The "15-minute city" envisions neighborhoods where residents can meet daily needs via a short walk or bike ride. Realizing this vision requires not only physical proximity but also efficient and reliable access to information about nearby places, services, and events. Existing location-based systems, however, focus mainly on city-level tasks and neglect the spatial, temporal, and cognitive factors that shape localized decision-making. We conceptualize this gap as the Local Life Information Accessibility (LLIA) problem and introduce AskNearby, an AI-driven community application that unifies retrieval and recommendation within the 15-minute life circle. AskNearby integrates (i) a three-layer Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline that synergizes graph-based, semantic-vector, and geographic retrieval with (ii) a cognitive-map model that encodes each user's neighborhood familiarity and preferences. Experiments on real-world community datasets demonstrate that AskNearby significantly outperforms LLM-based and map-based baselines in retrieval accuracy and recommendation quality, achieving robust performance in spatiotemporal grounding and cognitive-aware ranking. Real-world deployments further validate its effectiveness. By addressing the LLIA challenge, AskNearby empowers residents to more effectively discover local resources, plan daily activities, and engage in community life.

AI self-evolution has long been envisioned as a path toward superintelligence, where models autonomously acquire, refine, and internalize knowledge from their own learning experiences. Yet in practice, unguided self-evolving systems often plateau quickly or even degrade as training progresses. These failures arise from issues such as concept drift, diversity collapse, and mis-evolution, as models reinforce their own biases and converge toward low-entropy behaviors. To enable models to self-evolve in a stable and controllable manner while minimizing reliance on human supervision, we introduce R-Few, a guided Self-Play Challenger-Solver framework that incorporates lightweight human oversight through in-context grounding and mixed training. At each iteration, the Challenger samples a small set of human-labeled examples to guide synthetic question generation, while the Solver jointly trains on human and synthetic examples under an online, difficulty-based curriculum. Across math and general reasoning benchmarks, R-Few achieves consistent and iterative improvements. For example, Qwen3-8B-Base improves by +3.0 points over R-Zero on math tasks and achieves performance on par with General-Reasoner, despite the latter being trained on 20 times more human data. Ablation studies confirm the complementary contributions of grounded challenger training and curriculum-based solver training, and further analysis shows that R-Few mitigates drift, yielding more stable and controllable co-evolutionary dynamics.

Cell clustering is crucial for uncovering cellular heterogeneity in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data by identifying cell types and marker genes. Despite its importance, benchmarks for scRNA-seq clustering methods remain fragmented, often lacking standardized protocols and failing to incorporate recent advances in artificial intelligence. To fill these gaps, we present scCluBench, a comprehensive benchmark of clustering algorithms for scRNA-seq data. First, scCluBench provides 36 scRNA-seq datasets collected from diverse public sources, covering multiple tissues, which are uniformly processed and standardized to ensure consistency for systematic evaluation and downstream analyses. To evaluate performance, we collect and reproduce a range of scRNA-seq clustering methods, including traditional, deep learning-based, graph-based, and biological foundation models. We comprehensively evaluate each method both quantitatively and qualitatively, using core performance metrics as well as visualization analyses. Furthermore, we construct representative downstream biological tasks, such as marker gene identification and cell type annotation, to further assess the practical utility. scCluBench then investigates the performance differences and applicability boundaries of various clustering models across diverse analytical tasks, systematically assessing their robustness and scalability in real-world scenarios. Overall, scCluBench offers a standardized and user-friendly benchmark for scRNA-seq clustering, with curated datasets, unified evaluation protocols, and transparent analyses, facilitating informed method selection and providing valuable insights into model generalizability and application scope.

