We present TIDES, a text informed design approach for generating physically sound designs based on a textual description and a set of physical constraints.

The growing demand for efficient deep learning has positioned dataset distillation as a pivotal technique for compressing training dataset while preserving model performance. However, existing inner-loop optimization methods for dataset distillation typically rely on random truncation strategies, which lack flexibility and often yield suboptimal results. In this work, we observe that neural networks exhibit distinct learning dynamics across different training stages--early, middle, and late--making random truncation ineffective. To address this limitation, we propose Automatic Truncated Backpropagation Through Time (AT-BPTT), a novel framework that dynamically adapts both truncation positions and window sizes according to intrinsic gradient behavior. AT-BPTT introduces three key components: (1) a probabilistic mechanism for stage-aware timestep selection, (2) an adaptive window sizing strategy based on gradient variation, and (3) a low-rank Hessian approximation to reduce computational overhead. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet-1K show that AT-BPTT achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving accuracy by an average of 6.16% over baseline methods. Moreover, our approach accelerates inner-loop optimization by 3.9 while saving 63% memory cost.

With the rapid advancement of the digital economy, data collaboration between organizations has become a well-established business model, driving the growth of various industries. However, privacy concerns make direct data sharing impractical. To address this, Two-Party Split Learning (a.k.a. Vertical Federated Learning (VFL)) has emerged as a promising solution for secure collaborative learning. Despite its advantages, this architecture still suffers from low computational resource utilization and training efficiency.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) pretrained on large-scale multimodal data have shown promising capabilities in Video Anomaly Detection (VAD). However, their ability to reason about abnormal events based on scene semantics remains underexplored. In this paper, we investigate LVLMs' behavior in VAD from a visual-textual co-occurrence perspective, focusing on whether their decisions are driven by statistical shortcuts between visual instances and textual phrases. By analyzing visual-textual co-occurrence in pretraining data and conducting experiments under different data settings, we reveal a hallucination phenomenon: LVLMs tend to rely on co-occurrence patterns between visual instances and textual phrases associated with either normality or abnormality, leading to incorrect predictions when these high-frequency objects appear in semantically mismatched contexts. To address this issue, we propose VAD-DPO, a direct preference optimization method supervised with counter-example pairs. By constructing visually similar but semantically contrasting video clips, VAD-DPO encourages the model to align its predictions with the semantics of scene rather than relying on co-occurrence patterns. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of VAD-DPO in enhancing both anomaly detection and reasoning performance, particularly in scene-dependent scenarios.

Continuously extending combinatorial optimization objectives is a powerful technique commonly applied to the optimization of set functions. However, few such methods exist for extending functions on permutations, despite the fact that many combinatorial optimization problems, such as the quadratic assignment problem (QAP) and the traveling salesperson problem (TSP), are inherently optimization over permutations.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are susceptible to hallucinations, where generated responses seem semantically plausible yet exhibit little or no relevance to the input image. Previous studies reveal that this issue primarily stems from LVLMs' over-reliance on language priors while disregarding the visual information during decoding. To alleviate this issue, we introduce a novel Conditional Pointwise Mutual Information (C-PMI) calibrated decoding strategy, which adaptively strengthens the mutual dependency between generated texts and input images to mitigate hallucinations. Unlike existing methods solely focusing on text token sampling, we propose to jointly model the contributions of visual and textual tokens to C-PMI, formulating hallucination mitigation as a bi-level optimization problem aimed at maximizing mutual information. To solve it, we design a token purification mechanism that dynamically regulates the decoding process by sampling text tokens remaining maximally relevant to the given image, while simultaneously refining image tokens most pertinent to the generated response. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks reveal that the proposed method significantly reduces hallucinations in LVLMs while preserving decoding efficiency.

Stochastic optimal control methods often struggle in complex non-convex landscapes, frequently becoming trapped in local optima due to their inability to learn from historical trajectory data. This paper introduces Memory-Augmented Potential Field Theory, a unified mathematical framework that integrates historical experience into stochastic optimal control. Our approach dynamically constructs memory-based potential fields that identify and encode key topological features of the state space, enabling controllers to automatically learn from past experiences and adapt their optimization strategy. We provide a theoretical analysis showing that memory-augmented potential fields possess non-convex escape properties, asymptotic convergence characteristics, and computational efficiency. We implement this theoretical framework in a Memory-Augmented Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) controller that demonstrates significantly improved performance in challenging non-convex environments. The framework represents a generalizable approach to experience-based learning within control systems (especially robotic dynamics), enhancing their ability to navigate complex state spaces without requiring specialized domain knowledge or extensive offline training.

Training data attribution (TDA) provides insights into which training data is responsible for a learned model behavior. Gradient-based TDA methods such as influence functions and unrolled differentiation both involve a computation that resembles an inverse Hessian-vector product (iHVP), which is difficult to approximate efficiently. We introduce an algorithm (ASTRA) which uses the EKFAC-preconditioner on Neumann series iterations to arrive at an accurate iHVP approximation for TDA. ASTRA is easy to tune, requires fewer iterations than Neumann series iterations, and is more accurate than EKFAC-based approximations. Using ASTRA, we show that improving the accuracy of the iHVP approximation can significantly improve TDA performance.

Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) is a powerful framework used to address a wide range of NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems, often solved by Branch and bound (B&B). A key factor influencing the performance of B&B solvers is the variable selection heuristic governing branching decisions. Recent contributions have sought to adapt reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to the B&B setting to learn optimal branching policies, through Markov Decision Processes (MDP) inspired formulations, and ad hoc convergence theorems and algorithms. In this work, we introduce BBMDP, a principled vanilla MDP formulation for variable selection in B&B, allowing to leverage a broad range of RL algorithms for the purpose of learning optimal B&B heuristics. Computational experiments validate our model empirically, as our branching agent outperforms prior state-of-the-art RL agents on four standard MILP benchmarks.

We consider the problem of scheduling mjobs on nunrelated strategic machines to minimize the maximum load of any machine. As the machines are strategic they may misreport processing times to minimize their own load. The pioneering work of Nisan and Ronen gave an n-approximate deterministic strategyproof mechanism for this setting, and this was recently shown to be best possible by the breakthrough results of Christodoulou et al. This large approxation guarantee begs the question: how can we avoid these large worst-case results. In this work, we use the powerful framework of algorithms with (machine-learned) predictions to bypass these strong impossibility results. We show how we can predict O(m+n)values to obtain a deterministic strategyproof algorithm whose makespan is within a constant factor of the optimal makespan when the predictions are correct, and O(n) times the optimum no matter how poor the predictions are.