Noisy labels are inevitable in real-world scenarios. Due to the strong capacity of deep neural networks to memorize corrupted labels, these noisy labels can cause significant performance degradation. Existing research on mitigating the negative effects of noisy labels has mainly focused on robust loss functions and sample selection, with comparatively limited exploration of regularization in model architecture. Inspired by the sparsity regularization used in Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs), we propose a Dynamic Connection Masking (DCM) mechanism for both Multi-Layer Perceptron Networks (MLPs) and KANs to enhance the robustness of classifiers against noisy labels. The mechanism can adaptively mask less important edges during training by evaluating their information-carrying capacity. Through theoretical analysis, we demonstrate its efficiency in reducing gradient error. Our approach can be seamlessly integrated into various noise-robust training methods to build more robust deep networks, including robust loss functions, sample selection strategies, and regularization techniques. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches. Furthermore, we are also the first to investigate KANs as classifiers against noisy labels, revealing their superior noise robustness over MLPs in real-world noisy scenarios. Our code will soon be publicly available.

Accurate and efficient modeling of soft-tissue interactions is fundamental for advancing surgical simulation, surgical robotics, and model-based surgical automation. To achieve real-time latency, classical Finite Element Method (FEM) solvers are often replaced with neural approximations; however, naively training such models in a fully data-driven manner without incorporating physical priors frequently leads to poor generalization and physically implausible predictions. We present a novel physics-informed neural simulation framework that enables real-time prediction of soft-tissue deformations under complex single- and multi-grasper interactions. Our approach integrates Kelvinlet-based analytical priors with large-scale FEM data, capturing both linear and nonlinear tissue responses. This hybrid design improves predictive accuracy and physical plausibility across diverse neural architectures while maintaining the low-latency performance required for interactive applications. We validate our method on challenging surgical manipulation tasks involving standard laparoscopic grasping tools, demonstrating substantial improvements in deformation fidelity and temporal stability over existing baselines. These results establish Kelvinlet-augmented learning as a principled and computationally efficient paradigm for real-time, physics-aware soft-tissue simulation in surgical AI.

By leveraging reduced-order models for platform-agnostic gait generation, RoMoCo enables flexible controller design across diverse robots. We demonstrate its versatility and performance through extensive simulations on the Cassie, Unitree H1, and G1 robots, and validate its real-world efficacy with hardware experiments on the Cassie and G1 humanoids.

Dialogue discourse parsing aims to identify and analyze discourse relations between the utterances within dialogues. However, linguistic features in dialogues, such as omission and idiom, frequently introduce ambiguities that obscure the intended discourse relations, posing significant challenges for parsers. To address this issue, we propose a Discourse-aware Clarification Module (DCM) to enhance the performance of the dialogue discourse parser. DCM employs two distinct reasoning processes: clarification type reasoning and discourse goal reasoning. The former analyzes linguistic features, while the latter distinguishes the intended relation from the ambiguous one. Furthermore, we introduce Contribution-aware Preference Optimization (CPO) to mitigate the risk of erroneous clarifications, thereby reducing cascading errors. CPO enables the parser to assess the contributions of the clarifications from DCM and provide feedback to optimize the DCM, enhancing its adaptability and alignment with the parser's requirements. Extensive experiments on the STAC and Molweni datasets demonstrate that our approach effectively resolves ambiguities and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines.

The Introduction is generally very good (with minor exceptions described below). Comparison to other models is required. Only one alternative approach is compared to the suggested method and another one-step model (DCM) is not lawfully described. I suggest the authors discuss other applications beside EEG/MEG as many of the alternative approaches were shown to be useful to many modalities. Please introduce consistent spacing before citations (in many cases the space doe not exist at all).