Autonomous Vehicles (AV) and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) have been revolutionized by Deep Learning. As a data-driven approach, Deep Learning relies on vast amounts of driving data, typically labeled in great detail. As a result, datasets, alongside hardware and algorithms, are foundational building blocks for the development of AVs. In this work we revisit one of the most widely used autonomous driving datasets: the nuScenes dataset. nuScenes exemplifies key trends in AV development, being the first dataset to include radar data, to feature diverse urban driving scenes from two continents, and to be collected using a fully autonomous vehicle operating on public roads, while also promoting multi-modal sensor fusion, standardized benchmarks, and a broad range of tasks including perception, localization \& mapping, prediction and planning. We provide an unprecedented look into the creation of nuScenes, as well as its extensions nuImages and Panoptic nuScenes, summarizing many technical details that have hitherto not been revealed in academic publications. Furthermore, we trace how the influence of nuScenes impacted a large number of other datasets that were released later and how it defined numerous standards that are used by the community to this day. Finally, we present an overview of both official and unofficial tasks using the nuScenes dataset and review major methodological developments, thereby offering a comprehensive survey of the autonomous driving literature, with a particular focus on nuScenes.

Solving complex or long-horizon problems often requires large language models (LLMs) to use external tools and operate over a significantly longer context window. New LLMs enable longer context windows and support tool calling capabilities. Prior works have focused mainly on evaluation of LLMs on long-context prompts, leaving agentic setup relatively unexplored, both from capability and safety perspectives. Our work addresses this gap. We find that LLM agents could be sensitive to length, type, and placement of the context, exhibiting unexpected and inconsistent shifts in task performance and in refusals to execute harmful requests. Models with 1M-2M token context windows show severe degradation already at 100K tokens, with performance drops exceeding 50\% for both benign and harmful tasks. Refusal rates shift unpredictably: GPT-4.1-nano increases from $\sim$5\% to $\sim$40\% while Grok 4 Fast decreases from $\sim$80\% to $\sim$10\% at 200K tokens. Our work shows potential safety issues with agents operating on longer context and opens additional questions on the current metrics and paradigm for evaluating LLM agent safety on long multi-step tasks. In particular, our results on LLM agents reveal a notable divergence in both capability and safety performance compared to prior evaluations of LLMs on similar criteria.

Discovering which tables in large, heterogeneous repositories can be joined and by what transformations is a central challenge in data integration and data discovery. Traditional join discovery methods are largely designed for equi-joins, which assume that join keys match exactly or nearly so. These techniques, while efficient in clean, well-normalized databases, fail in open or federated settings where identifiers are inconsistently formatted, embedded, or split across multiple columns. Approximate or fuzzy joins alleviate minor string variations but cannot capture systematic transformations. We introduce QJoin, a reinforcement-learning framework that learns and reuses transformation strategies across join tasks. QJoin trains an agent under a uniqueness-aware reward that balances similarity with key distinctiveness, enabling it to explore concise, high-value transformation chains. To accelerate new joins, we introduce two reuse mechanisms: (i) agent transfer, which initializes new policies from pretrained agents, and (ii) transformation reuse, which caches successful operator sequences for similar column clusters. On the AutoJoin Web benchmark (31 table pairs), QJoin achieves an average F1-score of 91.0%. For 19,990 join tasks in NYC+Chicago open datasets, Qjoin reduces runtime by up to 7.4% (13,747 s) by using reusing. These results demonstrate that transformation learning and reuse can make join discovery both more accurate and more efficient.

Adapting large pre-trained models to unseen tasks under tight data and compute budgets remains challenging. Meta-learning approaches explicitly learn good initializations, but they require an additional meta-training phase over many tasks, incur high training cost, and can be unstable. At the same time, the number of task-specific pre-trained models continues to grow, yet the question of how to transfer them to new tasks with minimal additional training remains relatively underexplored. We propose BOLT (Basis-Oriented Low-rank Transfer), a framework that reuses existing fine-tuned models not by merging weights, but instead by extracting an orthogonal, task-informed spectral basis and adapting within that subspace. In the offline phase, BOLT collects dominant singular directions from multiple task vectors and orthogonalizes them per layer to form reusable bases. In the online phase, we freeze these bases and train only a small set of diagonal coefficients per layer for the new task, yielding a rank-controlled update with very few trainable parameters. This design provides (i) a strong, training-free initialization for unseen tasks, obtained by pooling source-task coefficients, along with a lightweight rescaling step while leveraging the shared orthogonal bases, and (ii) a parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) path that, in our experiments, achieves robust performance compared to common PEFT baselines as well as a representative meta-learned initialization. Our results show that constraining adaptation to a task-informed orthogonal subspace provides an effective alternative for unseen-task transfer.

