Large Language Model
IndEgo: ADataset of Industrial Scenarios and Collaborative Work for Egocentric Assistants
We introduce IndEgo, a multimodal egocentric and exocentric dataset addressing common industrial tasks, including assembly/disassembly, logistics and organisation, inspection and repair, woodworking, and others. The dataset contains 3,460 egocentric recordings (approximately 197 hours), along with 1,092 exocentric recordings (approximately 97 hours). A key focus of the dataset is collaborative work, where two workers jointly perform cognitively and physically intensive tasks. The egocentric recordings include rich multimodal data and added context via eye gaze, narration, sound, motion, and others. We provide detailed annotations (actions, summaries, mistake annotations, narrations), metadata, processed outputs (eye gaze, hand pose, semi-dense point cloud), and benchmarks on procedural and non-procedural task understanding, Mistake Detection, and reasoning-based Question Answering.
Data Mixture Optimization: AMulti-fidelity Multi-scale Bayesian Framework
Careful curation of data sources can significantly improve the performance of LLM pre-training, but predominant approaches rely heavily on intuition or costly trial-and-error, making them difficult to generalize across different data domains and downstream tasks. Although scaling laws can provide a principled and general approach for data curation, standard deterministic extrapolation from small-scale experiments to larger scales requires strong assumptions on the reliability of such extrapolation, whose brittleness has been highlighted in prior works. In this paper, we introduce a probabilistic extrapolation framework for data mixture optimization that avoids rigid assumptions and explicitly models the uncertainty in performance across decision variables. We formulate data curation as a sequential decisionmaking problem--multi-fidelity, multi-scale Bayesian optimization--where {data mixtures, model scale, training steps}are adaptively selected to balance training cost and potential information gain. Our framework naturally gives rise to algorithm prototypes that leverage noisy information from inexpensive experiments to systematically inform costly training decisions. To accelerate methodological progress, we build a simulator based on 472 language model pre-training runs with varying data compositions from the SlimPajama dataset. We observe that even simple kernels and acquisition functions can enable principled decisions across training models from 20M to 1B parameters and achieve 2.6x and 3.3x speedups compared to multi-fidelity Bayesian optimization and random search baselines. Taken together, our framework underscores potential efficiency gains achievable by developing principled and transferable data mixture optimization methods.
Overleaf Example
A foundation model for medical time series, pretrained on ethically approved clinical datasets, can substantially reduce annotation burdens, minimize the need for task-specific tuning, and promote reliable transferability across healthcare institutions, data modalities, and clinical tasks, especially in data-scarce or privacysensitive environments. However, existing generalist time series foundation models struggle to handle medical time series data due to their inherent challenges, including irregular intervals, heterogeneous sampling rates, and frequent missing values. To address these challenges, we introduce MIRA, a unified foundation model specifically designed for medical time series forecasting. MIRA incorporates a Continuous-Time Rotary Positional Encoding that enables fine-grained modeling of variable time intervals, a frequency-specific mixture-of-experts layer that routes computation across latent frequency regimes to further promote temporal specialization, and a Continuous Dynamics Extrapolation Block based on Neural ODE that models the continuous trajectory of latent states, enabling accurate forecasting at arbitrary target timestamps. Pretrained on a large-scale and diverse medical corpus comprising over 454 billion time points collect from publicly available datasets, MIRA achieves reductions in forecasting errors by an average of 8% and 6% in out-of-distribution and in-distribution scenarios, respectively, when compared to other zero-shot and fine-tuned baselines. We also introduce a comprehensive benchmark spanning multiple downstream clinical tasks, establishing a foundation for future research in medical time series modeling. Our code is available at Microsoft/MIRA.
BNMusic: Blending Environmental Noises into Personalized Music
While being disturbed by environmental noises, the acoustic masking technique is a conventional way to reduce the annoyance in audio engineering that seeks to cover up the noises with other dominant yet less intrusive sounds. However, misalignment between the dominant sound and the noise--such as mismatched downbeats--often requires an excessive volume increase to achieve effective masking. Motivated by recent advances in cross-modal generation, in this work, we introduce an alternative method to acoustic masking, aiming to reduce the noticeability of environmental noises by blending them into personalized music generated based on user-provided text prompts. Following the paradigm of music generation using mel-spectrogram representations, we propose a Blending Noises into Personalized Music (BNMusic) framework with two key stages.
AgentTTS: Large Language Model Agent for Test-time Compute-optimal Scaling Strategy in Complex Tasks
Test-time scaling (TTS) enhances the performance of large language models (LLMs) by allocating additional compute resources during inference. However, existing research primarily investigates TTS in single-stage tasks; while many real-world problems are multi-stage complex tasks, composed of a sequence of heterogeneous subtasks with each subtask requires LLM of specific capability. Therefore, we study a novel problem: the test-time compute-optimal scaling in multi-stage complex tasks, aiming to select suitable models and allocate budgets per subtask to maximize overall performance. TTS in multi-stage tasks introduces two fundamental challenges: (i) The combinatorial search space of model and budget allocations, combined with the high cost of inference, makes brute-force search impractical.
