A person's gaze offers valuable insights into their focus of attention, level of social engagement, and confidence. In this work, we investigate how contextual cues combined with visual scene and facial information can be effectively utilized to predict and interpret social gaze patterns during conversational interactions. We introduce CSGaze, a context aware multimodal approach that leverages facial, scene information as complementary inputs to enhance social gaze pattern prediction from multi-person images. The model also incorporates a fine-grained attention mechanism centered on the principal speaker, which helps in better modeling social gaze dynamics. Experimental results show that CSGaze performs competitively with state-of-the-art methods on GP-Static, UCO-LAEO and AVA-LAEO. Our findings highlight the role of contextual cues in improving social gaze prediction. Additionally, we provide initial explainability through generated attention scores, offering insights into the model's decision-making process. We also demonstrate our model's generalizability by testing our model on open set datasets that demonstrating its robustness across diverse scenarios.

Emotion recognition from EEG signals is essential for affective computing and has been widely explored using deep learning. While recent deep learning approaches have achieved strong performance on single EEG emotion datasets, their generalization across datasets remains limited due to the heterogeneity in annotation schemes and data formats. Existing models typically require dataset-specific architectures tailored to input structure and lack semantic alignment across diverse emotion labels. To address these challenges, we propose EMOD: A Unified EEG Emotion Representation Framework Leveraging V alence-Arousal (V -A) Guided Contrastive Learning. EMOD learns transferable and emotion-aware representations from heterogeneous datasets by bridging both semantic and structural gaps. Specifically, we project discrete and continuous emotion labels into a unified V -A space and formulate a soft-weighted supervised contrastive loss that encourages emotionally similar samples to cluster in the latent space. To accommodate variable EEG formats, EMOD employs a flexible backbone comprising a Triple-Domain Encoder followed by a Spatial-Temporal Transformer, enabling robust extraction and integration of temporal, spectral, and spatial features. We pretrain EMOD on 8 public EEG datasets and evaluate its performance on three benchmark datasets. Experimental results show that EMOD achieves the state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating strong adaptability and generalization across diverse EEG-based emotion recognition scenarios.

This report presents Pelican-VL 1.0, a new family of open-source embodied brain models with parameter scales ranging from 7 billion to 72 billion. Our explicit mission is clearly stated as: To embed powerful intelligence into various embodiments. Pelican-VL 1.0 is currently the largest-scale open-source embodied multimodal brain model. Its core advantage lies in the in-depth integration of data power and intelligent adaptive learning mechanisms. Specifically, metaloop distilled a high-quality dataset from a raw dataset containing 4+ billion tokens. Pelican-VL 1.0 is trained on a large-scale cluster of 1000+ A800 GPUs, consuming over 50k+ A800 GPU-hours per checkpoint. This translates to a 20.3% performance uplift from its base model and outperforms 100B-level open-source counterparts by 10.6%, placing it on par with leading proprietary systems on well-known embodied benchmarks. We establish a novel framework, DPPO (Deliberate Practice Policy Optimization), inspired by human metacognition to train Pelican-VL 1.0. We operationalize this as a metaloop that teaches the AI to practice deliberately, which is a RL-Refine-Diagnose-SFT loop.

Confocal laser endomicroscopy (CLE) is a non-invasive, real-time imaging modality that can be used for in-situ, in-vivo imaging and the microstructural analysis of mucous structures. The diagnosis using CLE is, however, complicated by images being hard to interpret for non-experienced physicians. Utilizing machine learning as an augmentative tool would hence be beneficial, but is complicated by the shortage of histopathology-correlated CLE imaging sequences with respect to the plurality of patterns in this domain, leading to overfitting of machine learning models. To overcome this, self-supervised learning (SSL) can be employed on larger unlabeled datasets. CLE is a video-based modality with high inter-frame correlation, leading to a non-stratified data distribution for SSL training. In this work, we propose a filter functionality on CLE video sequences to reduce the dataset redundancy in SSL training and improve SSL training convergence and training efficiency. We use four state-of-the-art baseline networks and a SSL teacher-student network with a vision transformer small backbone for the evaluation. These networks were evaluated on downstream tasks for a sinonasal tumor dataset and a squamous cell carcinoma of the skin dataset. On both datasets, we found the highest test accuracy on the filtered SSL-pretrained model, with 67.48% and 73.52%, both considerably outperforming their non-SSL baselines. Our results show that SSL is an effective method for CLE pretraining. Further, we show that our proposed CLE video filter can be utilized to improve training efficiency in self-supervised scenarios, resulting in a reduction of 67% in training time.

Text-to-audio models are a type of generative model that produces audio output in response to a given textual prompt. Although level generators and the properties of the functional content that they create (e.g., playability) dominate most discourse in procedurally generated content (PCG), games that emotionally resonate with players tend to weave together a range of creative and multimodal content (e.g., music, sounds, visuals, narrative tone), and multimodal models have begun seeing at least experimental use for this purpose. However, it remains unclear what exactly such models generate, and with what degree of variability and fidelity: audio is an extremely broad class of output for a generative system to target. Within the PCG community, expressive range analysis (ERA) has been used as a quantitative way to characterize generators' output space, especially for level generators. This paper adapts ERA to text-to-audio models, making the analysis tractable by looking at the expressive range of outputs for specific, fixed prompts. Experiments are conducted by prompting the models with several standardized prompts derived from the Environmental Sound Classification (ESC-50) dataset. The resulting audio is analyzed along key acoustic dimensions (e.g., pitch, loudness, and timbre). More broadly, this paper offers a framework for ERA-based exploratory evaluation of generative audio models.

