Incomplete data are common in real-world tabular applications, where numerical, categorical, and discrete attributes coexist within a single dataset. This heterogeneous structure presents significant challenges for existing diffusion-based imputation models, which typically assume a homogeneous feature space and rely on stochastic denoising trajectories. Such assumptions make it difficult to maintain conditional consistency, and they often lead to information collapse for categorical variables or instability when numerical variables require deterministic updates. These limitations indicate that a single diffusion process is insufficient for mixed-type tabular imputation. We propose a hybrid deterministic diffusion framework that separates heterogeneous features into two complementary generative channels. A continuous DDIM-based channel provides efficient and stable deterministic denoising for numerical variables, while a discrete latent-path diffusion channel, inspired by loopholing-based discrete diffusion, models categorical and discrete features without leaving their valid sample manifolds. The two channels are trained under a unified conditional imputation objective, enabling coherent reconstruction of mixed-type incomplete data. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets show that the proposed framework achieves higher imputation accuracy, more stable sampling trajectories, and improved robustness across MCAR, MAR, and MNAR settings compared with existing diffusion-based and classical methods. These results demonstrate the importance of structure-aware diffusion processes for advancing deep learning approaches to incomplete tabular data.

Bridging continuous perceptual signals and discrete symbolic reasoning is a fundamental challenge in AI systems that must operate under uncertainty. We present a neuro-symbolic framework that explicitly models and propagates uncertainty from perception to planning, providing a principled connection between these two abstraction levels. Our approach couples a transformer-based perceptual front-end with graph neural network (GNN) relational reasoning to extract probabilistic symbolic states from visual observations, and an uncertainty-aware symbolic planner that actively gathers information when confidence is low. We demonstrate the framework's effectiveness on tabletop robotic manipulation as a concrete application: the translator processes 10,047 PyBullet-generated scenes (3--10 objects) and outputs probabilistic predicates with calibrated confidences (overall F1=0.68). When embedded in the planner, the system achieves 94\%/90\%/88\% success on Simple Stack, Deep Stack, and Clear+Stack benchmarks (90.7\% average), exceeding the strongest POMDP baseline by 10--14 points while planning within 15\,ms. A probabilistic graphical-model analysis establishes a quantitative link between calibrated uncertainty and planning convergence, providing theoretical guarantees that are validated empirically. The framework is general-purpose and can be applied to any domain requiring uncertainty-aware reasoning from perceptual input to symbolic planning.

The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) is designed to promote research on abstract reasoning, a fundamental aspect of human intelligence. Common approaches to ARC treat it as a language-oriented problem, addressed by large language models (LLMs) or recurrent reasoning models. However, although the puzzle-like tasks in ARC are inherently visual, existing research has rarely approached the problem from a vision-centric perspective. In this work, we formulate ARC within a vision paradigm, framing it as an image-to-image translation problem. T o incorporate visual priors, we represent the inputs on a "canvas" that can be processed like natural images. It is then natural for us to apply standard vision architectures, such as a vanilla Vision Transformer (ViT), to perform image-to-image mapping. Our model is trained from scratch solely on ARC data and generalizes to unseen tasks through test-time training. Our framework, termed Vision ARC (V ARC), achieves 60.4% accuracy on the ARC-1 benchmark, substantially outperforming existing methods that are also trained from scratch. Our results are competitive with those of leading LLMs and close the gap to average human performance.

Spatiotemporal data mining (STDM) has a wide range of applications in various complex physical systems (CPS), i.e., transportation, manufacturing, healthcare, etc. Among all the proposed methods, the Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (ConvLSTM) has proved to be generalizable and extendable in different applications and has multiple variants achieving state-of-the-art performance in various STDM applications. However, ConvLSTM and its variants are computationally expensive, which makes them inapplicable in edge devices with limited computational resources. With the emerging need for edge computing in CPS, efficient AI is essential to reduce the computational cost while preserving the model performance. Common methods of efficient AI are developed to reduce redundancy in model capacity (i.e., model pruning, compression, etc.). However, spatiotemporal data mining naturally requires extensive model capacity, as the embedded dependencies in spatiotemporal data are complex and hard to capture, which limits the model redundancy. Instead, there is a fairly high level of data and feature redundancy that introduces an unnecessary computational burden, which has been largely overlooked in existing research. Therefore, we developed a novel framework SparseST, that pioneered in exploiting data sparsity to develop an efficient spatiotemporal model. In addition, we explore and approximate the Pareto front between model performance and computational efficiency by designing a multi-objective composite loss function, which provides a practical guide for practitioners to adjust the model according to computational resource constraints and the performance requirements of downstream tasks.

Deep learning's rise since the early 2010s has transformed fields like computer vision and natural language processing and strongly influenced biomedical research. For drug discovery specifically, a key inflection - akin to vision's "ImageNet moment" - arrived in 2015, when deep neural networks surpassed traditional approaches on the Tox21 Data Challenge. This milestone accelerated the adoption of deep learning across the pharmaceutical industry, and today most major companies have integrated these methods into their research pipelines. After the Tox21 Challenge concluded, its dataset was included in several established benchmarks, such as MoleculeNet and the Open Graph Benchmark. However, during these integrations, the dataset was altered and labels were imputed or manufactured, resulting in a loss of comparability across studies. Consequently, the extent to which bioactivity and toxicity prediction methods have improved over the past decade remains unclear. To this end, we introduce a reproducible leaderboard, hosted on Hugging Face with the original Tox21 Challenge dataset, together with a set of baseline and representative methods. The current version of the leaderboard indicates that the original Tox21 winner - the ensemble-based DeepTox method - and the descriptor-based self-normalizing neural networks introduced in 2017, continue to perform competitively and rank among the top methods for toxicity prediction, leaving it unclear whether substantial progress in toxicity prediction has been achieved over the past decade. As part of this work, we make all baselines and evaluated models publicly accessible for inference via standardized API calls to Hugging Face Spaces.

