This study presents AutoOpt-11k, a unique image dataset of over 11,000 handwritten and printed mathematical optimization models corresponding to single-objective, multi-objective, multi-level, and stochastic optimization problems exhibiting various types of complexities such as non-linearity, nonconvexity, non-differentiability, discontinuity, and high-dimensionality. The labels consist of the LaTeX representation for all the images and modeling language representation for a subset of images. The dataset is created by 25 experts following ethical data creation guidelines and verified in two-phases to avoid errors. Further, we develop AutoOpt framework, a machine learning based automated approach for solving optimization problems, where the user just needs to provide an image of the formulation and AutoOpt solves it efficiently without any further human intervention. AutoOpt framework consists of three Modules: (i) M1 (Image_to_Text)- a deep learning model performs the Mathematical Expression Recognition (MER) task to generate the LaTeX code corresponding to the optimization formulation in image; (ii) M2 (Text_to_Text)- a small-scale fine-tuned LLM generates the PYOMO script (optimization modeling language) from LaTeX code; (iii) M3 (Optimization)- a Bilevel Optimization based Decomposition (BOBD) method solves the optimization formulation described in the PYOMO script. We use AutoOpt-11k dataset for training and testing of deep learning models employed in AutoOpt. The deep learning model for MER task (M1) outperforms ChatGPT, Gemini and Nougat on BLEU score metric. BOBD method (M3), which is a hybrid approach, yields better results on complex test problems compared to common approaches, like interior-point algorithm and genetic algorithm.

Generating hyperspectral images (HSIs) from RGB images through spectral reconstruction can significantly reduce the cost of HSI acquisition. In this paper, we propose a Fractal-Based Recursive Spectral Reconstruction Network (FRN), which differs from existing paradigms that attempt to directly integrate the full-spectrum information from the R, G, and B channels in a one-shot manner. Instead, it treats spectral reconstruction as a progressive process, predicting from broad to narrow bands or employing a coarse-to-fine approach for predicting the next wavelength. Inspired by fractals in mathematics, FRN establishes a novel spectral reconstruction paradigm by recursively invoking an atomic reconstruction module. In each invocation, only the spectral information from neighboring bands is used to provide clues for the generation of the image at the next wavelength, which follows the low-rank property of spectral data. Moreover, we design a band-aware state space model that employs a pixel-differentiated scanning strategy at different stages of the generation process, further suppressing interference from low-correlation regions caused by reflectance differences. Through extensive experimentation across different datasets, FRN achieves superior reconstruction performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/mongko007/frn.

Predicting protein function from sequence is a central challenge in computational biology. While existing methods rely heavily on structured ontologies or similaritybased techniques, they often lack the flexibility to express structure-free functional descriptions and novel biological functions. In this work, we introduce Prot2TextV2, a novel multimodal sequence-to-text model that generates free-form natural language descriptions of protein function directly from amino acid sequences. Our method combines a protein language model as a sequence encoder (ESM-3B) and a decoder-only language model (LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct)

Human social interactions depend on the ability to infer others' unspoken intentions, emotions, and beliefs--a cognitive skill grounded in the psychological concept of Theory of Mind (ToM). While large language models (LLMs) excel in semantic understanding tasks, they struggle with the ambiguity and contextual nuance inherent in human communication. To bridge this gap, we introduce MetaMind, a multiagent framework inspired by psychological theories of metacognition, designed to emulate human-like social reasoning. MetaMind decomposes social understanding into three collaborative stages: (1) a Theory-of-Mind Agent generates hypotheses about user mental states (e.g., intent, emotion), (2) a Moral Agent refines these hypotheses using cultural norms and ethical constraints, and (3) a Response Agent generates contextually appropriate responses while validating alignment with inferred intent. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance across three challenging benchmarks, with 35.7% improvement in real-world social scenarios and 6.2% gain in ToM reasoning. Notably, it enables LLMs to match human-level performance on key ToM tasks for the first time. Ablation studies confirm the necessity of all components, which showcase the framework's ability to balance contextual plausibility, social appropriateness, and user adaptation.

