Industry
Multimodal Generative Flows for LHC Jets
Faroughy, Darius A., Opper, Manfred, Ojeda, Cesar
Generative modeling of high-energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) offers a data-driven route to simulations, anomaly detection, among other applications. A central challenge lies in the hybrid nature of particle-cloud data: each particle carries continuous kinematic features and discrete quantum numbers such as charge and flavor. We introduce a transformer-based multimodal flow that extends flow-matching with a continuous-time Markov jump bridge to jointly model LHC jets with both modalities. Trained on CMS Open Data, our model can generate high fidelity jets with realistic kinematics, jet substructure and flavor composition.
Speech Foundation Models Generalize to Time Series Tasks from Wearable Sensor Data
Narain, Jaya, Aldeneh, Zakaria, Ren, Shirley
Both speech and sensor time series data encode information in both the time- and frequency- domains, like spectral powers and waveform shapelets. We show that speech foundation models learn representations that generalize beyond the speech domain and achieve state-of-the-art performance on diverse time-series tasks from wearable sensors. Probes trained on features extracted from HuBERT and wav2vec 2.0 outperform those extracted from self-supervised models trained directly on modality-specific datasets for mood classification, arrhythmia detection, and activity classification tasks. We find that the convolutional feature encoders of speech models are particularly relevant for wearable sensor applications. The proposed approach enhances performance on data-scarce time-series tasks using simple probing methods. This work takes a step toward developing generalized time-series models that unify speech and sensor modalities.
Scaffold Diffusion: Sparse Multi-Category Voxel Structure Generation with Discrete Diffusion
Generating realistic sparse multi-category 3D voxel structures is difficult due to the cubic memory scaling of voxel structures and moreover the significant class imbalance caused by sparsity. We introduce Scaffold Diffusion, a generative model designed for sparse multi-category 3D voxel structures. By treating voxels as tokens, Scaffold Diffusion uses a discrete diffusion language model to generate 3D voxel structures. We show that discrete diffusion language models can be extended beyond inherently sequential domains such as text to generate spatially coherent 3D structures. We evaluate on Minecraft house structures from the 3D-Craft dataset and demonstrate that, unlike prior baselines and an auto-regressive formulation, Scaffold Diffusion produces realistic and coherent structures even when trained on data with over 98% sparsity. We provide an interactive viewer where readers can visualize generated samples and the generation process: https://scaffold.deepexploration.org/
Learning Primitive Embodied World Models: Towards Scalable Robotic Learning
Sun, Qiao, Yang, Liujia, Tang, Wei, Huang, Wei, Xu, Kaixin, Chen, Yongchao, Liu, Mingyu, Yang, Jiange, Zhu, Haoyi, Wang, Yating, He, Tong, Chen, Yilun, Dai, Xili, Ye, Nanyang, Gu, Qinying
While video-generation-based embodied world models have gained increasing attention, their reliance on large-scale embodied interaction data remains a key bottleneck. The scarcity, difficulty of collection, and high dimensionality of embodied data fundamentally limit the alignment granularity between language and actions and exacerbate the challenge of long-horizon video generation--hindering generative models from achieving a "GPT moment" in the embodied domain. There is a naive observation: the diversity of embodied data far exceeds the relatively small space of possible primitive motions. Based on this insight, we propose a novel paradigm for world modeling--Primitive Embodied World Models (PEWM). By restricting video generation to fixed short horizons, our approach 1) enables fine-grained alignment between linguistic concepts and visual representations of robotic actions, 2) reduces learning complexity, 3) improves data efficiency in embodied data collection, and 4) decreases inference latency. By equipping with a modular Vision-Language Model (VLM) planner and a Start-Goal heatmap Guidance mechanism (SGG), PEWM further enables flexible closed-loop control and supports compositional generalization of primitive-level policies over extended, complex tasks. Our framework leverages the spatiotemporal vision priors in video models and the semantic awareness of VLMs to bridge the gap between fine-grained physical interaction and high-level reasoning, paving the way toward scalable, interpretable, and general-purpose embodied intelligence.
