A fundamental challenge in the empirical sciences involves uncovering causal structure through observation and experimentation. Causal discovery entails linking the conditional independence (CI) invariances in observational data to their corresponding graphical constraints via d-separation. In this paper, we consider a general setting where we have access to data from multiple experimental distributions resulting from hard interventions, as well as potentially from an observational distribution. By comparing different interventional distributions, we propose a set of graphical constraints that are fundamentally linked to Pearl's do-calculus within the framework of hard interventions. These graphical constraints associate each graphical structure with a set of interventional distributions that are consistent with the rules of do-calculus. We characterize the interventional equivalence class of causal graphs with latent variables and introduce a graphical representation that can be used to determine whether two causal graphs are interventionally equivalent, i.e., whether they are associated with the same family of hard interventional distributions, where the elements of the family are indistinguishable using the invariances from do-calculus. We also propose a learning algorithm to integrate multiple datasets from hard interventions, introducing new orientation rules. The learning objective is a tuple of augmented graphs which entails a set of causal graphs. We also prove the soundness of the proposed algorithm.

In this work, we prove that agents capable of adapting to distribution shifts must have learned the causal model of their environment even in the presence of mediation. This term describes situations where an agent's actions affect its environment, a dynamic common to most real-world settings. For example, a robot in an industrial plant might interact with tools, move through space, and transform products to complete its task. We introduce an algorithm for eliciting causal knowledge from robust agents using optimal policy oracles, with the flexibility to incorporate prior causal knowledge. We further demonstrate its effectiveness in mediated singleagent scenarios and multi-agent environments. We identify conditions under which the presence of a single robust agent is sufficient to recover the full causal model and derive optimal policies for other agents in the same environment. Finally, we show how to apply these results to sequential decision-making tasks modeled as Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs).

Why do AI models struggle with online hate speech detection? Hate speech that once circulated in person now travels farther and faster via anonymous online accounts behind a screen. As the United Nations marks the International Day for Countering Hate Speech on June 18, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned that social platforms are amplifying the threat. With artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly tasked with detecting and removing hate speech online, Al Jazeera looks at where these systems fall short compared with human judgement. How is hate speech defined?

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.

Generalizing to complex and temporally extended task objectives and safety constraints remains a critical challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Linear temporal logic (LTL) offers a unified formalism to specify such requirements, yet existing methods are limited in their abilities to handle nested long-horizon tasks and safety constraints, and cannot identify situations when a subgoal is not satisfiable and an alternative should be sought. In this paper, we introduce GenZ-LTL, a method that enables zero-shot generalization to arbitrary LTL specifications.

Sign Language Translation (SLT) aims to map sign language videos to spoken language text. A common approach relies on gloss annotations as an intermediate representation, decomposing SLT into two sub-tasks: video-to-gloss recognition and gloss-to-text translation. While effective, this paradigm depends on expertannotated gloss labels, which are costly and rarely available in existing datasets, limiting its scalability. To address this challenge, we propose a gloss-free pseudo gloss generation framework that eliminates the need for human-annotated glosses while preserving the structured intermediate representation. Specifically, we prompt a Large Language Model (LLM) with a few example text-gloss pairs using incontext learning to produce draft sign glosses from spoken language text. To enhance the correspondence between LLM-generated pseudo glosses and the sign sequences in video, we correct the ordering in the pseudo glosses for better alignment via a weakly supervised learning process. This reordering facilitates the incorporation of auxiliary alignment objectives, and allows for the use of efficient supervision via a Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss. We train our SLT model--consisting of a vision encoder and a translator--through a three-stage pipeline, which progressively narrows the modality gap between sign language and spoken language. Despite its simplicity, our approach outperforms previous stateof-the-art gloss-free frameworks on two SLT benchmarks and achieves competitive results compared to gloss-based methods.

Langevin dynamics sampling suffers from extremely low generation speed, fundamentally limited by numerous fine-grained iterations to converge to the target distribution. We introduce PID-controlled Langevin Dynamics (PIDLD), a novel sampling acceleration algorithm that reinterprets the sampling process using control-theoretic principles. By treating energy gradients as feedback signals, PIDLD combines historical gradients (the integral term) and gradient trends (the derivative term) to efficiently traverse energy landscapes and adaptively stabilize, thereby significantly reducing the number of iterations required to produce highquality samples. Our approach requires no additional training, datasets, or prior information, making it immediately integrable with any Langevin-based method. Extensive experiments across image generation and reasoning tasks demonstrate that PIDLD achieves higher quality with fewer steps, making Langevin-based generative models more practical for efficiency-critical applications.

A longstanding goal in safe reinforcement learning (RL) is a method to ensure the safety of a policy throughout the entire process, from learning to operation. However, existing safe RL paradigms inherently struggle to achieve this objective. We propose a method, called Provably Lifetime Safe RL (PLS), that integrates offline safe RL with safe policy deployment to address this challenge. Our proposed method learns a policy offline using return-conditioned supervised learning and then deploys the resulting policy while cautiously optimizing a limited set of parameters, known as target returns, using Gaussian processes (GPs). Theoretically, we justify the use of GPs by analyzing the mathematical relationship between target and actual returns. We then prove that PLS finds near-optimal target returns while guaranteeing safety with high probability. Empirically, we demonstrate that PLS outperforms baselines both in safety and reward performance, thereby achieving the longstanding goal to obtain high rewards while ensuring the safety of a policy throughout the lifetime from learning to operation.

Learning generalizable robotic manipulation policies remains a key challenge due to the scarcity of diverse real-world training data. While recent approaches have attempted to mitigate this through self-supervised representation learning, most either rely on 2D vision pretraining paradigms such as masked image modeling, which primarily focus on static semantics or scene geometry, or utilize large-scale video prediction models that emphasize 2D dynamics, thus failing to jointly learn the geometry, semantics, and dynamics required for effective manipulation. In this paper, we present DynaRend, a representation learning framework that learns 3D-aware and dynamics-informed triplane features via masked reconstruction and future prediction using differentiable volumetric rendering.

Public opinion governance in social networks is critical for public health campaigns, political elections, and commercial marketing. In this paper, we addresse the problem of maximizing overall opinion in social networks by strategically modifying the internal opinions of a fixed number of nodes. Traditional matrix inversion methods suffer from prohibitively high computational costs, prompting us to propose two efficient sampling-based algorithms. Furthermore, we develop a deterministic asynchronous algorithm that exactly identifies the optimal set of nodes through asynchronous update operations and progressive refinement, ensuring both efficiency and precision. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our methods outperform baseline approaches. Notably, our asynchronous algorithm delivers exceptional efficiency and accuracy across all scenarios, even in networks with tens of millions of nodes.