While diffusion language models (DLMs) have achieved competitive performance in text generation, improving their reasoning ability with reinforcement learning remains an active research area. Here, we introduce d2, a reasoning framework tailored for masked DLMs. Central to our framework is a new policy gradient algorithm that relies on properties of masking to accurately estimate the likelihoods of sampling trajectories. Our estimators trade off computation for approximation accuracy in an analytically tractable manner, and are particularly effective for DLMs that support any-order likelihood estimation. We characterize and study this property in popular DLMs and show that it is key for efficient diffusion-based reasoning. Empirically, d2 significantly improves over previous diffusion reasoning frameworks using only RL (without relying on supervised fine-tuning), and sets a new state-of-the-art performance for DLMs on logical reasoning tasks (Countdown and Sudoku) and math reasoning benchmarks (GSM8K and MATH500).

Group interactions occur in various real-world contexts, e.g., co-authorship, email communication, and online Q&A. In each group, there is often a particularly significant member, around whom the group is formed. Examples include the first or last author of a paper, the sender of an email, and the questioner in a Q&A session. In this work, we discuss the existence of such individuals in real-world group interactions. We call such individuals group anchors and study the problem of identifying them. First, we introduce the concept of group anchors and the identification problem. Then, we discuss our observations on group anchors in real-world group interactions. Based on our observations, we develop AnchorRadar, a fast and effective method for group anchor identification under realistic settings with label scarcity, i.e., when only a few groups have known anchors. AnchorRadar is a semi-supervised method using information from groups both with and without known group anchors. Finally, through extensive experiments on thirteen real-world datasets, we demonstrate the empirical superiority of AnchorRadar over various baselines w.r.t. accuracy and efficiency. In most cases, AnchorRadar achieves higher accuracy in group anchor identification than all the baselines, while using 10.2$\times$ less training time than the fastest baseline and 43.6$\times$ fewer learnable parameters than the most lightweight baseline on average.

Purpose: To develop a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system powered by LLaMA-4 109B for automated, protocol-aware, and interpretable evaluation of radiotherapy treatment plans. Methods and Materials: We curated a multi-protocol dataset of 614 radiotherapy plans across four disease sites and constructed a knowledge base containing normalized dose metrics and protocol-defined constraints. The RAG system integrates three core modules: a retrieval engine optimized across five SentenceTransformer backbones, a percentile prediction component based on cohort similarity, and a clinical constraint checker. These tools are directed by a large language model (LLM) using a multi-step prompt-driven reasoning pipeline to produce concise, grounded evaluations. Results: Retrieval hyperparameters were optimized using Gaussian Process on a scalarized loss function combining root mean squared error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and clinically motivated accuracy thresholds. The best configuration, based on all-MiniLM-L6-v2, achieved perfect nearest-neighbor accuracy within a 5-percentile-point margin and a sub-2pt MAE. When tested end-to-end, the RAG system achieved 100% agreement with the computed values by standalone retrieval and constraint-checking modules on both percentile estimates and constraint identification, confirming reliable execution of all retrieval, prediction and checking steps. Conclusion: Our findings highlight the feasibility of combining structured population-based scoring with modular tool-augmented reasoning for transparent, scalable plan evaluation in radiation therapy. The system offers traceable outputs, minimizes hallucination, and demonstrates robustness across protocols. Future directions include clinician-led validation, and improved domain-adapted retrieval models to enhance real-world integration.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) applications are built from specialized components -- inference servers, object storage, vector and graph databases, and user interfaces -- interconnected via web-based APIs. While these components are often containerized and deployed in cloud environments, such capabilities are still emerging at High-Performance Computing (HPC) centers. In this paper, we share our experience deploying GenAI workloads within an established HPC center, discussing the integration of HPC and cloud computing environments. We describe our converged computing architecture that integrates HPC and Kubernetes platforms running containerized GenAI workloads, helping with reproducibility. A case study illustrates the deployment of the Llama Large Language Model (LLM) using a containerized inference server (vLLM) across both Kubernetes and HPC platforms using multiple container runtimes. Our experience highlights practical considerations and opportunities for the HPC container community, guiding future research and tool development.

This paper introduces a deep learning approach for predicting time-dependent full-field damage in concrete. The study uses an auto-regressive U-Net model to predict the evolution of the scalar damage field in a unit cell given microstructural geometry and evolution of an imposed shrinkage profile. By sequentially using the predicted damage output as input for subsequent predictions, the model facilitates the continuous assessment of damage progression. Complementarily, a convolutional neural network (CNN) utilises the damage estimations to forecast key mechanical properties, including observed shrinkage and residual stiffness. The proposed dual-network architecture demonstrates high computational efficiency and robust predictive performance on the synthesised datasets. The approach reduces the computational load traditionally associated with full-field damage evaluations and is used to gain insights into the relationship between aggregate properties, such as shape, size, and distribution, and the effective shrinkage and reduction in stiffness. Ultimately, this can help to optimize concrete mix designs, leading to improved durability and reduced internal damage.

