We present LongVPO, a novel two-stage Direct Preference Optimization framework that enables short-context vision-language models to robustly understand ultra-long videos without any long-video annotations. In Stage 1, we synthesize preference triples by anchoring questions to individual short clips, interleaving them with distractors, and applying visual-similarity and question-specificity filtering to mitigate positional bias and ensure unambiguous supervision.

Trust in a decision-making system requires both safety guarantees and the ability to interpret and understand its behavior. This is particularly important for learned systems, whose decision-making processes are often highly opaque. Shielding is a prominent model-based technique for enforcing safety in reinforcement learning. However, because shields are automatically synthesized using rigorous formal methods, their decisions are often similarly difficult for humans to interpret. Recently, decision trees became customary to represent controllers and policies.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, yet their large scale often renders them impractical for resource-constrained environments.

In this work, we propose using a unified representation, termed Factorized Features, for low-level vision tasks, where we test on Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) and Image Compression. Motivated by the shared principles between these tasks, they require recovering and preserving fine image details, whether by enhancing resolution for SISR or reconstructing compressed data for Image Compression. Unlike previous methods that mainly focus on network architecture, our proposed approach utilizes a basis-coefficient decomposition as well as an explicit formulation of frequencies to capture structural components and multi-scale visual features in images, which addresses the core challenges of both tasks. We replace the representation of prior models from simple feature maps with Factorized Features to validate the potential for broad generalizability. In addition, we further optimize the compression pipeline by leveraging the mergeable-basis property of our Factorized Features, which consolidates shared structures on multiframe compression. Extensive experiments show that our unified representation delivers state-of-the-art performance, achieving an average relative improvement of 204.4% in PSNR over the baseline in Super-Resolution (SR) and 9.35% BD-rate reduction in Image Compression compared to the previous SOTA.

LiDAR-based world models offer more structured and geometry-aware representations than their image-based counterparts. However, existing LiDAR world models are narrowly trained; each model excels only in the domain for which it was built. This raises a critical question: can we develop LiDAR world models that exhibit strong transferability across multiple domains? To answer this, we conduct the first systematic domain transfer study across three demanding scenarios: (i) outdoor to indoor generalization, (ii) sparse-to dense-beam adaptation, and (iii) non-semantic to semantic transfer. Given different amounts of fine-tuning data, our experiments show that a single pretrained model can achieve up to 11% absolute improvement (83% relative) over training from scratch and outperforms training from scratch in 30/36 of our comparisons. This transferability significantly reduces the reliance on manually annotated data for semantic occupancy forecasting: our method exceeds previous baselines with only 5% of the labeled training data of prior work. We also observed inefficiencies of current generative-model-based LiDAR world models, mainly through their under-compression of LiDAR data and inefficient training objectives. To address these issues, we propose a latent conditional flow matching (CFM)-based framework that achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction accuracy using only half the training data and a compression ratio 6 times higher than that of prior methods. Our model also achieves SOTA performance on semantic occupancy forecasting while being 1.98x-23x more computationally efficient (a 1.1x-3.9x

We analyze task orderings in continual learning for linear regression, assuming joint realizability of training data. We focus on orderings that greedily maximize dissimilarity between consecutive tasks, a concept briefly explored in prior work but still surrounded by open questions. Using tools from the Kaczmarz method literature, we formalize such orderings and develop geometric and algebraic intuitions around them. Empirically, we demonstrate that greedy orderings converge faster than random ones in terms of the average loss across tasks, both for linear regression with random data and for linear probing on CIFAR-100classification tasks. Analytically, in a high-rank regression setting, we prove a loss bound for greedy orderings analogous to that of random ones. However, under general rank, we establish a repetition-dependent separation. Specifically, while prior work showed that for random orderings, with or without replacement, the average loss after k iterations is bounded by O(1/ k)--we prove that single-pass greedy orderings may fail catastrophically, whereas those allowing repetition converge at rate O(1/ 3 k). Overall, we reveal nuances within and between greedy and random orderings.

Diversified recommendation has attracted increasing attention from both researchers and practitioners, which can effectively address the homogeneity of recommended items. Existing approaches predominantly aim to infer the diversity of user preferences from observed user feedback. Nonetheless, due to inherent data biases, the observed data may not fully reflect user interests, where underexplored preferences can be overwhelmed or remain unmanifested. Failing to capture these preferences can lead to suboptimal diversity in recommendations. To fill this gap, this work aims to study diversified recommendation from a data-bias perspective.

Numerous models have been developed for scanpath and saliency prediction, which are typically trained on scanpaths, which model eye movement as a sequence of discrete fixation points connected by saccades, while the rich information contained in the raw trajectories is often discarded. Moreover, most existing approaches fail to capture the variability observed among human subjects viewing the same image. They generally predict a single scanpath of fixed, pre-defined length, which conflicts with the inherent diversity and stochastic nature of real-world visual attention. To address these challenges, we propose DiffEye, a diffusion-based training framework designed to model continuous and diverse eye movement trajectories during free viewing of natural images. Our method builds on a diffusion model conditioned on visual stimuli and introduces a novel component, namely Corresponding Positional Embedding (CPE), which aligns spatial gaze information with the patch-based semantic features of the visual input. By leveraging raw eye-tracking trajectories rather than relying on scanpaths, DiffEyecaptures the inherent variability in human gaze behavior and generates high-quality, realistic eye movement patterns, despite being trained on a comparatively small dataset. The generated trajectories can also be converted into scanpaths and saliency maps, resulting in outputs that more accurately reflect the distribution of human visual attention. DiffEyeis the first method to tackle this task on natural images using a diffusion model while fully leveraging the richness of raw eye-tracking data. Our extensive evaluation shows that DiffEyenot only achieves state-of-the-art performance in scanpath generation but also enables, for the first time, the generation of continuous eye movement trajectories.

How does the training data affect a model's behavior? This is the question we seek to answer with data attribution. The leading practical approaches to data attribution are based on influence functions (IF). IFs utilize a first-order Taylor approximation to efficiently predict the effect of removing a set of samples from the training set without retraining the model, and are used in a wide variety of machine learning applications. However, especially in the high-dimensional regime (# params Ω(# samples)), they are often imprecise and tend to underestimate the effect of sample removals, even for simple models such as logistic regression. We present rescaled influence functions (RIF), a tool for data attribution which can be used as a dropin replacement for influence functions, with little computational overhead but significant improvement in accuracy. We compare IF and RIF on a range of realworld datasets, showing that RIFs offer significantly better predictions in practice, and present a theoretical analysis explaining this improvement. Finally, we present a simple class of data poisoning attacks that would fool IF-based detections but would be detected by RIF.

Synthesizing realistic Martian landscape videos is crucial for mission rehearsal and robotic of high-quality simulation. Martian Howe data ver, and this the task significant poses unique domain challenges gap between due to Martian the scarcity and terrestrial composed imagery of two k .