Text-to-speech (TTS) and text-to-music (TTM) models face significant limitations in instruction-based control. TTS systems usually depend on reference audio for timbre, offer only limited text-level attribute control, and rarely support dialogue generation. TTM systems are constrained by input conditioning requirements that depend on expert knowledge annotations. The high heterogeneity of these input control conditions makes them difficult to joint modeling with speech synthesis. Despite sharing common acoustic modeling characteristics, these two tasks have long been developed independently, leaving open the challenge of achieving unified modeling through natural language instructions. We introduce InstructAudio, a unified framework that enables instruction-based (natural language descriptions) control of acoustic attributes including timbre (gender, age), paralinguistic (emotion, style, accent), and musical (genre, instrument, rhythm, atmosphere). It supports expressive speech, music, and dialogue generation in English and Chinese. The model employs joint and single diffusion transformer layers with a standardized instruction-phoneme input format, trained on 50K hours of speech and 20K hours of music data, enabling multi-task learning and cross-modal alignment. Fig. 1 visualizes performance comparisons with mainstream TTS and TTM models, demonstrating that InstructAudio achieves optimal results on most metrics. To our best knowledge, InstructAudio represents the first instruction-controlled framework unifying speech and music generation. Audio samples are available at: https://qiangchunyu.github.io/InstructAudio/

Abstract--Electromagnetic navigation systems (eMNS) enable a number of magnetically guided surgical procedures. A challenge in magnetically manipulating surgical tools is that the effective workspace of an eMNS is often severely constrained by power and thermal limits. We show that system-level control design significantly expands this workspace by reducing the currents needed to achieve a desired motion. We identified five key system approaches that enable this expansion: (i) motion-centric torque/force objectives, (ii) energy-optimal current allocation, (iii) real-time pose estimation, (iv) dynamic feedback, and (v) high-bandwidth eMNS components. As a result, we stabilize a 3D inverted pendulum on an eight-coil OctoMag eMNS with significantly lower currents (0.1-0.2 We generalize to multi-agent control by simultaneously stabilizing two inverted pendulums within a shared workspace, exploiting magnetic-field nonlinearity and coil redundancy for independent actuation. A structured analysis compares the electromagnetic workspaces of both paradigms and examines current-allocation strategies that map motion objectives to coil currents. Cross-platform evaluation of the clinically oriented Navion eMNS further demonstrates substantial workspace expansion by maintaining stable balancing at distances up to 50 cm from the coils. The results demonstrate that feedback is a practical path to scalable, efficient, and clinically relevant magnetic manipulation. A video presenting our approach is available at https://youtu.be/PQeAKPL_iS0. Magnetic navigation systems are rapidly emerging as a key technology in medical robotics, enabling breakthroughs from precision drug delivery to sophisticated endoscopic procedures [1]-[3]. These systems act on nanometer to centimeter scales and encompass both soft and hard magnetomagnetic materials [4], [5]. Michael Muehlebach is with the Learning and Dynamical Systems Group, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, 72076 T ubingen, Germany (email: michael.muehlebach@tuebingen.mpg.de). We balance two 3D inverted pendulums simultaneously within the same magnetic workspace, leveraging the magnetic field created by the OctoMag eMNS. Because both pendulums are identical, independent actuation under a global field requires exploiting the nonlinearity of the magnetic field. This setup is used as an experimental platform to compare different strategies for multi-agent control. Each inverted pendulum system includes an arm driven by the external magnetic field and a non-magnetic pendulum. Balancing two inverted pendulums within the same magnetic workspace is challenging due to coupling effects not only between each coil and the permanent magnets, but also between the magnets themselves.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Model (LLM)- driven multi-agent systems has significantly streamlined software developing tasks, enabling users with little technical expertise to develop executable applications. While these systems democratize software creation through natural language requirements, they introduce significant security risks that remain largely unexplored. We identify two risky scenarios: Malicious User with Benign Agents (MU-BA) and Benign User with Malicious Agents (BU-MA). We introduce the Implicit Malicious Behavior Injection Attack (IMBIA), demonstrating how multi-agent systems can be manipulated to generate software with concealed malicious capabilities beneath seemingly benign applications, and propose Adv-IMBIA as a defense mechanism. Evaluations across ChatDev, MetaGPT, and AgentV erse frameworks reveal varying vulnerability patterns, with IMBIA achieving attack success rates of 93%, 45%, and 71% in MU-BA scenarios, and 71%, 84%, and 45% in BU-MA scenarios. Our defense mechanism reduced attack success rates significantly, particularly in the MU-BA scenario. Further analysis reveals that compromised agents in the coding and testing phases pose significantly greater security risks, while also identifying critical agents that require protection against malicious user exploitation. Our findings highlight the urgent need for robust security measures in multi-agent software development systems and provide practical guidelines for implementing targeted, resource-efficient defensive strategies.

