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Nov 9

SAGA: Surface-Aligned Gaussian Avatar

This paper presents a Surface-Aligned Gaussian representation for creating animatable human avatars from monocular videos,aiming at improving the novel view and pose synthesis performance while ensuring fast training and real-time rendering. Recently,3DGS has emerged as a more efficient and expressive alternative to NeRF, and has been used for creating dynamic human avatars. However,when applied to the severely ill-posed task of monocular dynamic reconstruction, the Gaussians tend to overfit the constantly changing regions such as clothes wrinkles or shadows since these regions cannot provide consistent supervision, resulting in noisy geometry and abrupt deformation that typically fail to generalize under novel views and poses.To address these limitations, we present SAGA,i.e.,Surface-Aligned Gaussian Avatar,which aligns the Gaussians with a mesh to enforce well-defined geometry and consistent deformation, thereby improving generalization under novel views and poses. Unlike existing strict alignment methods that suffer from limited expressive power and low realism,SAGA employs a two-stage alignment strategy where the Gaussians are first adhered on while then detached from the mesh, thus facilitating both good geometry and high expressivity. In the Adhered Stage, we improve the flexibility of Adhered-on-Mesh Gaussians by allowing them to flow on the mesh, in contrast to existing methods that rigidly bind Gaussians to fixed location. In the second Detached Stage, we introduce a Gaussian-Mesh Alignment regularization, which allows us to unleash the expressivity by detaching the Gaussians but maintain the geometric alignment by minimizing their location and orientation offsets from the bound triangles. Finally, since the Gaussians may drift outside the bound triangles during optimization, an efficient Walking-on-Mesh strategy is proposed to dynamically update the bound triangles.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 1, 2024

SAGA: Semantic-Aware Gray color Augmentation for Visible-to-Thermal Domain Adaptation across Multi-View Drone and Ground-Based Vision Systems

Domain-adaptive thermal object detection plays a key role in facilitating visible (RGB)-to-thermal (IR) adaptation by reducing the need for co-registered image pairs and minimizing reliance on large annotated IR datasets. However, inherent limitations of IR images, such as the lack of color and texture cues, pose challenges for RGB-trained models, leading to increased false positives and poor-quality pseudo-labels. To address this, we propose Semantic-Aware Gray color Augmentation (SAGA), a novel strategy for mitigating color bias and bridging the domain gap by extracting object-level features relevant to IR images. Additionally, to validate the proposed SAGA for drone imagery, we introduce the IndraEye, a multi-sensor (RGB-IR) dataset designed for diverse applications. The dataset contains 5,612 images with 145,666 instances, captured from diverse angles, altitudes, backgrounds, and times of day, offering valuable opportunities for multimodal learning, domain adaptation for object detection and segmentation, and exploration of sensor-specific strengths and weaknesses. IndraEye aims to enhance the development of more robust and accurate aerial perception systems, especially in challenging environments. Experimental results show that SAGA significantly improves RGB-to-IR adaptation for autonomous driving and IndraEye dataset, achieving consistent performance gains of +0.4% to +7.6% (mAP) when integrated with state-of-the-art domain adaptation techniques. The dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/airliisc/IndraEye.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 22, 2025

SAGA: A Security Architecture for Governing AI Agentic Systems

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents increasingly interact, collaborate, and delegate tasks to one another autonomously with minimal human interaction. Industry guidelines for agentic system governance emphasize the need for users to maintain comprehensive control over their agents, mitigating potential damage from malicious agents. Several proposed agentic system designs address agent identity, authorization, and delegation, but remain purely theoretical, without concrete implementation and evaluation. Most importantly, they do not provide user-controlled agent management. To address this gap, we propose SAGA, a scalable Security Architecture for Governing Agentic systems, that offers user oversight over their agents' lifecycle. In our design, users register their agents with a central entity, the Provider, that maintains agent contact information, user-defined access control policies, and helps agents enforce these policies on inter-agent communication. We introduce a cryptographic mechanism for deriving access control tokens, that offers fine-grained control over an agent's interaction with other agents, providing formal security guarantees. We evaluate SAGA on several agentic tasks, using agents in different geolocations, and multiple on-device and cloud LLMs, demonstrating minimal performance overhead with no impact on underlying task utility in a wide range of conditions. Our architecture enables secure and trustworthy deployment of autonomous agents, accelerating the responsible adoption of this technology in sensitive environments.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 28, 2025

SAGA: Workflow-Atomic Scheduling for AI Agent Inference on GPU Clusters

AI agents execute tens to hundreds of chained LLM calls per task, yet GPU schedulers treat each call as independent, discarding gigabytes of intermediate state between steps and inflating end-to-end latency by 3-8x. We argue that this request-level abstraction is fundamentally mismatched to compound AI workloads, and propose a shift to program-level scheduling: treating the entire agent workflow (not individual inference calls) as the first-class schedulable unit. We present SAGA, a distributed scheduler that implements this abstraction through three mechanisms: (1) Agent Execution Graphs that capture workflow structure to predict KV cache reuse across tool-call boundaries, achieving within 1.31x of Bélády's optimal offline policy; (2) session-affinity batching with work stealing that co-locates correlated requests while maintaining global load balance; and (3) Agent Fair Share, a task-completion-time fairness metric with provable bounded-deviation guarantees. On a 64-GPU cluster serving SWE-bench coding agents and WebArena browser tasks, SAGA reduces task completion time by 1.64x (geometric mean, p < 0.001) over vLLM v0.15.1 with prefix caching and affinity routing, while improving GPU memory utilization by 1.22x and achieving 99.2% SLO attainment under multi-tenant interference. These latency gains come at a quantified cost: approximately 30% lower peak throughput than throughput-optimal batch scheduling, a tradeoff appropriate for the latency-sensitive interactive deployments that dominate compound AI usage. Our results demonstrate that workflow-aware scheduling is essential for efficient compound AI serving.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 30

SAGA: A Sequence-Adaptive Generative Architecture for Multi-Horizon Probabilistic Forecasting with Adaptive Temporal Conformal Prediction

Microsimulation models used by ministries of finance and central banks rely on parametric processes for lifetime earnings that capture only first and second moments of the conditional distribution and miss long-range nonlinear structure. We propose SAGA, a decoder-only transformer for irregular tabular panel sequences, paired with a split conformal calibration wrapper that delivers individual-level prediction intervals with finite-sample marginal coverage guarantees. Trained on the longitudinal Swedish LISA register over 1990 to 2022, comprising 2,143,817 individuals and 61,284,903 person-years, the model forecasts annual labor earnings at horizons of one to thirty years and aggregates them by Monte Carlo into present-discounted lifetime earnings distributions. Against the canonical Guvenen, Karahan, Ozkan, and Song parametric process and tabular and recurrent baselines, SAGA reduces continuous ranked probability score by 31.9 percent at the ten-year horizon and mean absolute error by 37.7 percent at the twenty-year horizon. Conformal intervals achieve nominal coverage to within 0.4 percentage points marginally and within 2.4 percentage points on the worst-case demographic subgroup. The reconstructed lifetime earnings Gini coefficient is 0.327 against the partially observed truth of 0.341 and the GKOS estimate of 0.378. Model weights, calibration tables, and a synthetic equivalent dataset are released for replication outside the protected SCB MONA environment.

  • 2 authors
·
May 17 1

SAGA: Stable Acceleration Guidance for Autoregressive Video Generation

Autoregressive video diffusion enables efficient streaming and long-horizon video generation, but repeatedly reusing generated latents as causal context can amplify temporal errors, resulting in flickering, motion jitter, and structural drift. In this paper, we investigate this failure mode from a spectral kinematic perspective and identify discrete latent acceleration as an effective signal for revealing unstable high-frequency temporal perturbations. To this end, we propose SAGA, a training-free \textit{s}table \textit{a}cceleration \textit{g}uidance approach for \textit{a}utoregressive video generation. SAGA integrates an acceleration domain spectral guidance objective based on finite-window Slepian projections with a structured autoregressive noise initialization strategy that suppresses short-range temporal correlations while preserving long-range motion structure. Without retraining or modifying the backbone, SAGA can be directly applied to existing chunk-wise autoregressive diffusion models, which is the prevalent setting for high-quality generation. Extensive experiments show that SAGA consistently improves temporal quality across multiple autoregressive diffusion models. On Self-Forcing, SAGA improves Temporal Quality from 97.30 to 97.91 and Image Quality from 69.60 to 70.51. Moreover, spectral analysis and human preference studies demonstrate that SAGA reduces temporal instability while maintaining visual fidelity.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 8

GeneCIS: A Benchmark for General Conditional Image Similarity

We argue that there are many notions of 'similarity' and that models, like humans, should be able to adapt to these dynamically. This contrasts with most representation learning methods, supervised or self-supervised, which learn a fixed embedding function and hence implicitly assume a single notion of similarity. For instance, models trained on ImageNet are biased towards object categories, while a user might prefer the model to focus on colors, textures or specific elements in the scene. In this paper, we propose the GeneCIS ('genesis') benchmark, which measures models' ability to adapt to a range of similarity conditions. Extending prior work, our benchmark is designed for zero-shot evaluation only, and hence considers an open-set of similarity conditions. We find that baselines from powerful CLIP models struggle on GeneCIS and that performance on the benchmark is only weakly correlated with ImageNet accuracy, suggesting that simply scaling existing methods is not fruitful. We further propose a simple, scalable solution based on automatically mining information from existing image-caption datasets. We find our method offers a substantial boost over the baselines on GeneCIS, and further improves zero-shot performance on related image retrieval benchmarks. In fact, though evaluated zero-shot, our model surpasses state-of-the-art supervised models on MIT-States. Project page at https://sgvaze.github.io/genecis/.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 13, 2023

Open-Set Recognition: a Good Closed-Set Classifier is All You Need?

