Technology
MiCADangelo: Fine-Grained Reconstruction of Constrained CAD Models from 3D Scans
Computer-Aided Design (CAD) plays a foundational role in modern manufacturing and product development, often requiring designers to modify or build upon existing models. Converting 3D scans into parametric CAD representations--a process known as CAD reverse engineering--remains a significant challenge due to the high precision and structural complexity of CAD models. Existing deep learning-based approaches typically fall into two categories: bottom-up, geometry-driven methods, which often fail to produce fully parametric outputs, and top-down strategies, which tend to overlook fine-grained geometric details.
SketchMind: A Multi-Agent Cognitive Framework for Assessing Student-Drawn Scientific Sketches
Scientific sketches (e.g., models) offer a powerful lens into students' conceptual understanding, yet AI-powered automated assessment of such free-form, visually diverse artifacts remains a critical challenge. Existing solutions often treat sketch evaluation as either an image classification task or monolithic vision-language models, which lack interpretability, pedagogical alignment, and adaptability across cognitive levels. To address these limitations, we present SketchMind, a cognitively grounded, multi-agent framework for evaluating and improving student-drawn scientific sketches. SketchMind introduces Sketch Reasoning Graphs (SRGs), semantic graph representations that embed domain concepts and Bloom's taxonomy-based cognitive labels. The system comprises modular agents responsible for rubric parsing, sketch perception, cognitive alignment, and iterative feedback with sketch modification, enabling personalized and transparent evaluation.
ThinkAct: Vision-Language-Action Reasoning via Reinforced Visual Latent Planning
Vision-language-action (VLA) reasoning tasks require agents to interpret multimodal instructions, perform long-horizon planning, and act adaptively in dynamic environments. Existing approaches typically train VLA models in an end-to-end fashion, directly mapping inputs to actions without explicit reasoning, which hinders their ability to plan over multiple steps or adapt to complex task variations. In this paper, we propose ThinkAct, a dual-system framework that bridges high-level reasoning with low-level action execution via reinforced visual latent planning. ThinkAct trains a multimodal LLM to generate embodied reasoning plans guided by reinforcing action-aligned visual rewards based on goal completion and trajectory consistency. These reasoning plans are compressed into a visual plan latent that conditions a downstream action model for robust action execution on target environments. Extensive experiments on embodied reasoning and robot manipulation benchmarks demonstrate that ThinkAct enables few-shot adaptation, long-horizon planning, and self-correction behaviors in complex embodied AI tasks.
How to Learn a Star: Binary Classification with Starshaped Polyhedral Sets
We consider binary classification restricted to a class of continuous piecewise linear functions whose decision boundaries are (possibly nonconvex) starshaped polyhedral sets, supported on a fixed polyhedral simplicial fan. We investigate the expressivity of these function classes and describe the combinatorial and geometric structure of the loss landscape, most prominently the sublevel sets, for two loss-functions: the 0/1-loss (discrete loss) and a log-likelihood loss function. In particular, we give explicit bounds on the VC dimension of this model, and concretely describe the sublevel sets of the discrete loss as chambers in a hyperplane arrangement. For the log-likelihood loss, we give sufficient conditions for the optimum to be unique, and describe the geometry of the optimum when varying the rate parameter of the underlying exponential probability distribution.
FlowMo: Variance-Based Flow Guidance for Coherent Motion in Video Generation
Text-to-video diffusion models are notoriously limited in their ability to model temporal aspects such as motion, physics, and dynamic interactions. Existing approaches address this limitation by retraining the model or introducing external conditioning signals to enforce temporal consistency. In this work, we explore whether a meaningful temporal representation can be extracted directly from the predictions of a pre-trained model without any additional training or auxiliary inputs.
