People are already using AI to date (and to flirt), but what about marrying one? In an April 2025 survey of 2,000 Gen Z respondents by AI company Joi AI, eight in 10 said they'd consider marrying an AI partner. AI companions appear to be Joi AI's bread and butter. On its website, you can chat with pre-made characters or make your own. The company calls these connections "AI-lationships."

Localized receptive fields--neurons that are selective for certain contiguous spatiotemporal features of their input--populate early sensory regions of the mammalian brain. Unsupervised learning algorithms that optimize explicit sparsity or independence criteria replicate features of these localized receptive fields, but fail to explain directly how localization arises through learning without efficient coding, as occurs in early layers of deep neural networks and might occur in early sensory regions of biological systems. We consider an alternative model in which localized receptive fields emerge without explicit top-down efficiency constraints--a feedforward neural network trained on a data model inspired by the structure of natural images. Previous work identified the importance of non-Gaussian statistics to localization in this setting but left open questions about the mechanisms driving dynamical emergence. We address these questions by deriving the effective learning dynamics for a single nonlinear neuron, making precise how higher-order statistical properties of the input data drive emergent localization, and we demonstrate that the predictions of these effective dynamics extend to the many-neuron setting. Our analysis provides an alternative explanation for the ubiquity of localization as resulting from the nonlinear dynamics of learning in neural circuits.

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in natural language processing tasks and demonstrate considerable potential in the legal domain. However, legal applications demand high standards of accuracy, reliability, and fairness. Applying existing LLMs to legal systems without careful evaluation of their potential and limitations could pose significant risks in legal practice. To this end, we introduce a standardized comprehensive Chinese legal benchmark LexEval. This benchmark is notable in the following three aspects: (1) Ability Modeling: We propose a new taxonomy of legal cognitive abilities to organize different tasks.

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular method for efficiently inferring optima of an expensive black-box function via a sequence of queries. Existing informationtheoretic BO procedures aim to make queries that most reduce the uncertainty about optima, where the uncertainty is captured by Shannon entropy. However, an optimal measure of uncertainty would, ideally, factor in how we intend to use the inferred quantity in some downstream procedure. In this paper, we instead consider a generalization of Shannon entropy from work in statistical decision theory [13, 39], which contains a broad class of uncertainty measures parameterized by a problem-specific loss function corresponding to a downstream task. We first show that special cases of this entropy lead to popular acquisition functions used in BO procedures such as knowledge gradient, expected improvement, and entropy search. We then show how alternative choices for the loss yield a flexible family of acquisition functions that can be customized for use in novel optimization settings.

Real-world classification problems must contend with domain shift, the (potential) mismatch between the domain where a model is deployed and the domain(s) where the training data was gathered. Methods to handle such problems must specify what structure is common between the domains and what varies. A natural assumption is that causal (structural) relationships are invariant in all domains. Then, it is tempting to learn a predictor for label Y that depends only on its causal parents. However, many real-world problems are "anti-causal" in the sense that Y is a cause of the covariates X--in this case, Y has no causal parents and the naive causal invariance is useless.

However, there are only a few datasets that include concept-level meta-labels and most of these meta-labels are relevant for natural images that do not require domain expertise. Previous densely annotated datasets in medicine focused on meta-labels that are relevant to a single disease such as osteoarthritis or melanoma. In dermatology, skin disease is described using an established clinical lexicon that allows clinicians to describe physical exam findings to one another. To provide a medical dataset densely annotated by domain experts with annotations useful across multiple disease processes, we developed SkinCon: a skin disease dataset densely annotated by dermatologists. SkinCon includes 3230 images from the Fitzpatrick 17k skin disease dataset densely annotated with 48 clinical concepts, 22 of which have at least 50 images representing the concept. The concepts used were chosen by two dermatologists considering the clinical descriptor terms used to describe skin lesions.

Equivariant representation is necessary for the brain and artificial perceptual systems to faithfully represent the stimulus under some (Lie) group transformations. However, it remains unknown how recurrent neural circuits in the brain represent the stimulus equivariantly, nor the neural representation of abstract group operators. The present study uses a one-dimensional (1D) translation group as an example to explore the general recurrent neural circuit mechanism of the equivariant stimulus representation. We found that a continuous attractor network (CAN), a canonical neural circuit model, self-consistently generates a continuous family of stationary population responses (attractors) that represents the stimulus equivariantly. Inspired by the Drosophila's compass circuit, we found that the 1D translation operators can be represented by extra speed neurons besides the CAN, where speed neurons' responses represent the moving speed (1D translation group parameter), and their feedback connections to the CAN represent the translation generator (Lie algebra). We demonstrated that the network responses are consistent with experimental data. Our model for the first time demonstrates how recurrent neural circuitry in the brain achieves equivariant stimulus representation.

We list them in Table A.2. Running a large number of algorithm-hyperparameter pairs many times is very computationally expensive. In order to save time and resources, we leverage the fact that multiple approaches can share resources. We describe how we compute the numbers for each approach as follows: For each offline RL dataset in Sepsis, TutorBot, Robomimic, and D4RL, we produce the following partitions (we refer to this as the "partition generation procedure"): 1. 2-fold CV split (2 partitions consisted of (S

Anomaly detection is widely used for identifying critical errors and suspicious behaviors, but current methods lack interpretability. We leverage common properties of existing methods and recent advances in generative models to introduce counterfactual explanations for anomaly detection. Given an input, we generate its counterfactual as a diffusion-based repair that shows what a non-anomalous version should have looked like. A key advantage of this approach is that it enables a domain-independent formal specification of explainability desiderata, offering a unified framework for generating and evaluating explanations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our anomaly explainability framework, AR-Pro, on vision (MVTec, VisA) and time-series (SWaT, WADI, HAI) anomaly datasets. The code used for the experiments is accessible at: https://github.com/xjiae/arpro.

Figure 2: The figure presents still images extracted from 360 videos used in the experiment to display various environments to the participants. The videos were selected from the publically available 360 VR video dataset (Li et al. (2017).) The EEVR dataset comprises synchronized pairs of physiological signals and textual data. It includes responses to four self-assessment questions regarding perceived arousal, valence, dominance, and discrete emotions ratings collected using PANAS questionnaires (which were further utilized to calculate Positive and Negative Affect Score). The EEVR dataset was collected using Virtual Reality (VR) 360 videos as the elicitation medium. The videos utilized in the dataset were selected based on their arousal and valence ratings to cover all four quadrants of the Russell circumplex emotion model (Russell et al. (1989)), as shown in Figure 2. The remainder of the supplementary materials provide detailed information about the EEVR dataset. Figure 3 provides a datasheet for the EEVR dataset based on Gebru et al. (2018).