Egocentric videos of human manipulation provide scalable supervision for embodied intelligence, yet existing resources rarely combine low-cost continuous capture, manipulation-level structured annotations, and reusable tools for robot learning. We present Open-AoE, an open, community-oriented egocentric manipulation dataset and toolchain spanning the full pipeline from smartphone capture to model training. Its first release contains approximately 2,000 hours of manipulation video collected in natural environments by 500+ contributors using 400+ smartphones. The dataset provides text annotations, MANO-based hand poses, camera trajectories, and temporally localized atomic actions. Open-AoE further includes a data processing pipeline that transforms raw recordings into structured samples through temporal action segmentation, semantic annotation, hand reconstruction, and camera trajectory reconstruction. Meanwhile, we provide a separate downstream toolchain supports visualization, cross-embodiment retargeting, model-specific data conversion, and training recipes for VLA policies, WAMs, and World Models. By integrating scalable capture, structured processing, and downstream adaptation, Open-AoE reduces the barriers to both data contribution and reuse, providing practical open infrastructure for embodied model training, human-to-robot transfer, and world modeling.
Recently, there has been a surge of interest and attention in Transformer-based structures, such as Vision Transformer (ViT) and Vision Multilayer Perceptron (VMLP). Compared with the previous convolution-based structures, the Transformer-based structure under investigation showcases a comparable or superior performance under its distinctive attention-based input token mixer strategy. Introducing adversarial examples as a robustness consideration has had a profound and detrimental impact on the performance of well-established convolution-based structures. This inherent vulnerability to adversarial attacks has also been demonstrated in Transformer-based structures. In this paper, our emphasis lies on investigating the intrinsic robustness of the structure rather than introducing novel defense measures against adversarial attacks. To address the susceptibility to robustness issues, we employ a rational structure design approach to mitigate such vulnerabilities. Specifically, we enhance the adversarial robustness of the structure by increasing the proportion of high-frequency structural robust biases. As a result, we introduce a novel structure called Robust Bias Transformer-based Structure (RBFormer) that shows robust superiority compared to several existing baseline structures. Through a series of extensive experiments, RBFormer outperforms the original structures by a significant margin, achieving an impressive improvement of +16.12% and +5.04% across different evaluation criteria on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-1k, respectively.
Meng Chu, Xuan Billy Zhang, Kevin Qinghong Lin et al.
As AI systems move from generating text to accomplishing goals through sustained interaction, the ability to model environment dynamics becomes a central bottleneck. Agents that manipulate objects, navigate software, coordinate with others, or design experiments require predictive environment models, yet the term world model carries different meanings across research communities. We introduce a "levels x laws" taxonomy organized along two axes. The first defines three capability levels: L1 Predictor, which learns one-step local transition operators; L2 Simulator, which composes them into multi-step, action-conditioned rollouts that respect domain laws; and L3 Evolver, which autonomously revises its own model when predictions fail against new evidence. The second identifies four governing-law regimes: physical, digital, social, and scientific. These regimes determine what constraints a world model must satisfy and where it is most likely to fail. Using this framework, we synthesize over 400 works and summarize more than 100 representative systems spanning model-based reinforcement learning, video generation, web and GUI agents, multi-agent social simulation, and AI-driven scientific discovery. We analyze methods, failure modes, and evaluation practices across level-regime pairs, propose decision-centric evaluation principles and a minimal reproducible evaluation package, and outline architectural guidance, open problems, and governance challenges. The resulting roadmap connects previously isolated communities and charts a path from passive next-step prediction toward world models that can simulate, and ultimately reshape, the environments in which agents operate.
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) rely on vision encoders and Large Language Models (LLMs) to exhibit remarkable capabilities on various multi-modal tasks in the joint space of vision and language. However, typographic attacks, which disrupt Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP), have also been expected to be a security threat to LVLMs. Firstly, we verify typographic attacks on current well-known commercial and open-source LVLMs and uncover the widespread existence of this threat. Secondly, to better assess this vulnerability, we propose the most comprehensive and largest-scale Typographic Dataset to date. The Typographic Dataset not only considers the evaluation of typographic attacks under various multi-modal tasks but also evaluates the effects of typographic attacks, influenced by texts generated with diverse factors. Based on the evaluation results, we investigate the causes why typographic attacks impacting VLMs and LVLMs, leading to three highly insightful discoveries. During the process of further validating the rationality of our discoveries, we can reduce the performance degradation caused by typographic attacks from 42.07\% to 13.90\%. Code and Dataset are available in \href{https://github.com/ChaduCheng/TypoDeceptions}
James Diffenderfer, Brian R. Bartoldson, Shreya Chaganti et al.
