VISTA: Knowledge-Driven Interpretable Vessel Trajectory Imputation via Large Language Models

The Automatic Identification System provides critical information for maritime navigation and safety, yet its trajectories are often incomplete due to signal loss or deliberate tampering. Existing imputation methods emphasize trajectory recovery, paying limited attention to interpretability and failing to provide underlying knowledge that benefits downstream tasks such as anomaly detection and route planning. We propose knowledge-driven interpretable vessel trajectory imputation (VISTA), the first trajectory imputation framework that offers interpretability while simultaneously providing underlying knowledge to support downstream analysis. Specifically, we first define underlying knowledge as a combination of Structured Data-derived Knowledge (SDK) distilled from AIS data and Implicit LLM Knowledge acquired from large-scale Internet corpora. Second, to manage and leverage the SDK effectively at scale, we develop a data-knowledge-data loop that employs a Structured Data-derived Knowledge Graph for SDK extraction and knowledge-driven trajectory imputation. Third, to efficiently process large-scale AIS data, we introduce a workflow management layer that coordinates the end-to-end pipeline, enabling parallel knowledge extraction and trajectory imputation with anomaly handling and redundancy elimination. Experiments on two large AIS datasets show that VISTA is capable of state-of-the-art imputation accuracy and computational efficiency, improving over state-of-the-art baselines by 5%-94% and reducing time cost by 51%-93%, while producing interpretable knowledge cues that benefit downstream tasks. The source code and implementation details of VISTA are publicly available.

Symbolic Regression for Shared Expressions: Introducing Partial Parameter Sharing

Symbolic Regression aims to find symbolic expressions that describe datasets. Due to better interpretability, it is a machine learning paradigm particularly powerful for scientific discovery. In recent years, several works have expanded the concept to allow the description of similar phenomena using a single expression with varying sets of parameters, thereby introducing categorical variables. Some previous works allow only "non-shared" (category-value-specific) parameters, and others also incorporate "shared" (category-value-agnostic) parameters. We expand upon those efforts by considering multiple categorical variables, and introducing intermediate levels of parameter sharing. With two categorical variables, an intermediate level of parameter sharing emerges, i.e., parameters which are shared across either category but change across the other. The new approach potentially decreases the number of parameters, while revealing additional information about the problem. Using a synthetic, fitting-only example, we test the limits of this setup in terms of data requirement reduction and transfer learning. As a real-world symbolic regression example, we demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach on an astrophysics dataset used in a previous study, which considered only one categorical variable. We achieve a similar fit quality but require significantly fewer individual parameters, and extract additional information about the problem.

LAMB: LLM-based Audio Captioning with Modality Gap Bridging via Cauchy-Schwarz Divergence

Automated Audio Captioning aims to describe the semantic content of input audio. Recent works have employed large language models (LLMs) as a text decoder to leverage their reasoning capabilities. However, prior approaches that project audio features into the LLM embedding space without considering cross-modal alignment fail to fully utilize these capabilities. To address this, we propose LAMB, an LLM-based audio captioning framework that bridges the modality gap between audio embeddings and the LLM text embedding space. LAMB incorporates a Cross-Modal Aligner that minimizes Cauchy-Schwarz divergence while maximizing mutual information, yielding tighter alignment between audio and text at both global and token levels. We further design a Two-Stream Adapter that extracts semantically enriched audio embeddings, thereby delivering richer information to the Cross-Modal Aligner. Finally, leveraging the aligned audio embeddings, a proposed Token Guide directly computes scores within the LLM text embedding space to steer the output logits of generated captions. Experimental results confirm that our framework strengthens the reasoning capabilities of the LLM decoder, achieving state-of-the-art performance on AudioCaps.

