Foundation models have achieved remarkable results in 2D and language tasks like image segmentation, object detection, and visual-language understanding. However, their potential to enrich 3D scene representation learning is largely untapped due to the existence of the domain gap. In this work, we propose an innovative methodology called Bridge3D to address this gap by pre-training 3D models using features, semantic masks, and captions sourced from foundation models. Specifically, our method employs semantic masks from foundation models to guide the masking and reconstruction process for the masked autoencoder, enabling more focused attention on foreground representations.

Systematic literature reviews (SLRs) play an essential role in summarising, synthesising and validating scientific evidence. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in using machine learning techniques to automate the identification of relevant studies for SLRs. However, the lack of standardised evaluation datasets makes comparing the performance of such automated literature screening systems difficult. In this paper, we analyse the citation screening evaluation datasets, revealing that many of the available datasets are either too small, suffer from data leakage or have limited applicability to systems treating automated literature screening as a classification task, as opposed to, for example, a retrieval or question-answering task. To address these challenges, we introduce CSMED, a meta-dataset consolidating nine publicly released collections, providing unified access to 325 SLRs from the fields of medicine and computer science. CSMED serves as a comprehensive resource for training and evaluating the performance of automated citation screening models. Additionally, we introduce CSMED-FT, a new dataset designed explicitly for evaluating the full text publication screening task. To demonstrate the utility of CSMED, we conduct experiments and establish baselines on new datasets.

While neural network binary classifiers are often evaluated on metrics such as Accuracy and $F_1$-Score, they are commonly trained with a cross-entropy objective. How can this training-evaluation gap be addressed? While specific techniques have been adopted to optimize certain confusion matrix based metrics, it is challenging or impossible in some cases to generalize the techniques to other metrics. Adversarial learning approaches have also been proposed to optimize networks via confusion matrix based metrics, but they tend to be much slower than common training methods. In this work, we propose a unifying approach to training neural network binary classifiers that combines a differentiable approximation of the Heaviside function with a probabilistic view of the typical confusion matrix values using soft sets. Our theoretical analysis shows the benefit of using our method to optimize for a given evaluation metric, such as $F_1$-Score, with soft sets, and our extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our approach in several domains.

In practice, imitation learning is preferred over pure reinforcement learning whenever it is possible to design a teaching agent to provide expert supervision. However, we show that when the teaching agent makes decisions with access to privileged information that is unavailable to the student, this information is marginalized during imitation learning, resulting in an imitation gap and, potentially, poor results.

This paper presents HierSpeech, a high-quality end-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) system based on a hierarchical conditional variational autoencoder (VAE) utilizing self-supervised speech representations. Recently, single-stage TTS systems, which directly generate raw speech waveform from text, have been getting interest thanks to their ability in generating high-quality audio within a fully end-to-end training pipeline. However, there is still a room for improvement in the conventional TTS systems. Since it is challenging to infer both the linguistic and acoustic attributes from the text directly, missing the details of attributes, specifically linguistic information, is inevitable, which results in mispronunciation and over-smoothing problem in their synthetic speech. To address the aforementioned problem, we leverage self-supervised speech representations as additional linguistic representations to bridge an information gap between text and speech.

There still remains an extreme performance gap between Vision Transformers (ViTs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) when training from scratch on small datasets, which is concluded to the lack of inductive bias. In this paper, we further consider this problem and point out two weaknesses of ViTs in inductive biases, that is, the spatial relevance and diverse channel representation. First, on spatial aspect, objects are locally compact and relevant, thus fine-grained feature needs to be extracted from a token and its neighbors. While the lack of data hinders ViTs to attend the spatial relevance. Second, on channel aspect, representation exhibits diversity on different channels.

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has shown great potentials in finding better neural network designs. Sample-based NAS is the most reliable approach which aims at exploring the search space and evaluating the most promising architectures. However, it is computationally very costly. As a remedy, the one-shot approach has emerged as a popular technique for accelerating NAS using weight-sharing. However, due to the weight-sharing of vastly different networks, the one-shot approach is less reliable than the sample-based approach. In this work, we propose BONAS (Bayesian Optimized Neural Architecture Search), a sample-based NAS framework which is accelerated using weight-sharing to evaluate multiple related architectures simultaneously.

Artificial intelligence has advanced rapidly across perception, language, reasoning, and multimodal domains. Yet despite these achievements, modern AI systems remain fundamentally limited in their ability to self-monitor, self-correct, and regulate their behavior autonomously in dynamic contexts. This paper identifies and analyzes seven core deficiencies that constrain contemporary AI models: the absence of intrinsic self-monitoring, lack of meta-cognitive awareness, fixed and non-adaptive learning mechanisms, inability to restructure goals, lack of representational maintenance, insufficient embodied feedback, and the absence of intrinsic agency. Alongside identifying these limitations, we also outline a forward-looking perspective on how AI may evolve beyond them through architectures that mirror neurocognitive principles. We argue that these structural limitations prevent current architectures, including deep learning and transformer-based systems, from achieving robust generalization, lifelong adaptability, and real-world autonomy. Drawing on a comparative analysis of artificial systems and biological cognition [7], and integrating insights from AI research, cognitive science, and neuroscience, we outline how these capabilities are absent in current models and why scaling alone cannot resolve them. We conclude by advocating for a paradigmatic shift toward cognitively grounded AI (cognitive autonomy) capable of self-directed adaptation, dynamic representation management, and intentional, goal-oriented behavior, paired with reformative oversight mechanisms [8] that ensure autonomous systems remain interpretable, governable, and aligned with human values.

We establish a new connection between value and policy based reinforcement learning (RL) based on a relationship between softmax temporal value consistency and policy optimality under entropy regularization. Specifically, we show that softmax consistent action values correspond to optimal entropy regularized policy probabilities along any action sequence, regardless of provenance. From this observation, we develop a new RL algorithm, Path Consistency Learning (PCL), that minimizes a notion of soft consistency error along multi-step action sequences extracted from both on-and off-policy traces. We examine the behavior of PCL in different scenarios and show that PCL can be interpreted as generalizing both actor-critic and Q-learning algorithms. We subsequently deepen the relationship by showing how a single model can be used to represent both a policy and the corresponding softmax state values, eliminating the need for a separate critic. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that PCL significantly outperforms strong actor-critic and Q-learning baselines across several benchmarks.

Android is the largest mobile platform, yet automatically building applications remains a practical challenge. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for code repair, their use for fixing Android build errors remains underexplored. To address this gap, we first introduce AndroidBuildBench, a benchmark of 1,019 build failures curated from the commit histories of 43 open-source Android projects. Each problem is paired with a verified solution from a subsequent commit, ensuring that fixes are feasible. Second, we propose GradleFixer, an LLM agent with domain-specific tools for inspecting and manipulating the Gradle build environment. GradleFixer achieves a resolve rate of 81.4% (pass@1), significantly outperforming a state-of-the-art coding agent that relies on a general-purpose shell. GradleFixer's success suggests that while LLMs possess the high-level knowledge to solve these failures, they struggle to translate this knowledge into effective low-level actions using a general-purpose shell. We demonstrate the effectiveness of a strategy we term Tool Bridging, which replaces general-purpose shell commands with domain-aware abstractions. We hypothesize this approach works through two mechanisms: 1) it provides tools in an API-like format that LLMs use more reliably, and 2) it constrains the action space to relevant operations. This approach bridges the gap between the model's high-level reasoning and effective low-level execution.