MoFu: Scale-Aware Modulation and Fourier Fusion for Multi-Subject Video Generation

Multi-subject video generation aims to synthesize videos from textual prompts and multiple reference images, ensuring that each subject preserves natural scale and visual fidelity. However, current methods face two challenges: scale inconsistency, where variations in subject size lead to unnatural generation, and permutation sensitivity, where the order of reference inputs causes subject distortion. In this paper, we propose MoFu, a unified framework that tackles both challenges. For scale inconsistency, we introduce Scale-Aware Modulation (SMO), an LLM-guided module that extracts implicit scale cues from the prompt and modulates features to ensure consistent subject sizes. To address permutation sensitivity, we present a simple yet effective Fourier Fusion strategy that processes the frequency information of reference features via the Fast Fourier Transform to produce a unified representation. Besides, we design a Scale-Permutation Stability Loss to jointly encourage scale-consistent and permutation-invariant generation. To further evaluate these challenges, we establish a dedicated benchmark with controlled variations in subject scale and reference permutation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MoFu significantly outperforms existing methods in preserving natural scale, subject fidelity, and overall visual quality.

Beyond Centralization: Provable Communication Efficient Decentralized Multi-Task Learning

Representation learning is a widely adopted framework for learning in data-scarce environments, aiming to extract common features from related tasks. While centralized approaches have been extensively studied, decentralized methods remain largely underexplored. We study decentralized multi-task representation learning in which the features share a low-rank structure. We consider multiple tasks, each with a finite number of data samples, where the observations follow a linear model with task-specific parameters. In the decentralized setting, task data are distributed across multiple nodes, and information exchange between nodes is constrained by a communication network. The goal is to recover the underlying feature matrix whose rank is much smaller than both the parameter dimension and the number of tasks. We propose a new alternating projected gradient and minimization algorithm with provable accuracy guarantees. We provide comprehensive characterizations of the time, communication, and sample complexities. Importantly, the communication complexity is independent of the target accuracy, which significantly reduces communication cost compared to prior methods. Numerical simulations validate the theoretical analysis across different dimensions and network topologies, and demonstrate regimes in which decentralized learning outperforms centralized federated approaches.

TICON: A Slide-Level Tile Contextualizer for Histopathology Representation Learning

The interpretation of small tiles in large whole slide images (WSI) often needs a larger image context. We introduce TICON, a transformer-based tile representation contextualizer that produces rich, contextualized embeddings for ''any'' application in computational pathology. Standard tile encoder-based pipelines, which extract embeddings of tiles stripped from their context, fail to model the rich slide-level information essential for both local and global tasks. Furthermore, different tile-encoders excel at different downstream tasks. Therefore, a unified model is needed to contextualize embeddings derived from ''any'' tile-level foundation model. TICON addresses this need with a single, shared encoder, pretrained using a masked modeling objective to simultaneously unify and contextualize representations from diverse tile-level pathology foundation models. Our experiments demonstrate that TICON-contextualized embeddings significantly improve performance across many different tasks, establishing new state-of-the-art results on tile-level benchmarks (i.e., HEST-Bench, THUNDER, CATCH) and slide-level benchmarks (i.e., Patho-Bench). Finally, we pretrain an aggregator on TICON to form a slide-level foundation model, using only 11K WSIs, outperforming SoTA slide-level foundation models pretrained with up to 350K WSIs.

Beyond Weight Adaptation: Feature-Space Domain Injection for Cross-Modal Ship Re-Identification

Cross-Modality Ship Re-Identification (CMS Re-ID) is critical for achieving all-day and all-weather maritime target tracking, yet it is fundamentally challenged by significant modality discrepancies. Mainstream solutions typically rely on explicit modality alignment strategies; however, this paradigm heavily depends on constructing large-scale paired datasets for pre-training. To address this, grounded in the Platonic Representation Hypothesis, we explore the potential of Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) in bridging modality gaps. Recognizing the suboptimal performance of existing generic Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods that operate within the weight space, particularly on limited-capacity models, we shift the optimization perspective to the feature space and propose a novel PEFT strategy termed Domain Representation Injection (DRI). Specifically, while keeping the VFM fully frozen to maximize the preservation of general knowledge, we design a lightweight, learnable Offset Encoder to extract domain-specific representations rich in modality and identity attributes from raw inputs. Guided by the contextual information of intermediate features at different layers, a Modulator adaptively transforms these representations. Subsequently, they are injected into the intermediate layers via additive fusion, dynamically reshaping the feature distribution to adapt to the downstream task without altering the VFM's pre-trained weights. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method, achieving State-of-the-Art (SOTA) performance with minimal trainable parameters. For instance, on the HOSS-ReID dataset, we attain 57.9\% and 60.5\% mAP using only 1.54M and 7.05M parameters, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/TingfengXian/DRI.

