Optimizing EEG Graph Structure for Seizure Detection: An Information Bottleneck and Self-Supervised Learning Approach

Seizure detection from EEG signals is highly challenging due to complex spatiotemporal dynamics and extreme inter-patient variability. To model them, recent methods construct dynamic graphs via statistical correlations, predefined similarity measures, or implicit learning, yet rarely account for EEG's noisy nature. Consequently, these graphs usually contain redundant or task-irrelevant connections, undermining model performance even with state-of-the-art architectures. In this paper, we present a new perspective for EEG seizure detection: jointly learning denoised dynamic graph structures and informative spatial-temporal representations guided by the Information Bottleneck (IB). Unlike prior approaches, our graph constructor explicitly accounts for the noisy characteristics of EEG data, producing compact and reliable connectivity patterns that better support downstream seizure detection. To further enhance representation learning, we employ a self-supervised Graph Masked AutoEncoder that reconstructs masked EEG signals based on dynamic graph context, promoting structure-aware and compact representations aligned with the IB principle. Bringing things together, we introduce Information Bottleneck-guided EEG SeizuRE DetectioN via SElf-Supervised Learning (IRENE), which explicitly learns dynamic graph structures and interpretable spatial-temporal EEG representations. IRENE addresses three core challenges: (i) Identifying the most informative nodes and edges; (ii) Explaining seizure propagation in the brain network; and (iii) Enhancing robustness against label scarcity and inter-patient variability. Extensive experiments on benchmark EEG datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in seizure detection and provides clinically meaningful insights into seizure dynamics. The source code is available at https://github.com/LabRAI/IRENE.

ForestSim: A Synthetic Benchmark for Intelligent Vehicle Perception in Unstructured Forest Environments

Robust scene understanding is essential for intelligent vehicles operating in natural, unstructured environments. While semantic segmentation datasets for structured urban driving are abundant, the datasets for extremely unstructured wild environments remain scarce due to the difficulty and cost of generating pixel-accurate annotations. These limitations hinder the development of perception systems needed for intelligent ground vehicles tasked with forestry automation, agricultural robotics, disaster response, and all-terrain mobility. To address this gap, we present ForestSim, a high-fidelity synthetic dataset designed for training and evaluating semantic segmentation models for intelligent vehicles in forested off-road and no-road environments. ForestSim contains 2094 photorealistic images across 25 diverse environments, covering multiple seasons, terrain types, and foliage densities. Using Unreal Engine environments integrated with Microsoft AirSim, we generate consistent, pixel-accurate labels across 20 classes relevant to autonomous navigation. We benchmark ForestSim using state-of-the-art architectures and report strong performance despite the inherent challenges of unstructured scenes. ForestSim provides a scalable and accessible foundation for perception research supporting the next generation of intelligent off-road vehicles. The dataset and code are publicly available: Dataset: https://vailforestsim.github.io Code: https://github.com/pragatwagle/ForestSim

Efficient Video Diffusion with Sparse Information Transmission for Video Compression

Video compression aims to maximize reconstruction quality with minimal bitrates. Beyond standard distortion metrics, perceptual quality and temporal consistency are also critical. However, at ultra-low bitrates, traditional end-to-end compression models tend to produce blurry images of poor perceptual quality. Besides, existing generative compression methods often treat video frames independently and show limitations in time coherence and efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose the Efficient Video Diffusion with Sparse Information Transmission (Diff-SIT), which comprises the Sparse Temporal Encoding Module (STEM) and the One-Step Video Diffusion with Frame Type Embedder (ODFTE). The STEM sparsely encodes the original frame sequence into an information-rich intermediate sequence, achieving significant bitrate savings. Subsequently, the ODFTE processes this intermediate sequence as a whole, which exploits the temporal correlation. During this process, our proposed Frame Type Embedder (FTE) guides the diffusion model to perform adaptive reconstruction according to different frame types to optimize the overall quality. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that Diff-SIT establishes a new state-of-the-art in perceptual quality and temporal consistency, particularly in the challenging ultra-low-bitrate regime. Code is released at https://github.com/MingdeZhou/Diff-SIT.

Good Arguments Against the People Pleasers: How Reasoning Mitigates (Yet Masks) LLM Sycophancy

Alignment techniques often inadvertently induce sycophancy in LLMs. While prior studies studied this behaviour in direct-answer settings, the role of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning remains under-explored: does it serve as a logical constraint that mitigates sycophancy, or a tool for post-hoc rationalization that masks it? We evaluate a range of models across objective and subjective tasks to investigate the issue. Results show that reasoning generally reduces sycophancy in final decisions but also masks sycophancy in some samples, where models construct deceptive justifications through logical inconsistencies, calculation errors, and one-sided arguments etc. Furthermore, LLMs are more prone to sycophancy in subjective tasks and under authority-bias. Our mechanistic analysis on three open-source models reveals that the tendency of sycophancy is dynamic during the reasoning process rather than being pre-determined at the input stage.

Selective Denoising Diffusion Model for Time Series Anomaly Detection

Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) has been an important area of research for decades, with reconstruction-based methods, mostly based on generative models, gaining popularity and demonstrating success. Diffusion models have recently attracted attention due to their advanced generative capabilities. Existing diffusion-based methods for TSAD rely on a conditional strategy, which reconstructs input instances from white noise with the aid of the conditioner. However, this poses challenges in accurately reconstructing the normal parts, resulting in suboptimal detection performance. In response, we propose a novel diffusion-based method, named AnomalyFilter, which acts as a selective filter that only denoises anomaly parts in the instance while retaining normal parts. To build such a filter, we mask Gaussian noise during the training phase and conduct the denoising process without adding noise to the instances. The synergy of the two simple components greatly enhances the performance of naive diffusion models. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate that AnomalyFilter achieves notably low reconstruction error on normal parts, providing empirical support for its effectiveness in anomaly detection. AnomalyFilter represents a pioneering approach that focuses on the noise design of diffusion models specifically tailored for TSAD.

