Large-scale egocentric video datasets capture diverse human activities across a wide range of scenarios, offering rich and detailed insights into how humans interact with objects, especially those that require fine-grained dexterous control. Such complex, dexterous skills with precise controls are crucial for many robotic manipulation tasks, yet are often insufficiently addressed by traditional data-driven approaches to robotic manipulation. To address this gap, we leverage manipulation priors learned from large-scale egocentric video datasets to improve policy learning for dexterous robotic manipulation tasks. We present MAPLE, a novel method for dexterous robotic manipulation that learns features to predict object contact points and detailed hand poses at the moment of contact from egocentric images. We then use the learned features to train policies for downstream manipulation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of MAPLE across 4 existing simulation benchmarks, as well as a newly designed set of 4 challenging simulation tasks requiring fine-grained object control and complex dexterous skills. The benefits of MAPLE are further highlighted in real-world experiments using a 17 DoF dexterous robotic hand, whereas the simultaneous evaluation across both simulation and real-world experiments has remained underexplored in prior work. We additionally showcase the efficacy of our model on an egocentric contact point prediction task, validating its usefulness beyond dexterous manipulation policy learning.

--Processing-in-Memory (PIM) architectures offer promising solutions for efficiently handling AI applications in energy-constrained edge environments. While traditional PIM designs enhance performance and energy efficiency by reducing data movement between memory and processing units, they are limited in edge devices due to continuous power demands and the storage requirements of large neural network weights in SRAM and DRAM. Hybrid PIM architectures, incorporating nonvolatile memories like MRAM and ReRAM, mitigate these limitations but struggle with a mismatch between fixed computing resources and dynamically changing inference workloads. T o address these challenges, this study introduces a Heterogeneous-Hybrid PIM ( HH-PIM) architecture, comprising high-performance MRAM-SRAM PIM modules and low-power MRAM-SRAM PIM modules. We further propose a data placement optimization algorithm that dynamically allocates data based on computational demand, maximizing energy efficiency. FPGA prototyping and power simulations with processors featuring HH-PIM and other PIM types demonstrate that the proposed HH-PIM achieves up to 60.43% average energy savings over conventional PIMs while meeting application latency requirements. These results confirm HH-PIM's suitability for adaptive, energy-efficient AI processing in edge devices. With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), real-world applications are rapidly expanding, fueling a trend to embed AI capabilities into IoT devices across diverse fields. However, traditional server-centric data processing, such as cloud computing, faces significant energy and latency challenges due to processing and communication overloads.

Deep neural networks such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transformers have achieved many successes in image classification in recent years. It has been consistently demonstrated that best practice for image classification is when large deep models can be trained on abundant labelled data. However there are many real world scenarios where the requirement for large amounts of training data to get the best performance cannot be met. In these scenarios transfer learning can help improve performance. To date there have been no surveys that comprehensively review deep transfer learning as it relates to image classification overall. However, several recent general surveys of deep transfer learning and ones that relate to particular specialised target image classification tasks have been published. We believe it is important for the future progress in the field that all current knowledge is collated and the overarching patterns analysed and discussed. In this survey we formally define deep transfer learning and the problem it attempts to solve in relation to image classification. We survey the current state of the field and identify where recent progress has been made. We show where the gaps in current knowledge are and make suggestions for how to progress the field to fill in these knowledge gaps. We present a new taxonomy of the applications of transfer learning for image classification. This taxonomy makes it easier to see overarching patterns of where transfer learning has been effective and, where it has failed to fulfill its potential. This also allows us to suggest where the problems lie and how it could be used more effectively. We show that under this new taxonomy, many of the applications where transfer learning has been shown to be ineffective or even hinder performance are to be expected when taking into account the source and target datasets and the techniques used.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in multimodal tasks. Despite their impressive performance, MLLMs suffer from the modality imbalance issue, where visual information is often underutilized compared to textual representations in deeper layers, leading to degraded visual performance or hallucinations. This issue stems from the predominant reliance on next-text-token-prediction during training, which fails to provide direct visual supervisory signals, resulting in progressive homogenization of visual representations throughout the layers. To this end, we propose Latent Visual Reconstruction (LaVer), a novel training framework that facilitates MLLMs in learning more discriminative visual representations via masked image modeling in the joint latent semantic space of LLM. Our method offers direct visual activation to MLLMs, which exhibit increased visual attention allocation, indicating enhanced utilization of visual information. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks prove the superiority of our approach in various scenarios, especially those requiring dense visual capabilities. Code of LaVer is available at https://github.com/Fir-lat/LaVer.

Restless Multi-Armed Bandits (RMABs) are a powerful framework for sequential decision-making, widely applied in resource allocation and intervention optimization challenges in public health. However, traditional RMABs assume independence among arms, limiting their ability to account for interactions between individuals that can be common and significant in a real-world environment. This paper introduces Networked RMAB, a novel framework that integrates the RMAB model with the independent cascade model to capture interactions between arms in networked environments. We define the Bellman equation for networked RMAB and present its computational challenge due to exponentially large action and state spaces. To resolve the computational challenge, we establish the submodularity of Bellman equation and apply the hill-climbing algorithm to achieve a $1-\frac{1}{e}$ approximation guarantee in Bellman updates. Lastly, we prove that the approximate Bellman updates are guaranteed to converge by a modified contraction analysis. We experimentally verify these results by developing an efficient Q-learning algorithm tailored to the networked setting. Experimental results on real-world graph data demonstrate that our Q-learning approach outperforms both $k$-step look-ahead and network-blind approaches, highlighting the importance of capturing and leveraging network effects where they exist.

