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Beyond the Failures: Rethinking Foundation Models in Pathology
Despite their successes in vision and language, foundation models have stumbled in pathology, revealing low accuracy, instability, and heavy computational demands. These shortcomings stem not from tuning problems but from deeper conceptual mismatches: dense embeddings cannot represent the combinatorial richness of tissue, and current architectures inherit flaws in self-supervision, patch design, and noise-fragile pretraining. Biological complexity and limited domain innovation further widen the gap. The evidence is clear--pathology requires models explicitly designed for biological images rather than adaptations of large-scale natural-image methods whose assumptions do not hold for tissue.
Breaking the Circle: An Autonomous Control-Switching Strategy for Stable Orographic Soaring in MAVs
Hwang, Sunyou, De Wagter, Christophe, Remes, Bart, de Croon, Guido
Abstract--Orographic soaring can significantly extend the endurance of micro aerial vehicles (MA Vs), but circling behavior, arising from control conflicts between longitudinal and vertical axes, increases energy consumption and the risk of divergence. We propose a control switching method, named SAOS: Switched Control for Autonomous Orographic Soaring, which mitigates circling behavior by selectively controlling either the horizontal or vertical axis, effectively transforming the system from under-actuated to fully actuated during soaring. Additionally, the angle of attack is incorporated into the INDI controller to improve force estimation. Simulations with randomized initial positions and wind tunnel experiments on two MA Vs demonstrate that the SAOS improves position convergence, reduces throttle usage, and mitigates roll oscillations caused by pitch-roll coupling. These improvements enhance energy efficiency and flight stability in constrained soaring environments. The flight endurance of micro air vehicles (MA Vs) significantly constrains operational capabilities, limiting the scope of missions they can perform [1], [2]. This limitation is not solely due to inherently short flight durations, but also because take-off and landing procedures typically demand substantial time, energy, effort, and space. One potential solution to this problem lies in the advancement of battery technology, which could lead to improved efficiency. However, progress in this area has been relatively slow [3], [4]. Consequently, researchers have been exploring alternative solutions, such as using energy sources with higher energy densities or enabling mid-air refueling or recharging [5], [6]. Nevertheless, these approaches require considerable investment in hardware and system infrastructure, and often necessitate larger, heavier platforms--undermining the fundamental advantage of MA Vs being small. An alternative approach is to exploit soaring, a flight technique widely employed by birds [7]-[9] and human-piloted glider aircraft [10], [11]. Soaring takes advantage of wind energy, specifically upward vertical winds, to gain altitude or remain airborne with minimal energy expenditure. A key strength of soaring is its compatibility with existing systems: it can be integrated into any fixed-wing aircraft without requiring hardware modifications, making it a valuable complement to other endurance-enhancing strategies. V arious types of soaring techniques exist [12].
Assessing the Feasibility of Early Cancer Detection Using Routine Laboratory Data: An Evaluation of Machine Learning Approaches on an Imbalanced Dataset
The development of accessible screening tools for early cancer detection in dogs represents a significant challenge in veterinary medicine. Routine laboratory data offer a promising, low-cost source for such tools, but their utility is hampered by the non-specificity of individual biomarkers and the severe class imbalance inherent in screening populations. This study assesses the feasibility of cancer risk classification using the Golden Retriever Lifetime Study (GRLS) cohort under real-world constraints, including the grouping of diverse cancer types and the inclusion of post-diagnosis samples. A comprehensive benchmark evaluation was conducted, systematically comparing 126 analytical pipelines that comprised various machine learning models, feature selection methods, and data balancing techniques. Data were partitioned at the patient level to prevent leakage. The optimal model, a Logistic Regression classifier with class weighting and recursive feature elimination, demonstrated moderate ranking ability (AUROC = 0.815; 95% CI: 0.793-0.836) but poor clinical classification performance (F1-score = 0.25, Positive Predictive Value = 0.15). While a high Negative Predictive Value (0.98) was achieved, insufficient recall (0.79) precludes its use as a reliable rule-out test. Interpretability analysis with SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) revealed that predictions were driven by non-specific features like age and markers of inflammation and anemia. It is concluded that while a statistically detectable cancer signal exists in routine lab data, it is too weak and confounded for clinically reliable discrimination from normal aging or other inflammatory conditions. This work establishes a critical performance ceiling for this data modality in isolation and underscores that meaningful progress in computational veterinary oncology will require integration of multi-modal data sources.
Benchmarking World-Model Learning
Warrier, Archana, Nguyen, Dat, Naim, Michelangelo, Jain, Moksh, Liang, Yichao, Schroeder, Karen, Yang, Cambridge, Tenenbaum, Joshua B., Vollmer, Sebastian, Ellis, Kevin, Tavares, Zenna
Model-learning agents should gather information to learn world models that support many downstream tasks and inferences, such as predicting unobserved states, estimating near- and far-term consequences of actions, planning action sequences, and detecting changes in dynamics. Current methods for learning and evaluating world models diverge from this goal: training and evaluation are anchored to next-frame prediction, and success is scored by reward maximization in the same environment. We propose WorldTest, a protocol to evaluate model-learning agents that separates reward-free interaction from a scored test phase in a different but related environment. WorldTest is open-ended $\unicode{x2014}$ models should support many different tasks unknown ahead of time $\unicode{x2014}$ and agnostic to model representation, allowing comparison across approaches. We instantiated WorldTest with AutumnBench, a suite of 43 interactive grid-world environments and 129 tasks across three families: masked-frame prediction, planning, and predicting changes to the causal dynamics. We compared 517 human participants and three frontier models on AutumnBench. We found that humans outperform the models, and scaling compute improves performance only in some environments but not others. WorldTest provides a novel template $\unicode{x2014}$ reward-free exploration, derived tests, and behavior-based scoring $\unicode{x2014}$ to evaluate what agents learn about environment dynamics, and AutumnBench exposes significant headroom in world-model learning.
Tawa: Automatic Warp Specialization for Modern GPUs with Asynchronous References
Chen, Hongzheng, Fan, Bin, Collins, Alexander, Hagedorn, Bastian, Gaburov, Evghenii, Masuda, Masahiro, Brookhart, Matthew, Sullivan, Chris, Knight, Jason, Zhang, Zhiru, Grover, Vinod
Modern GPUs feature specialized hardware units that enable high-performance, asynchronous dataflow execution. However, the conventional SIMT programming model is fundamentally misaligned with this task-parallel hardware, creating a significant programmability gap. While hardware-level warp specialization is the key to unlocking peak performance, it forces developers to manually orchestrate complex, low-level communication and software pipelines--a process that is labor-intensive, error-prone, and unsustainable. To address this challenge, we present Tawa, an automated compiler that systematically generates high-performance, warp-specialized code from a high-level, tile-based program. Central to our approach is a novel IR abstraction, asynchronous references (aref), which expresses warp-level communication without exposing low-level hardware details. Using this abstraction, Tawa automatically partitions programs into producer-consumer roles and manages the intricate dataflow pipeline, relieving developers of invasive kernel rewriting. Evaluation on NVIDIA H100 GPUs across representative LLM kernels shows that Tawa delivers high hardware utilization, achieving up to 1.1$\times$ speedup over highly optimized cuBLAS GEMM kernels. For attention workloads, Tawa attains 1.2$\times$ speedup over Triton and matches the performance of the hand-optimized CUTLASS C++ FlashAttention-3 kernel with far less programming effort.
Deep Edge Filter: Return of the Human-Crafted Layer in Deep Learning
Lee, Dongkwan, Lee, Junhoo, Kwak, Nojun
We introduce the Deep Edge Filter, a novel approach that applies high-pass filtering to deep neural network features to improve model generalizability. Our method is motivated by our hypothesis that neural networks encode task-relevant semantic information in high-frequency components while storing domain-specific biases in low-frequency components of deep features. By subtracting low-pass filtered outputs from original features, our approach isolates generalizable representations while preserving architectural integrity. Experimental results across diverse domains such as Vision, Text, 3D, and Audio demonstrate consistent performance improvements regardless of model architecture and data modality. Analysis reveals that our method induces feature sparsification and effectively isolates high-frequency components, providing empirical validation of our core hypothesis.
The Adoption Paradox for Veterinary Professionals in China: High Use of Artificial Intelligence Despite Low Familiarity
While the global integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into veterinary medicine is accelerating, its adoption dynamics in major markets such as China remain uncharacterized. This paper presents the first exploratory analysis of AI perception and adoption among veterinary professionals in China, based on a cross-sectional survey of 455 practitioners conducted in mid-2025. We identify a distinct "adoption paradox": although 71.0% of respondents have incorporated AI into their workflows, 44.6% of these active users report low familiarity with the technology. In contrast to the administrative-focused patterns observed in North America, adoption in China is practitioner-driven and centers on core clinical tasks, such as disease diagnosis (50.1%) and prescription calculation (44.8%). However, concerns regarding reliability and accuracy remain the primary barrier (54.3%), coexisting with a strong consensus (93.8%) for regulatory oversight. These findings suggest a unique "inside-out" integration model in China, characterized by high clinical utility but restricted by an "interpretability gap," underscoring the need for specialized tools and robust regulatory frameworks to safely harness AI's potential in this expanding market.
Evaluating Small Vision-Language Models on Distance-Dependent Traffic Perception
Theodoridis, Nikos, Brophy, Tim, Mohandas, Reenu, Sistu, Ganesh, Collins, Fiachra, Scanlan, Anthony, Eising, Ciaran
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are becoming increasingly powerful, demonstrating strong performance on a variety of tasks that require both visual and textual understanding. Their strong generalisation abilities make them a promising component for automated driving systems, which must handle unexpected corner cases. However, to be trusted in such safety-critical applications, a model must first possess a reliable perception system. Moreover, since critical objects and agents in traffic scenes are often at a distance, we require systems that are not "shortsighted", i.e., systems with strong perception capabilities at both close (up to 20 meters) and long (30+ meters) range. With this in mind, we introduce Distance-Annotated Traffic Perception Question Answering (DTPQA), the first Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmark focused solely on perception-based questions in traffic scenes, enriched with distance annotations. By excluding questions that require reasoning, we ensure that model performance reflects perception capabilities alone. Since automated driving hardware has limited processing power and cannot support large VLMs, our study centers on smaller VLMs. More specifically, we evaluate several state-of-the-art (SOTA) small VLMs on DTPQA and show that, despite the simplicity of the questions, these models significantly underperform compared to humans (~60% average accuracy for the best-performing small VLM versus ~85% human performance). However, it is important to note that the human sample size was relatively small, which imposes statistical limitations. We also identify specific perception tasks, such as distinguishing left from right, that remain particularly challenging for these models.
Demystifying deep search: a holistic evaluation with hint-free multi-hop questions and factorised metrics
Song, Maojia, Liu, Renhang, Wang, Xinyu, Jiang, Yong, Xie, Pengjun, Huang, Fei, Zhou, Jingren, Herremans, Dorien, Poria, Soujanya
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems and web agents are increasingly evaluated on multi-hop deep search tasks, yet current practice suffers from two major limitations. First, most benchmarks leak the reasoning path in the question text, allowing models to follow surface cues rather than discover reasoning chains autonomously. Second, evaluation is typically reduced to a single pass rate, which collapses diverse behaviours into one score and obscures whether failures stem from inadequate search, poor knowledge use, or inappropriate refusal. To address these issues, we present WebDetective, a benchmark of hint-free multi-hop questions paired with a controlled Wikipedia sandbox that ensures full traceability of model actions, and a holistic evaluation framework that separates search sufficiency, knowledge utilisation, and refusal behaviour. Our evaluation of 25 state-of-the-art models reveals systematic weaknesses across all architectures: models struggle with knowledge utilisation despite having sufficient evidence and demonstrate near-absent appropriate refusal when evidence is lacking. These patterns expose a fundamental gap: today's systems excel at executing given reasoning paths but fail when required to discover them. We develop an agentic workflow, EvidenceLoop, that explicitly targets the challenges our benchmark identifies, incorporating verification loops and systematic evidence tracking that improve both search and synthesis capabilities. This baseline demonstrates that WebDetective's diagnostic framework can guide concrete architectural improvements, establishing our benchmark as a critical tool for developing genuinely autonomous reasoning systems rather than pattern-following agents.
Automatic Fact-checking in English and Telugu
Chikkala, Ravi Kiran, Anikina, Tatiana, Skachkova, Natalia, Vykopal, Ivan, Agerri, Rodrigo, van Genabith, Josef
False information poses a significant global challenge, and manually verifying claims is a time-consuming and resource-intensive process. In this research paper, we experiment with different approaches to investigate the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) in classifying factual claims by their veracity and generating justifications in English and Telugu. The key contributions of this work include the creation of a bilingual English-Telugu dataset and the benchmarking of different veracity classification approaches based on LLMs.