Learning to Commit: Generating Organic Pull Requests via Online Repository Memory

Large language model (LLM)-based coding agents achieve impressive results on controlled benchmarks yet routinely produce pull requests that real maintainers reject. The root cause is not functional incorrectness but a lack of organicity: generated code ignores project-specific conventions, duplicates functionality already provided by internal APIs, and violates implicit architectural constraints accumulated over years of development. Simply exposing an agent to the latest repository snapshot is not enough: the snapshot reveals the final state of the codebase, but not the repository-specific change patterns by which that state was reached. We introduce Learning to Commit, a framework that closes this gap through Online Repository Memory. Given a repository with a strict chronological split, the agent performs supervised contrastive reflection on earlier commits: it blindly attempts to resolve each historical issue, compares its prediction against the oracle diff, and distils the gap into a continuously growing set of skills-reusable patterns capturing coding style, internal API usage, and architectural invariants. When a new PR description arrives, the agent conditions its generation on these accumulated skills, producing changes grounded in the project's own evolution rather than generic pretraining priors. Evaluation is conducted on genuinely future, merged pull requests that could not have been seen during the skill-building phase, and spans multiple dimensions including functional correctness, code-style consistency, internal API reuse rate, and modified-region plausibility. Experiments on an expert-maintained repository with rich commit history show that Online Repository Memory effectively improves organicity scores on held-out future tasks.

Beyond Language: Grounding Referring Expressions with Hand Pointing in Egocentric Vision

Traditional Visual Grounding (VG) predominantly relies on textual descriptions to localize objects, a paradigm that inherently struggles with linguistic ambiguity and often ignores non-verbal deictic cues prevalent in real-world interactions. In natural egocentric engagements, hand-pointing combined with speech forms the most intuitive referring mechanism. To bridge this gap, we introduce EgoPoint-Ground, the first large-scale multimodal dataset dedicated to egocentric deictic visual grounding. Comprising over \textbf{15k} interactive samples in complex scenes, the dataset provides rich, multi-grained annotations including hand-target bounding box pairs and dense semantic captions. We establish a comprehensive benchmark for hand-pointing referring expression resolution, evaluating a wide spectrum of mainstream Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and state-of-the-art VG architectures. Furthermore, we propose SV-CoT, a novel baseline framework that reformulates grounding as a structured inference process, synergizing gestural and linguistic cues through a Visual Chain-of-Thought paradigm. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SV-CoT achieves an $\textbf{11.7\%}$ absolute improvement over existing methods, effectively mitigating semantic ambiguity and advancing the capability of agents to comprehend multimodal physical intents. The dataset and code will be made publicly available.

EnTaCs: Analyzing the Relationship Between Sentiment and Language Choice in English-Tamil Code-Switching

This paper investigates the relationship between utterance sentiment and language choice in English-Tamil code-switched text, using methods from machine learning and statistical modelling. We apply a fine-tuned XLM-RoBERTa model for token-level language identification on 35,650 romanized YouTube comments from the DravidianCodeMix dataset, producing per-utterance measurements of English proportion and language switch frequency. Linear regression analysis reveals that positive utterances exhibit significantly greater English proportion (34.3%) than negative utterances (24.8%), and mixed-sentiment utterances show the highest language switch frequency when controlling for utterance length. These findings support the hypothesis that emotional content demonstrably influences language choice in multilingual code-switching settings, due to socio-linguistic associations of prestige and identity with embedded and matrix languages.

Generation Is Compression: Zero-Shot Video Coding via Stochastic Rectified Flow

Existing generative video compression methods use generative models only as post-hoc reconstruction modules atop conventional codecs. We propose \emph{Generative Video Codec} (GVC), a zero-shot framework that turns a pretrained video generative model into the codec itself: the transmitted bitstream directly specifies the generative decoding trajectory, with no retraining required. To enable this, we convert the deterministic rectified-flow ODE of modern video foundation models into an equivalent SDE at inference time, unlocking per-step stochastic injection points for codebook-driven compression. Building on this unified backbone, we instantiate three complementary conditioning strategies -- \emph{Image-to-Video} (I2V) with adaptive tail-frame atom allocation, \emph{Text-to-Video} (T2V) operating at near-zero side information as a pure generative prior, and \emph{First-Last-Frame-to-Video} (FLF2V) with boundary-sharing GOP chaining for dual-anchor temporal control. Together, these variants span a principled trade-off space between spatial fidelity, temporal coherence, and compression efficiency. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that GVC achieves high-quality reconstruction below 0.002\,bpp while supporting flexible bitrate control through a single hyperparameter.

Beyond MACs: Hardware Efficient Architecture Design for Vision Backbones

Vision backbone networks play a central role in modern computer vision. Enhancing their efficiency directly benefits a wide range of downstream applications. To measure efficiency, many publications rely on MACs (Multiply Accumulate operations) as a predictor of execution time. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate the shortcomings of such a metric, especially in the context of edge devices. By contrasting the MAC count and execution time of common architectural design elements, we identify key factors for efficient execution and provide insights to optimize backbone design. Based on these insights, we present LowFormer, a novel vision backbone family. LowFormer features a streamlined macro and micro design that includes Lowtention, a lightweight alternative to Multi-Head Self-Attention. Lowtention not only proves more efficient, but also enables superior results on ImageNet. Additionally, we present an edge GPU version of LowFormer, that can further improve upon its baseline's speed on edge GPU and desktop GPU. We demonstrate LowFormer's wide applicability by evaluating it on smaller image classification datasets, as well as adapting it to several downstream tasks, such as object detection, semantic segmentation, image retrieval, and visual object tracking. LowFormer models consistently achieve remarkable speed-ups across various hardware platforms compared to recent state-of-the-art backbones. Code and models are available at https://github.com/altair199797/LowFormer/blob/main/Beyond_MACs.md.

