Numerous studies have demonstrated that the Transformer architecture possesses the capability for in-context learning (ICL). In scenarios involving function approximation, context can serve as a control parameter for the model, endowing it with the universal approximation property (UAP). In practice, context is represented by tokens from a finite set, referred to as a vocabulary, which is the case considered in this paper, \emph{i.e.}, vocabulary in-context learning (VICL). We demonstrate that VICL in single-layer Transformers, without positional encoding, does not possess the UAP; however, it is possible to achieve the UAP when positional encoding is included. Several sufficient conditions for the positional encoding are provided. Our findings reveal the benefits of positional encoding from an approximation theory perspective in the context of ICL.

Gaze understanding unifies the detection of people, their gaze targets, and objects of interest into a single framework, offering critical insight into visual attention and intent estimation. Although prior research has modelled gaze cues in visual scenes, a unified system is still needed for gaze understanding using both visual and language prompts. This paper introduces GazeVLM, a novel Vision-Language Model (VLM) for multi-task gaze understanding in images, addressing person detection, gaze target detection, and gaze object identification. While other transformer-based methods exist for gaze analysis, GazeVLM represents, to our knowledge, the first application of a VLM to these combined tasks, allowing for selective execution of each task. Through the integration of visual (RGB and depth) and textual modalities, our ablation study on visual input combinations revealed that a fusion of RGB images with HHA-encoded depth maps, guided by text prompts, yields superior performance. We also introduce an object-level gaze detection metric for gaze object identification ($AP_{ob}$). Through experiments, GazeVLM demonstrates significant improvements, notably achieving state-of-the-art evaluation scores on GazeFollow and VideoAttentionTarget datasets.

In the time-series domain, an increasing number of works combine text with temporal data to leverage the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for various downstream time-series understanding tasks. This enables a single model to flexibly perform tasks that previously required specialized models for each domain. However, these methods typically rely on text labels for supervision during training, biasing the model toward textual cues while potentially neglecting the full temporal features. Such a bias can lead to outputs that contradict the underlying time-series context. To address this issue, we construct the EvalTS benchmark, comprising 10 tasks across three difficulty levels, from fundamental temporal pattern recognition to complex real-world reasoning, to evaluate models under more challenging and realistic scenarios. We also propose TimeSense, a multimodal framework that makes LLMs proficient in time-series analysis by balancing textual reasoning with a preserved temporal sense. TimeSense incorporates a Temporal Sense module that reconstructs the input time-series within the model's context, ensuring that textual reasoning is grounded in the time-series dynamics. Moreover, to enhance spatial understanding of time-series data, we explicitly incorporate coordinate-based positional embeddings, which provide each time point with spatial context and enable the model to capture structural dependencies more effectively. Experimental results demonstrate that TimeSense achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple tasks, and it particularly outperforms existing methods on complex multi-dimensional time-series reasoning tasks.

While context-based detectors have achieved strong generalization for AI-generated text by measuring distributional inconsistencies, image-based detectors still struggle with overfitting to generator-specific artifacts. We introduce CINEMAE, a novel paradigm for AIGC image detection that adapts the core principles of text detection methods to the visual domain. Our key insight is that Masked AutoEncoder (MAE), trained to reconstruct masked patches conditioned on visible context, naturally encodes semantic consistency expectations. We formalize this reconstruction process probabilistically, computing conditional Negative Log-Likelihood (NLL, p(masked | visible)) to quantify local semantic anomalies. By aggregating these patch-level statistics with global MAE features through learned fusion, CINEMAE achieves strong cross-generator generalization. Trained exclusively on Stable Diffusion v1.4, our method achieves over 95% accuracy on all eight unseen generators in the GenImage benchmark, substantially outperforming state-of-the-art detectors. This demonstrates that context-conditional reconstruction uncertainty provides a robust, transferable signal for AIGC detection.

Emerging continual learning applications necessitate next-generation neural processing unit (NPU) platforms to support both training and inference operations. The promising Microscaling (MX) standard enables narrow bit-widths for inference and large dynamic ranges for training. However, existing MX multiply-accumulate (MAC) designs face a critical trade-off: integer accumulation requires expensive conversions from narrow floating-point products, while FP32 accumulation suffers from quantization losses and costly normalization. To address these limitations, we propose a hybrid precision-scalable reduction tree for MX MACs that combines the benefits of both approaches, enabling efficient mixed-precision accumulation with controlled accuracy relaxation. Moreover, we integrate an 8x8 array of these MACs into the state-of-the-art (SotA) NPU integration platform, SNAX, to provide efficient control and data transfer to our optimized precision-scalable MX datapath. We evaluate our design both on MAC and system level and compare it to the SotA. Our integrated system achieves an energy efficiency of 657, 1438-1675, and 4065 GOPS/W, respectively, for MXINT8, MXFP8/6, and MXFP4, with a throughput of 64, 256, and 512 GOPS.

