Large language models (LLMs) trained via reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR) have achieved breakthroughs on tasks with explicit, automatable verification, such as software programming and mathematical problems. Extending RLVR to electronic design automation (EDA), especially automatically generating hardware description languages (HDLs) like Verilog from natural-language (NL) specifications, however, poses three key challenges: the lack of automated and accurate verification environments, the scarcity of high-quality NL-code pairs, and the prohibitive computation cost of RLVR. To this end, we introduce CodeV-R1, an RLVR framework for training Verilog generation LLMs. First, we develop a rule-based testbench generator that performs robust equivalence checking against golden references. Second, we propose a round-trip data synthesis method that pairs open-source Verilog snippets with LLM-generated NL descriptions, verifies code-NL-code consistency via the generated testbench, and filters out inequivalent examples to yield a high-quality dataset. Third, we employ a two-stage "distillthen-RL" training pipeline: distillation for the cold start of reasoning abilities, followed by adaptive DAPO, our novel RLVR algorithm that can reduce training cost by adaptively adjusting sampling rate. The resulting model, CodeV-R17B, achieves 68.6 % and 72.9 % pass@1 on VerilogEval v2 and RTLLM v1.1, respectively, surpassing prior state-of-the-art by 12 20 %, while even exceeding the performance of 671BDeepSeek-R1 on RTLLM. We have released our model, training code, and dataset to facilitate research in EDA and LLM communities. 1

Pretrained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have shown promising zero-shot out-of-distribution (OOD) detection capabilities by leveraging semantic similarities between input images and textual labels. However, most existing approaches focus solely on expanding the label space in the text domain, ignoring complementary visual cues that can further enhance discriminative power. In this paper, we introduce DualCnst, a novel framework that integrates text-image dual consistency for improved zero-shot OOD detection. Specifically, we generate synthetic images from both ID and mined OOD textual labels using a text-to-image generative model, and jointly evaluate each test image based on (i) its semantic similarity to class labels and (ii) its visual similarity to the synthesized images. The resulting unified score function effectively combines multimodal information without requiring access to in-distribution images or additional training. We further provide theoretical analysis showing that incorporating multimodal negative labels reduces score variance and improves OOD separability. Extensive experiments across diverse OOD benchmarks demonstrate that DualCnst achieves state-of-theart performance while remaining scalable, data-agnostic, and fully compatible with prior text-only VLM-based methods. The code is publicly available at: https: //github.com/TMLSIAT/DualCnst.

Watermarking is a crucial technique for identifying these AI-generated images and preventing their misuse. In this paper, we introduce Shallow Diffuse, a new watermarking technique that embeds robust and invisible watermarks into diffusion model outputs. Unlike existing approaches that integrate watermarking throughout the entire diffusion sampling process, Shallow Diffuse decouples these steps by leveraging the presence of a low-dimensional subspace in the image generation process. This method ensures that a substantial portion of the watermark lies in the null space of this subspace, effectively separating it from the image generation process. Our theoretical and empirical analyses show that this decoupling strategy greatly enhances the consistency of data generation and the detectability of the watermark. Extensive experiments further validate that Shallow Diffuse outperforms existing watermarking methods in terms of consistency.

Large vision-language models (VLLMs) have driven significant progress in multimodal systems, enabling a wide range of applications across domains such as healthcare, education, and content generation. Despite the success, the large-scale datasets used to train these models often contain sensitive or personally identifiable information, raising serious privacy concerns. To audit and better understand such risks, membership inference attacks (MIAs) have become a key tool. However, existing MIAs against VLLMs predominantly assume access to full-model logits, which are typically unavailable in many practical deployments. To facilitate MIAs in a more realistic and restrictive setting, we propose a novel framework: label-only membership inference attacks (LOMIA) targeting pre-trained VLLMs where only the model's top-1 prediction is available. Within this framework, we propose three effective attack methods, all of which exploit the intuition that training samples are more likely to be memorized by the VLLMs, resulting in outputs that exhibit higher semantic alignment and lower perplexity. Our experiments show that our framework surpasses existing label-only attack adaptations for different VLLMs and competes with state-of-the-art logits-based attacks across all metrics on three widely used open-source VLLMs and GPT-4o.

Designing enzyme backbones with substrate-specific functionality is a critical challenge in computational protein engineering. Current generative models excel in protein design but face limitations in binding data, substrate-specific control, and flexibility for de novo enzyme backbone generation. To address this, we introduce EnzyBind, a dataset with 11,100 experimentally validated enzyme-substrate pairs specifically curated from PDBbind. Building on this, we propose EnzyControl, a method that enables functional and substrate-specific control in enzyme backbone generation. Our approach generates enzyme backbones conditioned on MSAannotated catalytic sites and their corresponding substrates, which are automatically extracted from curated enzyme-substrate data. At the core of EnzyControl is EnzyAdapter, a lightweight, modular component integrated into a pretrained motifscaffolding model, allowing it to become substrate-aware. A two-stage training paradigm further refines the model's ability to generate accurate and functional enzyme structures. Experiments show that our EnzyControl achieves the best performance across structural and functional metrics on EnzyBind and EnzyBench benchmarks, with particularly notable improvements of 13% in designability and 13% in catalytic efficiency compared to the baseline models.

