The extensive adoption of Deep Neural Networks has led to their increased utilization in challenging scientific visualization tasks. Recent advancements in building compressed data models using implicit neural representations have shown promising results for tasks like spatiotemporal volume visualization and super-resolution. Inspired by these successes, we develop compressed neural representations for multivariate datasets containing tens to hundreds of variables. Our approach utilizes a single network to learn representations for all data variables simultaneously through parameter sharing. This allows us to achieve state-of-the-art data compression. Through comprehensive evaluations, we demonstrate superior performance in terms of reconstructed data quality, rendering and visualization quality, preservation of dependency information among variables, and storage efficiency.

Subword tokenization methods like Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) are widely used in large language models due to their balance of vocabulary compactness and representational power. However, they suffer from inefficiencies in representing rare words and require large embedding matrices. Character-level models address these issues but introduce performance bottlenecks, particularly in Transformer-based architectures. Recent hierarchical models attempt to merge the benefits of both paradigms by grouping characters into patches, but existing patching strategies either rely on whitespace-limiting applicability to certain languages, or require auxiliary models that introduce new dependencies. In this paper, we propose a dynamic character grouping method that leverages the structure of existing BPE tokenization without requiring additional models. By appending explicit end-of-patch markers to BPE tokens and introducing a second-level BPE compression stage to control patch granularity, our method offers efficient, flexible, and language-agnostic representations. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach matches or exceeds the performance of dynamic entropy- and whitespace-based patching strategies, while maintaining a compact vocabulary.

The concept of knowledge distillation (KD) describes the training of a student model from a teacher model and is a widely adopted technique in deep learning. However, it is still not clear how and why distillation works. Previous studies focus on two central aspects of distillation: model size, and generalisation. In this work we study distillation in a third dimension: dataset size. We present a suite of experiments across a wide range of datasets, tasks and neural architectures, demonstrating that the effect of distillation is not only preserved but amplified in low-data regimes. We call this newly discovered property the data efficiency of distillation. Equipped with this new perspective, we test the predictive power of existing theories of KD as we vary the dataset size. Our results disprove the hypothesis that distillation can be understood as label smoothing, and provide further evidence in support of the dark knowledge hypothesis. Finally, we analyse the impact of modelling factors such as the objective, scale and relative number of samples on the observed phenomenon. Ultimately, this work reveals that the dataset size may be a fundamental but overlooked variable in the mechanisms underpinning distillation.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been pivotal in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but it often suffers from limited exploration and entropy collapse, where models exploit a narrow set of solutions, leading to a loss of sampling diversity and subsequently preventing RL from further improving performance. This issue is exacerbated in parallel sampling methods, where multiple outputs are drawn from the same distribution, potentially causing the model to converge to similar solutions. We propose SESA, a novel SEquential SAmpling framework that mitigates this challenge by generating diverse solution sketches sequentially before expanding them into full reasoning paths. This approach ensures broader exploration by conditioning each new output on previous ones, promoting diversity throughout the process and preventing policy collapse. Our experiments on a synthetic task show that sequential sampling consistently outperforms traditional RL methods in terms of path diversity and recovery from collapse. Further evaluations on real-world tasks demonstrate that SESA improves both the exploration of valid strategies and the overall performance of LLMs. On three agent benchmarks, SESA lifts success rates by $+0.25$, $+0.42$, and $+0.07$ absolute over the base model (up to an additional $211\%$ relative improvement over baseline RL), underscoring its exploration advantage. This work introduces a structured approach to exploration, paving the way for more effective and diverse reasoning in RL-trained LLMs. Our code is released at https://github.com/MuLabPKU/sesa.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate code, but can they generate fast code? In this paper, we study this question using a dataset of 65 real-world tasks mined from open-source Java programs. We specifically select tasks where developers achieved significant speedups, and employ an automated pipeline to generate patches for these issues using two leading LLMs under four prompt variations. By rigorously benchmarking the results against the baseline and human-authored solutions, we demonstrate that LLM-generated code indeed improves performance over the baseline in most cases. However, patches proposed by human developers outperform LLM fixes by a statistically significant margin, indicating that LLMs often fall short of finding truly optimal solutions. We further find that LLM solutions are semantically identical or similar to the developer optimization idea in approximately two-thirds of cases, whereas they propose a more original idea in the remaining one-third. However, these original ideas only occasionally yield substantial performance gains.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to map the body of scholarly literature at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI), analytics and sports and thereafter, leverage the insights generated to chart guideposts for future research. Design/methodology/approach: The study carries out systematic literature review (SLR). Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) protocol is leveraged to identify 204 journal articles pertaining to utilization of AI and analytics in sports published during 2002 to 2024. We follow it up with extraction of the latent topics from sampled articles by leveraging the topic modelling technique of BERTopic. Findings: The study identifies the following as predominant areas of extant research on usage of AI and analytics in sports: performance modelling, physical and mental health, social media sentiment analysis, and tactical tracking. Each extracted topic is further examined in terms of its relative prominence, representative studies, and key term associations. Drawing on these insights, the study delineates promising avenues for future inquiry. Research limitations/implications: The study offers insights to academicians and sports administrators on transformational impact of AI and analytics in sports. Originality/value: The study introduces BERTopic as a novel approach for extracting latent structures in sports research, thereby advancing both scholarly understanding and the methodological toolkit of the field.

