Technology
FAME: Adaptive Functional Attention with Expert Routing for Function-on-Function Regression
Functional data play a pivotal role across science and engineering, yet their infinite-dimensional nature makes representation learning challenging. Conventional statistical models depend on pre-chosen basis expansions or kernels, limiting the flexibility of data-driven discovery, while many deep-learning pipelines treat functions as fixed-grid vectors, ignoring inherent continuity. In this paper, we introduce Functional Attention with a Mixture-of-Experts (FAME), an end-to-end, fully data-driven framework for function-on-function regression. FAME forms continuous attention by coupling a bidirectional neural controlled differential equation with MoE-driven vector fields to capture intra-functional continuity, and further fuses change to inter-functional dependencies via multi-head cross attention. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world functional regression benchmarks show that FAME achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and strong robustness to arbitrarily sampled discrete observations of functions.
Text-Aware Real-World Image Super-Resolution via Diffusion Model with Joint Segmentation Decoders
The introduction of generative models has significantly advanced image super-resolution (SR) in handling real-world degradations. However, they often incur fidelity-related issues, particularly distorting textual structures. In this paper, we introduce a novel diffusion-based SR framework, namely TADiSR, which integrates text-aware attention and joint segmentation decoders to recover not only natural details but also the structural fidelity of text regions in degraded real-world images. Moreover, we propose a complete pipeline for synthesizing high-quality images with fine-grained full-image text masks, combining realistic foreground text regions with detailed background content. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach substantially enhances text legibility in super-resolved images, achieving state-of-the-art performance across multiple evaluation metrics and exhibiting strong generalization to real-world scenarios. Our code is available at here .
ReDit: Reward Dithering for Improved LLM Policy Optimization
DeepSeek-R1 has successfully enhanced Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning capabilities through its rule-based reward system. While it's a ''perfect'' reward system that effectively mitigates reward hacking, such reward functions are often discrete. Our experimental observations suggest that discrete rewards can lead to gradient anomaly, unstable optimization, and slow convergence. To address this issue, we propose ReDit (Reward Dithering), a method that dithers the discrete reward signal by adding simple random noise. With this perturbed reward, exploratory gradients are continuously provided throughout the learning process, enabling smoother gradient updates and accelerating convergence.
Smooth Quadratic Prediction Markets
When agents trade in a Duality-based Cost Function prediction market, they collectively implement the learning algorithm Follow-The-Regularized-Leader [Abernethy et al., 2013]. We ask whether other learning algorithms could be used to inspire the design of prediction markets. By decomposing and modifying the Duality-based Cost Function Market Maker's (DCFMM) pricing mechanism, we propose a new prediction market, called the Smooth Quadratic Prediction Market, the incentivizes agents to collectively implement general steepest gradient descent. Relative to the DCFMM, the Smooth Quadratic Prediction Market has a better worst-case monetary loss for AD securities while preserving axiom guarantees such as the existence of instantaneous price, information incorporation, expressiveness, no arbitrage, and a form of incentive compatibility. To motivate the application of the Smooth Quadratic Prediction Market, we independently examine agents' trading behavior under two realistic constraints: bounded budgets and buy-only securities. Finally, we provide an introductory analysis of an approach to facilitate adaptive liquidity using the Smooth Quadratic Prediction Market. Our results suggest future designs where the price update rule is separate from the fee structure, yet guarantees are preserved.
REOBench: Benchmarking Robustness of Earth Observation Foundation Models
Earth observation foundation models have shown strong generalization across multiple Earth observation tasks, but their robustness under real-world perturbations remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce REOBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the robustness of Earth observation foundation models across six tasks and twelve types of image corruptions, including both appearance-based and geometric perturbations. To ensure realistic and fine-grained evaluation, our benchmark focuses on high-resolution optical remote sensing images, which are widely used in critical applications such as urban planning and disaster response. We conduct a systematic evaluation of a broad range of models trained using masked image modeling, contrastive learning, and vision-language pre-training paradigms. Our results reveal that (1) existing Earth observation foundation models experience significant performance degradation when exposed to input corruptions.
