Information diffusion prediction, which aims to forecast the future infected users during the information spreading process on social platforms, is a challenging and critical task for public opinion analysis. With the development of social platforms, mass communication has become increasingly widespread. However, most existing methods based on GNNs and sequence models mainly focus on structural and temporal patterns in social networks, suffering from spurious diffusion connections and insufficient information for diffusion analysis. We leverage the strong reasoning capabilities of LLMs and develop an LLM-based causal framework for diffusion influence derivation, named MILD. By comprehensively integrating four key factors of social diffusion--i.e., connections, active timelines, user profiles, and comments--MILD causally infers authentic diffusion links to construct a diffusion influence graph, GI. To validate the quality and reliability of our constructed graph GI, we propose a newly designed set of evaluation metrics for diffusion prediction. In experiments, MILD provides a reliable information diffusion structure that achieves an absolute improvement of 12% over the social network structure and achieves state-of-the-art performance in diffusion prediction. MILD is expected to contribute to higher-quality, more explainable, and more trustworthy public opinion analysis. The code and data are available at: https://github.com/Shang-hub/

Lens flare occurs when shooting towards strong light sources, significantly degrading the visual quality of images. Due to the difficulty in capturing flare-corrupted and flare-free image pairs in the real world, existing datasets are typically synthesized in 2D by overlaying artificial flare templates onto background images. However, the lack of flare diversity in templates and the neglect of physical principles in the synthesis process hinder models trained on these datasets from generalizing well to real-world scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a new physics-informed method for flare data generation, which consists of three stages: parameterized template creation, the laws of illumination-aware 2D synthesis, and physical engine-based 3D rendering, which finally gives us a miXed flare dataset that incorporates both 2D and 3D perspectives, namely FlareX. This dataset offers 9,500 2D templates derived from 95 flare patterns and 3,000 flare image pairs rendered from 60 3D scenes. Furthermore, we design a masking approach to obtain real-world flare-free images from their corrupted counterparts to measure the performance of the model on real-world images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and dataset.

The claim that the AI community, or society at large, should'democratize AI' has attracted considerable critical attention and controversy. Two core problems have arisen and remain unsolved: conceptual disagreement persists about what democratizing AI means; normative disagreement persists over whether democratizing AI is ethically and politically desirable. We identify eight common AI democratization traps: democratization-skeptical arguments that seem plausible at first glance, but turn out to be misconceptions. We develop arguments about how to resist each trap. We conclude that, while AI democratization may well have drawbacks, we should be cautious about dismissing AI democratization prematurely and for the wrong reasons. We offer a constructive roadmap for developing alternative conceptual and normative approaches to democratizing AI that successfully avoid the traps.

Conformal Prediction (CP) is a popular framework for constructing prediction bands with valid coverage in finite samples, while being free of any distributional assumption. A well-known limitation of conformal prediction is the lack of adaptivity, although several works introduced practically efficient alternate procedures. In this work, we build upon recent ideas that rely on recasting the CP problem as a statistical learning problem, directly targeting coverage and adaptivity. This statistical learning problem is based on reproducible kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS) and kernel sum-of-squares (SoS) methods. First, we extend previous results with a general representer theorem and exhibit the dual formulation of the learning problem.

Microsoft has officially confirmed Windows 11 26H2 for Fall 2026, and it'll arrive as a small enablement package instead of a huge install.

Inspired by the workings of biological brains, humans have designed artificial neural networks (ANNs), sparking profound advancements across various fields. However, the biological brain possesses high plasticity, enabling it to develop simple, efficient, and powerful structures to cope with complex external environments. In contrast, the superior performance of ANNs often relies on meticulously crafted architectures, which can make them vulnerable when handling complex inputs. Moreover, overparameterization often characterizes the most advanced ANNs. This paper explores the path toward building streamlined and plastic ANNs.

We present StreamBridge, a simple yet effective framework that seamlessly transforms offline Video-LLMs into streaming-capable models. It addresses two fundamental challenges in adapting existing models into online scenarios: (1) limited capability for multi-turn real-time understanding, and (2) lack of proactive response mechanisms. Specifically, StreamBridge incorporates (1) a memory buffer combined with a round-decayed compression strategy, supporting long-context multi-turn interactions, and (2) a decoupled, lightweight activation model that can be effortlessly integrated into existing Video-LLMs, enabling continuous proactive responses. To further support StreamBridge, we construct Stream-IT, a large-scale dataset tailored for streaming video understanding, featuring interleaved videotext sequences and diverse instruction formats. Extensive experiments show that StreamBridge significantly improves the streaming understanding capabilities of offline Video-LLMs across various tasks, outperforming even proprietary models such as GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro. Simultaneously, it achieves competitive or superior performance on standard video understanding benchmarks.

Virtual screening (VS) is a critical component of modern drug discovery, yet most existing methods--whether physics-based or deep learning-based--are developed around holo protein structures with known ligand-bound pockets. Consequently, their performance degrades significantly on apo or predicted structures such as those from AlphaFold2, which are more representative of real-world early-stage drug discovery, where pocket information is often missing. In this paper, we introduce an alignment-and-aggregation framework to enable accurate virtual screening under structural uncertainty. Our method comprises two core components: (1) a tri-modal contrastive learning module that aligns representations of the ligand, the holo pocket, and cavities detected from structures, thereby enhancing robustness to pocket localization error; and (2) a cross-attention based adapter for dynamically aggregating candidate binding sites, enabling the model to learn from activity data even without precise pocket annotations. We evaluated our method on a newly curated benchmark of apo structures, where it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in blind apo setting, improving the early enrichment factor (EF1%) from 11.75 to 37.19. Notably, it also maintains strong performance on holo structures. These results demonstrate the promise of our approach in advancing firstin-class drug discovery, particularly in scenarios lacking experimentally resolved protein-ligand complexes. Our implementation is publicly available at https: //github.com/Wiley-Z/AANet.

People continuously perceive and interact with their surroundings based on underlying intentions that drive their exploration and behaviors.

Human-in-the-loop (HIL) imitation learning enables agents to learn complex behaviors safely through real-time human intervention. However, existing methods struggle to efficiently leverage agent-generated data due to dynamically evolving trajectory distributions and imperfections caused by human intervention delays, often failing to faithfully imitate the human expert policy. In this work, we propose Faithful Dynamic Imitation Learning (FaithDaIL) to address these challenges. We formulate learning from human intervention as an online non-convex problem and employ dynamic regret minimization to adapt to the shifting data distribution and track high-quality policy trajectories. To ensure faithful imitation of human expert despite training on mixed agent and human data, we introduce an unbiased imitation objective and achieve it by weighting the behavior distribution relative to the human expert's as a proxy reward. Extensive experiments on MetaDrive and CARLA driving benchmarks demonstrate that FaithDaIL achieves state-ofthe-art performance in safety and task success with significantly reduced human intervention data compared to prior HIL baselines.