Numerous studies have compared machine learning (ML) and discrete choice models (DCMs) in predicting travel demand. However, these studies often lack generalizability as they compare models deterministically without considering contextual variations. To address this limitation, our study develops an empirical benchmark by designing a tournament model, thus efficiently summarizing a large number of experiments, quantifying the randomness in model comparisons, and using formal statistical tests to differentiate between the model and contextual effects. This benchmark study compares two large-scale data sources: a database compiled from literature review summarizing 136 experiments from 35 studies, and our own experiment data, encompassing a total of 6,970 experiments from 105 models and 12 model families. This benchmark study yields two key findings. Firstly, many ML models, particularly the ensemble methods and deep learning, statistically outperform the DCM family (i.e., multinomial, nested, and mixed logit models). However, this study also highlights the crucial role of the contextual factors (i.e., data sources, inputs and choice categories), which can explain models' predictive performance more effectively than the differences in model types alone. Model performance varies significantly with data sources, improving with larger sample sizes and lower dimensional alternative sets. After controlling all the model and contextual factors, significant randomness still remains, implying inherent uncertainty in such model comparisons. Overall, we suggest that future researchers shift more focus from context-specific model comparisons towards examining model transferability across contexts and characterizing the inherent uncertainty in ML, thus creating more robust and generalizable next-generation travel demand models.

Abstract--This paper presents a novel controller for the bipedal robot Bolt. Our approach leverages a whole-body model predictive controller in conjunction with a footstep sequencer to achieve robust locomotion. Simulation results demonstrate effective velocity tracking as well as push and slippage recovery abilities. In addition to that, we provide a theoretical sensitivity analysis of the footstep sequencing problem to enhance the understanding of the results. A. Context Bipedal robotics, with its origins tracing back to the end of the last century, has witnessed a significant surge in recent years.

In this work, the Divergent Component of Motion (DCM) method is expanded to include angular coordinates for the first time. This work introduces the idea of spatial DCM, which adds an angular objective to the existing linear DCM theory. To incorporate the angular component into the framework, a discussion is provided on extending beyond the linear motion of the Linear Inverted Pendulum model (LIPM) towards the Single Rigid Body model (SRBM) for DCM. This work presents the angular DCM theory for a 1D rotation, simplifying the SRBM rotational dynamics to a flywheel to satisfy necessary linearity constraints. The 1D angular DCM is mathematically identical to the linear DCM and defined as an angle which is ahead of the current body rotation based on the angular velocity. This theory is combined into a 3D linear and 1D angular DCM framework, with discussion on the feasibility of simultaneously achieving both sets of objectives. A simulation in MATLAB and hardware results on the TORO humanoid are presented to validate the framework's performance.

In this paper, a novel approach is proposed for learning robot control in contact-rich tasks such as wiping, by developing Diffusion Contact Model (DCM). Previous methods of learning such tasks relied on impedance control with time-varying stiffness tuning by performing Bayesian optimization by trial-and-error with robots. The proposed approach aims to reduce the cost of robot operation by predicting the robot contact trajectories from the variable stiffness inputs and using neural models. However, contact dynamics are inherently highly nonlinear, and their simulation requires iterative computations such as convex optimization. Moreover, approximating such computations by using finite-layer neural models is difficult. To overcome these limitations, the proposed DCM used the denoising diffusion models that could simulate the complex dynamics via iterative computations of multi-step denoising, thus improving the prediction accuracy. Stiffness tuning experiments conducted in simulated and real environments showed that the DCM achieved comparable performance to a conventional robot-based optimization method while reducing the number of robot trials.

Boundary points pose a significant challenge for machine learning tasks, including classification, clustering, and dimensionality reduction. Due to the similarity of features, boundary areas can result in mixed-up classes or clusters, leading to a crowding problem in dimensionality reduction. To address this challenge, numerous boundary point detection methods have been developed, but they are insufficiently to accurately and efficiently identify the boundary points in non-convex structures and high-dimensional manifolds. In this work, we propose a robust and efficient method for detecting boundary points using Local Direction Dispersion (LoDD). LoDD considers that internal points are surrounded by neighboring points in all directions, while neighboring points of a boundary point tend to be distributed only in a certain directional range. LoDD adopts a density-independent K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) method to determine neighboring points, and defines a statistic-based metric using the eigenvalues of the covariance matrix of KNN coordinates to measure the centrality of a query point. We demonstrated the validity of LoDD on five synthetic datasets (2-D and 3-D) and ten real-world benchmarks, and tested its clustering performance by equipping with two typical clustering methods, K-means and Ncut. Our results show that LoDD achieves promising and robust detection accuracy in a time-efficient manner.