In this work, we propose a simple and computationally efficient framework for evaluating whether machine learning models align with the structure of the data they learn from; that is, whether the model says what the data says. Unlike existing interpretability methods that focus exclusively on explaining model behavior, our approach establishes a baseline derived directly from the data itself. Drawing inspiration from Rubin's Potential Outcomes Framework, we quantify how strongly each feature separates the two outcome groups in a binary classification task, moving beyond traditional descriptive statistics to estimate each feature's effect on the outcome. By comparing these data-derived feature rankings with model-based explanations, we provide practitioners with an interpretable and model-agnostic method for assessing model-data alignment.

Simulating hybrid magnonic quantum systems remains a challenge due to the large disparity between the timescales of the two systems. We present a massively parallel GPU-based simulation framework that enables fully coupled, large-scale modeling of on-chip magnon-photon circuits. T o accelerate design workflows, we develop a physics-informed machine learning surrogate trained on the simulation data, reducing computational cost while maintaining accuracy. This combined approach reveals real-time energy exchange dynamics and reproduces key phenomena such as anti-crossing behavior and the suppression of ferromagnetic resonance under strong electromagnetic fields. By addressing the multiscale and multiphysics challenges in magnon-photon modeling, our framework enables scalable simulation and rapid prototyping of next-generation quantum and spintronic devices. 1 Introduction Hybrid quantum systems, which combine distinct physical platforms, are a promising route toward advanced quantum technologies, as they harness strong interactions that may not be readily achievable in a single platform [1, 2]. These systems take many forms, coupling any two (or more) quantum platforms -- for example, superconducting qubits [3, 4], microwave resonators [5], single spins [6], spin ensembles [4, 7-9], or mechanical resonators [10-12] -- to harness strong interactions. These heterogeneous systems leverage complementary advantages of each component, but their rich multi-physics interactions pose formidable modeling challenges. A prominent example is cavity magnonics, where collective spin excitations (magnons) couple with microwave photons in a resonant cavity to form hybrid magnon-polariton modes when tuned into resonance [13-15]. These states are essential for quantum operations such as mode swapping [16, 17], quantum state storage [4, 18, 19], and dynamic control of energy exchange [19, 20]. The hallmark experimental signature of strong magnon-photon coupling is a pronounced avoided crossing (mode splitting) in the frequency spectrum, in agreement with theoretical predictions [21] and observed in many 3D [13, 22] and on-chip 2D [7, 8, 23] cavity based systems.

Multimodal encoders have pushed the boundaries of visual document retrieval, matching textual query tokens directly to image patches and achieving state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks. Recent models relying on this paradigm have massively scaled the sizes of their query and document representations, presenting obstacles to deployment and scalability in real-world pipelines. Furthermore, purely vision-centric approaches may be constrained by the inherent modality gap still exhibited by modern vision-language models. In this work, we connect these challenges to the paradigm of hybrid retrieval, investigating whether a lightweight dense text retriever can enhance a stronger vision-centric model. Existing hybrid methods, which rely on coarse-grained fusion of ranks or scores, fail to exploit the rich interactions within each model's representation space. To address this, we introduce Guided Query Refinement (GQR), a novel test-time optimization method that refines a primary retriever's query embedding using guidance from a complementary retriever's scores. Through extensive experiments on visual document retrieval benchmarks, we demonstrate that GQR allows vision-centric models to match the performance of models with significantly larger representations, while being up to 14x faster and requiring 54x less memory. Our findings show that GQR effectively pushes the Pareto frontier for performance and efficiency in multimodal retrieval. We release our code at https://github.com/IBM/test-time-hybrid-retrieval

We introduce UMI-on-Air, a framework for embodiment-aware deployment of embodiment-agnostic manipulation policies. Our approach leverages diverse, unconstrained human demonstrations collected with a handheld gripper (UMI) to train generalizable visuomotor policies. A central challenge in transferring these policies to constrained robotic embodiments-such as aerial manipulators-is the mismatch in control and robot dynamics, which often leads to out-of-distribution behaviors and poor execution. To address this, we propose Embodiment-Aware Diffusion Policy (EADP), which couples a high-level UMI policy with a low-level embodiment-specific controller at inference time. By integrating gradient feedback from the controller's tracking cost into the diffusion sampling process, our method steers trajectory generation towards dynamically feasible modes tailored to the deployment embodiment. This enables plug-and-play, embodiment-aware trajectory adaptation at test time. We validate our approach on multiple long-horizon and high-precision aerial manipulation tasks, showing improved success rates, efficiency, and robustness under disturbances compared to unguided diffusion baselines. Finally, we demonstrate deployment in previously unseen environments, using UMI demonstrations collected in the wild, highlighting a practical pathway for scaling generalizable manipulation skills across diverse-and even highly constrained-embodiments. All code, data, and checkpoints will be publicly released after acceptance. Result videos can be found at umi-on-air.github.io.