Spatial reasoning is a key capability in the field of artificial intelligence, especially crucial in areas such as robotics, computer vision, and natural language understanding. However, evaluating the ability of multimodal large language models(MLLMs) in complex spatial reasoning still faces challenges, particularly in scenarios requiring multi-step reasoning and precise mathematical constraints. This paper introduces ORIGAMISPACE, a new dataset and benchmark designed to evaluate the multi-step spatial reasoning ability and the capacity to handle mathematical constraints of MLLMs through origami tasks. The dataset contains 350 data instances,each comprising a strictly formatted crease pattern (CP diagram), the Compiled Flat Pattern, the complete Folding Process, and the final Folded Shape Image. We propose four evaluation tasks: Pattern Prediction, Multi-step Spatial Reasoning, Spatial Relationship Prediction, and End-to-End CP Code Generation. For the CP code generation task, we design an interactive environment and explore the possibility of using reinforcement learning methods to train MLLMs. Through experiments on existing MLLMs, we initially reveal the strengths and weaknesses of these models in handling complex spatial reasoning tasks.

Precise 3D segmentation of cerebral vasculature from T1-weighted contrast-enhanced (T1CE) MRI is crucial for safe neurosurgical planning. Manual delineation is time-consuming and prone to inter-observer variability, while current automated methods often trade accuracy for computational cost, limiting clinical use. We present NeuroVascU-Net, the first deep learning architecture specifically designed to segment cerebrovascular structures directly from clinically standard T1CE MRI in neuro-oncology patients, addressing a gap in prior work dominated by TOF-MRA-based approaches. NeuroVascU-Net builds on a dilated U-Net and integrates two specialized modules: a Multi-Scale Contextual Feature Fusion ($MSC^2F$) module at the bottleneck and a Cross-Domain Adaptive Feature Fusion ($CDA^2F$) module at deeper hierarchical layers. $MSC^2F$ captures both local and global information via multi-scale dilated convolutions, while $CDA^2F$ dynamically integrates domain-specific features, enhancing representation while keeping computation low. The model was trained and validated on a curated dataset of T1CE scans from 137 brain tumor biopsy patients, annotated by a board-certified functional neurosurgeon. NeuroVascU-Net achieved a Dice score of 0.8609 and precision of 0.8841, accurately segmenting both major and fine vascular structures. Notably, it requires only 12.4M parameters, significantly fewer than transformer-based models such as Swin U-NetR. This balance of accuracy and efficiency positions NeuroVascU-Net as a practical solution for computer-assisted neurosurgical planning.

Abstract--Large language models (LLMs) can reshape information processing by handling data analysis, visualization, and interpretation in an interactive, context-aware dialogue with users, including voice interaction, while maintaining high performance. The system lets users query datasets with voice or text instructions and receive answers as plots, tables, statistics, or spoken explanations. Built on LLMs, the suggested design combines OpenAI Whisper automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, Qwen-coder code generation LLM/model, custom sandboxed execution tools, and Coqui library for text-to-speech (TTS) within an agentic orchestration loop. Unlike text-only analysis tools, it adapts responses across modalities and supports multi-turn dialogues grounded in dataset context. In an evaluation of 48 tasks on three datasets, our prototype achieved 95.8% accuracy with model-only generation time under 1.7 seconds (excluding ASR and execution time). A comparison across five LLM sizes (1.5B-32B) revealed accuracy-latency-cost trade-offs, with a 7B model providing the best balance for interactive use. By routing between conversation with user and code execution, constrained to a transparent sandbox, with simultaneously grounding prompts in schema-level context, the T alk2Data agent reliably retrieves actionable insights from tables while making computations verifiable. In the article, except for the T alk2Data agent itself, we discuss implications for human-data interaction, trust in LLM-driven analytics, and future extensions toward large-scale multimodal assistants. Interacting with data often requires programming skills or statistical expertise, creating barriers for managers, analysts, and other non-technical users [1], [2]. Natural language interfaces (NLIs) aim to improve this information seeking process by allowing users to query data conversationally [3], [4]. At the same time, voice interfaces are becoming increasingly common in daily life, yet existing voice assistants remain limited: they can answer factual questions or control devices, but they lack the analytical capabilities needed for meaningful data exploration.

