This position paper argues that the use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to control, direct, guide or govern any weapon, either in situ or remotely, should be prohibited by government agencies and non-governmental organizations. Such a moratorium should exist until hallucinations can be successfully modeled and predicted. Generative AI is inherently unreliable and not appropriate in environments that could result in the loss of life.

Cybersecurity and software research have crossed paths with modern deep learning research for a few years. The power of large language models (LLMs) in particular has intrigued us to apply them to understanding binary code. In this paper, we investigate some of the many ways LLMs can be applied to binary code similarity detection, as it is a significantly more difficult task compared to source code similarity detection due to the sparsity of information and less meaningful syntax. It also has great practical implications, such as vulnerability and malware detection. We find that pretrained LLMs are mostly capable of detecting similar binary code, even with a zero-shot setting. Our main contributions and findings are to provide several supervised fine-tuning methods that, when combined, significantly surpass zero-shot LLMs and state-of-the-art binary code similarity detection methods.

Multi-class tissue-type classification of colorectal cancer (CRC) histopathologic images is a significant step in the development of downstream machine learning models for diagnosis and treatment planning. However, publicly available CRC datasets used to build tissue classifiers often suffer from insufficient morphologic diversity, class imbalance, and low-quality image tiles, limiting downstream model performance and generalizability. To address this research gap, we introduce STARC-9 (STAnford coloRectal Cancer), a large-scale dataset for multi-class tissue classification. STARC-9 comprises 630,000 histopathologic image tiles uniformly sampled across nine clinically relevant tissue classes (each represented by 70,000 tiles), systematically extracted from hematoxylin & eosin-stained whole-slide images (WSI) from 200 CRC patients at the Stanford University School of Medicine. To construct STARC-9, we propose a novel framework, DeepCluster++, consisting of two primary steps to ensure diversity within each tissue class, followed by pathologist verification.

Understanding the predictions made by deep learning models remains a central challenge, especially in high-stakes applications. A promising approach is to equip models with the ability to answer counterfactual questions -- hypothetical ``what if?'' scenarios that go beyond the observed data and provide insight into a model reasoning. In this work, we introduce the notion of causal interpretability, which formalizes when counterfactual queries can be evaluated from a specific class of models and observational data. We analyze two common model classes -- blackbox and concept-based predictors -- and show that neither is causally interpretable in general. To address this gap, we develop a framework for building models that are causally interpretable by design. Specifically, we derive a complete graphical criterion that determines whether a given model architecture supports a given counterfactual query. This leads to a fundamental tradeoff between causal interpretability and predictive accuracy, which we characterize by identifying the unique maximal set of features that yields an interpretable model with maximal predictive expressiveness. Experiments corroborate the theoretical findings.

Machine learning (ML) is transforming modeling and control in the physical, engineering, and biological sciences. However, rapid development has outpaced the creation of standardized, objective benchmarks--leading to weak baselines, reporting bias, and inconsistent evaluations across methods. This undermines reproducibility, misguides resource allocation, and obscures scientific progress. To address this, we propose a Common Task Framework (CTF) for scientific machine learning. The CTF features a curated set of datasets and task-specific metrics spanning forecasting, state reconstruction, and generalization under realistic constraints, including noise and limited data. Inspired by the success of CTFs in fields like natural language processing and computer vision, our framework provides a structured, rigorous foundation for head-to-head evaluation of diverse algorithms.

Large foundation models face challenges in acquiring transferable, structured thinking abilities, especially when supervised with rigid templates or crowd-annotated instruction datasets. Unlike prior approaches, we focus on a thinking-centric data synthesis paradigm that enables models to evolve through self-generated, cognitively guided data. We propose MindGYM, a structured and scalable framework for question synthesis, composed of: (1) Cognitive Thinking Process Injection, which infuses high-level reasoning objectives to shape the model's synthesis behavior; (2) Seed Single-Hop Question Synthesis, generating atomic questions from diverse semantic types to encourage broader thinking; and (3) Challenging Multi-Hop QA Synthesis, composing more complex multi-hop questions based on QA seeds for deeper reasoning. Detailed analysis shows that synthetic data generated by our method achieves 16.7% higher average quality and 67.91% lower quality variance compared to baseline sources, highlighting that both high-quality and self-contained data are essential for effective, thinking-oriented fine-tuning. MindGYM improves performance on six reasoning benchmarks, achieving gains of up to 16% on MathVision using only 400 data samples, and generalizable improvements across different model sizes and architectures. MindGYM underscores the viability of self-challenging mechanisms in refining large model capabilities while minimizing human intervention and resource demands.Code and data are released to promote data-centric research into self-evolving foundation models driven by their internal reasoning capabilities.

