Zero-shot Human-Object Interaction detection aims to localize humans and objects in an image and recognize their interaction, even when specific verb-object pairs are unseen during training. Recent works have shown promising results using prompt learning with pretrained vision-language models such as CLIP, which align natural language prompts with visual features in a shared embedding space. However, existing approaches still fail to handle the --including (1), where instances of the same verb appear in diverse poses and contexts, and (2), where distinct verbs yield visually similar patterns.

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable success in high-fidelity image synthesis and prompt-guided generative modeling. However, ensuring adequate diversity in generated samples of prompt-guided diffusion models remains a challenge, particularly when the prompts span a broad semantic spectrum and the diversity of generated data needs to be evaluated in a prompt-aware fashion across semantically similar prompts. Recent methods have introduced guidance via diversity measures to encourage more varied generations. In this work, we extend the diversity measure-based approaches by proposing the *S*calable *P*rompt-*A*ware *R*eny *K*ernel *E*ntropy Diversity Guidance (*SPARKE*) method for prompt-aware diversity guidance. SPARKE utilizes conditional entropy for diversity guidance, which dynamically conditions diversity measurement on similar prompts and enables prompt-aware diversity control. While the entropy-based guidance approach enhances prompt-aware diversity, its reliance on the matrix-based entropy scores poses computational challenges in large-scale generation settings. To address this, we focus on the special case of \textit{Conditional latent RKE Score Guidance}, reducing entropy computation and gradient-based optimization complexity from the $\mathcal{O}(n^3)$ of general entropy measures to $\mathcal{O}(n)$. The reduced computational complexity allows for diversity-guided sampling over potentially thousands of generation rounds on different prompts. We numerically test the SPARKE method on several text-to-image diffusion models, demonstrating that the proposed method improves the prompt-aware diversity of the generated data without incurring significant computational costs.

Distributional discrepancy between training and test data can lead models to make inaccurate predictions when encountering out-of-distribution (OOD) samples in real-world applications. Although existing graph OOD detection methods leverage data-centric techniques to extract effective representations, their performance remains compromised by structural redundancy that induces semantic shifts. To address this dilemma, we propose RedOUT, an unsupervised framework that integrates structural entropy into test-time OOD detection for graph classification. Concretely, we introduce the Redundancy-aware Graph Information Bottleneck (ReGIB) and decompose the objective into essential information and irrelevant redundancy. By minimizing structural entropy, the decoupled redundancy is reduced, and theoretically grounded upper and lower bounds are proposed for optimization. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of RedOUT on OOD detection. Specifically, our method achieves an average improvement of 6.7\%, significantly surpassing the best competitor by 17.3\% on the ClinTox/LIPO dataset pair.

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), which introduces a product of two trainable low-rank matrices into frozen pre-trained weights, is widely used for efficient fine-tuning of language models in federated learning (FL). However, when combined with differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD), LoRA faces substantial noise amplification: DP-SGD perturbs per-sample gradients, and the matrix multiplication of the LoRA update ($BA$) intensifies this effect. Freezing one matrix (*e.g.*, $A$) reduces the noise but restricts model expressiveness, often resulting in suboptimal adaptation. To address this, we propose $\texttt{FedSVD}$, a simple yet effective method that introduces a global reparameterization based on singular value decomposition (SVD).

Transformer-based algorithms, such as LoRAT, have significantly enhanced object-tracking performance. However, these approaches rely on a standard attention mechanism, which incurs quadratic token complexity, making real-time inference computationally expensive. In this paper, we introduce LoRATv2, a novel tracking framework that addresses these limitations with three main contributions. First, LoRATv2 integrates frame-wise causal attention, which ensures full self-attention within each frame while enabling causal dependencies across frames, significantly reducing computational overhead. Moreover, key-value (KV) caching is employed to efficiently reuse past embeddings for further speedup.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have intensified efforts to fuse heterogeneous open-source models into a unified system that inherits their complementary strengths. Existing logit-based fusion methods maintain inference efficiency but treat vocabulary dimensions independently, overlooking semantic dependencies encoded by cross-dimension interactions. These dependencies reflect how token types interact under a model's internal reasoning and are essential for aligning models with diverse generation behaviors. To explicitly model these dependencies, we propose \textbf{InfiGFusion}, the first structure-aware fusion framework with a novel \textit{Graph-on-Logits Distillation} (GLD) loss. Specifically, we retain the top-$k$ logits per output and aggregate their outer products across sequence positions to form a global co-activation graph, where nodes represent vocabulary channels and edges quantify their joint activations. To ensure scalability and efficiency, we design a sorting-based closed-form approximation that reduces the original $O(n^4)$ cost of Gromov-Wasserstein distance to $O(n \log n)$, with provable approximation guarantees. Experiments across multiple fusion settings show that GLD consistently improves fusion quality and stability. InfiGFusion outperforms SOTA models and fusion baselines across 11 benchmarks spanning reasoning, coding, and mathematics. It shows particular strength in complex reasoning tasks, with +35.6 improvement on Multistep Arithmetic and +37.06 on Causal Judgement over SFT, demonstrating superior multi-step and relational inference.