Successful adoption of deep learning (DL) in the wild requires models to be: (1) compact, (2) accurate, and (3) robust to distributional shifts. Unfortunately, efforts towards simultaneously meeting these requirements have mostly been unsuccessful. This raises an important question: Is the inability to create Compact, Accurate, and Robust Deep neural networks (CARDs) fundamental? To answer this question, we perform a large-scale analysis of popular model compression techniques which uncovers several intriguing patterns. Notably, in contrast to traditional pruning approaches (e.g., fine tuning and gradual magnitude pruning), we find that "lottery ticket-style" approaches can surprisingly be used to produce CARDs, including binary-weight CARDs. Specifically, we are able to create extremely compact CARDs that, compared to their larger counterparts, have similar test accuracy and matching (or better) robustness -- simply by pruning and (optionally) quantizing. Leveraging the compactness of CARDs, we develop a simple domain-adaptive test-time ensembling approach (CARD-Decks) that uses a gating module to dynamically select appropriate CARDs from the CARD-Deck based on their spectral-similarity with test samples. The proposed approach builds a "winning hand'' of CARDs that establishes a new state-of-the-art (on RobustBench) on CIFAR-10-C accuracies (i.e., 96.8% standard and 92.75% robust) and CIFAR-100-C accuracies (80.6% standard and 71.3% robust) with better memory usage than non-compressed baselines (pretrained CARDs and CARD-Decks available at https://github.com/RobustBench/robustbench). Finally, we provide theoretical support for our empirical findings.
This paper studies the problem of post-hoc calibration of machine learning classifiers. We introduce the following desiderata for uncertainty calibration: (a) accuracy-preserving, (b) data-efficient, and (c) high expressive power. We show that none of the existing methods satisfy all three requirements, and demonstrate how Mix-n-Match calibration strategies (i.e., ensemble and composition) can help achieve remarkably better data-efficiency and expressive power while provably maintaining the classification accuracy of the original classifier. Mix-n-Match strategies are generic in the sense that they can be used to improve the performance of any off-the-shelf calibrator. We also reveal potential issues in standard evaluation practices. Popular approaches (e.g., histogram-based expected calibration error (ECE)) may provide misleading results especially in small-data regime. Therefore, we propose an alternative data-efficient kernel density-based estimator for a reliable evaluation of the calibration performance and prove its asymptotically unbiasedness and consistency. Our approaches outperform state-of-the-art solutions on both the calibration as well as the evaluation tasks in most of the experimental settings. Our codes are available at https://github.com/zhang64-llnl/Mix-n-Match-Calibration.
Existing unpaired low-light image enhancement approaches prefer to employ the two-way GAN framework, in which two CNN generators are deployed for enhancement and degradation separately. However, such data-driven models ignore the inherent characteristics of transformation between the low and normal light images, leading to unstable training and artifacts. Here, we propose to leverage the invertible network to enhance low-light image in forward process and degrade the normal-light one inversely with unpaired learning. The generated and real images are then fed into discriminators for adversarial learning. In addition to the adversarial loss, we design various loss functions to ensure the stability of training and preserve more image details. Particularly, a reversibility loss is introduced to alleviate the over-exposure problem. Moreover, we present a progressive self-guided enhancement process for low-light images and achieve favorable performance against the SOTAs.
