SODA: Semi On-Policy Black-Box Distillation for Large Language Models

Black-box knowledge distillation for large language models presents a strict trade-off. Simple off-policy methods (e.g., sequence-level knowledge distillation) struggle to correct the student's inherent errors. Fully on-policy methods (e.g., Generative Adversarial Distillation) solve this via adversarial training but introduce well-known training instability and crippling computational overhead. To address this dilemma, we propose SODA (Semi On-policy Distillation with Alignment), a highly efficient alternative motivated by the inherent capability gap between frontier teachers and much smaller base models. Because a compact student model's natural, zero-shot responses are almost strictly inferior to the powerful teacher's targets, we can construct a highly effective contrastive signal simply by pairing the teacher's optimal response with a one-time static snapshot of the student's outputs. This demonstrates that exposing the small student to its own static inferior behaviors is sufficient for high-quality distribution alignment, eliminating the need for costly dynamic rollouts and fragile adversarial balancing. Extensive evaluations across four compact Qwen2.5 and Llama-3 models validate this semi on-policy paradigm. SODA matches or outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on 15 out of 16 benchmark results. More importantly, it achieves this superior distillation quality while training 10 times faster, consuming 27% less peak GPU memory, and completely eliminating adversarial instability.

Climate Prompting: Generating the Madden-Julian Oscillation using Video Diffusion and Low-Dimensional Conditioning

Generative Deep Learning is a powerful tool for modeling of the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO) in the tropics, yet its relationship to traditional theoretical frameworks remains poorly understood. