Recent advances in whole-body robot control have enabled humanoid and legged robots to perform increasingly agile and coordinated motions. However, standardized benchmarks for evaluating these capabilities in real-world settings, and in direct comparison to humans, remain scarce. Existing evaluations often rely on pre-collected human motion datasets or simulation-based experiments, which limit reproducibility, overlook hardware factors, and hinder fair human-robot comparisons. We present Switch-JustDance, a low-cost and reproducible benchmarking pipeline that leverages motion-sensing console games, Just Dance on the Nintendo Switch, to evaluate robot whole-body control. Using Just Dance on the Nintendo Switch as a representative platform, Switch-JustDance converts in-game choreography into robot-executable motions through streaming, motion reconstruction, and motion retargeting modules and enables users to evaluate controller performance through the game's built-in scoring system. We first validate the evaluation properties of Just Dance, analyzing its reliability, validity, sensitivity, and potential sources of bias. Our results show that the platform provides consistent and interpretable performance measures, making it a suitable tool for benchmarking embodied AI. Building on this foundation, we benchmark three state-of-the-art humanoid whole-body controllers on hardware and provide insights into their relative strengths and limitations.

Multivariate Time-Series (MTS) clustering discovers intrinsic grouping patterns of temporal data samples. Although time-series provide rich discriminative information, they also contain substantial redundancy, such as steady-state machine operation records and zero-output periods of solar power generation. Such redundancy diminishes the attention given to discriminative timestamps in representation learning, thus leading to performance bottlenecks in MTS clustering. Masking has been widely adopted to enhance the MTS representation, where temporal reconstruction tasks are designed to capture critical information from MTS. However, most existing masking strategies appear to be standalone preprocess-ing steps, isolated from the learning process, which hinders dynamic adaptation to the importance of clustering-critical timestamps. Accordingly, this paper proposes the Evolving-masked MTS Clustering (EMTC) method, whose model architecture comprises Importance-aware V ariate-wise Masking (IVM) and Multi-Endogenous Views (MEV) generation modules. IVM adaptively guides the model in learning more discriminative representations for clustering, while the reconstruction and cluster-guided contrastive learning pathways enhance and connect the representation learning to clustering tasks. Extensive experiments on 15 benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of EMTC over eight SOT A methods, where the EMTC achieves an average improvement of 4.85% in F1-Score over the strongest baselines.

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into explainable recommendation systems often leads to a performance-efficiency trade-off in end-to-end architectures, where joint optimization of ranking and explanation can result in suboptimal compromises. To resolve this, we propose Prism, a novel decoupled framework that rigorously separates the recommendation process into a dedicated ranking stage and an explanation generation stage. This decomposition ensures that each component is optimized for its specific objective, eliminating inherent conflicts in coupled models. Inspired by knowledge distillation, Prism leverages a powerful, instruction-following teacher LLM (FLAN-T5-XXL) as an Oracle to produce high-fidelity explanatory knowledge. A compact, fine-tuned student model (BART-Base), the Prism, then specializes in synthesizing this knowledge into personalized explanations. Our extensive experiments on benchmark datasets reveal a key finding: the distillation process not only transfers knowledge but also acts as a noise filter. Our 140M-parameter Prism model significantly outperforms its 11B-parameter teacher in human evaluations of faithfulness and personalization, demonstrating an emergent ability to correct hallucinations present in the teacher's outputs. While achieving a 24x speedup and a 10x reduction in memory consumption, our analysis validates that decoupling, coupled with targeted distillation, provides an efficient and effective pathway to high-quality, and perhaps more importantly, trustworthy explainable recommendation.

This research report addresses the absence of an actionable definition for Loss of Control (LoC) in AI systems by developing a novel taxonomy and preparedness framework. Despite increasing policy and research attention, existing LoC definitions vary significantly in scope and timeline, hindering effective LoC assessment and mitigation. To address this issue, we draw from an extensive literature review and propose a graded LoC taxonomy, based on the metrics of severity and persistence, that distinguishes between Deviation, Bounded LoC, and Strict LoC. We model pathways toward a societal state of vulnerability in which sufficiently advanced AI systems have acquired or could acquire the means to cause Bounded or Strict LoC once a catalyst, either misalignment or pure malfunction, materializes. We argue that this state becomes increasingly likely over time, absent strategic intervention, and propose a strategy to avoid reaching a state of vulnerability. Rather than focusing solely on intervening on AI capabilities and propensities potentially relevant for LoC or on preventing potential catalysts, we introduce a complementary framework that emphasizes three extrinsic factors: Deployment context, Affordances, and Permissions (the DAP framework). Compared to work on intrinsic factors and catalysts, this framework has the unfair advantage of being actionable today. Finally, we put forward a plan to maintain preparedness and prevent the occurrence of LoC outcomes should a state of societal vulnerability be reached, focusing on governance measures (threat modeling, deployment policies, emergency response) and technical controls (pre-deployment testing, control measures, monitoring) that could maintain a condition of perennial suspension.

Existing linguistic steganography methods primarily rely on content transformations to conceal secret messages. However, they often cause subtle yet looking-innocent deviations between normal and stego texts, posing potential security risks in real-world applications. To address this challenge, we propose a content-preserving linguistic steganography paradigm for perfectly secure covert communication without modifying the cover text. Based on this paradigm, we introduce CLstega (\textit{C}ontent-preserving \textit{L}inguistic \textit{stega}nography), a novel method that embeds secret messages through controllable distribution transformation. CLstega first applies an augmented masking strategy to locate and mask embedding positions, where MLM(masked language model)-predicted probability distributions are easily adjustable for transformation. Subsequently, a dynamic distribution steganographic coding strategy is designed to encode secret messages by deriving target distributions from the original probability distributions. To achieve this transformation, CLstega elaborately selects target words for embedding positions as labels to construct a masked sentence dataset, which is used to fine-tune the original MLM, producing a target MLM capable of directly extracting secret messages from the cover text. This approach ensures perfect security of secret messages while fully preserving the integrity of the original cover text. Experimental results show that CLstega can achieve a 100\% extraction success rate, and outperforms existing methods in security, effectively balancing embedding capacity and security.

The deployment of decision-making AI agents presents a critical challenge in maintaining alignment with human values or guidelines while operating in complex, dynamic environments. Agents trained solely to achieve their objectives may adopt harmful behavior, exposing a key trade-off between maximizing the reward function and maintaining alignment. For pre-trained agents, ensuring alignment is particularly challenging, as retraining can be a costly and slow process. This is further complicated by the diverse and potentially conflicting attributes representing the ethical values for alignment. To address these challenges, we propose a test-time alignment technique based on model-guided policy shaping. Our method allows precise control over individual behavioral attributes, generalizes across diverse reinforcement learning (RL) environments, and facilitates a principled trade-off between ethical alignment and reward maximization without requiring agent retraining. We evaluate our approach using the MACHIAVELLI benchmark, which comprises 134 text-based game environments and thousands of annotated scenarios involving ethical decisions. The RL agents are first trained to maximize the reward in their respective games. At test time, we apply policy shaping via scenario-action attribute classifiers to ensure decision alignment with ethical attributes. We compare our approach against prior training-time methods and general-purpose agents, as well as study several types of ethical violations and power-seeking behavior. Our results demonstrate that test-time policy shaping provides an effective and scalable solution for mitigating unethical behavior across diverse environments and alignment attributes.

Artificial intelligence is revealing what medicine never intended to encode. Deep vision models, trained on chest X-rays, can now detect not only disease but also invisible traces of social inequality. In this study, we show that state-of-the-art architectures (DenseNet121, SwinV2-B, MedMamba) can predict a patient's health insurance type, a strong proxy for socioeconomic status, from normal chest X-rays with significant accuracy (AUC around 0.70 on MIMIC-CXR-JPG, 0.68 on CheXpert). The signal was unlikely contributed by demographic features by our machine learning study combining age, race, and sex labels to predict health insurance types; it also remains detectable when the model is trained exclusively on a single racial group. Patch-based occlusion reveals that the signal is diffuse rather than localized, embedded in the upper and mid-thoracic regions. This suggests that deep networks may be internalizing subtle traces of clinical environments, equipment differences, or care pathways; learning socioeconomic segregation itself. These findings challenge the assumption that medical images are neutral biological data. By uncovering how models perceive and exploit these hidden social signatures, this work reframes fairness in medical AI: the goal is no longer only to balance datasets or adjust thresholds, but to interrogate and disentangle the social fingerprints embedded in clinical data itself.

Radar-based precipitation nowcasting, the task of forecasting short-term precipitation fields from previous radar images, is a critical problem for flood risk management and decision-making. While deep learning has substantially advanced this field, two challenges remain fundamental: the uncertainty of atmospheric dynamics and the efficient modeling of high-dimensional data. Diffusion models have shown strong promise by producing sharp, reliable forecasts, but their iterative sampling process is computationally prohibitive for time-critical applications. We introduce FlowCast, the first end-to-end probabilistic model leveraging Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) as a direct noise-to-data generative framework for precipitation nowcasting. Unlike hybrid approaches, FlowCast learns a direct noise-to-data mapping in a compressed latent space, enabling rapid, high-fidelity sample generation. Our experiments demonstrate that FlowCast establishes a new state-of-the-art in probabilistic performance while also exceeding deterministic baselines in predictive accuracy. A direct comparison further reveals the CFM objective is both more accurate and significantly more efficient than a diffusion objective on the same architecture, maintaining high performance with significantly fewer sampling steps. This work positions CFM as a powerful and practical alternative for high-dimensional spatiotemporal forecasting.

Autonomous agents driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized reasoning and problem-solving but remain static after training, unable to grow with experience as intelligent beings do during deployment. We introduce Forward Learning with EXperience (FLEX), a gradient-free learning paradigm that enables LLM agents to continuously evolve through accumulated experience. Specifically, FLEX cultivates scalable and inheritable evolution by constructing a structured experience library through continual reflection on successes and failures during interaction with the environment. FLEX delivers substantial improvements on mathematical reasoning, chemical retrosynthesis, and protein fitness prediction (up to 23% on AIME25, 10% on USPTO50k, and 14% on ProteinGym). We further identify a clear scaling law of experiential growth and the phenomenon of experience inheritance across agents, marking a step toward scalable and inheritable continuous agent evolution. Project Page: https://flex-gensi-thuair.github.io.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely adopted, but their high training cost leads many developers to fine-tune existing open-source models. While most adhere to open-source licenses, some falsely claim original training despite clear derivation from public models, raising pressing concerns about intellectual property protection and the need to verify model provenance. In this paper, we propose GhostSpec, a lightweight yet effective method for verifying LLM lineage without access to training data or modification of model behavior. Our approach constructs compact and robust fingerprints by applying singular value decomposition (SVD) to invariant products of internal attention weight matrices. Unlike watermarking or output-based methods, GhostSpec is fully data-free, non-invasive, and computationally efficient. Extensive experiments show it is robust to fine-tuning, pruning, expansion, and adversarial transformations, reliably tracing lineage with minimal overhead. By offering a practical solution for model verification, our method contributes to intellectual property protection and fosters a transparent, trustworthy LLM ecosystem. Our code is available at https://github.com/DX0369/GhostSpec.