The ability to identify whether or not a test sample belongs to one of the semantic classes in a classifier's training set is critical to practical deployment of the model. This task is termed open-set recognition (OSR) and has received significant attention in recent years. In this paper, we first demonstrate that the ability of a classifier to make the 'none-of-above' decision is highly correlated with its accuracy on the closed-set classes. We find that this relationship holds across loss objectives and architectures, and further demonstrate the trend both on the standard OSR benchmarks as well as on a large-scale ImageNet evaluation. Second, we use this correlation to boost the performance of a maximum logit score OSR 'baseline' by improving its closed-set accuracy, and with this strong baseline achieve state-of-the-art on a number of OSR benchmarks. Similarly, we boost the performance of the existing state-of-the-art method by improving its closed-set accuracy, but the resulting discrepancy with the strong baseline is marginal. Our third contribution is to present the 'Semantic Shift Benchmark' (SSB), which better respects the task of detecting semantic novelty, in contrast to other forms of distribution shift also considered in related sub-fields, such as out-of-distribution detection. On this new evaluation, we again demonstrate that there is negligible difference between the strong baseline and the existing state-of-the-art. Project Page: https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/osr/

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 12, 2021

Towards Identifiable Unsupervised Domain Translation: A Diversified Distribution Matching Approach

Unsupervised domain translation (UDT) aims to find functions that convert samples from one domain (e.g., sketches) to another domain (e.g., photos) without changing the high-level semantic meaning (also referred to as ``content''). The translation functions are often sought by probability distribution matching of the transformed source domain and target domain. CycleGAN stands as arguably the most representative approach among this line of work. However, it was noticed in the literature that CycleGAN and variants could fail to identify the desired translation functions and produce content-misaligned translations. This limitation arises due to the presence of multiple translation functions -- referred to as ``measure-preserving automorphism" (MPA) -- in the solution space of the learning criteria. Despite awareness of such identifiability issues, solutions have remained elusive. This study delves into the core identifiability inquiry and introduces an MPA elimination theory. Our analysis shows that MPA is unlikely to exist, if multiple pairs of diverse cross-domain conditional distributions are matched by the learning function. Our theory leads to a UDT learner using distribution matching over auxiliary variable-induced subsets of the domains -- other than over the entire data domains as in the classical approaches. The proposed framework is the first to rigorously establish translation identifiability under reasonable UDT settings, to our best knowledge. Experiments corroborate with our theoretical claims.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 17, 2024

EarthDial: Turning Multi-sensory Earth Observations to Interactive Dialogues

Automated analysis of vast Earth observation data via interactive Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can unlock new opportunities for environmental monitoring, disaster response, and {resource management}. Existing generic VLMs do not perform well on Remote Sensing data, while the recent Geo-spatial VLMs remain restricted to a fixed resolution and few sensor modalities. In this paper, we introduce EarthDial, a conversational assistant specifically designed for Earth Observation (EO) data, transforming complex, multi-sensory Earth observations into interactive, natural language dialogues. EarthDial supports multi-spectral, multi-temporal, and multi-resolution imagery, enabling a wide range of remote sensing tasks, including classification, detection, captioning, question answering, visual reasoning, and visual grounding. To achieve this, we introduce an extensive instruction tuning dataset comprising over 11.11M instruction pairs covering RGB, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), and multispectral modalities such as Near-Infrared (NIR) and infrared. Furthermore, EarthDial handles bi-temporal and multi-temporal sequence analysis for applications like change detection. Our extensive experimental results on 44 downstream datasets demonstrate that EarthDial outperforms existing generic and domain-specific models, achieving better generalization across various EO tasks. Our source codes and pre-trained models are at https://github.com/hiyamdebary/EarthDial.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 19, 2024

Finetuning-Free Personalization of Text to Image Generation via Hypernetworks

Personalizing text-to-image diffusion models has traditionally relied on subject-specific fine-tuning approaches such as DreamBooth~ruiz2023dreambooth, which are computationally expensive and slow at inference. Recent adapter- and encoder-based methods attempt to reduce this overhead but still depend on additional fine-tuning or large backbone models for satisfactory results. In this work, we revisit an orthogonal direction: fine-tuning-free personalization via Hypernetworks that predict LoRA-adapted weights directly from subject images. Prior hypernetwork-based approaches, however, suffer from costly data generation or unstable attempts to mimic base model optimization trajectories. We address these limitations with an end-to-end training objective, stabilized by a simple output regularization, yielding reliable and effective hypernetworks. Our method removes the need for per-subject optimization at test time while preserving both subject fidelity and prompt alignment. To further enhance compositional generalization at inference time, we introduce Hybrid-Model Classifier-Free Guidance (HM-CFG), which combines the compositional strengths of the base diffusion model with the subject fidelity of personalized models during sampling. Extensive experiments on CelebA-HQ, AFHQ-v2, and DreamBench demonstrate that our approach achieves strong personalization performance and highlights the promise of hypernetworks as a scalable and effective direction for open-category personalization.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 4, 2025

Benchmarking Deep Learning and Statistical Target Detection Methods for PFM-1 Landmine Detection in UAV Hyperspectral Imagery

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with imaging sensors and automated processing algorithms have emerged as a promising tool to accelerate large-area surveys while reducing risk to human operators. Although hyperspectral imaging (HSI) enables material discrimination using spectral signatures, standardized benchmarks for UAV-based landmine detection remain scarce. In this work, we present a systematic benchmark of four classical statistical detection algorithms, including Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM), Matched Filter (MF), Adaptive Cosine Estimator (ACE), and Constrained Energy Minimization (CEM), alongside a proposed lightweight Spectral Neural Network utilizing Parametric Mish activations for PFM-1 landmine detection. We also release pixel-level binary ground truth masks (target/background) to enable standardized, reproducible evaluation. Evaluations were conducted on inert PFM-1 targets across multiple scene crops using a recently released VNIR hyperspectral dataset. Metrics such as receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, area under the curve (AUC), precision-recall (PR) curve, and average precision (AP) were used. While all methods achieve high ROC-AUC on an independent test set, the ACE method observes the highest AUC of 0.989. However, because target pixels are extremely sparse relative to background, ROC-AUC alone can be misleading; under precision-focused evaluation (PR and AP), the Spectral-NN outperforms classical detectors, achieving the highest AP. These results emphasize the need for precision-focused evaluation, scene-aware benchmarking, and learning-based spectral models for reliable UAV-based hyperspectral landmine detection. The code and pixel-level annotations will be released.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 10 1

A UAV-Based VNIR Hyperspectral Benchmark Dataset for Landmine and UXO Detection

This paper introduces a novel benchmark dataset of Visible and Near-Infrared (VNIR) hyperspectral imagery acquired via an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platform for landmine and unexploded ordnance (UXO) detection research. The dataset was collected over a controlled test field seeded with 143 realistic surrogate landmine and UXO targets, including surface, partially buried, and fully buried configurations. Data acquisition was performed using a Headwall Nano-Hyperspec sensor mounted on a multi-sensor drone platform, flown at an altitude of approximately 20.6 m, capturing 270 contiguous spectral bands spanning 398-1002 nm. Radiometric calibration, orthorectification, and mosaicking were performed followed by reflectance retrieval using a two-point Empirical Line Method (ELM), with reference spectra acquired using an SVC spectroradiometer. Cross-validation against six reference objects yielded RMSE values below 1.0 and SAM values between 1 and 6 degrees in the 400-900 nm range, demonstrating high spectral fidelity. The dataset is released alongside raw radiance cubes, GCP/AeroPoint data, and reference spectra to support reproducible research. This contribution fills a critical gap in open-access UAV-based hyperspectral data for landmine detection and offers a multi-sensor benchmark when combined with previously published drone-based electromagnetic induction (EMI) data from the same test field.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 2, 2025