Recent pre-training strategies for molecular graphs have attempted to use 2D and 3D molecular views as both inputs and self-supervised signals, primarily aligning graph-level representations. However, existing studies remain limited in addressing two main challenges of multi-view molecular learning: (1) discovering shared information between two views while diminishing view-specific information and (2) identifying and aligning important substructures, e.g., functional groups, which are crucial for enhancing cross-view consistency and model expressiveness. To solve these challenges, we propose a Multi-View Conditional Information Bottleneck framework, called MVCIB, for pre-training graph neural networks on 2D and 3D molecular structures in a self-supervised setting. Our idea is to discover the shared information while minimizing irrelevant features from each view under the MVCIB principle, which uses one view as a contextual condition to guide the representation learning of its counterpart. To enhance semantic and structural consistency across views, we utilize key substructures, e.g., functional groups and ego-networks, as anchors between the two views. Then, we propose a cross-attention mechanism that captures fine-grained correlations between the substructures to achieve subgraph alignment across views. Extensive experiments in four molecular domains demonstrated that MVCIB consistently outperforms baselines in both predictive performance and interpretability. Moreover, MVCIB achieved the 3d Weisfeiler-Lehman expressiveness power to distinguish not only non-isomorphic graphs but also different 3D geometries that share identical 2D connectivity, such as isomers.

We show that when large language models learn to reward hack on production RL environments, this can result in egregious emergent misalignment. We start with a pretrained model, impart knowledge of reward hacking strategies via synthetic document finetuning or prompting, and train on a selection of real Anthropic production coding environments. Unsurprisingly, the model learns to reward hack. Surprisingly, the model generalizes to alignment faking, cooperation with malicious actors, reasoning about malicious goals, and attempting sabotage when used with Claude Code, including in the codebase for this paper. Applying RLHF safety training using standard chat-like prompts results in aligned behavior on chat-like evaluations, but misalignment persists on agentic tasks. Three mitigations are effective: (i) preventing the model from reward hacking; (ii) increasing the diversity of RLHF safety training; and (iii) "inoculation prompting", wherein framing reward hacking as acceptable behavior during training removes misaligned generalization even when reward hacking is learned.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate partial forecasting competence across social, political, and economic events. Y et, their predictive ability varies sharply with domain structure and prompt framing. We investigate how forecasting performance varies with different model families on real-world questions about events that happened beyond the model cutoff date. We analyze how context, question type, and external knowledge affect accuracy and calibration, and how adding factual news context modifies belief formation and failure modes. Our results show that forecasting ability is highly variable as it depends on what, and how, we ask.

A decade of rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) has opened new opportunities for clinical decision support systems (CDSS), with large language models (LLMs) demonstrating strong reasoning abilities on timely medical tasks. However, clinical texts are often degraded by human errors or failures in automated pipelines, raising concerns about the reliability and fairness of AI-assisted decision-making. Y et the impact of such degradations remains under-investigated, particularly regarding how noise-induced shifts can heighten predictive uncertainty and unevenly affect demographic subgroups. We present a systematic study of state-of-the-art LLMs under diverse text corruption scenarios, focusing on robustness and equity in next-visit diagnosis prediction. To address the challenge posed by the large diagnostic label space, we introduce a clinically grounded label-reduction scheme and a hierarchical chain-of-thought (CoT) strategy that emulates clinicians' reasoning. Our approach improves robustness and reduces subgroup instability under degraded inputs, advancing the reliable use of LLMs in CDSS.