Divergent Emotional Patterns in Disinformation on Social Media? An Analysis of Tweets and TikToks about the DANA in Valencia

This study investigates the dissemination of disinformation on social media platforms during the DANA event (DANA is a Spanish acronym for Depresion Aislada en Niveles Altos, translating to high-altitude isolated depression) that resulted in extremely heavy rainfall and devastating floods in Valencia, Spain, on October 29, 2024. We created a novel dataset of 650 TikTok and X posts, which was manually annotated to differentiate between disinformation and trustworthy content. Additionally, a Few-Shot annotation approach with GPT-4o achieved substantial agreement (Cohen's kappa of 0.684) with manual labels. Emotion analysis revealed that disinformation on X is mainly associated with increased sadness and fear, while on TikTok, it correlates with higher levels of anger and disgust. Linguistic analysis using the LIWC dictionary showed that trustworthy content utilizes more articulate and factual language, whereas disinformation employs negations, perceptual words, and personal anecdotes to appear credible. Audio analysis of TikTok posts highlighted distinct patterns: trustworthy audios featured brighter tones and robotic or monotone narration, promoting clarity and credibility, while disinformation audios leveraged tonal variation, emotional depth, and manipulative musical elements to amplify engagement. In detection models, SVM+TF-IDF achieved the highest F1-Score, excelling with limited data. Incorporating audio features into roberta-large-bne improved both Accuracy and F1-Score, surpassing its text-only counterpart and SVM in Accuracy. GPT-4o Few-Shot also performed well, showcasing the potential of large language models for automated disinformation detection. These findings demonstrate the importance of leveraging both textual and audio features for improved disinformation detection on multimodal platforms like TikTok.

User Altruism in Recommendation Systems

Users of social media platforms based on recommendation systems (RecSys) (e.g. TikTok, X, YouTube) strategically interact with platform content to influence future recommendations. On some such platforms, users have been documented to form large-scale grassroots movements encouraging others to purposefully interact with algorithmically suppressed content in order to "boost" its recommendation; we term this behavior user altruism. To capture this behavior, we study a game between users and a RecSys, where users provide the RecSys (potentially manipulated) preferences over the contents available to them, and the RecSys -- limited by data and computation constraints -- creates a low-rank approximation preference matrix, and ultimately provides each user her (approximately) most-preferred item. We compare the users' social welfare under truthful preference reporting and under a class of strategies capturing user altruism. In our theoretical analysis, we provide sufficient conditions to ensure strict increases in user social welfare under user altruism, and provide an algorithm to find an effective altruistic strategy. Interestingly, we show that for commonly assumed recommender utility functions, effectively altruistic strategies also improve the utility of the RecSys! We show that our results are robust to several model misspecifications, thus strengthening our conclusions. Our theoretical analysis is complemented by empirical results of effective altruistic strategies on the GoodReads dataset, and an online survey on how real-world users behave altruistically in RecSys. Overall, our findings serve as a proof-of-concept of the reasons why traditional RecSys may incentivize users to form collectives and/or follow altruistic strategies when interacting with them.

VividPose: Advancing Stable Video Diffusion for Realistic Human Image Animation

Human image animation involves generating a video from a static image by following a specified pose sequence. Current approaches typically adopt a multi-stage pipeline that separately learns appearance and motion, which often leads to appearance degradation and temporal inconsistencies. To address these issues, we propose VividPose, an innovative end-to-end pipeline based on Stable Video Diffusion (SVD) that ensures superior temporal stability. To enhance the retention of human identity, we propose an identity-aware appearance controller that integrates additional facial information without compromising other appearance details such as clothing texture and background. This approach ensures that the generated videos maintain high fidelity to the identity of human subject, preserving key facial features across various poses. To accommodate diverse human body shapes and hand movements, we introduce a geometry-aware pose controller that utilizes both dense rendering maps from SMPL-X and sparse skeleton maps. This enables accurate alignment of pose and shape in the generated videos, providing a robust framework capable of handling a wide range of body shapes and dynamic hand movements. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on the UBCFashion and TikTok benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, VividPose exhibits superior generalization capabilities on our proposed in-the-wild dataset. Codes and models will be available.