SAPL: Semantic-Agnostic Prompt Learning in CLIP for Weakly Supervised Image Manipulation Localization

Malicious image manipulation threatens public safety and requires efficient localization methods. Existing approaches depend on costly pixel-level annotations which make training expensive. Existing weakly supervised methods rely only on image-level binary labels and focus on global classification, often overlooking local edge cues that are critical for precise localization. We observe that feature variations at manipulated boundaries are substantially larger than in interior regions. To address this gap, we propose Semantic-Agnostic Prompt Learning (SAPL) in CLIP, which learns text prompts that intentionally encode non-semantic, boundary-centric cues so that CLIPs multimodal similarity highlights manipulation edges rather than high-level object semantics. SAPL combines two complementary modules Edge-aware Contextual Prompt Learning (ECPL) and Hierarchical Edge Contrastive Learning (HECL) to exploit edge information in both textual and visual spaces. The proposed ECPL leverages edge-enhanced image features to generate learnable textual prompts via an attention mechanism, embedding semantic-irrelevant information into text features, to guide CLIP focusing on manipulation edges. The proposed HECL extract genuine and manipulated edge patches, and utilize contrastive learning to boost the discrimination between genuine edge patches and manipulated edge patches. Finally, we predict the manipulated regions from the similarity map after processing. Extensive experiments on multiple public benchmarks demonstrate that SAPL significantly outperforms existing approaches, achieving state-of-the-art localization performance.

SecMoE: Communication-Efficient Secure MoE Inference via Select-Then-Compute

Privacy-preserving Transformer inference has gained attention due to the potential leakage of private information. Despite recent progress, existing frameworks still fall short of practical model scales, with gaps up to a hundredfold. A possible way to close this gap is the Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, which has emerged as a promising technique to scale up model capacity with minimal overhead. However, given that the current secure two-party (2-PC) protocols allow the server to homomorphically compute the FFN layer with its plaintext model weight, under the MoE setting, this could reveal which expert is activated to the server, exposing token-level privacy about the client's input. While naively evaluating all the experts before selection could protect privacy, it nullifies MoE sparsity and incurs the heavy computational overhead that sparse MoE seeks to avoid. To address the privacy and efficiency limitations above, we propose a 2-PC privacy-preserving inference framework, \SecMoE. Unifying per-entry circuits in both the MoE layer and piecewise polynomial functions, \SecMoE obliviously selects the extracted parameters from circuits and only computes one encrypted entry, which we refer to as Select-Then-Compute. This makes the model for private inference scale to 63$\times$ larger while only having a 15.2$\times$ increase in end-to-end runtime. Extensive experiments show that, under 5 expert settings, \SecMoE lowers the end-to-end private inference communication by 1.8$\sim$7.1$\times$ and achieves 1.3$\sim$3.8$\times$ speedup compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) protocols.

Smart Privacy Policy Assistant: An LLM-Powered System for Transparent and Actionable Privacy Notices

Most users agree to online privacy policies without reading or understanding them, even though these documents govern how personal data is collected, shared, and monetized. Privacy policies are typically long, legally complex, and difficult for non-experts to interpret. This paper presents the Smart Privacy Policy Assistant, an LLM-powered system that automatically ingests privacy policies, extracts and categorizes key clauses, assigns human-interpretable risk levels, and generates clear, concise explanations. The system is designed for real-time use through browser extensions or mobile interfaces, surfacing contextual warnings before users disclose sensitive information or grant risky permissions. We describe the end-to-end pipeline, including policy ingestion, clause categorization, risk scoring, and explanation generation, and propose an evaluation framework based on clause-level accuracy, policy-level risk agreement, and user comprehension.

Excess Description Length of Learning Generalizable Predictors

Understanding whether fine-tuning elicits latent capabilities or teaches new ones is a fundamental question for language model evaluation and safety. We develop a formal information-theoretic framework for quantifying how much predictive structure fine-tuning extracts from the train dataset and writes into a model's parameters. Our central quantity, Excess Description Length (EDL), is defined via prequential coding and measures the gap between the bits required to encode training labels sequentially using an evolving model (trained online) and the residual encoding cost under the final trained model. We establish that EDL is non-negative in expectation, converges to surplus description length in the infinite-data limit, and provides bounds on expected generalization gain. Through a series of toy models, we clarify common confusions about information in learning: why random labels yield EDL near zero, how a single example can eliminate many bits of uncertainty about the underlying rule(s) that describe the data distribution, why structure learned on rare inputs contributes proportionally little to expected generalization, and how format learning creates early transients distinct from capability acquisition. This framework provides rigorous foundations for the empirical observation that capability elicitation and teaching exhibit qualitatively distinct scaling signatures.