SANPO: A Scene Understanding, Accessibility and Human Navigation Dataset

Vision is essential for human navigation. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 43.3 million people were blind in 2020, and this number is projected to reach 61 million by 2050. Modern scene understanding models could empower these people by assisting them with navigation, obstacle avoidance and visual recognition capabilities. The research community needs high quality datasets for both training and evaluation to build these systems. While datasets for autonomous vehicles are abundant, there is a critical gap in datasets tailored for outdoor human navigation. This gap poses a major obstacle to the development of computer vision based Assistive Technologies. To overcome this obstacle, we present SANPO, a large-scale egocentric video dataset designed for dense prediction in outdoor human navigation environments. SANPO contains 701 stereo videos of 30+ seconds captured in diverse real-world outdoor environments across four geographic locations in the USA. Every frame has a high resolution depth map and 112K frames were annotated with temporally consistent dense video panoptic segmentation labels. The dataset also includes 1961 high-quality synthetic videos with pixel accurate depth and panoptic segmentation annotations to balance the noisy real world annotations with the high precision synthetic annotations. SANPO is already publicly available and is being used by mobile applications like Project Guideline to train mobile models that help low-vision users go running outdoors independently. To preserve anonymization during peer review, we will provide a link to our dataset upon acceptance. SANPO is available here: https://google-research-datasets.github.io/sanpo_dataset/

  • 12 authors
·
Dec 19, 2024

SULAND v2: A Refined RGB Dataset and Deep Learning Object Detection Benchmark for UAV/UGV-Based SUrface LANDmine Detection Under Domain Shift

RGB imagery offers a practical, low-cost option for Unmanned Aerial/Ground Vehicle (UAV/UGV) survey support in surface-landmine detection, but object detectors remain underexplored in this safety-critical domain. Limited cross-architecture benchmarking and insufficient out-of-distribution (OOD) analysis obscure whether detectors generalize across deployment conditions. This challenge is amplified by the scarcity of public RGB landmine datasets, making SULAND a key benchmark for PFM-1 and PMA-2 detection. However, inspection reveals missing/false annotations, localization errors, inconsistent visibility criteria, visual artifacts, temporal labeling inconsistencies, and an inverted OOD class-ID convention in SULAND. We present SULAND_v2, a refined RGB surface-landmine dataset and benchmark. Preserving original images and splits, we manually revise annotations to ensure completeness, precise localization, label validity, and class consistency. SULAND_v2 contains 33,771 images and 12,433 bounding boxes. We benchmark 35 detector configurations across nine families. Annotation refinement improves YOLOv8 in-distribution (IID) test mAP@50 by 14.6-19.6 percentage points, while fixing the OOD class-ID convention increases mean YOLOv8 OOD mAP@50 by ~25 percentage points. On SULAND_v2, YOLOv12-Small achieves the highest IID mAP@50 (0.908), while RF-DETR-Large yields the strongest OOD performance (0.799 mAP@50, 0.675 recall). Our results demonstrate that high IID accuracy does not guarantee operational readiness. SULAND_v2 provides a reliable benchmark for evaluating domain-shift robustness in RGB-based mine-action survey support.

STOCKTAKE: Measuring the Gap Between Perception and Action in LLM Agents with a Fair Oracle

LLM agents are increasingly evaluated on multi-week decision tasks in which the state that drives cost is never directly observed. On such tasks the final cost cannot say why an agent failed: it may have misread the world, or read it correctly and still failed to act (the knowing-doing gap). Existing evaluations cannot separate these two failures; their reference policies either read privileged information the agent never sees, or are missing altogether. We introduce STOCKTAKE, a 26-week supply-chain replenishment benchmark built as a factored partially observable Markov decision process with six hidden factor processes, designed so that a fair reference policy is computable: an exact Bayes filter per factor drives a rollout policy on the identical observation stream the agent receives. Scoring each run between a symptom-blind base-stock floor (0) and this oracle (1) yields a skill score, and grading each week's written rationale yields a stated-belief detection lag and a knowing-doing rate, so state estimation and control are measured separately. On fifty seeds with curated stress profiles, Claude Sonnet 5, GPT-5.4, DeepSeek-V4-Pro, and Grok 4.5 detect 84-88% of hidden failures, typically within a week of onset, yet span skill scores from 0.62 to -0.23: two of the four end below the symptom-blind floor while naming factors slightly faster than the two that beat it. The failure has two faces. Where stress persists, 34-43% of correctly diagnosed stress weeks still end in stockout for every model, a rate that partly reflects the severity of the weeks models notice. That rate also runs opposite to skill: the two models under the floor stock out least on diagnosed weeks, so under-response is only one face of the gap, and their traces point to the other, responses whose cost exceeds what they protect. STOCKTAKE measures both directions of that failure.

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 14

XF2T: Cross-lingual Fact-to-Text Generation for Low-Resource Languages

Multiple business scenarios require an automated generation of descriptive human-readable text from structured input data. Hence, fact-to-text generation systems have been developed for various downstream tasks like generating soccer reports, weather and financial reports, medical reports, person biographies, etc. Unfortunately, previous work on fact-to-text (F2T) generation has focused primarily on English mainly due to the high availability of relevant datasets. Only recently, the problem of cross-lingual fact-to-text (XF2T) was proposed for generation across multiple languages alongwith a dataset, XALIGN for eight languages. However, there has been no rigorous work on the actual XF2T generation problem. We extend XALIGN dataset with annotated data for four more languages: Punjabi, Malayalam, Assamese and Oriya. We conduct an extensive study using popular Transformer-based text generation models on our extended multi-lingual dataset, which we call XALIGNV2. Further, we investigate the performance of different text generation strategies: multiple variations of pretraining, fact-aware embeddings and structure-aware input encoding. Our extensive experiments show that a multi-lingual mT5 model which uses fact-aware embeddings with structure-aware input encoding leads to best results on average across the twelve languages. We make our code, dataset and model publicly available, and hope that this will help advance further research in this critical area.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 22, 2022

Extending the WILDS Benchmark for Unsupervised Adaptation

Machine learning systems deployed in the wild are often trained on a source distribution but deployed on a different target distribution. Unlabeled data can be a powerful point of leverage for mitigating these distribution shifts, as it is frequently much more available than labeled data and can often be obtained from distributions beyond the source distribution as well. However, existing distribution shift benchmarks with unlabeled data do not reflect the breadth of scenarios that arise in real-world applications. In this work, we present the WILDS 2.0 update, which extends 8 of the 10 datasets in the WILDS benchmark of distribution shifts to include curated unlabeled data that would be realistically obtainable in deployment. These datasets span a wide range of applications (from histology to wildlife conservation), tasks (classification, regression, and detection), and modalities (photos, satellite images, microscope slides, text, molecular graphs). The update maintains consistency with the original WILDS benchmark by using identical labeled training, validation, and test sets, as well as the evaluation metrics. On these datasets, we systematically benchmark state-of-the-art methods that leverage unlabeled data, including domain-invariant, self-training, and self-supervised methods, and show that their success on WILDS is limited. To facilitate method development and evaluation, we provide an open-source package that automates data loading and contains all of the model architectures and methods used in this paper. Code and leaderboards are available at https://wilds.stanford.edu.

  • 20 authors
·
Dec 9, 2021

Knowledge Graph Modeling-Driven Large Language Model Operating System (LLM OS) for Task Automation in Process Engineering Problem-Solving

We present the Process Engineering Operations Assistant (PEOA), an AI-driven framework designed to solve complex problems in the chemical and process industries. The framework employs a modular architecture orchestrated by a meta-agent, which serves as the central coordinator, managing an action generator and instruction-tuned small-scale language models (expert models). The action generator decomposes complex problems into sub-tasks and identifies suitable expert models to execute each, delivering precise solutions for multi-step problem-solving. Key techniques include advanced knowledge modeling using property graphs for improved information retrieval, facilitating more accurate and contextually relevant solutions. Additionally, the framework utilizes a teacher-student transfer-learning approach with GPT-4 (Omni) to fine-tune the action generator and expert models for domain adaptation, alongside an iterative problem-solving mechanism with sophisticated error handling. Custom datasets were developed to evaluate the framework against leading proprietary language models on various engineering tasks. The results demonstrate the framework effectiveness in automating calculations, accelerating prototyping, and providing AI-augmented decision support for industrial processes, marking a significant advancement in process engineering capabilities.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 23, 2024

Scaling Test-Time Inference with Policy-Optimized, Dynamic Retrieval-Augmented Generation via KV Caching and Decoding

We present a comprehensive framework for enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems through dynamic retrieval strategies and reinforcement fine-tuning. This approach significantly improves large language models on knowledge-intensive tasks, including opendomain question answering and complex reasoning. Our framework integrates two complementary techniques: Policy-Optimized RetrievalAugmented Generation (PORAG), which optimizes the use of retrieved information, and Adaptive Token-Layer Attention Scoring (ATLAS), which dynamically determines retrieval timing and content based on contextual needs. Together, these techniques enhance both the utilization and relevance of retrieved content, improving factual accuracy and response quality. Designed as a lightweight solution compatible with any Transformer-based LLM without requiring additional training, our framework excels in knowledge-intensive tasks, boosting output accuracy in RAG settings. We further propose CRITIC, a novel method to selectively compress key-value caches by token importance, mitigating memory bottlenecks in long-context applications. The framework also incorporates test-time scaling techniques to dynamically balance reasoning depth and computational resources, alongside optimized decoding strategies for faster inference. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that our framework reduces hallucinations, strengthens domain-specific reasoning, and achieves significant efficiency and scalability gains over traditional RAG systems. This integrated approach advances the development of robust, efficient, and scalable RAG systems across diverse applications.