ZEUS: Accelerating Diffusion Models with Only Second-Order Predictor

Denoising generative models deliver high-fidelity generation but remain bottlenecked by inference latency due to the many iterative denoiser calls required during sampling. Training-free acceleration methods reduce latency by either sparsifying the model architecture or shortening the sampling trajectory. Current training-free acceleration methods are more complex than necessary: higher-order predictors amplify error under aggressive speedups, and architectural modifications hinder deployment. Beyond 2x acceleration, step skipping creates structural scarcity -- at most one fresh evaluation per local window -- leaving the computed output and its backward difference as the only causally grounded information. Based on this, we propose ZEUS, an acceleration method that predicts reduced denoiser evaluations using a second-order predictor, and stabilizes aggressive consecutive skipping with an interleaved scheme that avoids back-to-back extrapolations. ZEUS adds essentially zero overhead, no feature caches, and no architectural modifications, and it is compatible with different backbones, prediction objectives, and solver choices. Across image and video generation, ZEUS consistently improves the speed-fidelity performance over recent training-free baselines, achieving up to 3.2x end-to-end speedup while maintaining perceptual quality. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Ting-Justin-Jiang/ZEUS.

Learn by Surprise, Commit by Proof

We propose LSCP, a self-gated post-training framework for autonomous knowledge acquisition: learning only what a model does not already know, verified against what it does know, at a strength proportional to conviction, with no external oracle. When a passage produces anomalously high per-token loss, LSCP flags it, generates a Q&A chain that forces the model to articulate its own knowledge and identify gaps, then adjusts AdamW's $β_2$ proportionally to conviction depth k (the number of self-verification steps the passage survives) via $β_2 = 0.999 \cdot r^k$. The entire learning intensity is governed by a single parameter $r$. Beyond new knowledge, this process sharpens weakly encoded existing knowledge, which is a primary source of hallucination. The framework is self-extinguishing: as the model learns, per-token loss on learned passages decreases toward the surprisal threshold and the system progressively converges to standard AdamW. This models biological memory consolidation: temporary information in the context window is selectively consolidated into parametric weights, the model's long-term memory. Experiments on the reference model (Qwen3-14B) and across six models (8B--32B, four families) show that standard fine-tuning produces rote memorization (perturbation gap (the ratio of paraphrase to original perplexity) of 11.6 +- 0.2 x baseline) while all LSCP conditions learn semantically (2.7--3.0x). The r=1.0 condition (identical optimizer, nearly identical data, only Q&A format differs) confirms that the training data format, not $β_2$ gating, is the primary mechanism preventing memorization; gating instead protects neighboring knowledge from contamination by corrupt content (93 +- 7% accuracy on adjacent questions at r=0.98 vs. 90% baseline).

Generalization Bounds and Statistical Guarantees for Multi-Task and Multiple Operator Learning with MNO Networks

Multiple operator learning concerns learning operator families $\{G[α]:U\to V\}_{α\in W}$ indexed by an operator descriptor $α$. Training data are collected hierarchically by sampling operator instances $α$, then input functions $u$ per instance, and finally evaluation points $x$ per input, yielding noisy observations of $G[α][u](x)$. While recent work has developed expressive multi-task and multiple operator learning architectures and approximation-theoretic scaling laws, quantitative statistical generalization guarantees remain limited. We provide a covering-number-based generalization analysis for separable models, focusing on the Multiple Neural Operator (MNO) architecture: we first derive explicit metric-entropy bounds for hypothesis classes given by linear combinations of products of deep ReLU subnetworks, and then combine these complexity bounds with approximation guarantees for MNO to obtain an explicit approximation-estimation tradeoff for the expected test error on new (unseen) triples $(α,u,x)$. The resulting bound makes the dependence on the hierarchical sampling budgets $(n_α,n_u,n_x)$ transparent and yields an explicit learning-rate statement in the operator-sampling budget $n_α$, providing a sample-complexity characterization for generalization across operator instances. The structure and architecture can also be viewed as a general purpose solver or an example of a "small'' PDE foundation model, where the triples are one form of multi-modality.

MiCA Learns More Knowledge Than LoRA and Full Fine-Tuning

Minor Component Adaptation (MiCA) is a novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning method for large language models that focuses on adapting underutilized subspaces of model representations. Unlike conventional methods such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), which target dominant subspaces, MiCA leverages Singular Value Decomposition to identify subspaces related to minor singular vectors associated with the least significant singular values and constrains the update of parameters during fine-tuning to those directions. This strategy leads to up to 5.9x improvement in knowledge acquisition under optimized training hyperparameters and a minimal parameter footprint of 6-60% compared to LoRA. These results suggest that constraining adaptation to minor singular directions provides a more efficient and stable mechanism for integrating new knowledge into pre-trained language models.

