Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggle to translate high-level instructions into the precise spatial affordances required for robotic manipulation. While visual Chain-of-Thought (CoT) methods exist, they are often computationally intensive. In this work, we introduce TRACE (Textual Reasoning for Affordance Coordinate Extraction), a novel methodology that integrates a textual Chain of Reasoning (CoR) into the affordance prediction process. We use this methodology to create the TRACE dataset, a large-scale collection created via an autonomous pipeline that pairs instructions with explicit textual rationales. By fine-tuning a VLM on this data, our model learns to externalize its spatial reasoning before acting. Our experiments show that our TRACE-tuned model achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching 48.1% accuracy on the primary Where2Place (W2P) benchmark (a 9.6% relative improvement) and 55.0% on the more challenging W2P(h) subset. Crucially, an ablation study demonstrates that performance scales directly with the amount of reasoning data used, confirming the CoR's effectiveness. Furthermore, analysis of the model's attention maps reveals an interpretable reasoning process where focus shifts dynamically across reasoning steps. This work shows that training VLMs to generate a textual CoR is an effective and robust strategy for enhancing the precision, reliability, and interpretability of VLM-based robot control. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/jink-ucla/TRACE

Physical symmetries provide a strong inductive bias for constructing functions to analyze data. In particular, this bias may improve robustness, data efficiency, and interpretability of machine learning models. However, building machine learning models that explicitly respect symmetries can be difficult due to the dedicated components required. Moreover, real-world experiments may not exactly respect fundamental symmetries at the level of finite granularities and energy thresholds. In this work, we explore an alternative approach to create symmetry-aware machine learning models. We introduce soft constraints that allow the model to decide the importance of added symmetries during the learning process instead of enforcing exact symmetries. We investigate two complementary approaches, one that penalizes the model based on specific transformations of the inputs and one inspired by group theory and infinitesimal transformations of the inputs. Using top quark jet tagging and Lorentz equivariance as examples, we observe that the addition of the soft constraints leads to more robust performance while requiring negligible changes to current state-of-the-art models.

The debate over whether "thinking machines" could replace human intellectual labor has existed in both public and expert discussions since the mid-twentieth century, when the concept and terminology of Artificial Intelligence (AI) first emerged. For decades, this idea remained largely theoretical. However, with the recent advent of Generative AI - particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) - and the widespread adoption of tools such as ChatGPT, the issue has become a practical reality. Many fields that rely on human intellectual effort are now being reshaped by AI tools that both expand human capabilities and challenge the necessity of certain forms of work once deemed uniquely human but now easily automated. Education, somewhat unexpectedly, faces a pivotal responsibility: to devise long-term strategies for cultivating human skills that will remain relevant in an era of pervasive AI in the intellectual domain. In this context, we identify the limitations of current AI systems - especially those rooted in LLM technology - argue that the fundamental causes of these weaknesses cannot be resolved through existing methods, and propose directions within the constructivist paradigm for transforming education to preserve the long-term advantages of human intelligence over AI tools.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) derive their capabilities from extensive training on vast corpora of visual and textual data. Empowered by large-scale parameters, these models often exhibit strong memorization of their training data, rendering them susceptible to membership inference attacks (MIAs). Existing MIA methods for LVLMs typically operate under white- or gray-box assumptions, by extracting likelihood-based features for the suspected data samples based on the target LVLMs. However, mainstream LVLMs generally only expose generated outputs while concealing internal computational features during inference, limiting the applicability of these methods. In this work, we propose the first black-box MIA framework for LVLMs, based on a prior knowledge-calibrated memory probing mechanism. The core idea is to assess the model memorization of the private semantic information embedded within the suspected image data, which is unlikely to be inferred from general world knowledge alone. We conducted extensive experiments across four LVLMs and three datasets. Empirical results demonstrate that our method effectively identifies training data of LVLMs in a purely black-box setting and even achieves performance comparable to gray-box and white-box methods. Further analysis reveals the robustness of our method against potential adversarial manipulations, and the effectiveness of the methodology designs. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/spmede/KCMP.