SpidR: Learning Fast and Stable Linguistic Units for Spoken Language Models Without Supervision

The parallel advances in language modeling and speech representation learning have raised the prospect of learning language directly from speech without textual intermediates. This requires extracting semantic representations directly from speech. Our contributions are threefold. First, we introduce SpidR, a self-supervised speech representation model that efficiently learns representations with highly accessible phonetic information, which makes it particularly suited for textless spoken language modeling. It is trained on raw waveforms using a masked prediction objective combined with self-distillation and online clustering. The intermediate layers of the student model learn to predict assignments derived from the teacher's intermediate layers. This learning objective stabilizes the online clustering procedure compared to previous approaches, resulting in higher quality codebooks. SpidR outperforms wav2vec 2.0, HuBERT, WavLM, and DinoSR on downstream language modeling benchmarks (sWUGGY, sBLIMP, tSC). Second, we systematically evaluate across models and layers the correlation between speech unit quality (ABX, PNMI) and language modeling performance, validating these metrics as reliable proxies. Finally, SpidR significantly reduces pretraining time compared to HuBERT, requiring only one day of pretraining on 16 GPUs, instead of a week. This speedup is enabled by the pretraining method and an efficient codebase, which allows faster iteration and easier experimentation. We open-source the training code and model checkpoints at https://github.com/facebookresearch/spidr.

SMART SLM: Structured Memory and Reasoning Transformer, A Small Language Model for Accurate Document Assistance

The user of Engineering Manuals (EM) finds it difficult to read EM s because they are long, have a dense format which includes written documents, step by step procedures, and standard parameter lists for engineering equipment. Off the shelf transformers, especially compact ones, treat this material as a flat stream of tokens. This approach leads to confident but incorrect numeric answers and forces the models to memorize separate facts inefficiently. SMART (Structured Memory and Reasoning Transformer) offers a different and practical solution to the above problem. SMART structures its processing by using a hierarchical approach, and is based upon three main job categories (1) A syntax-aware Fact Extractor (Grammarian) Tree LSTM which extracts facts as subject relation object relations from EM sentences (2) A compact indexed memory MANN (Memory Augmented Neural Network) that indexes these Rational Subject Relation Objects as 384 dimensional vectors that are associated with the source of the information, and (3) A 6 layer Transformer that learns to fuse the previously retrieved facts into its generated response. The entire SMART model utilizes 45.51M parameters, which is 64% less than GPT-2 (124M) and 69% less than BERT (133M), and it achieves a 21.3% higher accuracy than GPT-2, indicating that SMART fits the data better with the least amount of processing requirements. SMART employs dual modes of inference an indexed fast path for known documents (sub-second answer times) and an indexed dynamic path assisted by RAGs for new uploads (FAISS Top 20 results with memory severed at 64 slots). In real world deployment, this framework leads to more well supported results with reduced hallucinations than comparable small transformer models.

LoFT-LLM: Low-Frequency Time-Series Forecasting with Large Language Models

Time-series forecasting in real-world applications such as finance and energy often faces challenges due to limited training data and complex, noisy temporal dynamics. Existing deep forecasting models typically supervise predictions using full-length temporal windows, which include substantial high-frequency noise and obscure long-term trends. Moreover, auxiliary variables containing rich domain-specific information are often underutilized, especially in few-shot settings. To address these challenges, we propose LoFT-LLM, a frequency-aware forecasting pipeline that integrates low-frequency learning with semantic calibration via a large language model (LLM). Firstly, a Patch Low-Frequency forecasting Module (PLFM) extracts stable low-frequency trends from localized spectral patches. Secondly, a residual learner then models high-frequency variations. Finally, a fine-tuned LLM refines the predictions by incorporating auxiliary context and domain knowledge through structured natural language prompts. Extensive experiments on financial and energy datasets demonstrate that LoFT-LLM significantly outperforms strong baselines under both full-data and few-shot regimes, delivering superior accuracy, robustness, and interpretability.

