' performance are far from robust and they face a certain level of data leakage. By dynamically generating OOD datasets, ThinkBench effectively provides a reliable evaluation of LLMs and reduces the impact of data contamination.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not a panacea for effortlessly solving the planet's environmental problems. AI still sparks passionate and dystopian predictions within some parts of the academic community, especially in the natural sciences. For some, the existence of AI tools means an existential threat to human creativity.10 Concerns about the increasing environmental costs of carbon emissions1 and water use demanded by information and communication technologies are also on the horizon. These viewpoints, however, overlook the advantages of employing AI in biodiversity research.

Large language models have become a powerful method for feature augmentation in recommendation systems. However, existing approaches relying on quick inference often suffer from incomplete feature coverage and insufficient specificity in feature descriptions, limiting their ability to capture fine-grained user preferences and undermining overall performance. Motivated by the recent success of inference scaling in math and coding tasks, we explore whether scaling inference can address these limitations and enhance feature quality. Our experiments show that scaling inference leads to significant improvements in recommendation performance, with a 12% increase in NDCG@10. The gains can be attributed to two key factors: feature quantity and specificity. In particular, models using extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning generate a greater number of detailed and precise features, offering deeper insights into user preferences and overcoming the limitations of quick inference. We further investigate the factors influencing feature quantity, revealing that model choice and search strategy play critical roles in generating a richer and more diverse feature set. This is the first work to apply inference scaling to feature augmentation in recommendation systems, bridging advances in reasoning tasks to enhance personalized recommendation.

Reasoning about images with rich text, such as charts and documents, is a critical application of vision-language models (VLMs). However, VLMs often struggle in these domains due to the scarcity of diverse text-rich vision-language data. To address this challenge, we present CoSyn, a framework that leverages the coding capabilities of text-only large language models (LLMs) to automatically create synthetic text-rich multimodal data. Given input text describing a target domain (e.g., "nutrition fact labels"), CoSyn prompts an LLM to generate code (Python, HTML, LaTeX, etc.) for rendering synthetic images. With the underlying code as textual representations of the synthetic images, CoSyn can generate high-quality instruction-tuning data, again relying on a text-only LLM. Using CoSyn, we constructed a dataset comprising 400K images and 2.7M rows of vision-language instruction-tuning data. Comprehensive experiments on seven benchmarks demonstrate that models trained on our synthetic data achieve state-of-the-art performance among competitive open-source models, including Llama 3.2, and surpass proprietary models such as GPT-4V and Gemini 1.5 Flash. Furthermore, CoSyn can produce synthetic pointing data, enabling VLMs to ground information within input images, showcasing its potential for developing multimodal agents capable of acting in real-world environments.