Choreographing a World of Dynamic Objects

Dynamic objects in our physical 4D (3D + time) world are constantly evolving, deforming, and interacting with other objects, leading to diverse 4D scene dynamics. In this paper, we present a universal generative pipeline, CHORD, for CHOReographing Dynamic objects and scenes and synthesizing this type of phenomena. Traditional rule-based graphics pipelines to create these dynamics are based on category-specific heuristics, yet are labor-intensive and not scalable. Recent learning-based methods typically demand large-scale datasets, which may not cover all object categories in interest. Our approach instead inherits the universality from the video generative models by proposing a distillation-based pipeline to extract the rich Lagrangian motion information hidden in the Eulerian representations of 2D videos. Our method is universal, versatile, and category-agnostic. We demonstrate its effectiveness by conducting experiments to generate a diverse range of multi-body 4D dynamics, show its advantage compared to existing methods, and demonstrate its applicability in generating robotics manipulation policies. Project page: https://yanzhelyu.github.io/chord

Towards Real-world Lens Active Alignment with Unlabeled Data via Domain Adaptation

Active Alignment (AA) is a key technology for the large-scale automated assembly of high-precision optical systems. Compared with labor-intensive per-model on-device calibration, a digital-twin pipeline built on optical simulation offers a substantial advantage in generating large-scale labeled data. However, complex imaging conditions induce a domain gap between simulation and real-world images, limiting the generalization of simulation-trained models. To address this, we propose augmenting a simulation baseline with minimal unlabeled real-world images captured at random misalignment positions, mitigating the gap from a domain adaptation perspective. We introduce Domain Adaptive Active Alignment (DA3), which utilizes an autoregressive domain transformation generator and an adversarial-based feature alignment strategy to distill real-world domain information via self-supervised learning. This enables the extraction of domain-invariant image degradation features to facilitate robust misalignment prediction. Experiments on two lens types reveal that DA3 improves accuracy by 46% over a purely simulation pipeline. Notably, it approaches the performance achieved with precisely labeled real-world data collected on 3 lens samples, while reducing on-device data collection time by 98.7%. The results demonstrate that domain adaptation effectively endows simulation-trained models with robust real-world performance, validating the digital-twin pipeline as a practical solution to significantly enhance the efficiency of large-scale optical assembly.

Phase4DFD: Multi-Domain Phase-Aware Attention for Deepfake Detection

Recent deepfake detection methods have increasingly explored frequency domain representations to reveal manipulation artifacts that are difficult to detect in the spatial domain. However, most existing approaches rely primarily on spectral magnitude, implicitly under exploring the role of phase information. In this work, we propose Phase4DFD, a phase aware frequency domain deepfake detection framework that explicitly models phase magnitude interactions via a learnable attention mechanism. Our approach augments standard RGB input with Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) magnitude and local binary pattern (LBP) representations to expose subtle synthesis artifacts that remain indistinguishable under spatial analysis alone. Crucially, we introduce an input level phase aware attention module that uses phase discontinuities commonly introduced by synthetic generation to guide the model toward frequency patterns that are most indicative of manipulation before backbone feature extraction. The attended multi domain representation is processed by an efficient BNext M backbone, with optional channel spatial attention applied for semantic feature refinement. Extensive experiments on the CIFAKE and DFFD datasets demonstrate that our proposed model Phase4DFD outperforms state of the art spatial and frequency-based detectors while maintaining low computational overhead. Comprehensive ablation studies further confirm that explicit phase modeling provides complementary and non-redundant information beyond magnitude-only frequency representations.