Learning Simple Interpolants for Linear Integer Arithmetic
Craig interpolation plays a central role in formal verification tasks such as model checking, invariant generation, and abstraction refinement. In the domain of linear integer arithmetic (LIA), interpolants are crucial for deriving inductive invariants that characterize unreachable or safe program states, enabling scalable and precise reasoning about software and hardware correctness. Despite progress in interpolation algorithms, generating concise and interpretable interpolants remains a key challenge. We propose a lightweight learning-based approach to generating simple interpolants for LIA. Our model learns to lazily sample input problems directly and is complementary to existing logical methods. When Z3 is guided by our learned model, the complexity of the interpolants it produces can be reduced by up to 47.3%. For older solvers, the reduction rate can reach up to 69.1%.
RepLDM: Reprogramming Pretrained Latent Diffusion Models for High-Quality, High-Efficiency, High-Resolution Image Generation
While latent diffusion models (LDMs), such as Stable Diffusion, are designed for high-resolution image generation, they often struggle with significant structural distortions when generating images at resolutions higher than their training one. Instead of relying on extensive retraining, a more resource-efficient approach is to reprogram the pretrained model for high-resolution (HR) image generation; however, existing methods often result in poor image quality and long inference time. We introduce RepLDM, a novel reprogramming framework for pretrained LDMs that enables high-quality, high-efficiency, high-resolution image generation; see Figure 1. RepLDM consists of two stages: (i) an attention guidance stage, which generates a latent representation of a higher-quality training-resolution image using a novel parameter-free self-attention mechanism to enhance the structural consistency; and (ii) a progressive upsampling stage, which progressively performs upsampling in pixel space to mitigate the severe artifacts caused by latent space upsampling. The effective initialization from the first stage allows for denoising at higher resolutions with significantly fewer steps, improving the efficiency. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that RepLDM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both quality and efficiency for HR image generation, underscoring its advantages for real-world applications.
Aeolus: A Multi-structural Flight Delay Dataset
We introduce Aeolus, a large-scale Multi-modal Flight Delay Dataset designed to advance research on flight delay prediction and support the development of foundation models for tabular data. Existing datasets in this domain are typically limited to flat tabular structures and fail to capture the spatiotemporal dynamics inherent in delay propagation. Aeolus addresses this limitation by providing three aligned modalities: (i) a tabular dataset with rich operational, meteorological, and airportlevel features for over 50 million flights; (ii) a flight chain module that models delay propagation along sequential flight legs, capturing upstream and downstream dependencies; and (iii) a flight network graph that encodes shared aircraft, crew, and airport resource connections, enabling cross-flight relational reasoning. The dataset is carefully constructed with temporal splits, comprehensive features, and strict leakage prevention to support realistic and reproducible machine learning evaluation. Aeolus supports a broad range of tasks, including regression, classification, temporal structure modeling, and graph learning, serving as a unified benchmark across tabular, sequential, and graph modalities. We release baseline experiments and preprocessing tools to facilitate adoption.
More of the Same: Persistent Representational Harms Under Increased Representation
To recognize and mitigate the harms of generative AI systems, it is crucial to consider whether and how different societal groups are represented by these systems. A critical gap emerges when naively measuring or improving is represented, as this does not consider people are represented. In this work, we develop GAS(P), an evaluation methodology for surfacing distribution-level group representational biases in generated text, tackling the setting where groups are unprompted (i.e., groups are not specified in the input to generative systems). We apply this novel methodology to investigate gendered representations in occupations across state-of-the-art large language models. We show that, even though the gender distribution when models are prompted to generate biographies leads to a large representation of women, even representational biases persist in how different genders are represented. Our evaluation methodology reveals that there are statistically significant distribution-level differences in the word choice used to describe biographies and personas of different genders across occupations, and we show that many of these differences are associated with representational harms and stereotypes. Our empirical findings caution that naively increasing (unprompted) representation may inadvertently proliferate representational biases, and our proposed evaluation methodology enables systematic and rigorous measurement of the problem.
Self-supervised Learning of Echocardiographic Video Representations via Online Cluster Distillation
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has achieved major advances in natural images and video understanding, but challenges remain in domains like echocardiography (heart ultrasound) due to subtle anatomical structures, complex temporal dynamics, and the current lack of domain-specific pre-trained models. Existing SSL approaches such as contrastive, masked modeling, and clustering-based methods struggle with high intersample similarity, sensitivity to low PSNR inputs common in ultrasound, or aggressive augmentations that distort clinically relevant features.