After pre-training, large language models are aligned with human preferences based on pairwise comparisons. State-of-the-art alignment methods (such as PPO-based RLHF and DPO) are built on the assumption of aligning with a single preference model, despite being deployed in settings where users have diverse preferences. As a result, it is not even clear that these alignment methods produce models that satisfy users on average -- a minimal requirement for pluralistic alignment. Drawing on social choice theory and modeling users' comparisons through individual BradleyTerry (BT) models, we introduce an alignment method's distortion: the worst-case ratio between the optimal achievable average utility, and the average utility of the learned policy. The notion of distortion helps draw sharp distinctions between alignment methods: Nash Learning from Human Feedback achieves the minimax optimal distortion of (12+o(1)) β (for the BT temperature β), robustly across utility distributions, distributions of comparison pairs, and permissible KL divergences from the reference policy. RLHF and DPO, by contrast, suffer (1 o(1)) β distortion already without a KL constraint, and eΩ(β) or even unbounded distortion in the full setting, depending on how comparison pairs are sampled.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit impressive performance, yet the integration of powerful vision encoders has significantly broadened their attack surface, rendering them increasingly susceptible to jailbreak attacks.

Visual personalization is essential in user-facing AI systems such as smart homes and healthcare, where aligning model behavior with user-centric concepts is critical. However, recent large Vision-Language Models (VLMs), despite their broad applicability, remain underexplored in their ability to adapt to individual users. In this paper, we introduce MMPB, the first extensive benchmark for evaluating VLMs on personalization. MMPB comprises 10k image-query pairs and includes 111 personalizable concepts across four categories: humans, animals, objects, and characters, with the human category enriched with preference-grounded queries.

Sperm whales communicate in short sequences of clicks known as codas. We present WhAM (Whale Acoustics Model), the first transformer-based model capable of generating synthetic sperm whale codas from any audio prompt. WhAM is built by finetuning VampNet, a masked acoustic token model pretrained on musical audio, using 10k coda recordings collected over the past two decades. Through iterative masked token prediction, WhAM generates high-fidelity synthetic codas that preserve key acoustic features of the source recordings. We evaluate WhAM's synthetic codas using Fréchet Audio Distance and through perceptual studies with expert marine biologists. On downstream classification tasks including rhythm, social unit, and vowel classification, WhAM's learned representations achieve strong performance, despite being trained for generation rather than classification.

Intracortical Brain-Computer Interfaces (iBCI) decode behavior from neural population activity to restore motor functions and communication abilities in individuals with motor impairments. A central challenge for long-term iBCI deployment is the nonstationarity of neural recordings, where the composition and tuning profiles of the recorded populations are unstable across recording sessions. Existing approaches attempt to address this issue by explicit alignment techniques; however, they rely on fixed neural identities and require test-time labels or parameter updates, limiting their generalization across sessions and imposing additional computational burden during deployment. In this work, we address the problem of cross-session nonstationarity in long-term iBCI systems and introduce SPINT a Spatial Permutation-Invariant Neural Transformer framework for behavioral decoding that operates directly on unordered sets of neural units. Central to our approach is a novel context-dependent positional embedding scheme that dynamically infers unit-specific identities, enabling flexible generalization across recording sessions. SPINT supports inference on variable-size populations and allows fewshot, gradient-free adaptation using a small amount of unlabeled data from the test session. We evaluate SPINT on three multi-session datasets from the FALCON Benchmark, covering continuous motor decoding tasks in human and non-human primates. SPINT demonstrates robust cross-session generalization, outperforming existing zero-shot and few-shot unsupervised baselines while eliminating the need for test-time alignment and fine-tuning. Our work contributes an initial step toward a robust and scalable neural decoding framework for long-term iBCI applications.

Autoregressive models have achieved significant success in image generation. However, unlike the inherent hierarchical structure of image information in the spectral domain, standard autoregressive methods typically generate pixels sequentially in a fixed spatial order. To better leverage this spectral hierarchy, we introduce NextFrequency Image Generation (NFIG). NFIG is a novel framework that decomposes the image generation process into multiple frequency-guided stages.