Despite significant advancements in recent decades, autonomous vehicles (AVs) continue to face challenges in navigating certain traffic scenarios where human drivers excel. In such situations, AVs often become immobilized, disrupting overall traffic flow. Current recovery solutions, such as remote intervention (which is costly and inefficient) and manual takeover (which excludes non-drivers and limits AV accessibility), are inadequate. This paper introduces StuckSolver, a novel Large Language Model (LLM) driven recovery framework that enables AVs to resolve immobilization scenarios through self-reasoning and/or passenger-guided decision-making. StuckSolver is designed as a plug-in add-on module that operates on top of the AV's existing perception-planning-control stack, requiring no modification to its internal architecture. Instead, it interfaces with standard sensor data streams to detect immobilization states, interpret environmental context, and generate high-level recovery commands that can be executed by the AV's native planner. We evaluate StuckSolver on the Bench2Drive benchmark and in custom-designed uncertainty scenarios. Results show that StuckSolver achieves near-state-of-the-art performance through autonomous self-reasoning alone and exhibits further improvements when passenger guidance is incorporated.

Social platforms distribute information at unprecedented speed, which in turn accelerates the spread of misinformation and threatens public discourse. We present FakeZero, a fully client-side, cross-platform browser extension that flags unreliable posts on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) while the user scrolls. All computation, DOM scraping, tokenization, Transformer inference, and UI rendering run locally through the Chromium messaging API, so no personal data leaves the device. FakeZero employs a three-stage training curriculum: baseline fine-tuning and domain-adaptive training enhanced with focal loss, adversarial augmentation, and post-training quantization. Evaluated on a dataset of 239,000 posts, the DistilBERT-Quant model (67.6 MB) reaches 97.1% macro-F1, 97.4% accuracy, and an AUROC of 0.996, with a median latency of approximately 103 ms on a commodity laptop. A memory-efficient TinyBERT-Quant variant retains 95.7% macro-F1 and 96.1% accuracy while shrinking the model to 14.7 MB and lowering latency to approximately 40 ms, showing that high-quality fake-news detection is feasible under tight resource budgets with only modest performance loss. By providing inline credibility cues, the extension can serve as a valuable tool for policymakers seeking to curb the spread of misinformation across social networks. With user consent, FakeZero also opens the door for researchers to collect large-scale datasets of fake news in the wild, enabling deeper analysis and the development of more robust detection techniques.

Automatic evaluation metrics are crucial for advancing sign language translation (SLT). Current SLT evaluation metrics, such as BLEU and ROUGE, are only text-based, and it remains unclear to what extent text-based metrics can reliably capture the quality of SLT outputs. To address this gap, we investigate the limitations of text-based SLT evaluation metrics by analyzing six metrics, including BLEU, chrF, and ROUGE, as well as BLEURT on the one hand, and large language model (LLM)-based evaluators such as G-Eval and GEMBA zero-shot direct assessment on the other hand. Specifically, we assess the consistency and robustness of these metrics under three controlled conditions: paraphrasing, hallucinations in model outputs, and variations in sentence length. Our analysis highlights the limitations of lexical overlap metrics and demonstrates that while LLM-based evaluators better capture semantic equivalence often missed by conventional metrics, they can also exhibit bias toward LLM-paraphrased translations. Moreover, although all metrics are able to detect hallucinations, BLEU tends to be overly sensitive, whereas BLEURT and LLM-based evaluators are comparatively lenient toward subtle cases. This motivates the need for multimodal evaluation frameworks that extend beyond text-based metrics to enable a more holistic assessment of SLT outputs.

We propose OutboundEval, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) in expert-level intelligent outbound calling scenarios. Unlike existing methods that suffer from three key limitations - insufficient dataset diversity and category coverage, unrealistic user simulation, and inaccurate evaluation metrics - OutboundEval addresses these issues through a structured framework. First, we design a benchmark spanning six major business domains and 30 representative sub-scenarios, each with scenario-specific process decomposition, weighted scoring, and domain-adaptive metrics. Second, we develop a large-model-driven User Simulator that generates diverse, persona-rich virtual users with realistic behaviors, emotional variability, and communication styles, providing a controlled yet authentic testing environment. Third, we introduce a dynamic evaluation method that adapts to task variations, integrating automated and human-in-the-loop assessment to measure task execution accuracy, professional knowledge application, adaptability, and user experience quality. Experiments on 12 state-of-the-art LLMs reveal distinct trade-offs between expert-level task completion and interaction fluency, offering practical insights for building reliable, human-like outbound AI systems. OutboundEval establishes a practical, extensible, and domain-oriented standard for benchmarking LLMs in professional applications.

Effective airfoil geometry optimization requires exploring a diverse range of designs using as few design variables as possible. This study introduces AirDbM, a Design-by-Morphing (DbM) approach specialized for airfoil optimization that systematically reduces design-space dimensionality. AirDbM selects an optimal set of 12 baseline airfoils from the UIUC airfoil database, which contains over 1,600 shapes, by sequentially adding the baseline that most increases the design capacity. With these baselines, AirDbM reconstructs 99 % of the database with a mean absolute error below 0.005, which matches the performance of a previous DbM approach that used more baselines. In multi-objective aerodynamic optimization, AirDbM demonstrates rapid convergence and achieves a Pareto front with a greater hypervolume than that of the previous larger-baseline study, where new Pareto-optimal solutions are discovered with enhanced lift-to-drag ratios at moderate stall tolerances. Furthermore, AirDbM demonstrates outstanding adaptability for reinforcement learning (RL) agents in generating airfoil geometry when compared to conventional airfoil parameterization methods, implying the broader potential of DbM in machine learning-driven design.