The rapid development and large body of literature on machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) can make it difficult to know how to proceed for researchers who are not experts but wish to use these tools. The spirit of this review is to help such researchers by serving as a practical, accessible guide to the state-of-the-art in MLIPs. This review paper covers a broad range of topics related to MLIPs, including (i) central aspects of how and why MLIPs are enablers of many exciting advancements in molecular modeling, (ii) the main underpinnings of different types of MLIPs, including their basic structure and formalism, (iii) the potentially transformative impact of universal MLIPs for both organic and inorganic systems, including an overview of the most recent advances, capabilities, downsides, and potential applications of this nascent class of MLIPs, (iv) a practical guide for estimating and understanding the execution speed of MLIPs, including guidance for users based on hardware availability, type of MLIP used, and prospective simulation size and time, (v) a manual for what MLIP a user should choose for a given application by considering hardware resources, speed requirements, energy and force accuracy requirements, as well as guidance for choosing pre-trained potentials or fitting a new potential from scratch, (vi) discussion around MLIP infrastructure, including sources of training data, pre-trained potentials, and hardware resources for training, (vii) summary of some key limitations of present MLIPs and current approaches to mitigate such limitations, including methods of including long-range interactions, handling magnetic systems, and treatment of excited states, and finally (viii) we finish with some more speculative thoughts on what the future holds for the development and application of MLIPs over the next 3-10+ years.

-- We introduce Vision-Language Attention Distillation (Vi-LAD), a novel approach for distilling socially compliant navigation knowledge from a large Vision-Language Model (VLM) into a lightweight transformer model for real-time robotic navigation. Unlike traditional methods that rely on expert demonstrations or human-annotated datasets, Vi-LAD performs knowledge distillation and fine-tuning at the intermediate layer representation level (i.e., attention maps) by leveraging the backbone of a pre-trained vision-action model. These attention maps highlight key navigational regions in a given scene, which serve as implicit guidance for socially aware motion planning. Vi-LAD fine-tunes a transformer-based model using intermediate attention maps extracted from the pre-trained vision-action model, combined with attention-like semantic maps constructed from a large VLM. T o achieve this, we introduce a novel attention-level distillation loss that fuses knowledge from both sources, generating augmented attention maps with enhanced social awareness. These refined attention maps are then utilized as a traversability costmap within a socially aware model predictive controller (MPC) for navigation. We validate our approach through real-world experiments on a Husky wheeled robot, demonstrating significant improvements over state-of-the-art (SOT A) navigation methods. Our results show up to 14.2% - 50% improvement in success rate, which highlights the effectiveness of Vi-LAD in enabling socially compliant and efficient robot navigation. I NTRODUCTION As autonomous robots become increasingly integrated into human-centered environments, ensuring safe, efficient, and socially compliant navigation is a critical challenge [1].

This paper presents MoE-Gen, a high-throughput MoE inference system optimized for single-GPU execution. Existing inference systems rely on model-based or continuous batching strategies, originally designed for interactive inference, which result in excessively small batches for MoE's key modules-attention and expert modules-leading to poor throughput. To address this, we introduce module-based batching, which accumulates tokens in host memory and dynamically launches large batches on GPUs to maximize utilization. Additionally, we optimize the choice of batch sizes for each module in an MoE to fully overlap GPU computation and communication, maximizing throughput. Evaluation demonstrates that MoE-Gen achieves 8-31x higher throughput compared to state-of-the-art systems employing model-based batching (FlexGen, MoE-Lightning, DeepSpeed), and offers even greater throughput improvements over continuous batching systems (e.g., vLLM and Ollama) on popular MoE models (DeepSeek and Mixtral) across offline inference tasks. MoE-Gen's source code is publicly available at https://github.com/EfficientMoE/MoE-Gen

Dance serves as a profound and universal expression of human culture, conveying emotions and stories through movements synchronized with music. Although some current works have achieved satisfactory results in the task of single-person dance generation, the field of multi-person dance generation remains relatively novel. In this work, we present a group choreography framework that leverages recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLM) by modeling the group dance generation problem as a sequence-to-sequence translation task. Our framework consists of a tokenizer that transforms continuous features into discrete tokens, and an LLM that is fine-tuned to predict motion tokens given the audio tokens. We show that by proper tokenization of input modalities and careful design of the LLM training strategies, our framework can generate realistic and diverse group dances while maintaining strong music correlation and dancer-wise consistency. Extensive experiments and evaluations demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) are increasingly vulnerable to AI-generated extremist content, including photorealistic images and text, which can be used to bypass safety mechanisms and generate harmful outputs. However, existing datasets for evaluating LMM robustness offer limited exploration of extremist content, often lacking AI-generated images, diverse image generation models, and comprehensive coverage of historical events, which hinders a complete assessment of model vulnerabilities. To fill this gap, we introduce ExtremeAIGC, a benchmark dataset and evaluation framework designed to assess LMM vulnerabilities against such content. ExtremeAIGC simulates real-world events and malicious use cases by curating diverse text- and image-based examples crafted using state-of-the-art image generation techniques. Our study reveals alarming weaknesses in LMMs, demonstrating that even cutting-edge safety measures fail to prevent the generation of extremist material. We systematically quantify the success rates of various attack strategies, exposing critical gaps in current defenses and emphasizing the need for more robust mitigation strategies.