Effortless, Simulation-Efficient Bayesian Inference using Tabular Foundation Models
Simulation-based inference (SBI) offers a flexible and general approach to performing Bayesian inference: In SBI, a neural network is trained on synthetic data simulated from a model and used to rapidly infer posterior distributions for observed data. A key goal for SBI is to achieve accurate inference with as few simulations as possible, especially for expensive simulators. In this work, we address this challenge by repurposing recent probabilistic foundation models for tabular data: We show how tabular foundation models---specifically TabPFN---can be used as pre-trained autoregressive conditional density estimators for SBI. We propose Neural Posterior Estimation with Prior-data Fitted Networks (NPE-PFN) and show that it is competitive with current SBI approaches in terms of accuracy for both benchmark tasks and two complex scientific inverse problems. Crucially, it often substantially outperforms them in terms of simulation efficiency, sometimes requiring orders of magnitude fewer simulations. NPE-PFN eliminates the need for selecting and training an inference network and tuning its hyperparameters. We also show that it exhibits superior robustness to model misspecification and can be scaled to simulation budgets that exceed the context size limit of TabPFN. NPE-PFN provides a new direction for SBI, where training-free, general-purpose inference models offer efficient, easy-to-use, and flexible solutions for a wide range of stochastic inverse problems.
A Reinforcement Learning-based Bidding Strategy for Data Consumers in Auction-based Federated Learning
A major challenge in AFL pertains to how DCs select and bid for DOs. Existing methods are generally static, making them ill-suited for dynamic AFL markets. To address this issue, we propose the R}einforcement Learning-based Bidding Strategy for DCs in Auction-based Federated Learning (RLB-AFL). We incorporate historical states into a Deep Q-Network to capture sequential information critical for bidding decisions. To mitigate state space sparsity, where specific states rarely reoccur for each DC during auctions, we incorporate the Gaussian Mixture Model into RLB-AFL.
FAIR Universe HiggsML Uncertainty Dataset and Competition
The FAIR Universe - HiggsML Uncertainty Challenge focused on measuring the physical properties of elementary particles with imperfect simulators. Participants were required to compute and report confidence intervals for a parameter of interest regarding the Higgs boson while accounting for various systematic (epistemic) uncertainties. The dataset is a tabular dataset of 28 features and 280 million instances. Each instance represents a simulated proton-proton collision as observed at CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. The features of these simulations were chosen to capture key characteristics of different types of particles.
Words That Unite The World: A Unified Framework for Deciphering Central Bank Communications
Central banks around the world play a crucial role in maintaining economic stability. Deciphering policy implications in their communications is essential, especially as misinterpretations can disproportionately impact vulnerable populations. To address this, we introduce the World Central Banks (WCB) dataset, the most comprehensive monetary policy corpus to date, comprising over 380k sentences from 25 central banks across diverse geographic regions, spanning 28 years of historical data. After uniformly sampling 1k sentences per bank (25k total) across all available years, we annotate and review each sentence using dual annotators, disagreement resolutions, and secondary expert reviews. We define three tasks: Stance Detection, Temporal Classification, and UncertaintyEstimation, with each sentence annotated for all three.
CMoB: Modality Valuation via Causal Effect for Balanced Multimodal Learning
Existing early and late fusion frameworks in multimodal learning are confronted with the fundamental challenge of modality imbalance, wherein disparities in representational capacities induce inter-modal competition during training. Current research methodologies primarily rely on modality-level contribution assessments to measure gaps in representational capabilities and enhance poorly learned modalities, overlooking the dynamic variations of modality contributions across individual samples. To address this, we propose a Causal-aware Modality valuation approach for Balanced multimodal learning (CMoB). We define a benefit function based on Shannon's theory of informational uncertainty to evaluate the changes in the importance of samples across different stages of multimodal training. Inspired by human cognitive science, we propose a causal-aware modality contribution quantification method from a causal perspective to capture fine-grained changes in modality contribution degrees within samples. In the iterative training of multimodal learning, we develop targeted modal enhancement strategies that dynamically select and optimize modalities based on real-time evaluation of their contribution variations across training samples. Our method enhances the discriminative ability of key modalities and the learning capacity of weak modalities while achieving fine-grained balance in multimodal learning. Extensive experiments on benchmark multimodal datasets and multimodal frameworks demonstrate the superiority of our CMoB approach for balanced multimodal learning.