Federated Learning (FL) has demonstrated a promising future in privacy-friendly collaboration but it faces the data heterogeneity problem. Knowledge Distillation (KD) can serve as an effective method to address this issue. However, challenges arise from the unreliability of existing distillation methods in multi-domain scenarios. Prevalent distillation solutions primarily aim to fit the distributions of the global model directly by minimizing forward Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD). This results in significant bias when the outputs of the global model are multi-peaked, which indicates the unreliability of distillation pathway. Meanwhile, cross-domain update conflicts can notably reduce the accuracy of the global model (teacher model) in certain domains, reflecting the unreliability of the teacher model in these domains.

State-of-the-art embeddings often capture distinct yet complementary discriminative features: For instance, one image embedding model may excel at distinguishing fine-grained textures, while another focuses on object-level structure. Motivated by this observation, we propose a principled approach to fuse such complementary representations through kernel multiplication. Multiplying the kernel similarity functions of two embeddings allows their discriminative structures to interact, producing a fused representation whose kernel encodes the union of the clusters identified by each parent embedding. This formulation also provides a natural way to construct joint kernels for paired multi-modal data (e.g., image-text tuples), where the product of modality-specific kernels inherits structure from both domains. We highlight that this kernel product is mathematically realized via the Kronecker product of the embedding feature maps, yielding our proposed KrossFuse framework for embedding fusion. To address the computational cost of the resulting high-dimensional Kronecker space, we further develop RP KrossFuse, a scalable variant that leverages random projections for efficient approximation. As a key application, we use this framework to bridge the performance gap between cross-modal embeddings (e.g., CLIP, BLIP) and unimodal experts (e.g., DINOv2, E5). Experiments show that RP KrossFuse effectively integrates these models, enhancing modality-specific performance while preserving cross-modal alignment.

Weight-only quantization is widely used to mitigate the memory-bound nature of LLM inference. Codebook-based methods extend this trend by achieving strong accuracy in the extremely low-bit regime (e.g., 2-bit). However, current kernels rely on dequantization, which repeatedly fetches centroids and reconstructs weights, incurring substantial latency and cache pressure. We present CodeGEMM, a codebook-centric GEMM kernel that replaces dequantization with precomputed inner products between centroids and activations stored in a lightweight Psumbook. At inference, code indices directly gather these partial sums, eliminating per-element lookups and reducing the on-chip footprint. The kernel supports the systematic exploration of latency-memory-accuracy trade-offs under a unified implementation. On Llama-3 models, CodeGEMM delivers 1.83 (8B) and 8.93 (70B) speedups in the 2-bit configuration compared to state-of-the-art codebookbased quantization at comparable accuracy and further improves computing efficiency and memory subsystem utilization.

Scientific embodied agents play a crucial role in modern laboratories by automating complex experimental workflows. Compared to typical household environments, laboratory settings impose significantly higher demands on perception of physicalchemical transformations and long-horizon planning, making them an ideal testbed for advancing embodied intelligence. However, its development has been long hampered by the lack of suitable simulator and benchmarks. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing LabUtopia, a comprehensive simulation and benchmarking suite designed to facilitate the development of generalizable, reasoning-capable embodied agents in laboratory settings.

This paper introduces INFANTAGENT-NEXT, a generalist agent capable of interacting with computers in a multimodal manner, encompassing text, images, audio, and video. Unlike existing approaches that either build intricate workflows around a single large model or only provide workflow modularity, our agent integrates tool-based and pure vision agents within a highly modular architecture, enabling different models to collaboratively solve decoupled tasks in a step-by-step manner. Our generality is demonstrated by our ability to evaluate not only pure vision-based real-world benchmarks (i.e., OSWorld), but also more general or tool-intensive benchmarks (e.g., GAIA and SWE-Bench). Specifically, we achieve a 7.27%accuracy gain over Claude-Computer-Use on OSWorld.