Beyond Oracle: Verifier-Supervision for Instruction Hierarchy in Reasoning and Instruction-Tuned LLMs
Large language models (LLMs) are often prompted with multi-level directives, such as system instructions and user queries, that imply a hierarchy of authority. Yet models frequently fail to enforce this structure, especially in multi-step reasoning where errors propagate across intermediate steps. Existing methods rely on oracle completions but lack verifiable reward signals or intermediate traces, limiting their applicability. We introduce a unified supervision framework that embeds programmatically verifiable checkers into synthesized instruction-conflict instances. Each instance pairs a compliance directive with a conflicting one, along with an executable verifier that deterministically checks output adherence. This enables alignment without oracle labels or reasoning traces, supporting both instruction-tuned and reasoning models. The framework is instantiated via a synthesis pipeline that includes unittest-based validation, LLM-assisted repair, and a probabilistic analysis of cleaning reliability. Fine-tuning on the resulting data improves instruction hierarchy adherence and boosts safety robustness, generalizing to adversarial safety benchmarks without task-specific supervision. This highlights verifiable supervision as a scalable foundation for robust alignment.
Fast in Slow System Unifying Fast Manipulation within Slow Reasoning
Generalized policy and execution efficiency constitute the two critical challenges in robotic manipulation. While recent foundation policies benefit from the commonsense reasoning capabilities of internet-scale pretrained vision-language models (VLMs), they often suffer from low execution frequency. To mitigate this dilemma, dual-system approaches have been proposed to leverage a VLM-based System 2 module for handling high-level decision-making, and a separate System 1 action module for ensuring real-time control. However, existing designs maintain both systems as separate models, limiting System 1 from fully leveraging the rich pretrained knowledge from the VLM-based System 2. In this work, we propose Fast-in-Slow (FiS), a unified dual-system vision-language-action (VLA) model that embeds the System 1 execution module within the VLM-based System 2 by partially sharing parameters. This innovative paradigm not only enables high-frequency execution in System 1, but also facilitates coordination between multimodal reasoning and execution components within a single foundation model of System 2. Given their fundamentally distinct roles within FiS-VLA, we design the two systems to incorporate heterogeneous modality inputs alongside asynchronous operating frequencies, enabling both fast and precise manipulation. To enable coordination between the two systems, a dual-aware co-training strategy is proposed that equips System 1 with action generation capabilities while preserving System 2's contextual understanding to provide stable latent conditions for System 1. For evaluation, FiS-VLA outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by 8% in simulation and 11% in realworld tasks in terms of average success rate, while achieving a 117.7 Hz control frequency with action chunk set to eight.
Support Vector Generation: Kernelizing Zero-Shot Classifiers from Pre-Trained Language Models
We introduce Support Vector Generation (SVG), a kernel-based framework that converts a frozen language model into an interpretable, training-free classifier for zero-and few-shot learning. SVG operates by combining Metropolis-Hastings sampling with support vector machine optimization in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) induced by the language model's embedding. Each classification decision is based on a weighted combination of at most 32 natural-language sentences, which serve as explicit support vectors and provide faithful rationales. Our theoretical analysis proves that SVG minimizes the empirical hinge loss over the span of the supports and admits a generalization bound independent of the language model size. Experiments on the GLUE benchmark show that SVG matches or surpasses prompting-based zero-shot baselines in accuracy across multiple tasks--without any fine-tuning or GPU acceleration. Notably, our CPU-only implementation completes training in under three minutes per task, and maintains competitive inference speed. These results suggest that SVG offers a viable path toward efficient, interpretable NLP systems under compute constraints.
Interactive Cross-modal Learning for Text-3DScene Retrieval
Text-3DScene Retrieval (T3SR) aims to retrieve relevant scenes using linguistic queries. Although traditional T3SR methods have made significant progress in capturing fine-grained associations, they implicitly assume that query descriptions are information-complete. In practical deployments, however, limited by the capabilities of users and models, it is difficult or even impossible to directly obtain a perfect textual query suiting the entire scene and model, thereby leading to performance degradation. To address this issue, we propose a novel Interactive Text-3D Scene Retrieval Method (IDeal), which promotes the enhancement of the alignment between texts and 3D scenes through continuous interaction. To achieve this, we present an Interactive Retrieval Refinement framework (IRR), which employs a questioner to pose contextually relevant questions to an answerer in successive rounds that either promote detailed probing or encourage exploratory divergence within scenes. Upon the iterative responses received from the answerer, IRR adopts a retriever to perform both feature-level and semantic-level information fusion, facilitating scene-level interaction and understanding for more precise re-rankings. To bridge the domain gap between queries and interactive texts, we propose an Interaction Adaptation Tuning strategy (IAT).
HMVLM: Human Motion-Vision-Lanuage Model via MoELoRA
The expansion of instruction-tuning data has enabled foundation language models to exhibit improved instruction adherence and superior performance across diverse downstream tasks. Semantically-rich 3D human motion is being progressively integrated with these foundation models to enhance multimodal understanding and cross-modal generation capabilities. However, the modality gap between human motion and text raises unresolved concerns about catastrophic forgetting during this integration. In addition, developing autoregressive-compatible pose representations that preserve generalizability across heterogeneous downstream tasks remains a critical technical barrier. To address these issues, we propose the Human MotionVision-Language Model (HMVLM), a unified framework based on the Mixture of Expert Low-Rank Adaption(MoE LoRA) strategy. The framework leverages the gating network to dynamically allocate LoRA expert weights based on the input prompt, enabling synchronized fine-tuning of multiple tasks. To mitigate catastrophic forgetting during instruction-tuning, we introduce a novel zero expert that preserves the pre-trained parameters for general linguistic tasks. For pose representation, we implement body-part-specific tokenization by partitioning the human body into different joint groups, enhancing the spatial resolution of the representation. Experiments show that our method effectively alleviates knowledge forgetting during instruction-tuning and achieves remarkable performance across diverse human motion downstream tasks.