Diffusion policies have emerged as a mainstream paradigm for building vision-language-action (VLA) models. Although they demonstrate strong robot control capabilities, their training efficiency remains suboptimal. In this work, we identify a fundamental challenge in conditional diffusion policy training: when generative conditions are hard to distinguish, the training objective degenerates into modeling the marginal action distribution, a phenomenon we term loss collapse. To overcome this, we propose Cocos, a simple yet general solution that modifies the source distribution in the conditional flow matching to be condition-dependent. By anchoring the source distribution around semantics extracted from condition inputs, Cocos encourages stronger condition integration and prevents the loss collapse. We provide theoretical justification and extensive empirical results across simulation and real-world benchmarks. Our method achieves faster convergence and higher success rates than existing approaches, matching the performance of large-scale pre-trained VLAs using significantly fewer gradient steps and parameters. Cocos is lightweight, easy to implement, and compatible with diverse policy architectures, offering a general-purpose improvement to diffusion policy training.

Machine learning has promised to change the landscape of laboratory chemistry, with impressive results in molecular property prediction and reaction retro-synthesis. However, chemical datasets are often inaccessible to the machine learning community as they tend to require cleaning, thorough understanding of the chemistry, or are simply not available. In this paper, we introduce a novel dataset for yield prediction, providing the first-ever transient flow dataset for machine learning benchmarking, covering over 1200 process conditions. While previous datasets focus on discrete parameters, our experimental set-up allow us to sample a large number of continuous process conditions, generating new challenges for machine learning models. We focus on solvent selection, a task that is particularly difficult to model theoretically and therefore ripe for machine learning applications.

Learning rules--prescriptions for updating model parameters to improve performance--are typically assumed rather than derived. Why do some learning rules work better than others, and under what assumptions can a given rule be considered optimal? We propose a theoretical framework that casts learning rules as policies for navigating (partially observable) loss landscapes, and identifies optimal rules as solutions to an associated optimal control problem. A range of well-known rules emerge naturally within this framework under different assumptions: gradient descent from short-horizon optimization, momentum from longer-horizon planning, natural gradients from accounting for parameter space geometry, non-gradient rules from partial controllability, and adaptive optimizers like Adam from online Bayesian inference of loss landscape shape. We further show that continual learning strategies like weight resetting can be understood as optimal responses to task uncertainty. By unifying these phenomena under a single objective, our framework clarifies the computational structure of learning and offers a principled foundation for designing adaptive algorithms.

Advanced reasoning models with agentic capabilities (AI agents) are deployed to interact with humans and to solve sequential decision making problems under (often approximate) utility functions and internal models. When such problems have resource or failure constraints where action sequences may be forcibly terminated once resources are exhausted, agents face implicit trade offs that reshape their utility-driven (rational) behaviour. Additionally, since these agents are typically commissioned by a human principal to act on their behalf, asymmetries in constraint exposure can give rise to previously unanticipated misalignment between human objectives and agent incentives. We formalise this setting through a survival bandit framework, provide theoretical and empirical results that quantify the impact of survival driven preference shifts, identify conditions under which misalignment emerges and propose mechanisms to mitigate the emergence of risk-seeking or risk-averse behaviours. As a result, this work aims to increase understanding and interpretability of emergent behaviours of AI agents operating under such survival pressure, and offer guidelines for safely deploying such AI systems in critical resource limited environments.