Overcoming Dynamics-Blindness: Training-Free Pace-and-Path Correction for VLA Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve remarkable flexibility and generalization beyond classical control paradigms. However, most prevailing VLAs are trained under a single-frame observation paradigm, which leaves them structurally blind to temporal dynamics. Consequently, these models degrade severely in non-stationary scenarios, even when trained or finetuned on dynamic datasets. Existing approaches either require expensive retraining or suffer from latency bottlenecks and poor temporal consistency across action chunks. We propose Pace-and-Path Correction, a training-free, closed-form inference-time operator that wraps any chunked-action VLA. From a single quadratic cost, joint minimization yields a unified solution that decomposes orthogonally into two distinct channels. The pace channel compresses execution along the planned direction, while the path channel applies an orthogonal spatial offset, jointly absorbing the perceived dynamics within the chunk window. We evaluate our approach on a comprehensive diagnostic benchmark MoveBench designed to isolate motion as the sole controlled variable. Empirical results demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art training-free wrappers and dynamic-adaptive methods and improves success rates by up to 28.8% and 25.9% in absolute terms over foundational VLA models in dynamic-only and static-dynamic mixed environments, respectively.

Reliability-Gated Source Anchoring for Continual Test-Time Adaptation

Continual test-time adaptation (CTTA) updates a pretrained model online on an unlabeled, non-stationary stream while anchoring it to a frozen source checkpoint. This anchor is useful only when the source remains reliable. On CCC-Hard, however, a ResNet-50 source falls to approximately $1.3\%$ top-$1$ accuracy, while existing source-anchored CTTA methods continue applying the same anchor strength. We call this failure mode blind anchoring and propose RMemSafe, a reliability-gated extension of ROID that uses the frozen source's normalized predictive entropy to attenuate all explicit source-coupled uses in the objective. When the source posterior approaches uniformity, the gate closes: the source anchor and agreement filter vanish, and the objective reduces to a source-agnostic fallback comprising ROID's base losses plus marginal calibration. Combined with ASR, RMemSafe achieves the lowest error on $8$ of $9$ matched-split continual-corruption cells and is the best reset-based method on all $9$, improving ROID+ASR by $1.05$~pp on ResNet-50 and $0.48$~pp on ViT-B/16. A controlled source-degradation sweep shows a $1.13{\times}$ shallower harm slope than ROID+ASR, consistent with the graceful-decay prediction. The entropy gate detects high-entropy source collapse, not confidently wrong low-entropy sources; this scope is explicitly evaluated and discussed.

LRD-Net: A Lightweight Real-Centered Detection Network for Cross-Domain Face Forgery Detection

The rapid advancement of diffusion-based generative models has made face forgery detection a critical challenge in digital forensics. Current detection methods face two fundamental limitations: poor cross-domain generalization when encountering unseen forgery types, and substantial computational overhead that hinders deployment on resource-constrained devices. We propose LRD-Net (Lightweight Real-centered Detection Network), a novel framework that addresses both challenges simultaneously. Unlike existing dual-branch approaches that process spatial and frequency information independently, LRD-Net adopts a sequential frequency-guided architecture where a lightweight Multi-Scale Wavelet Guidance Module generates attention signals that condition a MobileNetV3-based spatial backbone. This design enables effective exploitation of frequency-domain cues while avoiding the redundancy of parallel feature extraction. Furthermore, LRD-Net employs a real-centered learning strategy with exponential moving average prototype updates and drift regularization, anchoring representations around authentic facial images rather than modeling diverse forgery patterns. Extensive experiments on the DiFF benchmark demonstrate that LRD-Net achieves state-of-the-art cross-domain detection accuracy, consistently outperforming existing methods. Critically, LRD-Net accomplishes this with only 2.63M parameters - approximately 9x fewer than conventional approaches - while achieving over 8x faster training and nearly 10x faster inference. These results demonstrate that robust cross-domain face forgery detection can be achieved without sacrificing computational efficiency, making LRD-Net suitable for real-time deployment in mobile authentication systems and resource-constrained environments.

