Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide a powerful approach to training control policies for physical systems, such as robots, by combining end-to-end learning with transfer of semantic knowledge from web-scale vision-language model (VLM) training. However, the constraints of real-time control are often at odds with the design of VLMs: the most powerful VLMs have tens or hundreds of billions of parameters, presenting an obstacle to real-time inference, and operate on discrete tokens rather than the continuous-valued outputs that are required for controlling robots. To address this challenge, recent VLA models have used specialized modules for efficient continuous control, such as action experts or continuous output heads, which typically require adding new untrained parameters to the pretrained VLM backbone. While these modules improve real-time and control capabilities, it remains an open question whether they preserve or degrade the semantic knowledge contained in the pretrained VLM, and what effect they have on the VLA training dynamics. In this paper, we study this question in the context of VLAs that include a continuous diffusion or flow matching action expert, showing that naively including such experts significantly harms both training speed and knowledge transfer. We provide an extensive analysis of various design choices, their impact on performance and knowledge transfer, and propose a technique for insulating the VLM backbone during VLA training that mitigates this issue.

It's noteworthy that, with a generalist LLMbased framework, our model can achieve over 60% mAP on COCO, on par with

Specialized clinical AI assistants are rapidly entering medical practice, often framed as safer or more reliable than general-purpose large language models (LLMs). Yet, unlike frontier models, these clinical tools are rarely subjected to independent, quantitative evaluation, creating a critical evidence gap despite their growing influence on diagnosis, triage, and guideline interpretation. We assessed two widely deployed clinical AI systems (OpenEvidence and UpToDate Expert AI) against three state-of-the-art generalist LLMs (GPT-5, Gemini 3 Pro, and Claude Sonnet 4.5) using a 1,000-item mini-benchmark combining MedQA (medical knowledge) and HealthBench (clinician-alignment) tasks. Generalist models consistently outperformed clinical tools, with GPT-5 achieving the highest scores, while OpenEvidence and UpToDate demonstrated deficits in completeness, communication quality, context awareness, and systems-based safety reasoning. These findings reveal that tools marketed for clinical decision support may often lag behind frontier LLMs, underscoring the urgent need for transparent, independent evaluation before deployment in patient-facing workflows.

We investigate image segmentation of cells under the lens of scalar fields. Our goal is to learn a continuous scalar field on image domains such that its segmentation produces robust instances for cells present in images. This field is a function parameterized by the trained network, and its segmentation is realized by the watershed method. The fields we experiment with are solutions to the Poisson partial differential equation and a diffusion mimicking the steady-state solution of the heat equation. These solutions are obtained by minimizing just the field residuals, no regularization is needed, providing a robust regression capable of diminishing the adverse impacts of outliers in the training data and allowing for sharp cell boundaries. A single tensor is all that is needed to train a \unet\ thus simplifying implementation, lowering training and inference times, hence reducing energy consumption, and requiring a small memory footprint, all attractive features in edge computing. We present competitive results on public datasets from the literature and show that our novel, simple yet geometrically insightful approach can achieve excellent cell segmentation results.

Hospitals and healthcare systems rely on operational decisions that determine patient flow, cost, and quality of care. Despite strong performance on medical knowledge and conversational benchmarks, foundation models trained on general text may lack the specialized knowledge required for these operational decisions. We introduce Lang1, a family of models (100M-7B parameters) pretrained on a specialized corpus blending 80B clinical tokens from NYU Langone Health's EHRs and 627B tokens from the internet. To rigorously evaluate Lang1 in real-world settings, we developed the REalistic Medical Evaluation (ReMedE), a benchmark derived from 668,331 EHR notes that evaluates five critical tasks: 30-day readmission prediction, 30-day mortality prediction, length of stay, comorbidity coding, and predicting insurance claims denial. In zero-shot settings, both general-purpose and specialized models underperform on four of five tasks (36.6%-71.7% AUROC), with mortality prediction being an exception. After finetuning, Lang1-1B outperforms finetuned generalist models up to 70x larger and zero-shot models up to 671x larger, improving AUROC by 3.64%-6.75% and 1.66%-23.66% respectively. We also observed cross-task scaling with joint finetuning on multiple tasks leading to improvement on other tasks. Lang1-1B effectively transfers to out-of-distribution settings, including other clinical tasks and an external health system. Our findings suggest that predictive capabilities for hospital operations require explicit supervised finetuning, and that this finetuning process is made more efficient by in-domain pretraining on EHR. Our findings support the emerging view that specialized LLMs can compete with generalist models in specialized tasks, and show that effective healthcare systems AI requires the combination of in-domain pretraining, supervised finetuning, and real-world evaluation beyond proxy benchmarks.

It's noteworthy that, with a generalist LLMbased framework, our model can achieve over 60% mAP on COCO, on par with

Is bigger always better for time series foundation models? With the question in mind, we explore an alternative to training a single, large monolithic model: building a portfolio of smaller, pretrained forecasting models. By applying ensembling or model selection over these portfolios, we achieve competitive performance on large-scale benchmarks using much fewer parameters. We explore strategies for designing such portfolios and find that collections of specialist models consistently outperform portfolios of independently trained generalists. Remarkably, we demonstrate that post-training a base model is a compute-effective approach for creating sufficiently diverse specialists, and provide evidences that ensembling and model selection are more compute-efficient than test-time fine-tuning.

Mobile GUI agents are becoming critical tools for enhancing human-device interaction efficiency, with multimodal large language models (MLLMs) emerging as dominant paradigms in this domain. Current agents, however, are limited to following explicit human instructions, resulting in insufficient capability for proactive intent anticipation. Additionally, these agents fail to leverage the contextual information associated with users during task execution, thereby neglecting potentially vast differences in user preferences. To address these challenges, we introduce the FingerTip benchmark. It contains two new tracks: proactive task suggestions by analyzing environment observation and users' previous intents, and personalized task execution by catering to users' action preferences. We collected unique human demonstrations of multi-step Android device interactions across a variety of everyday apps. These demonstrations are not isolated but are continuously acquired from the users' long-term usage in their real lives, and encompass essential user-related contextual information. Our experiments reveal challenges of the tasks we propose. The model fine-tuned with the data we collected effectively utilized user information and achieved good results, highlighting the potential of our approach in building more user-oriented mobile GUI agents. Our code is open-source at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FingerTip-57B8 for reproducibility.