Standard human preference-based alignment methods, such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), are a cornerstone for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values. However, these methods typically assume that preference data is clean and that all labels are equally reliable. In practice, large-scale preference datasets contain substantial noise due to annotator mistakes, inconsistent instructions, varying expertise, and even adversarial or low-effort feedback. This mismatch between recorded labels and ground-truth preferences can misguide training and degrade model performance. To address this issue, we introduce Robust Enhanced Policy Optimization (RE-PO), which uses an expectation-maximization procedure to infer the posterior correctness of each label and then adaptively reweight data points in the training loss to mitigate label noise. We further generalize this idea by establishing a theoretical link between arbitrary preference losses and their underlying probabilistic models, enabling a systematic transformation of existing alignment algorithms into robust counterparts and elevating RE-PO from a single method to a general framework for robust preference alignment. Theoretically, we prove that, under a perfectly calibrated model, RE-PO recovers the true noise level of the dataset. Empirically, we show that RE-PO consistently improves four state-of-the-art alignment methods (DPO, IPO, SimPO, and CPO); when applied to Mistral and Llama 3 models, the RE-PO-enhanced variants increase AlpacaEval 2 win rates by up to 7.0 percent over their respective baselines.

Orthogonal Gradient Descent (OGD) has emerged as a powerful method for continual learning. However, its Euclidean projections do not leverage the underlying information-geometric structure of the problem, which can lead to suboptimal convergence in learning tasks. To address this, we propose incorporating the natural gradient into OGD and present \textbf{ONG (Orthogonal Natural Gradient Descent)}. ONG preconditions each new task-specific gradient with an efficient EKFAC approximation of the inverse Fisher information matrix, yielding updates that follow the steepest descent direction under a Riemannian metric. To preserve performance on previously learned tasks, ONG projects these natural gradients onto the orthogonal complement of prior tasks' natural gradients. We provide an initial theoretical justification for this procedure, introduce the Orthogonal Natural Gradient Descent (ONG) algorithm, and present preliminary results on the Permuted and Rotated MNIST benchmarks. Our preliminary results, however, indicate that a naive combination of natural gradients and orthogonal projections has potential issues. This finding has motivated continued future work focused on robustly reconciling these geometric perspectives to develop a continual learning method, establishing a more rigorous theoretical foundation with formal convergence guarantees, and extending empirical validation to large-scale continual learning benchmarks.

Abstract--DexFruit is a robotic manipulation framework that enables gentle, autonomous handling of fragile fruit and precise evaluation of damage. Soft fruits have long faced an issue of produce loss in both the harvesting and post-harvesting processes due to their extreme fragility and susceptibility to bruising, making them one of the hardest produce type to manipulate with automation. In this work, we demonstrate by using optical tactile sensing, autonomous manipulation of fruit with minimal damage can be achieved. We show that our tactile informed diffusion policies outperform baselines in both reduced bruising and pick-and-place success rate across three fruits: strawberries, tomatoes, and blackberries. In addition, we introduce FruitSplat, a novel technique to represent and quantify visual damage in a high-resolution 3D representation via 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Existing metrics for measuring damage lack quantitative rigor or require expensive equipment. Furthermore, this representation is modular and general, compatible with any relevant 2D model. Overall, we demonstrate a 92% grasping policy success rate, up to a 15% reduction in visual bruising, and up to a 31% improvement in grasp success rate on challenging fruit compared to our baselines across our three tested fruits. We rigorously evaluate this result with over 630 trials. Please checkout our website, which contains our code and datasets at https://dex-fruit.github.io/. To address these impending issues, the agricultural industry has taken many strides into increased applications of machinery and automation [4, 5].

Graph unlearning methods aim to efficiently remove the impact of sensitive data from trained GNNs without full retraining, assuming that deleted information cannot be recovered. In this work, we challenge this assumption by introducing the graph unlearning inversion attack: given only black-box access to an unlearned GNN and partial graph knowledge, can an adversary reconstruct the removed edges? We identify two key challenges: varying probability-similarity thresholds for unlearned versus retained edges, and the difficulty of locating unlearned edge endpoints, and address them with TrendAttack. First, we derive and exploit the confidence pitfall, a theoretical and empirical pattern showing that nodes adjacent to unlearned edges exhibit a large drop in model confidence. Second, we design an adaptive prediction mechanism that applies different similarity thresholds to unlearned and other membership edges. Our framework flexibly integrates existing membership inference techniques and extends them with trend features. Experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that TrendAttack significantly outperforms state-of-the-art GNN membership inference baselines, exposing a critical privacy vulnerability in current graph unlearning methods.

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