--We study the task of language-conditioned pick and place in clutter, where a robot should grasp a target object in open clutter and move it to a specified place. Some approaches learn end-to-end policies with features from vision foundation models, requiring large datasets. Others combine foundation models in a zero-shot setting, suffering from cascading errors. In this paper, we aim to develop an effective policy by integrating foundation priors from vision, language, and action. The alignment formulation enables our policy to train with less data and preserve zero-shot generalization capabilities. We show that a shared policy for both pick and place actions enhances the performance for each task, and introduce a policy adaptation scheme to accommodate the multi-modal nature of actions. Extensive experiments in simulation and the real-world show that our policy achieves higher task success rates with fewer steps for both pick and place tasks in clutter, effectively generalizing to unseen objects and language instructions. Videos and codes are available at the project page. HE ability to pick and place objects is essential for robotic manipulation [1]-[6]. Consider a scenario where a robot is commanded with language instructions to grasp a target object in open clutter, and move it to a specified place. The target object may be partially or fully occluded, posing challenges for object grounding and grasping. In such scenarios, multiple pick and place actions may be needed to clear obstacles for object rearrangement. A common way to construct a policy for such tasks is to predict 6-DoF actions directly from raw sensory information, as in classic end-to-end policies. Recently, these policies have achieved promising performances by incorporating features of pre-trained foundation models, e.g., vision-language models (VLM) and large language models (LLM) [7]-[12]. However, they require large amounts of demonstration data for policy learning, particularly for tasks involving cluttered environments. In addition, one has to deal with generalization issues to deploy these policies in real-world applications. Kechun Xu is with Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, and Alibaba Cloud, Hangzhou, China. Xunlong Xia, and Bing Deng are with Alibaba Cloud, Hangzhou, China. Kaixuan Wang, Yifei Y ang, Y unxuan Mao, Rong Xiong, and Y ue Wang are with Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), has significantly advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, such as Named Entity Recognition (NER), which involves identifying entities like person, location, and organization names in text. LLMs are especially promising for low-resource languages due to their ability to learn from limited data. However, the performance of GenAI models for Nepali, a low-resource language, has not been thoroughly evaluated. This paper investigates the application of state-of-the-art LLMs for Nepali NER, conducting experiments with various prompting techniques to assess their effectiveness. Our results provide insights into the challenges and opportunities of using LLMs for NER in low-resource settings and offer valuable contributions to the advancement of NLP research in languages like Nepali.

Representation Engineering (RepE) is a novel paradigm for controlling the behavior of LLMs. Unlike traditional approaches that modify inputs or fine-tune the model, RepE directly manipulates the model's internal representations. As a result, it may offer more effective, interpretable, data-efficient, and flexible control over models' behavior. We present the first comprehensive survey of RepE for LLMs, reviewing the rapidly growing literature to address key questions: What RepE methods exist and how do they differ? For what concepts and problems has RepE been applied? What are the strengths and weaknesses of RepE compared to other methods? To answer these, we propose a unified framework describing RepE as a pipeline comprising representation identification, operationalization, and control. We posit that while RepE methods offer significant potential, challenges remain, including managing multiple concepts, ensuring reliability, and preserving models' performance. Towards improving RepE, we identify opportunities for experimental and methodological improvements and construct a guide for best practices.

Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in perceiving and reasoning over multimodal inquiries, ushering in a new research era for foundation models. However, vision-language misalignment in MLLMs has emerged as a critical challenge, where the textual responses generated by these models are not factually aligned with the given text-image inputs. Existing efforts to address vision-language misalignment have focused on developing specialized vision-language connectors or leveraging visual instruction tuning from diverse domains. In this paper, we tackle this issue from a fundamental yet unexplored perspective by revisiting the core architecture of MLLMs. Most MLLMs are typically built on decoder-only LLMs consisting of a causal attention mechanism, which limits the ability of the earlier modalities (e.g., images) to incorporate information from the latter modalities (e.g., text). To address this problem, we propose \MapleLeaf AKI, a novel MLLM that unlocks causal attention into modality-mutual attention (MMA) to enable image tokens to attend to text tokens. This simple yet effective design allows AKI to achieve superior performance in 12 multimodal understanding benchmarks (+7.2% on average) without introducing additional parameters and increasing training time. Our MMA design is intended to be generic, allowing for application across various modalities, and scalable to accommodate diverse multimodal scenarios. The code and model are publicly available at https://github.com/sony/aki to encourage further advancements in MLLMs across various directions.

High-resolution tactile sensors have become critical for embodied perception and robotic manipulation. However, a key challenge in the field is the lack of transferability between sensors due to design and manufacturing variations, which result in significant differences in tactile signals. This limitation hinders the ability to transfer models or knowledge learned from one sensor to another. To address this, we introduce a novel method for extracting Sensor-Invariant Tactile Representations (SITR), enabling zero-shot transfer across optical tactile sensors. Our approach utilizes a transformer-based architecture trained on a diverse dataset of simulated sensor designs, allowing it to generalize to new sensors in the real world with minimal calibration. Experimental results demonstrate the method's effectiveness across various tactile sensing applications, facilitating data and model transferability for future advancements in the field.