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Ancient sharks once swam in this landlocked state

Popular Science

'Sharkansas' contains entire fossilized skeletons dating back 320 million years. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Arkansas is hundreds of miles from the Gulf of Mexico, but it's home to countless sharks . A trove of the fossilized predator's remains are embedded within the Fayetteville Shale --a roughly 350-million-year-old geological formation in the state's northwestern corner. Because a shark's cartilage skeleton decomposes so quickly, they usually only leave teeth behind when they die.


Large-Scale Differentiable Causal Discovery of Factor Graphs

Neural Information Processing Systems

A common theme in causal inference is learning causal relationships between observed variables, also known as causal discovery. This is usually a daunting task, given the large number of candidate causal graphs and the combinatorial nature of the search space. Perhaps for this reason, most research has so far focused on relatively small causal graphs, with up to hundreds of nodes. However, recent advances in fields like biology enable generating experimental data sets with thousands of interventions followed by rich profiling of thousands of variables, raising the opportunity and urgent need for large causal graph models. Here, we introduce the notion of factor directed acyclic graphs ($f$-DAGs) as a way to restrict the search space to non-linear low-rank causal interaction models.


End-to-end Symbolic Regression with Transformers

Neural Information Processing Systems

Symbolic regression, the task of predicting the mathematical expression of a function from the observation of its values, is a difficult task which usually involves a two-step procedure: predicting the skeleton of the expression up to the choice of numerical constants, then fitting the constants by optimizing a non-convex loss function. The dominant approach is genetic programming, which evolves candidates by iterating this subroutine a large number of times. Neural networks have recently been tasked to predict the correct skeleton in a single try, but remain much less powerful.In this paper, we challenge this two-step procedure, and task a Transformer to directly predict the full mathematical expression, constants included. One can subsequently refine the predicted constants by feeding them to the non-convex optimizer as an informed initialization. We present ablations to show that this end-to-end approach yields better results, sometimes even without the refinement step. We evaluate our model on problems from the SRBench benchmark and show that our model approaches the performance of state-of-the-art genetic programming with several orders of magnitude faster inference.


Artificial tendons give muscle-powered robots a boost

Robohub

Our muscles are nature's actuators. The sinewy tissue is what generates the forces that make our bodies move. In recent years, engineers have used real muscle tissue to actuate "biohybrid robots" made from both living tissue and synthetic parts. By pairing lab-grown muscles with synthetic skeletons, researchers are engineering a menagerie of muscle-powered crawlers, walkers, swimmers, and grippers. But for the most part, these designs are limited in the amount of motion and power they can produce.


HouseLayout3D: A Benchmark and Training-Free Baseline for 3D Layout Estimation in the Wild

Bieri, Valentin, Rakotosaona, Marie-Julie, Tateno, Keisuke, Engelmann, Francis, Guibas, Leonidas

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Current 3D layout estimation models are primarily trained on synthetic datasets containing simple single room or single floor environments. As a consequence, they cannot natively handle large multi floor buildings and require scenes to be split into individual floors before processing, which removes global spatial context that is essential for reasoning about structures such as staircases that connect multiple levels. In this work, we introduce HouseLayout3D, a real world benchmark designed to support progress toward full building scale layout estimation, including multiple floors and architecturally intricate spaces. We also present MultiFloor3D, a simple training free baseline that leverages recent scene understanding methods and already outperforms existing 3D layout estimation models on both our benchmark and prior datasets, highlighting the need for further research in this direction. Data and code are available at: https://houselayout3d.github.io.


Searching Meta Reasoning Skeleton to Guide LLM Reasoning

Zhang, Ziying, Wang, Yaqing, Yao, Quanming

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Meta reasoning behaviors work as a skeleton to guide large language model (LLM) reasoning, thus help to improve reasoning performance. However, prior researches implement meta reasoning skeleton with manually designed structure, limiting ability to adapt to query-specific requirement and capture intricate logical dependency among reasoning steps. To deal with the challenges, we represent meta reasoning skeleton with directed acyclic graph (DAG) to unify skeletons proposed in prior works and model intricate logical dependency. Then we propose AutoMR, a framework that searches for query-aware meta reasoning skeleton automatically inspired by automated machine learning (AutoML). Specifically, we construct search space based on DAG representation of skeleton and then formulate the search problem. This algorithm can derive any meta reasoning skeleton in search space efficiently and adapt skeleton to evolving base reasoning context, thus enable efficient query-aware skeleton search. We conduct experiments on extensive benchmark datasets. Experimental results show that AutoMR achieves better reasoning performance than previous works broadly. Large language model (LLM) demonstrate superior performance on complex tasks such as math Q&A when equipped with step-by-step reasoning ability (Wei et al., 2022; OpenAI, 2024; DeepSeek-AI, 2025). Researches on cognition divide reasoning into two levels: base reasoning (reasoning for problem directly) and meta reasoning (higher-level reasoning about how to reason) (Flavell, 1979). Meta reasoning, considered a unique ability of human cognition (Ackerman and Thompson, 2017), entails awareness of one's reasoning process and the deliberate selection of reasoning strategies.


Skeletons Matter: Dynamic Data Augmentation for Text-to-Query

Ji, Yuchen, Xu, Bo, Shi, Jie, Liang, Jiaqing, Yang, Deqing, Mao, Yu, Chen, Hai, Xiao, Yanghua

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The task of translating natural language questions into query languages has long been a central focus in semantic parsing. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly accelerated progress in this field. However, existing studies typically focus on a single query language, resulting in methods with limited generalizability across different languages. In this paper, we formally define the Text-to-Query task paradigm, unifying semantic parsing tasks across various query languages. We identify query skeletons as a shared optimization target of Text-to-Query tasks, and propose a general dynamic data augmentation framework that explicitly diagnoses model-specific weaknesses in handling these skeletons to synthesize targeted training data. Experiments on four Text-to-Query benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance using only a small amount of synthesized data, highlighting the efficiency and generality of our approach and laying a solid foundation for unified research on Text-to-Query tasks. We release our code at https://github.com/jjjycaptain/Skeletron.