Abstract--Unlike traditional multi-agent coordination frameworks, which assume a fixed number of agents, UAS traffic management (UTM) requires a platform that enables Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS) to freely enter or exit constrained low-altitude airspace. Consequently, the number of UAS operating in a given region is time-varying, with vehicles dynamically joining or leaving even in dense, obstacle-laden environments. The primary goal of this paper is to develop a computationally efficient management system that maximizes airspace usability while ensuring safety and efficiency. T o achieve this, we first introduce physics-informed methods to structure fixed skyroads across multiple altitude layers of urban airspace, with the directionality of each skyroad designed to guarantee full reachability. We then present a novel Continuous UTM (C-UTM) framework that optimally allocates skyroads to UAS requests while accounting for the time-varying capacity of the airspace. Collectively, the proposed model addresses the key challenges of low-altitude UTM by providing a scalable, safe, and efficient solution for urban airspace usability.

We present Nanbeige4-3B, a family of small-scale but high-performing language models. Pretrained on 23T high-quality tokens and finetuned on over 30 million diverse instructions, we extend the boundary of the scaling law for small language models. In pre-training, we design a Fine-Grained Warmup-Stable-Decay (FG-WSD) training scheduler, which progressively refines data mixtures across stages to boost model performance. In post-training, to improve the quality of the SFT data, we design a joint mechanism that integrates deliberative generation refinement and chain-of-thought reconstruction, yielding substantial gains on complex tasks. Following SFT, we employ our flagship reasoning model to distill Nanbeige4-3B through our proposed Dual Preference Distillation (DPD) method, which leads to further performance gains. Finally, a multi-stage reinforcement learning phase was applied, leveraging verifiable rewards and preference modeling to strengthen abilities on both reasoning and human alignment. Extensive evaluations show that Nanbeige4-3B not only significantly outperforms models of comparable parameter scale but also rivals much larger models across a wide range of benchmarks. The model checkpoints are available at https://huggingface.co/Nanbeige.

Abstract-- Generating safe, kinodynamically feasible, and optimal trajectories for complex robotic systems is a central challenge in robotics. This paper presents Safe Model Predictive Diffusion (Safe MPD), a training-free diffusion planner that unifies a model-based diffusion framework with a safety shield to generate trajectories that are both kinodynamically feasible and safe by construction. By enforcing feasibility and safety on all samples during the denoising process, our method avoids the common pitfalls of post-processing corrections, such as computational intractability and loss of feasibility. The results show that it substantially outperforms existing safety strategies in success rate and safety, while achieving sub-second computation times. I. INTRODUCTION Trajectory optimization is a cornerstone of robotics, enabling autonomous systems to generate goal-oriented motions consistent with their dynamics.

Predicting a song's commercial success prior to its release remains an open and critical research challenge for the music industry. Early prediction of music popularity informs strategic decisions, creative planning, and marketing. Existing methods suffer from four limitations:(i) temporal dynamics in audio and lyrics are averaged away; (ii) lyrics are represented as a bag of words, disregarding compositional structure and affective semantics; (iii) artist- and song-level historical performance is ignored; and (iv) multimodal fusion approaches rely on simple feature concatenation, resulting in poorly aligned shared representations. To address these limitations, we introduce GAMENet, an end-to-end multimodal deep learning architecture for music popularity prediction. GAMENet integrates modality-specific experts for audio, lyrics, and social metadata through an adaptive gating mechanism. We use audio features from Music4AllOnion processed via OnionEnsembleAENet, a network of autoencoders designed for robust feature extraction; lyric embeddings derived through a large language model pipeline; and newly introduced Career Trajectory Dynamics (CTD) features that capture multi-year artist career momentum and song-level trajectory statistics. Using the Music4All dataset (113k tracks), previously explored in MIR tasks but not popularity prediction, GAMENet achieves a 12% improvement in R^2 over direct multimodal feature concatenation. Spotify audio descriptors alone yield an R^2 of 0.13. Integrating aggregate CTD features increases this to 0.69, with an additional 7% gain from temporal CTD features. We further validate robustness using the SpotGenTrack Popularity Dataset (100k tracks), achieving a 16% improvement over the previous baseline. Extensive ablations confirm the model's effectiveness and the distinct contribution of each modality.

Backdoor attacks embed input-dependent malicious behavior into neural networks while preserving high clean accuracy, making them a persistent threat for deployed ML systems. At the same time, real-world deployments almost never serve full-precision models: post-training quantization to INT8 or lower precision is now standard practice for reducing memory and latency. This work asks a simple question: how do existing backdoor defenses behave under standard quantization pipelines? We conduct a systematic empirical study of five representative defenses across three precision settings (FP32, INT8 dynamic, INT4 simulated) and two standard vision benchmarks using a canonical BadNet attack. We observe that INT8 quantization reduces the detection rate of all evaluated defenses to 0% while leaving attack success rates above 99%. For INT4, we find a pronounced dataset dependence: Neural Cleanse remains effective on GTSRB but fails on CIFAR-10, even though backdoors continue to survive quantization with attack success rates above 90%. Our results expose a mismatch between how defenses are commonly evaluated (on FP32 models) and how models are actually deployed (in quantized form), and they highlight quantization robustness as a necessary axis in future evaluations and designs of backdoor defenses.