AgentCE-Bench: Agent Configurable Evaluation with Scalable Horizons and Controllable Difficulty under Lightweight Environments

Existing Agent benchmarks suffer from two critical limitations: high environment interaction overhead (up to 41\% of total evaluation time) and imbalanced task horizon and difficulty distributions that make aggregate scores unreliable. To address these issues, we propose AgentCE-Bench built around a unified grid-based planning task, where agents must fill hidden slots in a partially completed schedule subject to both local slot constraints and global constraints. Our benchmark offers fine-grained control through two orthogonal axes: \textbf{Scalable Horizons}, controlled by the number of hidden slots $H$, and \textbf{Controllable Difficulty}, governed by a decoy budget $B$ that determines the number of globally misleading decoy candidates. Crucially, all tool calls are resolved via static JSON files under a \textbf{Lightweight Environment} design, eliminating setup overhead and enabling fast, reproducible evaluation suitable for training-time validation. We first validate that $H$ and $B$ provide reliable control over task horizon and difficulty, and that AgentCE-Bench exhibits strong domain consistency and model discriminability. We then conduct comprehensive experiments across 13 models of diverse sizes and families over 6 domains, revealing significant cross-model performance variation and confirming that AgentCE-Bench provides interpretable and controllable evaluation of agent reasoning.

ACE-Bench: Agent Configurable Evaluation with Scalable Horizons and Controllable Difficulty under Lightweight Environments

Existing Agent benchmarks suffer from two critical limitations: high environment interaction overhead (up to 41\% of total evaluation time) and imbalanced task horizon and difficulty distributions that make aggregate scores unreliable. To address these issues, we propose ACE-Bench built around a unified grid-based planning task, where agents must fill hidden slots in a partially completed schedule subject to both local slot constraints and global constraints. Our benchmark offers fine-grained control through two orthogonal axes: Scalable Horizons, controlled by the number of hidden slots $H$, and Controllable Difficulty, governed by a decoy budget $B$ that determines the number of globally misleading decoy candidates. Crucially, all tool calls are resolved via static JSON files under a Lightweight Environment design, eliminating setup overhead and enabling fast, reproducible evaluation suitable for training-time validation. We first validate that H and B provide reliable control over task horizon and difficulty, and that ACE-Bench exhibits strong domain consistency and model discriminability. We then conduct comprehensive experiments across 13 models of diverse sizes and families over 6 domains, revealing significant cross-model performance variation and confirming that ACE-Bench provides interpretable and controllable evaluation of agent reasoning.

Medical Image Spatial Grounding with Semantic Sampling

Vision language models (VLMs) have shown significant promise in visual grounding for images as well as videos. In medical imaging research, VLMs represent a bridge between object detection and segmentation, and report understanding and generation. However, spatial grounding of anatomical structures in the three-dimensional space of medical images poses many unique challenges. In this study, we examine image modalities, slice directions, and coordinate systems as differentiating factors for vision components of VLMs, and the use of anatomical, directional, and relational terminology as factors for the language components. We then demonstrate that visual and textual prompting systems such as labels, bounding boxes, and mask overlays have varying effects on the spatial grounding ability of VLMs. To enable measurement and reproducibility, we introduce \textbf{MIS-Ground}, a benchmark that comprehensively tests a VLM for vulnerabilities against specific modes of \textbf{M}edical \textbf{I}mage \textbf{S}patial \textbf{Ground}ing. We release MIS-Ground to the public at \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/mis-ground}{\texttt{anonymous.4open.science/r/mis-ground}}. In addition, we present \textbf{MIS-SemSam}, a low-cost, inference-time, and model-agnostic optimization of VLMs that improve their spatial grounding ability with the use of \textbf{Sem}antic \textbf{Sam}pling. We find that MIS-SemSam improves the accuracy of Qwen3-VL-32B on MIS-Ground by 13.06\%.