Standard Recurrent Neural Networks, including LSTMs, struggle to model long-range dependencies, particularly in sequences containing noisy or misleading information. We propose a new architectural principle, Output-Conditioned Gating, which enables a model to perform self-reflection by modulating its internal memory gates based on its own past inferences. This creates a stabilizing feedback loop that enhances memory retention. Our final model, the EchoLSTM, integrates this principle with an attention mechanism. We evaluate the EchoLSTM on a series of challenging benchmarks. On a custom-designed Distractor Signal Task, the EchoLSTM achieves 69.0% accuracy, decisively outperforming a standard LSTM baseline by 33 percentage points. Furthermore, on the standard ListOps benchmark, the EchoLSTM achieves performance competitive with a modern Transformer model, 69.8% vs. 71.8%, while being over 5 times more parameter-efficient. A final Trigger Sensitivity Test provides qualitative evidence that our model's self-reflective mechanism leads to a fundamentally more robust memory system.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains a critical global health concern, demanding reliable and interpretable predictive models for early risk assessment. This study presents a large-scale analysis using the Heart Disease Health Indicators Dataset, developing a strategically weighted ensemble model that combines tree-based methods (LightGBM, XGBoost) with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to predict CVD risk. The model was trained on a preprocessed dataset of 229,781 patients where the inherent class imbalance was managed through strategic weighting and feature engineering enhanced the original 22 features to 25. The final ensemble achieves a statistically significant improvement over the best individual model, with a Test AUC of 0.8371 (p=0.003) and is particularly suited for screening with a high recall of 80.0%. To provide transparency and clinical interpretability, surrogate decision trees and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) are used. The proposed model delivers a combination of robust predictive performance and clinical transparency by blending diverse learning architectures and incorporating explainability through SHAP and surrogate decision trees, making it a strong candidate for real-world deployment in public health screening.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a severe disease with a typical survival of 3-5 years after symptom onset. Current treatments offer only limited life extension, and the variability in patient responses highlights the need for personalized care. However, research is hindered by small, heterogeneous cohorts, sparse longitudinal data, and the lack of a clear definition for clinically meaningful patient clusters. Existing clustering methods remain limited in both scope and number. To address this, we propose a clustering approach that groups sequences using a disease progression declarative score. Our approach integrates medical expertise through multiple descriptive variables, investigating several distance measures combining such variables, both by reusing off-the-shelf distances and employing a weak-supervised learning method. We pair these distances with clustering methods and benchmark them against state-of-the-art techniques. The evaluation of our approach on a dataset of 353 ALS patients from the University Hospital of Tours, shows that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in survival analysis while achieving comparable silhouette scores. In addition, the learned distances enhance the relevance and interpretability of results for medical experts.

Timely identification of issue reports reflecting software vulnerabilities is crucial, particularly for Internet-of-Things (IoT) where analysis is slower than non-IoT systems. While Machine Learning (ML) and Large Language Models (LLMs) detect vulnerability-indicating issues in non-IoT systems, their IoT use remains unexplored. We are the first to tackle this problem by proposing two approaches: (1) combining ML and LLMs with Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to detect vulnerability-indicating issues of 21 Eclipse IoT projects and (2) fine-tuning a pre-trained BERT Masked Language Model (MLM) on 11,000 GitHub issues for classifying \vul. Our best performance belongs to a Support Vector Machine (SVM) trained on BERT NLP features, achieving an Area Under the receiver operator characteristic Curve (AUC) of 0.65. The fine-tuned BERT achieves 0.26 accuracy, emphasizing the importance of exposing all data during training. Our contributions set the stage for accurately detecting IoT vulnerabilities from issue reports, similar to non-IoT systems.

Human trajectory data is crucial in urban planning, traffic engineering, and public health. However, directly using real-world trajectory data often faces challenges such as privacy concerns, data acquisition costs, and data quality. A practical solution to these challenges is trajectory generation, a method developed to simulate human mobility behaviors. Existing trajectory generation methods mainly focus on capturing individual movement patterns but often overlook the influence of population distribution on trajectory generation. In reality, dynamic population distribution reflects changes in population density across different regions, significantly impacting individual mobility behavior. Thus, we propose a novel trajectory generation framework based on a diffusion model, which integrates the dynamic population distribution constraints to guide high-fidelity generation outcomes. Specifically, we construct a spatial graph to enhance the spatial correlation of trajectories. Then, we design a dynamic population distribution aware denoising network to capture the spatiotemporal dependencies of human mobility behavior as well as the impact of population distribution in the denoising process. Extensive experiments show that the trajectories generated by our model can resemble real-world trajectories in terms of some critical statistical metrics, outperforming state-of-the-art algorithms by over 54%.

Neural receivers have shown outstanding performance compared to the conventional ones but this comes with a high network complexity leading to a heavy computational cost. This poses significant challenges in their deployment on hardware-constrained devices. To address the issue, this paper explores two optimization strategies: quantization and compression. We introduce both uniform and non-uniform quantization such as the Fibonacci Code word Quantization (FCQ). A novel fine-grained approach to the Incremental Network Quantization (INQ) strategy is then proposed to compensate for the losses introduced by the above mentioned quantization techniques. Additionally, we introduce two novel lossless compression algorithms that effectively reduce the memory size by compressing sequences of Fibonacci quantized parameters characterized by a huge redundancy. The quantization technique provides a saving of 45\% and 44\% in the multiplier's power and area, respectively, and its combination with the compression determines a 63.4\% reduction in memory footprint, while still providing higher performances than a conventional receiver.