As a representative optic degenerative condition, glaucoma has been a threat to millions due to its irreversibility and severe impact on human vision fields. Mainly characterized by dimmed and blurred visions, or peripheral vision loss, glaucoma is well known to occur due to damages in the optic nerve from increased intraocular pressure (IOP) or neovascularization within the retina. Traditionally, most glaucoma related works and clinical diagnosis focused on detecting these damages in the optic nerve by using patient data from perimetry tests, optic papilla inspections and tonometer-based IOP measurements. Recently, with advancements in computer vision AI models, such as VGG16 or Vision Transformers (ViT), AI-automatized glaucoma detection and optic cup segmentation based on retinal fundus images or OCT recently exhibited significant performance in aiding conventional diagnosis with high performance. However, current AI-driven glaucoma detection approaches still have significant room for improvement in terms of reliability, excessive parameter usage, possibility of spurious correlation within detection, and limitations in applications to intervention analysis or clinical simulations. Thus, this research introduced a novel causal representation driven glaucoma detection model: LightHCG, an extremely lightweight Convolutional VAE-based latent glaucoma representation model that can consider the true causality among glaucoma-related physical factors within the optic nerve region. Using HSIC-based latent space disentanglement and Graph Autoencoder based unsupervised causal representation learning, LightHCG not only exhibits higher performance in classifying glaucoma with 93~99% less weights, but also enhances the possibility of AI-driven intervention analysis, compared to existing advanced vision models such as InceptionV3, MobileNetV2 or VGG16.

Recent advances in general-purpose AI systems with attention-based transformers offer a potential window into how the neocortex and cerebellum, despite their relatively uniform circuit architectures, give rise to diverse functions and, ultimately, to human intelligence. This Perspective provides a cross-domain comparison between the brain and AI that goes beyond the traditional focus on visual processing, adopting the emerging perspecive of world-model-based computation. Here, we identify shared computational mechanisms in the attention-based neocortex and the non-attentional cerebellum: both predict future world events from past inputs and construct internal world models through prediction-error learning. These predictive world models are repurposed for seemingly distinct functions -- understanding in sensory processing and generation in motor processing -- enabling the brain to achieve multi-domain capabilities and human-like adaptive intelligence. Notably, attention-based AI has independently converged on a similar learning paradigm and world-model-based computation. We conclude that these shared mechanisms in both biological and artificial systems constitute a core computational foundation for realizing diverse functions including high-level intelligence, despite their relatively uniform circuit structures. Our theoretical insights bridge neuroscience and AI, advancing our understanding of the computational essence of intelligence.

World models have gained significant attention as a promising approach for autonomous driving. By emulating human-like perception and decision-making processes, these models can predict and adapt to dynamic environments. Existing methods typically map high-dimensional observations into compact latent spaces and learn optimal policies within these latent representations. However, prior work usually jointly learns ego-vehicle dynamics and environmental transition dynamics from the image input, leading to inefficiencies and a lack of robustness to variations in vehicle dynamics. To address these issues, we propose the Vehicle Dynamics embedded Dreamer (VDD) method, which decouples the modeling of ego-vehicle dynamics from environmental transition dynamics. This separation allows the world model to generalize effectively across vehicles with diverse parameters. Additionally, we introduce two strategies to further enhance the robustness of the learned policy: Policy Adjustment during Deployment (PAD) and Policy Augmentation during Training (PAT). Comprehensive experiments in simulated environments demonstrate that the proposed model significantly improves both driving performance and robustness to variations in vehicle dynamics, outperforming existing approaches.