Omni123: Exploring 3D Native Foundation Models with Limited 3D Data by Unifying Text to 2D and 3D Generation

Recent multimodal large language models have achieved strong performance in unified text and image understanding and generation, yet extending such native capability to 3D remains challenging due to limited data. Compared to abundant 2D imagery, high-quality 3D assets are scarce, making 3D synthesis under-constrained. Existing methods often rely on indirect pipelines that edit in 2D and lift results into 3D via optimization, sacrificing geometric consistency. We present Omni123, a 3D-native foundation model that unifies text-to-2D and text-to-3D generation within a single autoregressive framework. Our key insight is that cross-modal consistency between images and 3D can serve as an implicit structural constraint. By representing text, images, and 3D as discrete tokens in a shared sequence space, the model leverages abundant 2D data as a geometric prior to improve 3D representations. We introduce an interleaved X-to-X training paradigm that coordinates diverse cross-modal tasks over heterogeneous paired datasets without requiring fully aligned text-image-3D triplets. By traversing semantic-visual-geometric cycles (e.g., text to image to 3D to image) within autoregressive sequences, the model jointly enforces semantic alignment, appearance fidelity, and multi-view geometric consistency. Experiments show that Omni123 significantly improves text-guided 3D generation and editing, demonstrating a scalable path toward multimodal 3D world models.

LiteInception: A Lightweight and Interpretable Deep Learning Framework for General Aviation Fault Diagnosis

General aviation fault diagnosis and efficient maintenance are critical to flight safety; however, deploying deep learning models on resource-constrained edge devices poses dual challenges in computational capacity and interpretability. This paper proposes LiteInception--a lightweight interpretable fault diagnosis framework designed for edge deployment. The framework adopts a two-stage cascaded architecture aligned with standard maintenance workflows: Stage 1 performs high-recall fault detection, and Stage 2 conducts fine-grained fault classification on anomalous samples, thereby decoupling optimization objectives and enabling on-demand allocation of computational resources. For model compression, a multi-method fusion strategy based on mutual information, gradient analysis, and SE attention weights is proposed to reduce the input sensor channels from 23 to 15, and a 1+1 branch LiteInception architecture is introduced that compresses InceptionTime parameters by 70%, accelerates CPU inference by over 8x, with less than 3% F1 loss. Furthermore, knowledge distillation is introduced as a precision-recall regulation mechanism, enabling the same lightweight model to adapt to different scenarios--such as safety-critical and auxiliary diagnosis--by switching training strategies. Finally, a dual-layer interpretability framework integrating four attribution methods is constructed, providing traceable evidence chains of "which sensor x which time period." Experiments on the NGAFID dataset demonstrate a fault detection accuracy of 81.92% with 83.24% recall, and a fault identification accuracy of 77.00%, validating the framework's favorable balance among efficiency, accuracy, and interpretability.

Swift-SVD: Theoretical Optimality Meets Practical Efficiency in Low-Rank LLM Compression

The deployment of Large Language Models is constrained by the memory and bandwidth demands of static weights and dynamic Key-Value cache. SVD-based compression provides a hardware-friendly solution to reduce these costs. However, existing methods suffer from two key limitations: some are suboptimal in reconstruction error, while others are theoretically optimal but practically inefficient. In this paper, we propose Swift-SVD, an activation-aware, closed-form compression framework that simultaneously guarantees theoretical optimum, practical efficiency and numerical stability. Swift-SVD incrementally aggregates covariance of output activations given a batch of inputs and performs a single eigenvalue decomposition after aggregation, enabling training-free, fast, and optimal layer-wise low-rank approximation. We employ effective rank to analyze local layer-wise compressibility and design a dynamic rank allocation strategy that jointly accounts for local reconstruction loss and end-to-end layer importance. Extensive experiments across six LLMs and eight datasets demonstrate that Swift-SVD outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving optimal compression accuracy while delivering 3-70X speedups in end-to-end compression time. Our code will be released upon acceptance.