Influence estimation tools -- such as memorization scores -- are widely used to understand model behavior, attribute training data, and inform dataset curation. However, recent applications in data valuation and responsible machine learning raise the question: can these scores themselves be adversarially manipulated? In this work, we present a systematic study of the feasibility of attacking memorization-based influence estimators. We characterize attacks for producing highly memorized samples as highly sensitive queries in the regime where a trained algorithm is accurate. Our attack (calculating the pseudoinverse of the input) is practical, requiring only black-box access to model outputs and incur modest computational overhead. We empirically validate our attack across a wide suite of image classification tasks, showing that even state-of-the-art proxies are vulnerable to targeted score manipulations. In addition, we provide a theoretical analysis of the stability of memorization scores under adversarial perturbations, revealing conditions under which influence estimates are inherently fragile. Our findings highlight critical vulnerabilities in influence-based attribution and suggest the need for robust defenses. All code can be found at https://github.com/tuedo2/MemAttack

Deep learning methods for electronic-structure Hamiltonian prediction has offered significant computational efficiency advantages over traditional density functional theory (DFT), yet the diversity of atomic types, structural patterns, and the high-dimensional complexity of Hamiltonians pose substantial challenges to the generalization performance. In this work, we contribute on both the methodology and dataset sides to advance universal deep learning paradigm for Hamiltonian prediction. On the method side, we propose NextHAM, a neural E(3)-symmetry and expressive correction method for efficient and generalizable materials electronic-structure Hamiltonian prediction. First, we introduce the zeroth-step Hamiltoni-ans, which can be efficiently constructed by the initial charge density of DFT, as informative descriptors of neural regression model in the input level and initial estimates of the target Hamiltonian in the output level, so that the regression model directly predicts the correction terms to the target ground truths, thereby significantly simplifying the input-output mapping and facilitating fine-grained predictions. Second, we present a neural Transformer architecture with strict E(3)-Symmetry and high non-linear expressiveness for Hamiltonian prediction. Third, we propose a novel training objective to ensure the accuracy performance of Hamiltonians in both real space and reciprocal space, preventing error amplification and the occurrence of "ghost states" caused by the large condition number of the overlap matrix. Experimental results on Materials-HAM-SOC demonstrate that NextHAM achieves excellent accuracy in predicting Hamiltonians and band structures, with spin-off-diagonal block reaching the accuracy of sub-µeV scale. These results establish NextHAM as a universal and highly accurate deep learning model for electronic-structure prediction, delivering DFT -level precision with dramatically improved computational efficiency. Understanding the electronic structure is fundamental to unraveling how electrons govern the properties of condensed matter systems. This knowledge is essential for predicting a wide range of material characteristics, such as electrical conductivity, magnetism, optical behavior, and chemical activity, which are vital for technologies spanning from electronics to sustainable energy and advanced catalysis. At the heart of these calculations is the challenge of determining the system's Hamiltonian matrix, whose eigenvalues and eigenstates yield important quantities like energy levels, band structures, and electronic wavefunctions. Traditionally, Density Functional Theory (DFT) (Hohenberg & Kohn, 1964; Kohn & Sham, 1965) has been the standard approach for these problems. Recently, deep learning has emerged as a powerful tool in the physical sciences (Zhang et al., 2025).

Learning methods excel at motion generation in the information domain but are not primarily designed for physical interaction in the energy domain. Impedance Control shapes physical interaction but requires task-aware tuning by selecting feasible impedance parameters. We present Diffusion-Based Impedance Learning, a framework that combines both domains. A Transformer-based Diffusion Model with cross-attention to external wrenches reconstructs a simulated Zero-Force Trajectory (sZFT). This captures both translational and rotational task-space behavior. For rotations, we introduce a novel SLERP-based quaternion noise scheduler that ensures geometric consistency. The reconstructed sZFT is then passed to an energy-based estimator that updates stiffness and damping parameters. A directional rule is applied that reduces impedance along non task axes while preserving rigidity along task directions. Training data were collected for a parkour scenario and robotic-assisted therapy tasks using teleoperation with Apple Vision Pro. With only tens of thousands of samples, the model achieved sub-millimeter positional accuracy and sub-degree rotational accuracy. Its compact model size enabled real-time torque control and autonomous stiffness adaptation on a KUKA LBR iiwa robot. The controller achieved smooth parkour traversal within force and velocity limits and 30/30 success rates for cylindrical, square, and star peg insertions without any peg-specific demonstrations in the training data set. All code for the Transformer-based Diffusion Model, the robot controller, and the Apple Vision Pro telemanipulation framework is publicly available. These results mark an important step towards Physical AI, fusing model-based control for physical interaction with learning-based methods for trajectory generation.

As large language models (LLMs) are pretrained on massive web corpora, careful selection of data becomes essential to ensure effective and efficient learning. While perplexity (PPL)-based filtering has shown strong performance, it suffers from drawbacks: substantial time costs and inherent unreliability of the model when handling noisy or out-of-distribution samples. In this work, we propose a simple yet powerful alternative: a prior-based data filtering method that estimates token priors using corpus-level term frequency statistics, inspired by linguistic insights on word roles and lexical density. Our approach filters documents based on the mean and standard deviation of token priors, serving as a fast proxy to PPL while requiring no model inference. Despite its simplicity, the prior-based filter achieves the highest average performance across 20 downstream benchmarks, while reducing time cost by over 1000x compared to PPL-based filtering. We further demonstrate its applicability to symbolic languages such as code and math, and its dynamic adaptability to multilingual corpora without supervision

Existing physical commonsense reasoning benchmarks predominantly focus on Western contexts, overlooking cultural variations in physical problem-solving. To address this gap, we introduce EPiK (Everyday Physics in Korean Contexts), a novel benchmark comprising 181 binary-choice problems that test physical reasoning within Korean cultural contexts, ranging from kimchi (Korean food) to traditional fermentation. EPiK is constructed using a two-stage generation and verification pipeline to create culturally-authentic problems across 9 reasoning subtasks and 84 scenarios. Unlike approaches based on simple translation, our method generates problems organically from Korean contexts while upholding rigorous physical reasoning standards. Our evaluations show that Korean-specialized models consistently outperform general-purpose models of comparable size. This performance gap highlights the limitations of culturally-agnostic models and demonstrates the critical need for culturally-aware benchmarks to truly measure language understanding. Our EPiK is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/jjae/EPiK.