Source code clones pose risks ranging from intellectual property violations to unintended vulnerabilities. Effective and efficient scalable clone detection, especially for diverged clones, remains challenging. Large language models (LLMs) have recently been applied to clone detection tasks. However, the rapid emergence of LLMs raises questions about optimal model selection and potential LLM-ensemble efficacy. This paper addresses the first question by identifying 76 LLMs and filtering them down to suitable candidates for large-scale clone detection. The candidates were evaluated on two public industrial datasets, BigCloneBench, and a commercial large-scale dataset. No uniformly 'best-LLM' emerged, though CodeT5+110M, CuBERT and SPTCode were top-performers. Analysis of LLM-candidates suggested that smaller embedding sizes, smaller tokenizer vocabularies and tailored datasets are advantageous. On commercial large-scale dataset a top-performing CodeT5+110M achieved 39.71\% precision: twice the precision of previously used CodeBERT. To address the second question, this paper explores ensembling of the selected LLMs: effort-effective approach to improving effectiveness. Results suggest the importance of score normalization and favoring ensembling methods like maximum or sum over averaging. Also, findings indicate that ensembling approach can be statistically significant and effective on larger datasets: the best-performing ensemble achieved even higher precision of 46.91\% over individual LLM on the commercial large-scale code.

Mobile agents rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) to plan and execute tasks on smartphone user interfaces (UIs). While cloud-based LLMs achieve high task accuracy, they require uploading the full UI state at every step, exposing unnecessary and often irrelevant information. In contrast, local LLMs avoid UI uploads but suffer from limited capacity, resulting in lower task success rates. We propose $\textbf{CORE}$, a $\textbf{CO}$llaborative framework that combines the strengths of cloud and local LLMs to $\textbf{R}$educe UI $\textbf{E}$xposure, while maintaining task accuracy for mobile agents. CORE comprises three key components: (1) $\textbf{Layout-aware block partitioning}$, which groups semantically related UI elements based on the XML screen hierarchy; (2) $\textbf{Co-planning}$, where local and cloud LLMs collaboratively identify the current sub-task; and (3) $\textbf{Co-decision-making}$, where the local LLM ranks relevant UI blocks, and the cloud LLM selects specific UI elements within the top-ranked block. CORE further introduces a multi-round accumulation mechanism to mitigate local misjudgment or limited context. Experiments across diverse mobile apps and tasks show that CORE reduces UI exposure by up to 55.6% while maintaining task success rates slightly below cloud-only agents, effectively mitigating unnecessary privacy exposure to the cloud. The code is available at https://github.com/Entropy-Fighter/CORE.

In autonomous driving, dynamic environment and corner cases pose significant challenges to the robustness of ego vehicle's state understanding and decision making. We introduce VDRive, a novel pipeline for end-to-end autonomous driving that explicitly models state-action mapping to address these challenges, enabling interpretable and robust decision making. By leveraging the advancement of the state understanding of the Vision Language Action Model (VLA) with generative diffusion policy-based action head, our VDRive guides the driving contextually and geometrically. Contextually, VLA predicts future observations through token generation pre-training, where the observations are represented as discrete codes by a Conditional Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder (CVQ-VAE). Geometrically, we perform reinforcement learning fine-tuning of the VLA to predict future trajectories and actions based on current driving conditions. VLA supplies the current state tokens and predicted state tokens for the action policy head to generate hierarchical actions and trajectories. During policy training, a learned critic evaluates the actions generated by the policy and provides gradient-based feedback, forming an actor-critic framework that enables a reinforcement-based policy learning pipeline. Experiments show that our VDRive achieves state-of-the-art performance in the Bench2Drive closed-loop benchmark and nuScenes open-loop planning.

Long-form video reasoning remains a major challenge for Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs), as static uniform frame sampling leads to information dilution and obscures critical evidence. Furthermore, existing pixel-space video reasoning agents, which are designed to actively interact with the video to acquire new visual information, remain suboptimal due to their lack of rigorous reward mechanisms to enforce evidence purity and their inability to perform temporal information supplementation beyond pre-sampled frames. T o address this critical gap, we propose a novel evidence-prioritized adaptive framework built upon our core philosophy: "Select Less, Reason More. " Our core contribution is the evidence-aware reinforcement learning (EARL) framework, which transforms the model into an active interrogator of evidence. EARL is precisely engineered to dynamically select the most relevant frames and, crucially, to perform localized re-sampling around the selected key frames to access fine-grained temporal detail. Extensive experiments on five demanding video reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our EARLtrained model achieves new state-of-the-art among open-source Video LLMs, simultaneously learning an effective and high-purity visual evidence selection policy.