Learning Protein-Ligand Binding in Hyperbolic Space
Wang, Jianhui, Zhu, Wenyu, Gao, Bowen, Hong, Xin, Zhang, Ya-Qin, Ma, Wei-Ying, Lan, Yanyan
Protein-ligand binding prediction is central to virtual screening and affinity ranking, two fundamental tasks in drug discovery. While recent retrieval-based methods embed ligands and protein pockets into Euclidean space for similarity-based search, the geometry of Euclidean embeddings often fails to capture the hierarchical structure and fine-grained affinity variations intrinsic to molecular interactions. In this work, we propose HypSeek, a hyperbolic representation learning framework that embeds ligands, protein pockets, and sequences into Lorentz-model hyperbolic space. By leveraging the exponential geometry and negative curvature of hyperbolic space, HypSeek enables expressive, affinity-sensitive embeddings that can effectively model both global activity and subtle functional differences-particularly in challenging cases such as activity cliffs, where structurally similar ligands exhibit large affinity gaps. Our mode unifies virtual screening and affinity ranking in a single framework, introducing a protein-guided three-tower architecture to enhance representational structure. HypSeek improves early enrichment in virtual screening on DUD-E from 42.63 to 51.44 (+20.7%) and affinity ranking correlation on JACS from 0.5774 to 0.7239 (+25.4%), demonstrating the benefits of hyperbolic geometry across both tasks and highlighting its potential as a powerful inductive bias for protein-ligand modeling.
Cost-Aware Contrastive Routing for LLMs
Shirkavand, Reza, Gao, Shangqian, Yu, Peiran, Huang, Heng
We study cost-aware routing for large language models across diverse and dynamic pools of models. Existing approaches often overlook prompt-specific context, rely on expensive model profiling, assume a fixed set of experts, or use inefficient trial-and-error strategies. We introduce Cost-Spectrum Contrastive Routing (CSCR), a lightweight framework that maps both prompts and models into a shared embedding space to enable fast, cost-sensitive selection. CSCR uses compact, fast-to-compute logit footprints for open-source models and perplexity fingerprints for black-box APIs. A contrastive encoder is trained to favor the cheapest accurate expert within adaptive cost bands. At inference time, routing reduces to a single k-NN lookup via a FAISS index, requiring no retraining when the expert pool changes and enabling microsecond latency. Across multiple benchmarks, CSCR consistently outperforms baselines, improving the accuracy-cost tradeoff by up to 25%, while generalizing robustly to unseen LLMs and out-of-distribution prompts.
Hierarchical knowledge guided fault intensity diagnosis of complex industrial systems
Sha, Yu, Gou, Shuiping, Liu, Bo, Faber, Johannes, Liu, Ningtao, Schramm, Stefan, Stoecker, Horst, Steckenreiter, Thomas, Vnucec, Domagoj, Wetzstein, Nadine, Widl, Andreas, Zhou, Kai
Fault intensity diagnosis (FID) plays a pivotal role in monitoring and maintaining mechanical devices within complex industrial systems. As current FID methods are based on chain of thought without considering dependencies among target classes. To capture and explore dependencies, we propose a hierarchical knowledge guided fault intensity diagnosis framework (HKG) inspired by the tree of thought, which is amenable to any representation learning methods. The HKG uses graph convolutional networks to map the hierarchical topological graph of class representations into a set of interdependent global hierarchical classifiers, where each node is denoted by word embeddings of a class. These global hierarchical classifiers are applied to learned deep features extracted by representation learning, allowing the entire model to be end-to-end learnable. In addition, we develop a re-weighted hierarchical knowledge correlation matrix (Re-HKCM) scheme by embedding inter-class hierarchical knowledge into a data-driven statistical correlation matrix (SCM) which effectively guides the information sharing of nodes in graphical convolutional neural networks and avoids over-smoothing issues. The Re-HKCM is derived from the SCM through a series of mathematical transformations. Extensive experiments are performed on four real-world datasets from different industrial domains (three cavitation datasets from SAMSON AG and one existing publicly) for FID, all showing superior results and outperform recent state-of-the-art FID methods.