Disentangled Mode-Specific Representations for Tensor Time Series via Contrastive Learning

Multi-mode tensor time series (TTS) can be found in many domains, such as search engines and environmental monitoring systems. Learning representations of a TTS benefits various applications, but it is also challenging since the complexities inherent in the tensor hinder the realization of rich representations. In this paper, we propose a novel representation learning method designed specifically for TTS, namely MoST. Specifically, MoST uses a tensor slicing approach to reduce the complexity of the TTS structure and learns representations that can be disentangled into individual non-temporal modes. Each representation captures mode-specific features, which are the relationship between variables within the same mode, and mode-invariant features, which are in common in representations of different modes. We employ a contrastive learning framework to learn parameters; the loss function comprises two parts intended to learn representation in a mode-specific way and mode-invariant way, effectively exploiting disentangled representations as augmentations. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that MoST consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of classification and forecasting accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/KoheiObata/MoST.

ODEBrain: Continuous-Time EEG Graph for Modeling Dynamic Brain Networks

Modeling neural population dynamics is crucial for foundational neuroscientific research and various clinical applications. Conventional latent variable methods typically model continuous brain dynamics through discretizing time with recurrent architecture, which necessarily results in compounded cumulative prediction errors and failure of capturing instantaneous, nonlinear characteristics of EEGs. We propose ODEBRAIN, a Neural ODE latent dynamic forecasting framework to overcome these challenges by integrating spatio-temporal-frequency features into spectral graph nodes, followed by a Neural ODE modeling the continuous latent dynamics. Our design ensures that latent representations can capture stochastic variations of complex brain states at any given time point. Extensive experiments verify that ODEBRAIN can improve significantly over existing methods in forecasting EEG dynamics with enhanced robustness and generalization capabilities.

RepSPD: Enhancing SPD Manifold Representation in EEGs via Dynamic Graphs

Decoding brain activity from electroencephalography (EEG) is crucial for neuroscience and clinical applications. Among recent advances in deep learning for EEG, geometric learning stands out as its theoretical underpinnings on symmetric positive definite (SPD) allows revealing structural connectivity analysis in a physics-grounded manner. However, current SPD-based methods focus predominantly on statistical aggregation of EEGs, with frequency-specific synchronization and local topological structures of brain regions neglected. Given this, we propose RepSPD, a novel geometric deep learning (GDL)-based model. RepSPD implements a cross-attention mechanism on the Riemannian manifold to modulate the geometric attributes of SPD with graph-derived functional connectivity features. On top of this, we introduce a global bidirectional alignment strategy to reshape tangent-space embeddings, mitigating geometric distortions caused by curvature and thereby enhancing geometric consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework significantly outperforms existing EEG representation methods, exhibiting superior robustness and generalization capabilities.

SkyReels-V4: Multi-modal Video-Audio Generation, Inpainting and Editing model

SkyReels V4 is a unified multi modal video foundation model for joint video audio generation, inpainting, and editing. The model adopts a dual stream Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MMDiT) architecture, where one branch synthesizes video and the other generates temporally aligned audio, while sharing a powerful text encoder based on the Multimodal Large Language Models (MMLM). SkyReels V4 accepts rich multi modal instructions, including text, images, video clips, masks, and audio references. By combining the MMLMs multi modal instruction following capability with in context learning in the video branch MMDiT, the model can inject fine grained visual guidance under complex conditioning, while the audio branch MMDiT simultaneously leverages audio references to guide sound generation. On the video side, we adopt a channel concatenation formulation that unifies a wide range of inpainting style tasks, such as image to video, video extension, and video editing under a single interface, and naturally extends to vision referenced inpainting and editing via multi modal prompts. SkyReels V4 supports up to 1080p resolution, 32 FPS, and 15 second duration, enabling high fidelity, multi shot, cinema level video generation with synchronized audio. To make such high resolution, long-duration generation computationally feasible, we introduce an efficiency strategy: Joint generation of low resolution full sequences and high-resolution keyframes, followed by dedicated super-resolution and frame interpolation models. To our knowledge, SkyReels V4 is the first video foundation model that simultaneously supports multi-modal input, joint video audio generation, and a unified treatment of generation, inpainting, and editing, while maintaining strong efficiency and quality at cinematic resolutions and durations.

TIFO: Time-Invariant Frequency Operator for Stationarity-Aware Representation Learning in Time Series

Nonstationary time series forecasting suffers from the distribution shift issue due to the different distributions that produce the training and test data. Existing methods attempt to alleviate the dependence by, e.g., removing low-order moments from each individual sample. These solutions fail to capture the underlying time-evolving structure across samples and do not model the complex time structure. In this paper, we aim to address the distribution shift in the frequency space by considering all possible time structures. To this end, we propose a Time-Invariant Frequency Operator (TIFO), which learns stationarity-aware weights over the frequency spectrum across the entire dataset. The weight representation highlights stationary frequency components while suppressing non-stationary ones, thereby mitigating the distribution shift issue in time series. To justify our method, we show that the Fourier transform of time series data implicitly induces eigen-decomposition in the frequency space. TIFO is a plug-and-play approach that can be seamlessly integrated into various forecasting models. Experiments demonstrate our method achieves 18 top-1 and 6 top-2 results out of 28 forecasting settings. Notably, it yields 33.3% and 55.3% improvements in average MSE on the ETTm2 dataset. In addition, TIFO reduces computational costs by 60% -70% compared to baseline methods, demonstrating strong scalability across diverse forecasting models.