CADSmith: Multi-Agent CAD Generation with Programmatic Geometric Validation

Existing methods for text-to-CAD generation either operate in a single pass with no geometric verification or rely on lossy visual feedback that cannot resolve dimensional errors. We present CADSmith, a multi-agent pipeline that generates CadQuery code from natural language. It then undergoes an iterative refinement process through two nested correction loops: an inner loop that resolves execution errors and an outer loop grounded in programmatic geometric validation. The outer loop combines exact measurements from the OpenCASCADE kernel (bounding box dimensions, volume, solid validity) with holistic visual assessment from an independent vision-language model Judge. This provides both the numerical precision and the high-level shape awareness needed to converge on the correct geometry. The system uses retrieval-augmented generation over API documentation rather than fine-tuning, maintaining a current database as the underlying CAD library evolves. We evaluate on a custom benchmark of 100 prompts in three difficulty tiers (T1 through T3) with three ablation configurations. Against a zero-shot baseline, CADSmith achieves a 100% execution rate (up from 95%), improves the median F1 score from 0.9707 to 0.9846, the median IoU from 0.8085 to 0.9629, and reduces the mean Chamfer Distance from 28.37 to 0.74, demonstrating that closed-loop refinement with programmatic geometric feedback substantially improves the quality and reliability of LLM-generated CAD models.

Can AI Models Direct Each Other? Organizational Structure as a Probe into Training Limitations

Can an expensive AI model effectively direct a cheap one to solve software engineering tasks? We study this question by introducing ManagerWorker, a two-agent pipeline where an expensive "manager" model (text-only, no code execution) analyzes issues, dispatches exploration tasks, and reviews implementations, while a cheap "worker" model (with full repo access) executes code changes. We evaluate on 200 instances from SWE-bench Lite across five configurations that vary the manager-worker relationship, pipeline complexity, and model pairing. Our findings reveal both the promise and the limits of multi-agent direction: (1) a strong manager directing a weak worker (62%) matches a strong single agent (60%) at a fraction of the strong-model token usage, showing that expensive reasoning can substitute for expensive execution; (2) a weak manager directing a weak worker (42%) performs worse than the weak agent alone (44%), demonstrating that the directing relationship requires a genuine capability gap--structure without substance is pure overhead; (3) the manager's value lies in directing, not merely reviewing--a minimal review-only loop adds just 2pp over the baseline, while structured exploration and planning add 11pp, showing that active direction is what makes the capability gap productive; and (4) these behaviors trace to a single root cause: current models are trained as monolithic agents, and splitting them into director/worker roles fights their training distribution. The pipeline succeeds by designing around this mismatch--keeping each model close to its trained mode (text generation for the manager, tool use for the worker) and externalizing organizational structure to code. This diagnosis points to concrete training gaps: delegation, scoped execution, and mode switching are skills absent from current training data.

Demystifying Funding: Reconstructing a Unified Dataset of the UK Funding Lifecycle

We present a reconstruction of UKRI's Gateway to Research (GtR) database that links funding opportunities to their resulting project proposals through panel meeting outcomes. Unlike existing work that focuses primarily on funded projects and their outcomes, we close the complete funding lifecycle by integrating three previously disconnected data sources: the GtR project database, UKRI funding opportunities, and competitive funding decision records across UKRI's research councils. We describe the technical challenges of data collection, including navigating inconsistent publication formats and restricted access to panel decisions. The resulting dataset enables a holistic interrogation of the entire funding process, from opportunity announcement to research outcomes. We release the database and associated code.

MPDiT: Multi-Patch Global-to-Local Transformer Architecture For Efficient Flow Matching and Diffusion Model

Transformer architectures, particularly Diffusion Transformers (DiTs), have become widely used in diffusion and flow-matching models due to their strong performance compared to convolutional UNets. However, the isotropic design of DiTs processes the same number of patchified tokens in every block, leading to relatively heavy computation during training process. In this work, we introduce a multi-patch transformer design in which early blocks operate on larger patches to capture coarse global context, while later blocks use smaller patches to refine local details. This hierarchical design could reduces computational cost by up to 50\% in GFLOPs while achieving good generative performance. In addition, we also propose improved designs for time and class embeddings that accelerate training convergence. Extensive experiments on the ImageNet dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our architectural choices. Code is released at \url{https://github.com/quandao10/MPDiT}

HINT: Composed Image Retrieval with Dual-path Compositional Contextualized Network

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is a challenging image retrieval paradigm. It aims to retrieve target images from large-scale image databases that are consistent with the modification semantics, based on a multimodal query composed of a reference image and modification text. Although existing methods have made significant progress in cross-modal alignment and feature fusion, a key flaw remains: the neglect of contextual information in discriminating matching samples. However, addressing this limitation is not an easy task due to two challenges: 1) implicit dependencies and 2) the lack of a differential amplification mechanism. To address these challenges, we propose a dual-patH composItional coNtextualized neTwork (HINT), which can perform contextualized encoding and amplify the similarity differences between matching and non-matching samples, thus improving the upper performance of CIR models in complex scenarios. Our HINT model achieves optimal performance on all metrics across two CIR benchmark datasets, demonstrating the superiority of our HINT model. Codes are available at https://github.com/zh-mingyu/HINT.