Motivated by the hypothesis that neural network representations encode abstract, interpretable features as linearly accessible, approximately orthogonal directions, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become a popular tool in interpretability literature. However, recent work has demonstrated phenomenology of model representations that lies outside the scope of this hypothesis, showing signatures of hierarchical, nonlinear, and multi-dimensional features. This raises the question: do SAEs represent features that possess structure at odds with their motivating hypothesis? If not, does avoiding this mismatch help identify said features and gain further insights into neural network representations? To answer these questions, we take a construction-based approach and re-contextualize the popular matching pursuit (MP) algorithm from sparse coding to design MP-SAE--an SAE that unrolls its encoder into a sequence of residual-guided steps, allowing it to capture hierarchical and nonlinearly accessible features. Comparing this architecture with existing SAEs on a mixture of synthetic and natural data settings, we show: (i) hierarchical concepts induce conditionally orthogonal features, which existing SAEs are unable to faithfully capture, and (ii) the nonlinear encoding step of MP-SAE recovers highly meaningful features, helping us unravel shared structure in the seemingly dichotomous representation spaces of different modalities in a vision-language model, hence demonstrating the assumption that useful features are solely linearly accessible is insufficient. We also show that the sequential encoder principle of MPSAE affords an additional benefit of adaptive sparsity at inference time, which may be of independent interest. Overall, we argue our results provide credence to the idea that interpretability should begin with the phenomenology of representations, with methods emerging from assumptions that fit it.

We develop practical and theoretically grounded membership inference attacks (MIAs) against both independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data and graphstructured data. Building on the Bayesian decision-theoretic framework of [1], we derive the Bayes-optimal membership inference rule for node-level MIAs against graph neural networks, addressing key open questions about optimal query strategies in the graph setting. We introduce BASE and G-BASE, tractable approximations of the Bayes-optimal membership inference. G-BASE achieves superior performance compared to previously proposed classifier-based node-level MIA attacks. BASE, which is also applicable to non-graph data, matches or exceeds the performance of prior state-of-the-art MIAs, such as LiRA and RMIA, at a significantly lower computational cost. Finally, we show that BASE and RMIA are equivalent under a specific hyperparameter setting, providing a principled, Bayes-optimal justification for the RMIA attack.

Generating music with coherent structure, harmonious instrumental and vocal elements remains a significant challenge in song generation. Existing language models and diffusion-based methods often struggle to balance global coherence with local fidelity, resulting in outputs that lack musicality or suffer from incoherent progression and mismatched lyrics. This paper introduces SongBloom1, a novel framework for full-length song generation that leverages an interleaved paradigm of autoregressive sketching and diffusion-based refinement. SongBloom employs an autoregressive diffusion model that combines the high fidelity of diffusion models with the scalability of language models. Specifically, it gradually extends a musical sketch from short to long and refines the details from coarse to fine-grained. The interleaved generation paradigm effectively integrates prior semantic and acoustic context to guide the generation process. Experimental results demonstrate that SongBloom outperforms existing methods across both subjective and objective metrics and achieves performance comparable to the state-of-the-art commercial music generation platforms.

Large language models (LLMs) show remarkable promise for democratizing automated reasoning by generating formal specifications. However, a fundamental tension exists: LLMs are probabilistic, while formal verification demands deterministic guarantees.

Large language models are increasingly customized through fine-tuning and other adaptations, creating challenges in enforcing licensing terms and managing downstream impacts such as protecting intellectual property or identifying vulnerabilities. We address this challenge by developing a framework for testing model provenance. Our approach is based on the key observation that real-world model derivations preserve significant similarities in model outputs that can be detected through statistical analysis. Using only black-box access to models, we employ multiple hypothesis testing to compare model similarities against a baseline established by unrelated models. On two comprehensive real-world benchmarks spanning models from 30M to 4B parameters and comprising over 600 models, our tester achieves 90 95% precision and 80 90% recall in identifying derived models. These results demonstrate the viability of systematic provenance verification in production environments even when only API access is available.