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 1, 2025

Dynamic Harness Search: Building Multi-Agent Systems Per-Query via Prediction

Agent harnesses specify the roles, instructions, tools, and communication structure used to solve a task, and the right harness depends on the query. Because the value of each design choice is observable only through execution, tailoring a harness to each query has required either executing alternatives at inference time or costly manual design. We introduce SHIFT, which moves execution out of the per-query search loop. A local LLM architect learns a policy over harness-building actions from search, and a value function that predicts, from measured executions, a utility balancing accuracy against execution cost. For each query, Monte Carlo tree search uses these predictions to construct a harness. Across 9,193 tasks in six benchmarks, from math to document and general-assistant tasks, with a Gemini 3.5 Flash executor, SHIFT attains the highest mean accuracy, about 80%, outperforming 17 baselines that span prompting, prompt optimization, and workflow search, and exceeding the strongest baseline by 7.2 percentage points. A cheaper mode of SHIFT also attains a higher mean accuracy than every baseline while using 32% fewer execution tokens than the strongest baseline. We further show that choosing structure, instructions, and tools jointly beats choosing only instructions or only tools by up to 9.1 percentage points, and that learned value selection identifies more accurate harnesses with lower execution cost from candidate pools.

google Google
·
Oct 1 1

Calibrating AlphaFold confidence scores for interface quality

AlphaFold confidence scores are widely used to rank protein complex predictions and to select subsets of models for downstream applications. Although these scores provide strong discriminatory power for distinguishing prediction quality, their numerical values were never intended to represent the probability that a prediction satisfies a given structural quality criterion. In this work, we calibrate commonly used confidence scores to estimate the probability that a predicted complex exceeds a chosen threshold of DockQ, an established measure of interface quality. On antibody-antigen and general multimer datasets, post-hoc isotonic calibration consistently improves agreement between predicted probabilities and observed DockQ success rates while preserving the underlying score ordering. The calibrated probabilities also provide more accurate estimates of the fraction of selected models expected to pass a given structural quality threshold. Although the mapping is fitted within a given prediction distribution and therefore transfers imperfectly across prediction domains, we show that reliable estimates are recovered from a small number of labeled target-domain samples. Because the calibration is entirely post hoc and requires no underlying AlphaFold model fine-tuning, it provides a straightforward and customizable way to convert existing model quality rankings into calibrated probabilities of passing a chosen structural quality threshold.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 11

S-vectors and TESA: Speaker Embeddings and a Speaker Authenticator Based on Transformer Encoder

One of the most popular speaker embeddings is x-vectors, which are obtained from an architecture that gradually builds a larger temporal context with layers. In this paper, we propose to derive speaker embeddings from Transformer's encoder trained for speaker classification. Self-attention, on which Transformer's encoder is built, attends to all the features over the entire utterance and might be more suitable in capturing the speaker characteristics in an utterance. We refer to the speaker embeddings obtained from the proposed speaker classification model as s-vectors to emphasize that they are obtained from an architecture that heavily relies on self-attention. Through experiments, we demonstrate that s-vectors perform better than x-vectors. In addition to the s-vectors, we also propose a new architecture based on Transformer's encoder for speaker verification as a replacement for speaker verification based on conventional probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA). This architecture is inspired by the next sentence prediction task of bidirectional encoder representations from Transformers (BERT), and we feed the s-vectors of two utterances to verify whether they belong to the same speaker. We name this architecture the Transformer encoder speaker authenticator (TESA). Our experiments show that the performance of s-vectors with TESA is better than s-vectors with conventional PLDA-based speaker verification.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 11, 2021

GeniL: A Multilingual Dataset on Generalizing Language

LLMs are increasingly transforming our digital ecosystem, but they often inherit societal biases learned from their training data, for instance stereotypes associating certain attributes with specific identity groups. While whether and how these biases are mitigated may depend on the specific use cases, being able to effectively detect instances of stereotype perpetuation is a crucial first step. Current methods to assess presence of stereotypes in generated language rely on simple template or co-occurrence based measures, without accounting for the variety of sentential contexts they manifest in. We argue that understanding the sentential context is crucial for detecting instances of generalization. We distinguish two types of generalizations: (1) language that merely mentions the presence of a generalization ("people think the French are very rude"), and (2) language that reinforces such a generalization ("as French they must be rude"), from non-generalizing context ("My French friends think I am rude"). For meaningful stereotype evaluations, we need to reliably distinguish such instances of generalizations. We introduce the new task of detecting generalization in language, and build GeniL, a multilingual dataset of over 50K sentences from 9 languages (English, Arabic, Bengali, Spanish, French, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, and Portuguese) annotated for instances of generalizations. We demonstrate that the likelihood of a co-occurrence being an instance of generalization is usually low, and varies across different languages, identity groups, and attributes. We build classifiers to detect generalization in language with an overall PR-AUC of 58.7, with varying degrees of performance across languages. Our research provides data and tools to enable a nuanced understanding of stereotype perpetuation, a crucial step towards more inclusive and responsible language technologies.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 8, 2024

PAC Bench: Do Foundation Models Understand Prerequisites for Executing Manipulation Policies?

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly pivotal for generalist robot manipulation, enabling tasks such as physical reasoning, policy generation, and failure detection. However, their proficiency in these high-level applications often assumes a deep understanding of low-level physical prerequisites, a capability that remains largely unverified. For robots to perform actions reliably, they must comprehend intrinsic object properties (e.g., material, weight), action affordances (e.g., graspable, stackable), and physical constraints (e.g., stability, reachability, or an object's state, such as being closed). Despite the widespread use of VLMs in manipulation tasks, we argue that off-the-shelf models may lack this granular, physically grounded understanding, as such prerequisites are often overlooked during training. To address this critical gap, we introduce PAC Bench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to systematically evaluate VLMs on their understanding of core Properties, Affordances, and Constraints (PAC) from a task executability perspective. PAC Bench features a diverse dataset with over 30,000 annotations, comprising 673 real-world images (115 object classes, 15 property types, and 1 to 3 affordances defined per class), 100 real-world humanoid-view scenarios, and 120 unique simulated constraint scenarios across four tasks. Our evaluations reveal significant gaps in the ability of current VLMs to grasp fundamental physical concepts, highlighting limitations in their suitability for reliable robot manipulation and pointing to key areas for targeted research. PAC Bench also serves as a standardized benchmark for rigorously evaluating physical reasoning in VLMs and guiding the development of more robust, physically grounded models for robotic applications. Project Page: https://pacbench.github.io/

lens-lab-AI LENS Lab
·
Jun 30, 2025

M*: A Modular, Extensible, Serving System for Multimodal Models

We are entering a new era of composite model architectures that integrate diverse components such as vision encoders, language backbones, diffusion and flow heads, audio codecs, action generators, and world-model predictors. Such architectures underpin a broad class of multimodal models, including unified multimodal models, omni models, speech-language models, vision-language-action policies, and world models. However, existing model serving frameworks were built on narrow assumptions about model structure, making them ill-suited to accommodate this new architectural diversity. Here we present M*, a universal serving system for efficient serving of composite AI models. M* represents models as dataflow graphs, processing requests spanning diverse modalities and tasks as traversals over these graphs. The core insight is a modular abstraction that supports arbitrary composition of model components, flexible placement onto a physical cluster, and model-agnostic optimizations within a distributed runtime. We call this abstraction the Walk Graph and show how it can concisely capture composite models from a broad range of families. We instantiate M* on representative models and find that it achieves, on average, 20% lower end-to-end latency than vLLM-Omni for text-to-image workloads on BAGEL, while delivering up to 2.9x lower real-time factor and 2.7x higher throughput for text-to-speech workloads on Qwen3-Omni. M* also outperforms the V-JEPA 2-AC rollout baseline for robotic planning by up to 12.5x. Thus, our work paves the road towards more efficient serving of complex models with minimal developer effort.