We study policy optimization in Stackelberg mean field games (MFGs), a hierarchical framework for modeling the strategic interaction between a single leader and an infinitely large population of homogeneous followers. The objective can be formulated as a structured bi-level optimization problem, in which the leader needs to learn a policy maximizing its reward, anticipating the response of the followers. Existing methods for solving these (and related) problems often rely on restrictive independence assumptions between the leader's and followers' objectives, use samples inefficiently due to nested-loop algorithm structure, and lack finite-time convergence guarantees. To address these limitations, we propose AC-SMFG, a single-loop actor-critic algorithm that operates on continuously generated Markovian samples. The algorithm alternates between (semi-)gradient updates for the leader, a representative follower, and the mean field, and is simple to implement in practice. We establish the finite-time and finite-sample convergence of the algorithm to a stationary point of the Stackelberg objective. To our knowledge, this is the first Stackelberg MFG algorithm with non-asymptotic convergence guarantees. Our key assumption is a gradient alignment condition, which requires that the full policy gradient of the leader can be approximated by a partial component of it, relaxing the existing leader-follower independence assumption. Simulation results in a range of well-established economics environments demonstrate that AC-SMFG outperforms existing multi-agent and MFG learning baselines in policy quality and convergence speed.

Opaque objects reconstructed by 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) often exhibit a falsely transparent surface, leading to inconsistent background and internal patterns under camera motion in interactive viewing. This issue stems from the ill-posed optimization in 3DGS. During training, background and foreground Gaussians are blended via $\alpha$-compositing and optimized solely against the input RGB images using a photometric loss. As this process lacks an explicit constraint on surface opacity, the optimization may incorrectly assign transparency to opaque regions, resulting in view-inconsistent and falsely transparent output. This issue is difficult to detect in standard evaluation settings (i.e., rendering static images), but becomes particularly evident in object-centric reconstructions under interactive viewing.

State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as promising alternatives to attention mechanisms, with the Mamba architecture demonstrating impressive performance and linear complexity for processing long sequences. However, the fundamental differences between Mamba and Transformer architectures remain incompletely understood. In this work, we use carefully designed synthetic tasks to reveal Mamba's inherent limitations. Through experiments, we identify that Mamba's nonlinear convolution introduces an asymmetry bias that significantly impairs its ability to recognize symmetrical patterns and relationships. Using composite function and inverse sequence matching tasks, we demonstrate that Mamba strongly favors compositional solutions over symmetrical ones and struggles with tasks requiring the matching of reversed sequences. We show these limitations stem not from the SSM module itself but from the nonlinear convolution preceding it, which fuses token information asymmetrically. These insights provide a new understanding of Mamba's constraints and suggest concrete architectural improvements for future sequence models.

Positive-Unlabeled (PU) learning refers to a specific weakly-supervised learning paradigm that induces a binary classifier with a few positive labeled instances and massive unlabeled instances. To handle this task, the community has proposed dozens of PU learning methods with various techniques, demonstrating strong potential. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study to investigate the basic characteristics of current PU learning methods. We organize them into two fundamental families of PU learning, including, which approximate the expected risk of supervised learning, and, which estimate pseudo-labels for unlabeled instances. First, we make an empirical analysis on disambiguation-free empirical risks such as uPU, nnPU, and DistPU, and suggest a novel risk-consistent set-aware empirical risk from the perspective of aggregate supervision. Second, we make an empirical analysis of pseudo-labeling methods to evaluate the potential of pseudo-label estimation techniques and widely applied generic tricks in PU learning. Finally, based on those empirical findings, we propose a general framework of PU learning by integrating the set-aware empirical risk with pseudo-labeling. Compared with existing PU learning methods, the proposed framework can be a practical benchmark in PU learning.