Online ratings influence customer decision-making, yet standard aggregation methods, such as the sample mean, fail to adapt to quality changes over time and ignore review heterogeneity (e.g., review sentiment, a review's helpfulness). To address these challenges, we demonstrate the value of using the Gaussian process (GP) framework for rating aggregation. Specifically, we present a tailored GP model that captures the dynamics of ratings over time while additionally accounting for review heterogeneity. Based on 121,123 ratings from Yelp, we compare the predictive power of different rating aggregation methods in predicting future ratings, thereby finding that the GP model is considerably more accurate and reduces the mean absolute error by 10.2% compared to the sample mean. Our findings have important implications for marketing practitioners and customers. By moving beyond means, designers of online reputation systems can display more informative and adaptive aggregated rating scores that are accurate signals of expected customer satisfaction.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown a remarkable ability to generalize beyond their pre-training data, and fine-tuning LLMs can elevate performance to human-level and beyond. However, in real-world scenarios, lacking labeled data often prevents practitioners from obtaining well-performing models, thereby forcing practitioners to highly rely on prompt-based approaches that are often tedious, inefficient, and driven by trial and error. To alleviate this issue of lacking labeled data, we present a learning framework integrating LLMs with active learning for unlabeled dataset (LAUD). LAUD mitigates the cold-start problem by constructing an initial label set with zero-shot learning. Experimental results show that LLMs derived from LAUD outperform LLMs with zero-shot or few-shot learning on commodity name classification tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of LAUD.

Adaptive optimizers with decoupled weight decay, such as AdamW, are the de facto standard for pre-training large transformer-based generative models. Yet the quadratic nature of the $\ell_2$ penalty embedded in weight decay drives all parameters toward the origin at the same rate, making the update vulnerable to rare but extreme gradient directions and often over-penalizing well-conditioned coordinates. We propose AdamHuberDecay, a drop-in replacement for AdamW that substitutes the $\ell_2$ penalty with a decoupled smooth Huber regularizer. The resulting update decays parameters quadratically while their magnitude remains below a threshold $δ$, and linearly ($\ell_1$-like) once they exceed $δ$, yielding (i) bounded regularization gradients, (ii) invariance to per-coordinate second-moment rescaling, and (iii) stronger sparsity pressure on overgrown weights. We derive the closed-form decoupled Huber decay step and show how to integrate it with any Adam-family optimizer at $O(1)$ extra cost. Extensive experiments on GPT-2 and GPT-3 pre-training demonstrate that AdamHuberDecay (a) converges 10-15% faster in wall-clock time, (b) reduces validation perplexity by up to 4 points, (c) delivers performance improvements of 2.5-4.7% across downstream tasks, and (d) yields visibly sparser weight histograms that translate into 20-30% memory savings after magnitude pruning, without tuning the decay coefficient beyond the default grid used for AdamW. Ablations confirm robustness to outlier gradients and large-batch regimes, together with theoretical analyses that bound the expected parameter norm under noisy updates. AdamHuberDecay therefore provides a simple, principled path toward more efficient and resilient training of next-generation foundational generative transformers.

We propose an approach to enhancing synthetic video realism, which can re-render synthetic videos from a simulator in photorealistic fashion. Our realism enhancement approach is a zero-shot framework that focuses on preserving the multi-level structures from synthetic videos into the enhanced one in both spatial and temporal domains, built upon a diffusion video foundational model without further fine-tuning. Specifically, we incorporate an effective modification to have the generation/denoising process conditioned on estimated structure-aware information from the synthetic video, such as depth maps, semantic maps, and edge maps, by an auxiliary model, rather than extracting the information from a simulator. This guidance ensures that the enhanced videos are consistent with the original synthetic video at both the structural and semantic levels. Our approach is a simple yet general and powerful approach to enhancing synthetic video realism: we show that our approach outperforms existing baselines in structural consistency with the original video while maintaining state-of-the-art photorealism quality in our experiments.

We investigate tokenization strategies for Kurdish word embeddings by comparing word-level, morpheme-based, and BPE approaches on morphological similarity preservation tasks. We develop a BiLSTM-CRF morphological segmenter using bootstrapped training from minimal manual annotation and evaluate Word2Vec embeddings across comprehensive metrics including similarity preservation, clustering quality, and semantic organization. Our analysis reveals critical evaluation biases in tokenization comparison. While BPE initially appears superior in morphological similarity, it evaluates only 28.6\% of test cases compared to 68.7\% for morpheme model, creating artificial performance inflation. When assessed comprehensively, morpheme-based tokenization demonstrates superior embedding space organization, better semantic neighborhood structure, and more balanced coverage across morphological complexity levels. These findings highlight the importance of coverage-aware evaluation in low-resource language processing and offers different tokenization methods for low-resourced language processing.