Recent studies have demonstrated that fine-tuning language models with brain data can improve their semantic understanding, although these findings have so far been limited to English. Interestingly, similar to the shared multilingual embedding space of pretrained multilingual language models, human studies provide strong evidence for a shared semantic system in bilingual individuals. Here, we investigate whether fine-tuning language models with bilingual brain data changes model representations in a way that improves them across multiple languages. To test this, we fine-tune monolingual and multilingual language models using brain activity recorded while bilingual participants read stories in English and Chinese. We then evaluate how well these representations generalize to the bilingual participants' first language, their second language, and several other languages that the participants are not fluent in. We assess the fine-tuned language models on brain encoding performance and downstream NLP tasks. Our results show that bilingual brain-informed fine-tuned language models outperform their vanilla (pretrained) counterparts in both brain encoding performance and most downstream NLP tasks across multiple languages. These findings suggest that brain-informed fine-tuning improves multilingual understanding in language models, offering a bridge between cognitive neuroscience and NLP research. We make our code publicly available.

Electroencephalography (EEG) has wide-ranging applications, from clinical diagnosis to brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). With the increasing volume and variety of EEG data, there has been growing interest in establishing foundation models (FMs) to scale up and generalize neural decoding. Despite showing early potential, applying FMs to EEG remains challenging due to substantial inter-subject, intertask, and inter-condition variability, as well as diverse electrode configurations across recording setups. To tackle these open challenges, we propose NEURIPT, a foundation model developed for diverse EEG-based Neural Interfaces with a Pre-trained Transformer by capturing both homogeneous and heterogeneous spatio-temporal characteristics inherent in EEG signals. Temporally, we introduce Amplitude-Aware Masked Pretraining (AAMP), masking based on signal amplitude rather than random intervals, to learn robust representations across varying signal intensities beyond local interpolation. Moreover, this temporal representation is enhanced by a Progressive Mixture-of-Experts (PMoE) architecture, where specialized expert subnetworks are progressively introduced at deeper layers, adapting effectively to the diverse temporal characteristics of EEG signals.

This position paper argues that the theoretical inconsistency often observed among Responsible AI (RAI) metrics, such as differing fairness definitions or trade-offs between accuracy and privacy, should be embraced as a valuable feature rather than a flaw to be eliminated. We contend that navigating these inconsistencies, by treating metrics as divergent objectives, yields three key benefits: (1) Normative Pluralism: maintaining a full suite of potentially contradictory metrics ensures that the diverse moral stances and stakeholder values inherent in RAI are adequately represented; (2) Epistemological Completeness: using multiple, sometimes conflicting, metrics captures multifaceted ethical concepts more fully and preserves greater informational fidelity than any single, simplified definition; (3) Implicit Regularization: jointly optimizing for theoretically conflicting objectives discourages overfitting to any one metric, steering models toward solutions with better generalization and robustness under real-world complexities.

In real-world environments, a well-designed model must be capable of handling dynamically evolving distributions, where both in-distribution (ID) and out-ofdistribution (OOD) samples appear unpredictably and individually, making realtime adaptation particularly challenging. While open-set test-time adaptation has demonstrated effectiveness in adjusting to distribution shifts, existing methods often rely on batch processing and struggle to manage single-sample data stream in open-set environments.

We consider matroid allocation problems under opportunity fairness constraints: resources need to be allocated to a set of agents under matroid constraints (which include classical problems such as bipartite matching). Agents are divided into C groups according to a sensitive attribute, and an allocation is opportunity-fair if each group receives the same share proportional to the maximum feasible allocation it could achieve in isolation. We study the Price of Fairness (PoF), i.e., the ratio between maximum size allocations and maximum size opportunity-fair allocations. We first provide a characterization of the PoF leveraging the underlying polymatroid structure of the allocation problem. Based on this characterization, we prove bounds on the PoF in various settings from fully adversarial (worst-case) to fully random. Notably, one of our main results considers an arbitrary matroid structure with agents randomly divided into groups. In this setting, we prove a PoF bound as a function of the (relative) size of the largest group. Our result implies that, as long as there is no dominant group (i.e., the largest group is not too large), opportunity fairness constraints do not induce any loss of social welfare (defined as the allocation size). Overall, our results give insights into which aspects of the problem's structure affect the trade-off between opportunity fairness and social welfare.