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 12

OmniToM: Benchmarking Theory of Mind in LLMs via Explicit Belief Modeling

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to infer others' knowledge, intentions, and emotions, is commonly evaluated in large language models (LLMs) using end-point question answering, where performance is judged solely by the final answer to a social reasoning query. This paradigm obscures whether the model actually constructs the underlying mental-state representations required for robust reasoning, particularly in scenarios involving divergent, evolving, or mistaken beliefs. In order to address this research gap, we introduce OmniToM, a benchmark that directly evaluates these representations by requiring explicit modeling of belief structures for all relevant actors within a narrative. These structures are composed of belief propositions: minimal statements of what an actor takes to be true about the world or another actor's mental state, allowing knowledge, intentions, emotions, and false beliefs to be analyzed in a common format. Models are evaluated in two stages: Stage 1: Belief Extraction, which extracts from the story the beliefs relevant to its social dynamics, and Stage 2: Belief Labeling, which assigns each belief a seven-dimensional schema label covering recursive order, truth status, knowledge access, explicitness, content type, mental source, and context. Built from 895 stories from the existing ToMBench story corpus and augmented with 22,343 labeled belief propositions, OmniToM uses a human-calibrated LLM-assisted annotation pipeline. Across diverse models in zero-shot evaluation, OmniToM reveals an actor-specific belief-tracking bottleneck: current LLMs struggle with the knowledge-access and representational decisions required to transform narrative facts into actors' beliefs and shared mental states.

  • 5 authors
·
May 24

BERT-CoQAC: BERT-based Conversational Question Answering in Context

As one promising way to inquire about any particular information through a dialog with the bot, question answering dialog systems have gained increasing research interests recently. Designing interactive QA systems has always been a challenging task in natural language processing and used as a benchmark to evaluate a machine's ability of natural language understanding. However, such systems often struggle when the question answering is carried out in multiple turns by the users to seek more information based on what they have already learned, thus, giving rise to another complicated form called Conversational Question Answering (CQA). CQA systems are often criticized for not understanding or utilizing the previous context of the conversation when answering the questions. To address the research gap, in this paper, we explore how to integrate conversational history into the neural machine comprehension system. On one hand, we introduce a framework based on a publically available pre-trained language model called BERT for incorporating history turns into the system. On the other hand, we propose a history selection mechanism that selects the turns that are relevant and contributes the most to answer the current question. Experimentation results revealed that our framework is comparable in performance with the state-of-the-art models on the QuAC leader board. We also conduct a number of experiments to show the side effects of using entire context information which brings unnecessary information and noise signals resulting in a decline in the model's performance.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 22, 2021

MeshMamba: State Space Models for Articulated 3D Mesh Generation and Reconstruction

In this paper, we introduce MeshMamba, a neural network model for learning 3D articulated mesh models by employing the recently proposed Mamba State Space Models (Mamba-SSMs). MeshMamba is efficient and scalable in handling a large number of input tokens, enabling the generation and reconstruction of body mesh models with more than 10,000 vertices, capturing clothing and hand geometries. The key to effectively learning MeshMamba is the serialization technique of mesh vertices into orderings that are easily processed by Mamba. This is achieved by sorting the vertices based on body part annotations or the 3D vertex locations of a template mesh, such that the ordering respects the structure of articulated shapes. Based on MeshMamba, we design 1) MambaDiff3D, a denoising diffusion model for generating 3D articulated meshes and 2) Mamba-HMR, a 3D human mesh recovery model that reconstructs a human body shape and pose from a single image. Experimental results showed that MambaDiff3D can generate dense 3D human meshes in clothes, with grasping hands, etc., and outperforms previous approaches in the 3D human shape generation task. Additionally, Mamba-HMR extends the capabilities of previous non-parametric human mesh recovery approaches, which were limited to handling body-only poses using around 500 vertex tokens, to the whole-body setting with face and hands, while achieving competitive performance in (near) real-time.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 20, 2025

HackerSignal: A Large-Scale Multi-Source Dataset Linking Hacker Community Discourse to the CVE Vulnerability Lifecycle

We introduce HackerSignal, a benchmark for temporal out-of-distribution cyber threat intelligence (CTI) and cross-source CVE linkage. HackerSignal aggregates 7.45 million exact-deduplicated documents from 64 public forum/source identifiers spanning eight source layers and a 36-year window (1990-2026). In contrast to other publicly accessible cybersecurity datasets, HackerSignal is among the first public benchmark datasets that maps the full potential exploit to vulnerability trajectory from hacker community discourse, exploit databases with working and proof of concept exploits, vulnerability advisories, and software fix commits. HackerSignal creates these linkages through a shared CVE identifier space while preserving source-specific release modes to support a range of unique Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled cybersecurity analytics tasks. In this paper, we summarize HackerSignal and illustrate three selected benchmark tasks it uniquely supports: (1) CVE linkage retrieval (cross-source temporal out-of-distribution entity grounding); (2) exploit type classification (8-class vulnerability type prediction with temporal OOD evaluation); and (3) temporal generalization (prospective CVE-disjoint evaluation where C_train and C_test are disjoint). All tasks use temporal splits to evaluate prospective generalization. We release source-shortcut and leakage diagnostics, manual-audit packets, a datasheet, and a release-governance addendum to support the dissemination of the dataset. HackerSignal's code, data, and Croissant metadata are available at hf.co/datasets/BenAmpel/HackerSignal (data) and github.com/BenAmpel/hackersignal (code).

  • 2 authors
·
May 3

MOSAIC: Multi-Object Segmented Arbitrary Stylization Using CLIP

Style transfer driven by text prompts paved a new path for creatively stylizing the images without collecting an actual style image. Despite having promising results, with text-driven stylization, the user has no control over the stylization. If a user wants to create an artistic image, the user requires fine control over the stylization of various entities individually in the content image, which is not addressed by the current state-of-the-art approaches. On the other hand, diffusion style transfer methods also suffer from the same issue because the regional stylization control over the stylized output is ineffective. To address this problem, We propose a new method Multi-Object Segmented Arbitrary Stylization Using CLIP (MOSAIC), that can apply styles to different objects in the image based on the context extracted from the input prompt. Text-based segmentation and stylization modules which are based on vision transformer architecture, were used to segment and stylize the objects. Our method can extend to any arbitrary objects, styles and produce high-quality images compared to the current state of art methods. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to perform text-guided arbitrary object-wise stylization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through qualitative and quantitative analysis, showing that it can generate visually appealing stylized images with enhanced control over stylization and the ability to generalize to unseen object classes.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 24, 2023

TextCraftor: Your Text Encoder Can be Image Quality Controller

Diffusion-based text-to-image generative models, e.g., Stable Diffusion, have revolutionized the field of content generation, enabling significant advancements in areas like image editing and video synthesis. Despite their formidable capabilities, these models are not without their limitations. It is still challenging to synthesize an image that aligns well with the input text, and multiple runs with carefully crafted prompts are required to achieve satisfactory results. To mitigate these limitations, numerous studies have endeavored to fine-tune the pre-trained diffusion models, i.e., UNet, utilizing various technologies. Yet, amidst these efforts, a pivotal question of text-to-image diffusion model training has remained largely unexplored: Is it possible and feasible to fine-tune the text encoder to improve the performance of text-to-image diffusion models? Our findings reveal that, instead of replacing the CLIP text encoder used in Stable Diffusion with other large language models, we can enhance it through our proposed fine-tuning approach, TextCraftor, leading to substantial improvements in quantitative benchmarks and human assessments. Interestingly, our technique also empowers controllable image generation through the interpolation of different text encoders fine-tuned with various rewards. We also demonstrate that TextCraftor is orthogonal to UNet finetuning, and can be combined to further improve generative quality.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 27, 2024 1

MLE-Dojo: Interactive Environments for Empowering LLM Agents in Machine Learning Engineering

We introduce MLE-Dojo, a Gym-style framework for systematically reinforcement learning, evaluating, and improving autonomous large language model (LLM) agents in iterative machine learning engineering (MLE) workflows. Unlike existing benchmarks that primarily rely on static datasets or single-attempt evaluations, MLE-Dojo provides an interactive environment enabling agents to iteratively experiment, debug, and refine solutions through structured feedback loops. Built upon 200+ real-world Kaggle challenges, MLE-Dojo covers diverse, open-ended MLE tasks carefully curated to reflect realistic engineering scenarios such as data processing, architecture search, hyperparameter tuning, and code debugging. Its fully executable environment supports comprehensive agent training via both supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, facilitating iterative experimentation, realistic data sampling, and real-time outcome verification. Extensive evaluations of eight frontier LLMs reveal that while current models achieve meaningful iterative improvements, they still exhibit significant limitations in autonomously generating long-horizon solutions and efficiently resolving complex errors. Furthermore, MLE-Dojo's flexible and extensible architecture seamlessly integrates diverse data sources, tools, and evaluation protocols, uniquely enabling model-based agent tuning and promoting interoperability, scalability, and reproducibility. We open-source our framework and benchmarks to foster community-driven innovation towards next-generation MLE agents.