A Tool Bottleneck Framework for Clinically-Informed and Interpretable Medical Image Understanding

Recent tool-use frameworks powered by vision-language models (VLMs) improve image understanding by grounding model predictions with specialized tools. Broadly, these frameworks leverage VLMs and a pre-specified toolbox to decompose the prediction task into multiple tool calls (often deep learning models) which are composed to make a prediction. The dominant approach to composing tools is using text, via function calls embedded in VLM-generated code or natural language. However, these methods often perform poorly on medical image understanding, where salient information is encoded as spatially-localized features that are difficult to compose or fuse via text alone. To address this, we propose a tool-use framework for medical image understanding called the Tool Bottleneck Framework (TBF), which composes VLM-selected tools using a learned Tool Bottleneck Model (TBM). For a given image and task, TBF leverages an off-the-shelf medical VLM to select tools from a toolbox that each extract clinically-relevant features. Instead of text-based composition, these tools are composed by the TBM, which computes and fuses the tool outputs using a neural network before outputting the final prediction. We propose a simple and effective strategy for TBMs to make predictions with any arbitrary VLM tool selection. Overall, our framework not only improves tool-use in medical imaging contexts, but also yields more interpretable, clinically-grounded predictors. We evaluate TBF on tasks in histopathology and dermatology and find that these advantages enable our framework to perform on par with or better than deep learning-based classifiers, VLMs, and state-of-the-art tool-use frameworks, with particular gains in data-limited regimes. Our code is available at https://github.com/christinaliu2020/tool-bottleneck-framework.

DeepCQ: General-Purpose Deep-Surrogate Framework for Lossy Compression Quality Prediction

Error-bounded lossy compression techniques have become vital for scientific data management and analytics, given the ever-increasing volume of data generated by modern scientific simulations and instruments. Nevertheless, assessing data quality post-compression remains computationally expensive due to the intensive nature of metric calculations. In this work, we present a general-purpose deep-surrogate framework for lossy compression quality prediction (DeepCQ), with the following key contributions: 1) We develop a surrogate model for compression quality prediction that is generalizable to different error-bounded lossy compressors, quality metrics, and input datasets; 2) We adopt a novel two-stage design that decouples the computationally expensive feature-extraction stage from the light-weight metrics prediction, enabling efficient training and modular inference; 3) We optimize the model performance on time-evolving data using a mixture-of-experts design. Such a design enhances the robustness when predicting across simulation timesteps, especially when the training and test data exhibit significant variation. We validate the effectiveness of DeepCQ on four real-world scientific applications. Our results highlight the framework's exceptional predictive accuracy, with prediction errors generally under 10\% across most settings, significantly outperforming existing methods. Our framework empowers scientific users to make informed decisions about data compression based on their preferred data quality, thereby significantly reducing I/O and computational overhead in scientific data analysis.

Literature Mining System for Nutraceutical Biosynthesis: From AI Framework to Biological Insight

The extraction of structured knowledge from scientific literature remains a major bottleneck in nutraceutical research, particularly when identifying microbial strains involved in compound biosynthesis. This study presents a domain-adapted system powered by large language models (LLMs) and guided by advanced prompt engineering techniques to automate the identification of nutraceutical-producing microbes from unstructured scientific text. By leveraging few-shot prompting and tailored query designs, the system demonstrates robust performance across multiple configurations, with DeepSeekV3 outperforming LLaMA2 in accuracy, especially when domain-specific strain information is included. A structured and validated dataset comprising 35 nutraceutical-strain associations was generated, spanning amino acids, fibers, phytochemicals, and vitamins. The results reveal significant microbial diversity across monoculture and co-culture systems, with dominant contributions from Corynebacterium glutamicum, Escherichia coli, and Bacillus subtilis, alongside emerging synthetic consortia. This AI-driven framework not only enhances the scalability and interpretability of literature mining but also provides actionable insights for microbial strain selection, synthetic biology design, and precision fermentation strategies in the production of high-value nutraceuticals.