Recent reasoning-first models (e.g., OpenAI o1, DeepSeek R1) have spurred a resurgence of interest in RLVR. Nevertheless, advances are dominated by mathematics (e.g., AIME), with competitive-programming code generation underexplored and data curation receiving less attention than RL algorithm design. We investigate how to construct RLVR datasets (i.e., RL prompts) and present practical training techniques that yield strong performance on competitive-programming code generation. Our pipeline begins with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) distilled from strong open-source models, augmented with general-purpose and reasoning-intensive data. RL then follows a two-stage process with executable, testcase-driven rewards: first, training on a large, uniformly distributed set of competitive-programming problems using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with 8 rollouts per prompt and a relatively short response-generation window (e.g., 32k during SFT and 24k in this stage) to expand entropy and mitigate repetition and truncation; second, we perform \textbf{Pre-GRPO}: updating on a small, high-quality set of challenging problems with a large rollout budget (64 rollouts per prompt) under a hard-focus curriculum that continuously retains the most difficult instances throughout training. We implement our method on Qwen2.5-32B and evaluate on LeetCode and Codeforces weekly contests to avoid data leakage. The resulting model achieves state-of-the-art performance among models of similar scale and is comparable to leading systems such as DeepSeek v3.1 and Doubao-1.5-Thinking. We also examine scaling trends and observe strong RL scaling on an internal large-scale MoE model. Our study distills concise best practices for data curation, entropy expansion, and curriculum design in RLVR for competitive-programming code generation.

Multimodal Misinformation Detection (MMD) refers to the task of detecting social media posts involving misinformation, where the post often contains text and image modalities. However, by observing the MMD posts, we hold that the text modality may be much more informative than the image modality because the text generally describes the whole event/story of the current post but the image often presents partial scenes only. Our preliminary empirical results indicate that the image modality exactly contributes less to MMD. Upon this idea, we propose a new MMD method named RETSIMD. Specifically, we suppose that each text can be divided into several segments, and each text segment describes a partial scene that can be presented by an image. Accordingly, we split the text into a sequence of segments, and feed these segments into a pre-trained text-to-image generator to augment a sequence of images. We further incorporate two auxiliary objectives concerning text-image and image-label mutual information, and further post-train the generator over an auxiliary text-to-image generation benchmark dataset. Additionally, we propose a graph structure by defining three heuristic relationships between images, and use a graph neural network to generate the fused features. Extensive empirical results validate the effectiveness of RETSIMD.

Abstract--Accurate prediction of financial and electricity markets, especially under extreme conditions, remains a significant challenge due to their intrinsic nonlinearity, rapid fluctuations, and chaotic patterns. T o address these limitations, we propose the Chaotic Oscillatory Transformer Network (COTN). COTN innovatively combines a Transformer architecture with a novel Lee Oscillator activation function, processed through Max-over-Time pooling and a λ-gating mechanism. This design is specifically tailored to effectively capture chaotic dynamics and improve responsiveness during periods of heightened volatility, where conventional activation functions (e.g., ReLU, GELU) tend to saturate. Furthermore, COTN incorporates an Autoencoder Self-Regressive (ASR) module to detect and isolate abnormal market patterns, such as sudden price spikes or crashes, thereby preventing corruption of the core prediction process and enhancing robustness. Extensive experiments across electricity spot markets and financial markets demonstrate the practical applicability and resilience of COTN. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning models like Informer by up to 17% and traditional statistical methods like GARCH by as much as 40%. These results underscore COTN's effectiveness in navigating real-world market uncertainty and complexity, offering a powerful tool for forecasting highly volatile systems under duress.

Drug-target interaction (DTI) prediction is of great significance for drug discovery and drug repurposing. With the accumulation of a large volume of valuable data, data-driven methods have been increasingly harnessed to predict DTIs, reducing costs across various dimensions. Therefore, this paper proposes a $\textbf{L}$arge $\textbf{L}$anguage $\textbf{M}$odel and $\textbf{M}$ulti-$\textbf{M}$odel data co-powered $\textbf{D}$rug $\textbf{T}$arget $\textbf{I}$nteraction prediction framework, named LLM$^3$-DTI. LLM$^3$-DTI constructs multi-modal data embedding to enhance DTI prediction performance. In this framework, the text semantic embeddings of drugs and targets are encoded by a domain-specific LLM. To effectively align and fuse multi-modal embedding. We propose the dual cross-attention mechanism and the TSFusion module. Finally, these multi-modal data are utilized for the DTI task through an output network. The experimental results indicate that LLM$^3$-DTI can proficiently identify validated DTIs, surpassing the performance of the models employed for comparison across diverse scenarios. Consequently, LLM$^3$-DTI is adept at fulfilling the task of DTI prediction with excellence. The data and code are available at https://github.com/chaser-gua/LLM3DTI.

Deep learning algorithms are becoming an essential component of many artificial intelligence (AI) driven applications, many of which run on resource-constrained and energy-constrained systems. For efficient deployment of these algorithms, although different techniques for the compression of neural network models are proposed, neural pruning is one of the fastest and effective methods, which can provide a high compression gain with minimal cost. To harness enhanced performance gain with respect to model complexity, we propose a novel neural network pruning approach utilizing Hessian-vector products that approximate crucial curvature information in the loss function, which significantly reduces the computation demands. By employing a power iteration method, our algorithm effectively identifies and preserves the essential information, ensuring a balanced trade-off between model accuracy and computational efficiency. Herein, we introduce CAMP-HiVe, a cyclic pair merging-based pruning with Hessian Vector approximation by iteratively consolidating weight pairs, combining significant and less significant weights, thus effectively streamlining the model while preserving its performance. This dynamic, adaptive framework allows for real-time adjustment of weight significance, ensuring that only the most critical parameters are retained. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves significant reductions in computational requirements while maintaining high performance across different neural network architectures, e.g., ResNet18, ResNet56, and MobileNetv2, on standard benchmark datasets, e.g., CIFAR10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet, and it outperforms the existing state-of-the-art neural pruning methods.