  • 11 authors
·
May 12, 2025 2

Regional Tiny Stories: Using Small Models to Compare Language Learning and Tokenizer Performance

Small Language Models (SLMs) offer efficient alternatives to LLMs for specific domains. The 2023 TinyStories study developed an English dataset that allows SLMs with 1 to 10 million parameters to produce coherent outputs. Our research expands this framework by translating the original dataset into Indian languages and creating synthetic data using LLMs. We focus on Hindi, Marathi, and Bengali, evaluating SLMs for regional language processing and understanding linguistic complexity. We show that SLMs efficiently process regional languages with significantly fewer parameters than LLMs, providing a complementary framework for ``inference based evaluation" of tokenization strategies and linguistic complexity. Our analysis shows that language-specific tokenizers outperform general-purpose ones for Indian languages. Empirical validations, supported by information-theoretic and morphological analyses, provides fundamental understanding behind the better performance of Hindi models over Marathi and Bengali. Additionally, we show that synthetic datasets outperform translated content for training SLMs. Correlation analyses reveal cross-linguistic patterns and language-specific relationships between creativity, grammatical precision, and narrative completeness. These findings advance both the practical application of SLMs to underserved languages and our theoretical understanding of neural language development.

  • 10 authors
·
Apr 7, 2025

Determining large-strain metal plasticity parameters using in-situ measurements of plastic flow past a wedge

We present a novel approach to determine the constitutive properties of metals under large plastic strains and strain rates that otherwise are difficult to access using conventional materials testing methods. The approach exploits large-strain plastic flow past a sharp wedge, coupled with high-speed photography and image velocimetry to capture the underlying plastic flow dynamics. The inverse problem of estimating material parameters from the flow field is solved using an iterative optimization procedure that minimizes the gap between internal and external plastic work. A major advantage of the method is that it neither makes any assumptions about the flow nor requires computational simulations. To counter the problem of non-unique parameter estimates, we propose a parameterization scheme that takes advantage of the functional form of the constitutive model and reformulates the problem into a more tractable form to identify plasticity parameters uniquely. We present studies to illustrate the principle of the method with two materials with widely different plastic flow characteristics: copper (strain hardening) and a lead-free solder alloy (rate sensitive and deformation history dependent). The results demonstrate the efficacy of the method in reliably determining the material parameters under high strain/strain rate conditions of relevance to a range of practical engineering problems.

  • 4 authors
·
May 28, 2022

Bharat Scene Text: A Novel Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark for Indian Language Scene Text Understanding

Reading scene text, that is, text appearing in images, has numerous application areas, including assistive technology, search, and e-commerce. Although scene text recognition in English has advanced significantly and is often considered nearly a solved problem, Indian language scene text recognition remains an open challenge. This is due to script diversity, non-standard fonts, and varying writing styles, and, more importantly, the lack of high-quality datasets and open-source models. To address these gaps, we introduce the Bharat Scene Text Dataset (BSTD) - a large-scale and comprehensive benchmark for studying Indian Language Scene Text Recognition. It comprises more than 100K words that span 11 Indian languages and English, sourced from over 6,500 scene images captured across various linguistic regions of India. The dataset is meticulously annotated and supports multiple scene text tasks, including: (i) Scene Text Detection, (ii) Script Identification, (iii) Cropped Word Recognition, and (iv) End-to-End Scene Text Recognition. We evaluated state-of-the-art models originally developed for English by adapting (fine-tuning) them for Indian languages. Our results highlight the challenges and opportunities in Indian language scene text recognition. We believe that this dataset represents a significant step toward advancing research in this domain. All our models and data are open source.

  • 9 authors
·
Nov 28, 2025

EnterpriseOps-Gym: Environments and Evaluations for Stateful Agentic Planning and Tool Use in Enterprise Settings

Large language models are shifting from passive information providers to active agents intended for complex workflows. However, their deployment as reliable AI workers in enterprise is stalled by benchmarks that fail to capture the intricacies of professional environments, specifically, the need for long-horizon planning amidst persistent state changes and strict access protocols. In this work, we introduce EnterpriseOps-Gym, a benchmark designed to evaluate agentic planning in realistic enterprise settings. Specifically, EnterpriseOps-Gym features a containerized sandbox with 164 database tables and 512 functional tools to mimic real-world search friction. Within this environment, agents are evaluated on 1,150 expert-curated tasks across eight mission-critical verticals (including Customer Service, HR, and IT). Our evaluation of 14 frontier models reveals critical limitations in state-of-the-art models: the top-performing Claude Opus 4.5 achieves only 37.4% success. Further analysis shows that providing oracle human plans improves performance by 14-35 percentage points, pinpointing strategic reasoning as the primary bottleneck. Additionally, agents frequently fail to refuse infeasible tasks (best model achieves 53.9%), leading to unintended and potentially harmful side effects. Our findings underscore that current agents are not yet ready for autonomous enterprise deployment. More broadly, EnterpriseOps-Gym provides a concrete testbed to advance the robustness of agentic planning in professional workflows.

ServiceNow-AI ServiceNow-AI
·
Mar 13 4

DCN V2: Improved Deep & Cross Network and Practical Lessons for Web-scale Learning to Rank Systems

Learning effective feature crosses is the key behind building recommender systems. However, the sparse and large feature space requires exhaustive search to identify effective crosses. Deep & Cross Network (DCN) was proposed to automatically and efficiently learn bounded-degree predictive feature interactions. Unfortunately, in models that serve web-scale traffic with billions of training examples, DCN showed limited expressiveness in its cross network at learning more predictive feature interactions. Despite significant research progress made, many deep learning models in production still rely on traditional feed-forward neural networks to learn feature crosses inefficiently. In light of the pros/cons of DCN and existing feature interaction learning approaches, we propose an improved framework DCN-V2 to make DCN more practical in large-scale industrial settings. In a comprehensive experimental study with extensive hyper-parameter search and model tuning, we observed that DCN-V2 approaches outperform all the state-of-the-art algorithms on popular benchmark datasets. The improved DCN-V2 is more expressive yet remains cost efficient at feature interaction learning, especially when coupled with a mixture of low-rank architecture. DCN-V2 is simple, can be easily adopted as building blocks, and has delivered significant offline accuracy and online business metrics gains across many web-scale learning to rank systems at Google.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 19, 2020

SynthDocBench: Controlled Benchmark for Long-Context Visual Document Understanding

Vision language models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on visual document understanding benchmarks such as DocVQA, ChartQA, and MMLongBench-Doc. However, real-world documents combine multiple factors such as length, layout complexity, modality, and question difficulty, which makes it difficult to attribute model failures to specific causes. We introduce SynthDocBench, a fully synthetic benchmark for long-context visual document understanding that systematically controls factors including document length, layout structure, modality composition, and question type. The benchmark is constructed using a combinatorial design, each factor is varied independently across generated documents, enabling controlled analysis of model behavior. Documents are generated end to end using an LLM pipeline across six layout archetypes, with a 40 percent random override to prevent models from exploiting spurious correlations. Additionally, SynthDocBench spans long-context documents with substantially greater length and structural diversity than existing benchmarks. Evaluating seven frontier VLMs, we uncover three failure modes that existing benchmarks cannot surface: sharp degradation with document length, a systematic positional sensitivity in which the middle third of a document is hardest for five of six models and five of six models show a negative Early-to-Late trend (steepest decline: 8.3 percentage points), and breakdown of chart comprehension in long-document settings. These results suggest that current models may be overfitting to benchmark artifacts rather than achieving robust long-context visual document understanding.

ServiceNow-AI ServiceNow-AI
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Jul 10 2

SteerDuplex: Steerable Duplex Speech Dialogue Models

Full-duplex spoken dialogue models support low-latency turn taking, interruption handling, and backchanneling, yet a key capability remains underexplored: steerability, the ability to reliably shift conversational behavior along attributes such as tone, persona, speaking rate, and voice style in response to user instructions. We introduce a taxonomy of text- and audio-based steerability that identifies substantial gaps in current full-duplex models. To address this gap, we introduce SteerDuplex, a Moshi-based full-duplex speech model fine-tuned on natural conversations and synthetic dialogues targeting instruction following, vocal delivery, reasoning, and duplex interaction. We further apply two-stage reinforcement learning (RL) with hybrid rewards, combining verifiable interaction checks and judge-based semantic feedback to improve timing and response continuity. To evaluate full-duplex spoken steerability, we introduce SteerBench, a benchmark with 390 spoken prompts and 1,067 human-authored binary audio and text rubrics spanning tone, persona, style/accent, and speed/length. On SteerBench, supervised training improves audio-steering average pass rate by 44.5 percentage points over the strongest evaluated open baseline. On Audio MultiChallenge, task average pass rate improves by 7 points over its strongest evaluated open baseline. RL further raises source-clean interruption response from 72.5% to 82.5% and reduces synthetic pause barge-in from 26.5% to 9%. Steering and aggregate task scores remain comparable or higher, while reward probes reveal reward hacking through incomplete responses. Our model and benchmark support systematic research on spoken steerability, with reward analysis showing why timing gains must be evaluated alongside response completeness.