Imputation of missing data is a task that plays a vital role in a number of engineering and science applications. Often such missing data arise in experimental observations from limitations of sensors or post-processing transformation errors. Other times they arise from numerical and algorithmic constraints in computer simulations. One such instance and the application emphasis of this paper are numerical simulations of storm surge. The simulation data corresponds to time-series surge predictions over a number of save points within the geographic domain of interest, creating a spatio-temporal imputation problem where the surge points are heavily correlated spatially and temporally, and the missing values regions are structurally distributed at random. Very recently, machine learning techniques such as neural network methods have been developed and employed for missing data imputation tasks. Generative Adversarial Nets (GANs) and GAN-based techniques have particularly attracted attention as unsupervised machine learning methods. In this study, the Generative Adversarial Imputation Nets (GAIN) performance is improved by applying convolutional neural networks instead of fully connected layers to better capture the correlation of data and promote learning from the adjacent surge points. Another adjustment to the method needed specifically for the studied data is to consider the coordinates of the points as additional features to provide the model more information through the convolutional layers. We name our proposed method as Convolutional Generative Adversarial Imputation Nets (Conv-GAIN). The proposed method's performance by considering the improvements and adaptations required for the storm surge data is assessed and compared to the original GAIN and a few other techniques. The results show that Conv-GAIN has better performance than the alternative methods on the studied data.
Hewei Tang, Pengcheng Fu, Christopher S. Sherman et al.
Fast assimilation of monitoring data to update forecasts of pressure buildup and carbon dioxide (CO2) plume migration under geologic uncertainties is a challenging problem in geologic carbon storage. The high computational cost of data assimilation with a high-dimensional parameter space impedes fast decision-making for commercial-scale reservoir management. We propose to leverage physical understandings of porous medium flow behavior with deep learning techniques to develop a fast history matching-reservoir response forecasting workflow. Applying an Ensemble Smoother Multiple Data Assimilation framework, the workflow updates geologic properties and predicts reservoir performance with quantified uncertainty from pressure history and CO2 plumes interpreted through seismic inversion. As the most computationally expensive component in such a workflow is reservoir simulation, we developed surrogate models to predict dynamic pressure and CO2 plume extents under multi-well injection. The surrogate models employ deep convolutional neural networks, specifically, a wide residual network and a residual U-Net. The workflow is validated against a flat three-dimensional reservoir model representative of a clastic shelf depositional environment. Intelligent treatments are applied to bridge between quantities in a true-3D reservoir model and those in a single-layer reservoir model. The workflow can complete history matching and reservoir forecasting with uncertainty quantification in less than one hour on a mainstream personal workstation.
In this paper, we leverage predictive uncertainty of deep neural networks to answer challenging questions material scientists usually encounter in machine learning based materials applications workflows. First, we show that by leveraging predictive uncertainty, a user can determine the required training data set size necessary to achieve a certain classification accuracy. Next, we propose uncertainty guided decision referral to detect and refrain from making decisions on confusing samples. Finally, we show that predictive uncertainty can also be used to detect out-of-distribution test samples. We find that this scheme is accurate enough to detect a wide range of real-world shifts in data, e.g., changes in the image acquisition conditions or changes in the synthesis conditions. Using microstructure information from scanning electron microscope (SEM) images as an example use case, we show that leveraging uncertainty-aware deep learning can significantly improve the performance and dependability of classification models.
The scientific community has been increasingly interested in harnessing the power of deep learning to solve various domain challenges. However, despite the effectiveness in building predictive models, fundamental challenges exist in extracting actionable knowledge from deep neural networks due to their opaque nature. In this work, we propose techniques for exploring the behavior of deep learning models by injecting domain-specific actionable attributes as tunable "knobs" in the analysis pipeline. By incorporating the domain knowledge in a generative modeling framework, we are not only able to better understand the behavior of these black-box models, but also provide scientists with actionable insights that can potentially lead to fundamental discoveries.
The scientific community has been increasingly interested in harnessing the power of deep learning to solve various domain challenges. However, despite the effectiveness in building predictive models, fundamental challenges exist in extracting actionable knowledge from the deep neural network due to their opaque nature. In this work, we propose techniques for exploring the behavior of deep learning models by injecting domain-specific actionable concepts as tunable ``knobs'' in the analysis pipeline. By incorporating the domain knowledge with generative modeling, we are not only able to better understand the behavior of these black-box models, but also provide scientists with actionable insights that can potentially lead to fundamental discoveries.
We study an optimization-based approach to con- struct a mean-reverting portfolio of assets. Our objectives are threefold: (1) design a portfolio that is well-represented by an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process with parameters estimated by maximum likelihood, (2) select portfolios with desirable characteristics of high mean reversion and low variance, and (3) select a parsimonious portfolio, i.e. find a small subset of a larger universe of assets that can be used for long and short positions. We present the full problem formulation, a specialized algorithm that exploits partial minimization, and numerical examples using both simulated and empirical price data.