Scorio.jl: A Julia package for ranking stochastic responses

Scorio.jl is a Julia package for evaluating and ranking systems from repeated responses to shared tasks. It provides a common tensor-based interface for direct score-based, pairwise, psychometric, voting, graph, and listwise methods, so the same benchmark can be analyzed under multiple ranking assumptions. We describe the package design, position it relative to existing Julia tools, and report pilot experiments on synthetic rank recovery, stability under limited trials, and runtime scaling.

Ranking Reasoning LLMs under Test-Time Scaling

Test-time scaling evaluates reasoning LLMs by sampling multiple outputs per prompt, but ranking models in this regime remains underexplored. We formalize dense benchmark ranking under test-time scaling and introduce Scorio, a library that implements statistical ranking methods such as paired-comparison models, item response theory (IRT) models, voting rules, and graph- and spectral-based methods. Across $20$ reasoning models on four Olympiad-style math benchmarks (AIME'24, AIME'25, HMMT'25, and BrUMO'25; up to $N=80$ trials), most full-trial rankings agree closely with the Bayesian gold standard $\mathrm{Bayes}_{\mathcal{U}}@80$ (mean Kendall's $τ_b = 0.93$--$0.95$), and $19$--$34$ methods recover exactly the same ordering. In the single-trial regime, the best methods reach $τ_b \approx 0.86$. Using greedy decoding as an empirical prior ($\mathrm{Bayes}_{\mathbf{R}_0}@N$) reduces variance at $N=1$ by $16$--$52\%$, but can bias rankings when greedy and stochastic sampling disagree. These results identify reliable ranking methods for both high- and low-budget test-time scaling. We release Scorio as an open-source library at https://github.com/mohsenhariri/scorio.

Toward Guarantees for Clinical Reasoning in Vision Language Models via Formal Verification

Vision-language models (VLMs) show promise in drafting radiology reports, yet they frequently suffer from logical inconsistencies, generating diagnostic impressions unsupported by their own perceptual findings or missing logically entailed conclusions. Standard lexical metrics heavily penalize clinical paraphrasing and fail to capture these deductive failures in reference-free settings. Toward guarantees for clinical reasoning, we introduce a neurosymbolic verification framework that deterministically audits the internal consistency of VLM-generated reports. Our pipeline autoformalizes free-text radiographic findings into structured propositional evidence, utilizing an SMT solver (Z3) and a clinical knowledge base to verify whether each diagnostic claim is mathematically entailed, hallucinated, or omitted. Evaluating seven VLMs across five chest X-ray benchmarks, our verifier exposes distinct reasoning failure modes, such as conservative observation and stochastic hallucination, that remain invisible to traditional metrics. On labeled datasets, enforcing solver-backed entailment acts as a rigorous post-hoc guarantee, systematically eliminating unsupported hallucinations to significantly increase diagnostic soundness and precision in generative clinical assistants.

Robust Ultra-High-Dimensional Variable Selection With Correlated Structure Using Group Testing

Background: High-dimensional genomic data exhibit strong group correlation structures that challenge conventional feature selection methods, which often assume feature independence or rely on pre-defined pathways and are sensitive to outliers and model misspecification. Methods: We propose the Dorfman screening framework, a multi-stage procedure that forms data-driven variable groups via hierarchical clustering, performs group and within-group hypothesis testing, and refines selection using elastic net or adaptive elastic net. Robust variants incorporate OGK-based covariance estimation, rank-based correlation, and Huber-weighted regression to handle contaminated and non-normal data. Results: In simulations, Dorfman-Sparse-Adaptive-EN performed best under normal conditions, while Robust-OGK-Dorfman-Adaptive-EN showed clear advantages under data contamination, outperforming classical Dorfman and competing methods. Applied to NSCLC gene expression data for trametinib response, robust Dorfman methods achieved the lowest prediction errors and enriched recovery of clinically relevant genes. Conclusions: The Dorfman framework provides an efficient and robust approach to genomic feature selection. Robust-OGK-Dorfman-Adaptive-EN offers strong performance under both ideal and contaminated conditions and scales to ultra-high-dimensional settings, making it well suited for modern genomic biomarker discovery.