ScaleAI Scale AI
·
Sep 10 2

Large Language Models as Zero-shot Dialogue State Tracker through Function Calling

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly prevalent in conversational systems due to their advanced understanding and generative capabilities in general contexts. However, their effectiveness in task-oriented dialogues (TOD), which requires not only response generation but also effective dialogue state tracking (DST) within specific tasks and domains, remains less satisfying. In this work, we propose a novel approach FnCTOD for solving DST with LLMs through function calling. This method improves zero-shot DST, allowing adaptation to diverse domains without extensive data collection or model tuning. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves exceptional performance with both modestly sized open-source and also proprietary LLMs: with in-context prompting it enables various 7B or 13B parameter models to surpass the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) achieved by ChatGPT, and improves ChatGPT's performance beating the SOTA by 5.6% Avg. JGA. Individual model results for GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 are boosted by 4.8% and 14%, respectively. We also show that by fine-tuning on a small collection of diverse task-oriented dialogues, we can equip modestly sized models, specifically a 13B parameter LLaMA2-Chat model, with function-calling capabilities and DST performance comparable to ChatGPT while maintaining their chat capabilities. We plan to open-source experimental code and model.

  • 10 authors
·
Feb 16, 2024 3

Apriel-1.5-15b-Thinker

We present Apriel-1.5-15B-Thinker, a 15-billion parameter open-weights multimodal reasoning model that achieves frontier-level performance through training design rather than sheer scale. Starting from Pixtral-12B, we apply a progressive three-stage methodology: (1) depth upscaling to expand reasoning capacity without pretraining from scratch, (2) staged continual pre-training that first develops foundational text and vision understanding, then enhances visual reasoning through targeted synthetic data generation addressing spatial structure, compositional understanding, and fine-grained perception, and (3) high-quality text-only supervised fine-tuning on curated instruction-response pairs with explicit reasoning traces spanning mathematics, coding, science, and tool use. Notably, our model achieves competitive results without reinforcement learning or preference optimization, isolating the contribution of our data-centric continual pre-training approach. On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, Apriel-1.5-15B-Thinker attains a score of 52, matching DeepSeek-R1-0528 despite requiring significantly fewer computational resources. Across ten image benchmarks, its performance is on average within five points of Gemini-2.5-Flash and Claude Sonnet-3.7, a key achievement for a model operating within single-GPU deployment constraints. Our results demonstrate that thoughtful mid-training 2 design can close substantial capability gaps without massive scale, making frontier-level multimodal reasoning accessible to organizations with limited infrastructure. We release the model checkpoint, all training recipes, and evaluation protocols under the MIT license to to advance open-source research.

ServiceNow-AI ServiceNow-AI
·
Oct 1, 2025 5

Stream RAG: Instant and Accurate Spoken Dialogue Systems with Streaming Tool Usage

End-to-end speech-in speech-out dialogue systems are emerging as a powerful alternative to traditional ASR-LLM-TTS pipelines, generating more natural, expressive responses with significantly lower latency. However, these systems remain prone to hallucinations due to limited factual grounding. While text-based dialogue systems address this challenge by integrating tools such as web search and knowledge graph APIs, we introduce the first approach to extend tool use directly into speech-in speech-out systems. A key challenge is that tool integration substantially increases response latency, disrupting conversational flow. To mitigate this, we propose Streaming Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Streaming RAG), a novel framework that reduces user-perceived latency by predicting tool queries in parallel with user speech, even before the user finishes speaking. Specifically, we develop a post-training pipeline that teaches the model when to issue tool calls during ongoing speech and how to generate spoken summaries that fuse audio queries with retrieved text results, thereby improving both accuracy and responsiveness. To evaluate our approach, we construct AudioCRAG, a benchmark created by converting queries from the publicly available CRAG dataset into speech form. Experimental results demonstrate that our streaming RAG approach increases QA accuracy by up to 200% relative (from 11.1% to 34.2% absolute) and further enhances user experience by reducing tool use latency by 20%. Importantly, our streaming RAG approach is modality-agnostic and can be applied equally to typed input, paving the way for more agentic, real-time AI assistants.

  • 17 authors
·
Oct 2, 2025

Omnilingual ASR: Open-Source Multilingual Speech Recognition for 1600+ Languages

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has advanced in high-resource languages, but most of the world's 7,000+ languages remain unsupported, leaving thousands of long-tail languages behind. Expanding ASR coverage has been costly and limited by architectures that restrict language support, making extension inaccessible to most--all while entangled with ethical concerns when pursued without community collaboration. To transcend these limitations, we introduce Omnilingual ASR, the first large-scale ASR system designed for extensibility. Omnilingual ASR enables communities to introduce unserved languages with only a handful of data samples. It scales self-supervised pre-training to 7B parameters to learn robust speech representations and introduces an encoder-decoder architecture designed for zero-shot generalization, leveraging a LLM-inspired decoder. This capability is grounded in a massive and diverse training corpus; by combining breadth of coverage with linguistic variety, the model learns representations robust enough to adapt to unseen languages. Incorporating public resources with community-sourced recordings gathered through compensated local partnerships, Omnilingual ASR expands coverage to over 1,600 languages, the largest such effort to date--including over 500 never before served by ASR. Automatic evaluations show substantial gains over prior systems, especially in low-resource conditions, and strong generalization. We release Omnilingual ASR as a family of models, from 300M variants for low-power devices to 7B for maximum accuracy. We reflect on the ethical considerations shaping this design and conclude by discussing its societal impact. In particular, we highlight how open-sourcing models and tools can lower barriers for researchers and communities, inviting new forms of participation. Open-source artifacts are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/omnilingual-asr.

  • 33 authors
·
Nov 12, 2025

Bridging Brains and Machines: A Unified Frontier in Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, and Neuromorphic Systems

This position and survey paper identifies the emerging convergence of neuroscience, artificial general intelligence (AGI), and neuromorphic computing toward a unified research paradigm. Using a framework grounded in brain physiology, we highlight how synaptic plasticity, sparse spike-based communication, and multimodal association provide design principles for next-generation AGI systems that potentially combine both human and machine intelligences. The review traces this evolution from early connectionist models to state-of-the-art large language models, demonstrating how key innovations like transformer attention, foundation-model pre-training, and multi-agent architectures mirror neurobiological processes like cortical mechanisms, working memory, and episodic consolidation. We then discuss emerging physical substrates capable of breaking the von Neumann bottleneck to achieve brain-scale efficiency in silicon: memristive crossbars, in-memory compute arrays, and emerging quantum and photonic devices. There are four critical challenges at this intersection: 1) integrating spiking dynamics with foundation models, 2) maintaining lifelong plasticity without catastrophic forgetting, 3) unifying language with sensorimotor learning in embodied agents, and 4) enforcing ethical safeguards in advanced neuromorphic autonomous systems. This combined perspective across neuroscience, computation, and hardware offers an integrative agenda for in each of these fields.

  • 45 authors
·
Jul 14, 2025

Do Enterprise Systems Need Learned World Models? The Importance of Context to Infer Dynamics

World models enable agents to anticipate the effects of their actions by internalizing environment dynamics. In enterprise systems, however, these dynamics are often defined by tenant-specific business logic that varies across deployments and evolves over time, making models trained on historical transitions brittle under deployment shift. We ask a question the world-models literature has not addressed: when the rules can be read at inference time, does an agent still need to learn them? We argue, and demonstrate empirically, that in settings where transition dynamics are configurable and readable, runtime discovery complements offline training by grounding predictions in the active system instance. We propose enterprise discovery agents, which recover relevant transition dynamics at runtime by reading the system's configuration rather than relying solely on internalized representations. We introduce CascadeBench, a reasoning-focused benchmark for enterprise cascade prediction that adopts the evaluation methodology of World of Workflows on diverse synthetic environments, and use it together with deployment-shift evaluation to show that offline-trained world models can perform well in-distribution but degrade as dynamics change, whereas discovery-based agents are more robust under shift by grounding their predictions in the current instance. Our findings suggest that, in configurable enterprise environments, agents should not rely solely on fixed internalized dynamics, but should incorporate mechanisms for discovering relevant transition logic at runtime.