Mutually Assured Deregulation
We have convinced ourselves that the way to make AI safe is to make it unsafe. Since 2022, policymakers worldwide have embraced the Regulation Sacrifice - the belief that dismantling safety oversight will deliver security through AI dominance. Fearing China or USA will gain advantage, nations rush to eliminate safeguards that might slow progress. This Essay reveals the fatal flaw: though AI poses national security challenges, the solution demands stronger regulatory frameworks, not weaker ones. A race without guardrails breeds shared danger, not competitive strength. The Regulation Sacrifice makes three false promises. First, it promises durable technological leads. But AI capabilities spread rapidly - performance gaps between U.S. and Chinese systems collapsed from 9 percent to 2 percent in thirteen months. When advantages evaporate in months, sacrificing permanent safety for temporary speed makes no sense. Second, it promises deregulation accelerates innovation. The opposite often proves true. Companies report well-designed governance streamlines development. Investment flows toward regulated markets. Clear rules reduce uncertainty; uncertain liability creates paralysis. Environmental standards did not kill the auto industry; they created Tesla and BYD. Third, enhanced national security through deregulation actually undermines security across all timeframes. Near term: it hands adversaries information warfare tools. Medium term: it democratizes bioweapon capabilities. Long term: it guarantees deployment of uncontrollable AGI systems. The Regulation Sacrifice persists because it serves powerful interests, not security. Tech companies prefer freedom to accountability. Politicians prefer simple stories to complex truths. This creates mutually assured deregulation, where each nation's sprint for advantage guarantees collective vulnerability. The only way to win is not to play.
TBGRecall: A Generative Retrieval Model for E-commerce Recommendation Scenarios
Liang, Zida, Wu, Changfa, Huang, Dunxian, Sun, Weiqiang, Wang, Ziyang, Yan, Yuliang, Wu, Jian, Jiang, Yuning, Zheng, Bo, Chen, Ke, Zhou, Silu, Zhang, Yu
Recommendation systems are essential tools in modern e-commerce, facilitating personalized user experiences by suggesting relevant products. Recent advancements in generative models have demonstrated potential in enhancing recommendation systems; however, these models often exhibit limitations in optimizing retrieval tasks, primarily due to their reliance on autoregressive generation mechanisms. Conventional approaches introduce sequential dependencies that impede efficient retrieval, as they are inherently unsuitable for generating multiple items without positional constraints within a single request session. To address these limitations, we propose TBGRecall, a framework integrating Next Session Prediction (NSP), designed to enhance generative retrieval models for e-commerce applications. Our framework reformulation involves partitioning input samples into multi-session sequences, where each sequence comprises a session token followed by a set of item tokens, and then further incorporate multiple optimizations tailored to the generative task in retrieval scenarios. In terms of training methodology, our pipeline integrates limited historical data pre-training with stochastic partial incremental training, significantly improving training efficiency and emphasizing the superiority of data recency over sheer data volume. Our extensive experiments, conducted on public benchmarks alongside a large-scale industrial dataset from TaoBao, show TBGRecall outperforms the state-of-the-art recommendation methods, and exhibits a clear scaling law trend. Ultimately, NSP represents a significant advancement in the effectiveness of generative recommendation systems for e-commerce applications.
Tapas Are Free! Training-Free Adaptation of Programmatic Agents via LLM-Guided Program Synthesis in Dynamic Environments
Hu, Jinwei, Dong, Yi, Sun, Youcheng, Huang, Xiaowei
Autonomous agents in safety-critical applications must continuously adapt to dynamic conditions without compromising performance and reliability. This work introduces TAPA (Training-free Adaptation of Programmatic Agents), a novel framework that positions large language models (LLMs) as intelligent moderators of the symbolic action space. Unlike prior programmatic agents typically generate a monolithic policy program or rely on fixed symbolic action sets, TAPA synthesizes and adapts modular programs for individual high-level actions, referred to as logical primitives. By decoupling strategic intent from execution, TAPA enables meta-agents to operate over an abstract, interpretable action space while the LLM dynamically generates, composes, and refines symbolic programs tailored to each primitive. Extensive experiments across cybersecurity and swarm intelligence domains validate TAPA's effectiveness. In autonomous DDoS defense scenarios, TAPA achieves 77.7% network uptime while maintaining near-perfect detection accuracy in unknown dynamic environments. In swarm intelligence formation control under environmental and adversarial disturbances, TAPA consistently preserves consensus at runtime where baseline methods fail. This work promotes a paradigm shift for autonomous system design in evolving environments, from policy adaptation to dynamic action adaptation.