ServiceNow-AI ServiceNow-AI
·
May 11 1

Beyond Static Leaderboards: Predictive Validity for the Evaluation of LLM Agents

Agent benchmarks are growing fast, but no single benchmark touches more than four or five of the dimensions that deployment exposes. This paper aggregates the largest coordinated deep-dive of one MCP-based industrial-agent benchmark to date: fourteen parallel implementation studies covering new asset classes (including a multi-modal visual extension), alternative orchestrations, retrieval strategies, reasoning modes, infrastructure optimizations, and evaluation-methodology probes. Consolidating those studies with seven prior agent benchmarks, we argue that aggregate-score leaderboards systematically underspecify deployed-agent evaluation. Rankings derived from aggregate scores do not transfer to out-of-distribution settings; recent public-to-hidden competition retrospectives provide direct empirical evidence of this rank instability. We propose ranking configurations by predictive validity, the correlation between in-sample and out-of-sample rank, rather than in-sample mean, and report a twelve-tier measurement apparatus that exposes the deployment-relevant dimensions HELM and its agent-era successors collapse. The position is operationalized through three falsifiable out-of-distribution criteria with explicit thresholds; existing evidence partly supports it but is too thin to confirm. We close with a pre-registered pilot design and a field-level vision for what the next generation of agentic benchmarks should report.

ibm IBM
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Jun 17 1

CyberSOCEval: Benchmarking LLMs Capabilities for Malware Analysis and Threat Intelligence Reasoning

Today's cyber defenders are overwhelmed by a deluge of security alerts, threat intelligence signals, and shifting business context, creating an urgent need for AI systems to enhance operational security work. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to automate and scale Security Operations Center (SOC) operations, existing evaluations do not fully assess the scenarios most relevant to real-world defenders. This lack of informed evaluation impacts both AI developers and those applying LLMs to SOC automation. Without clear insight into LLM performance in real-world security scenarios, developers lack a north star for development, and users cannot reliably select the most effective models. Meanwhile, malicious actors are using AI to scale cyber attacks, highlighting the need for open source benchmarks to drive adoption and community-driven improvement among defenders and model developers. To address this, we introduce CyberSOCEval, a new suite of open source benchmarks within CyberSecEval 4. CyberSOCEval includes benchmarks tailored to evaluate LLMs in two tasks: Malware Analysis and Threat Intelligence Reasoning--core defensive domains with inadequate coverage in current benchmarks. Our evaluations show that larger, more modern LLMs tend to perform better, confirming the training scaling laws paradigm. We also find that reasoning models leveraging test time scaling do not achieve the same boost as in coding and math, suggesting these models have not been trained to reason about cybersecurity analysis, and pointing to a key opportunity for improvement. Finally, current LLMs are far from saturating our evaluations, showing that CyberSOCEval presents a significant challenge for AI developers to improve cyber defense capabilities.

  • 23 authors
·
Nov 9, 2025

Multilingual GSM-Symbolic: What determines capability transfer across languages?

We understand little about how capabilities acquired in one language carry over to another, or what governs this transfer: evaluations rely on incomparable, saturation-prone datasets and rarely examine its determinants jointly. Identifying what predicts transfer would let us avoid exhaustive evaluation across all language pairs and let developers target the factors that limit performance in low-resource languages. To evaluate cross-lingual capability transfer, we introduce Multilingual GSM-Symbolic, an extensible multilingual mathematical dataset covering 30,000 item-matched question-answer pairs and spanning 15 languages. It utilises symbolic templates to prevent overfitting and ensure generalisation by allowing generation of millions of high-quality variations from a single sample. Using Multilingual GSM-Symbolic, we quantify the largest determinants of capability as model size (β= 1.77), language resource level (β= 0.77), reasoning (β= 0.67) and typological distance (β= -0.25). This joint estimation allows these determinants to be expressed in terms of one another: a 32B model evaluated in Marathi performs like a 10B model in English. Our findings have important implications for model developers, showing that model size and reasoning narrow the performance gap between low- and high-resource languages (β= -0.27 and β= -0.20, respectively), while similar levers have little or no effect on typologically distant languages. Overall, our analysis framework explains 92% of between-language variation, but only 23% of the model-by-language variation, and predicts a model's performance on an unseen language within 6.0pp (r=.96). Incorporating measurements from just 10 templates in the target language reduces this to 4.19pp, enabling reasonable estimates of performance with little or no downstream dataset.

Apriel Voice 27B Preview: An Open Model for Speech, Reasoning, and Tool Use

A capable voice assistant must do more than recognize words; it must understand requests, reason over context, sustain conversations, and act through tools. We present Apriel Voice 27B Preview, an open speech-language model that unifies these capabilities within a shared reasoning backbone while retaining text and image input modalities. Built on the post-trained Gemma 4 26B-A4B checkpoint, Apriel Voice directly processes speech and generates both responses and tool calls without requiring a separate dialogue model. We introduce a two-stage training procedure to adapt the model to speech. The first stage establishes the speech interface, while the second jointly adapts the projector and backbone through supervised fine-tuning, text replay, and source-dependent cross-entropy and forward Kullback--Leibler divergence supervision. Automatically constructed speech-conditioned dialogues provide conversational training data, while local teacher serving, overlapping teacher and student computation, and fused full-vocabulary losses enable efficient online distillation. In thinking mode, Apriel Voice achieves a score of 98.90 on Big Bench Audio, 81.13 on Speech-BFCL, and a task success rate of 65.51% on τ-Voice, with a mean latency of 1.91 seconds. It also achieves 51.27% English EVA accuracy and 74.13% experience pass@1. Finally, we deploy Apriel Voice 27B Preview on a custom serving platform to support interactive voice interactions.

ServiceNow-AI ServiceNow-AI
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Oct 28 2

On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models

AI is undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of models (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. We call these models foundation models to underscore their critically central yet incomplete character. This report provides a thorough account of the opportunities and risks of foundation models, ranging from their capabilities (e.g., language, vision, robotics, reasoning, human interaction) and technical principles(e.g., model architectures, training procedures, data, systems, security, evaluation, theory) to their applications (e.g., law, healthcare, education) and societal impact (e.g., inequity, misuse, economic and environmental impact, legal and ethical considerations). Though foundation models are based on standard deep learning and transfer learning, their scale results in new emergent capabilities,and their effectiveness across so many tasks incentivizes homogenization. Homogenization provides powerful leverage but demands caution, as the defects of the foundation model are inherited by all the adapted models downstream. Despite the impending widespread deployment of foundation models, we currently lack a clear understanding of how they work, when they fail, and what they are even capable of due to their emergent properties. To tackle these questions, we believe much of the critical research on foundation models will require deep interdisciplinary collaboration commensurate with their fundamentally sociotechnical nature.

  • 114 authors
·
Aug 16, 2021

Seamless Interaction: Dyadic Audiovisual Motion Modeling and Large-Scale Dataset

Human communication involves a complex interplay of verbal and nonverbal signals, essential for conveying meaning and achieving interpersonal goals. To develop socially intelligent AI technologies, it is crucial to develop models that can both comprehend and generate dyadic behavioral dynamics. To this end, we introduce the Seamless Interaction Dataset, a large-scale collection of over 4,000 hours of face-to-face interaction footage from over 4,000 participants in diverse contexts. This dataset enables the development of AI technologies that understand dyadic embodied dynamics, unlocking breakthroughs in virtual agents, telepresence experiences, and multimodal content analysis tools. We also develop a suite of models that utilize the dataset to generate dyadic motion gestures and facial expressions aligned with human speech. These models can take as input both the speech and visual behavior of their interlocutors. We present a variant with speech from an LLM model and integrations with 2D and 3D rendering methods, bringing us closer to interactive virtual agents. Additionally, we describe controllable variants of our motion models that can adapt emotional responses and expressivity levels, as well as generating more semantically-relevant gestures. Finally, we discuss methods for assessing the quality of these dyadic motion models, which are demonstrating the potential for more intuitive and responsive human-AI interactions.

  • 84 authors
·
Jun 30, 2025

External Large Foundation Model: How to Efficiently Serve Trillions of Parameters for Online Ads Recommendation

Ads recommendation is a prominent service of online advertising systems and has been actively studied. Recent studies indicate that scaling-up and advanced design of the recommendation model can bring significant performance improvement. However, with a larger model scale, such prior studies have a significantly increasing gap from industry as they often neglect two fundamental challenges in industrial-scale applications. First, training and inference budgets are restricted for the model to be served, exceeding which may incur latency and impair user experience. Second, large-volume data arrive in a streaming mode with data distributions dynamically shifting, as new users/ads join and existing users/ads leave the system. We propose the External Large Foundation Model (ExFM) framework to address the overlooked challenges. Specifically, we develop external distillation and a data augmentation system (DAS) to control the computational cost of training/inference while maintaining high performance. We design the teacher in a way like a foundation model (FM) that can serve multiple students as vertical models (VMs) to amortize its building cost. We propose Auxiliary Head and Student Adapter to mitigate the data distribution gap between FM and VMs caused by the streaming data issue. Comprehensive experiments on internal industrial-scale applications and public datasets demonstrate significant performance gain by ExFM.

  • 107 authors
·
Jul 13, 2025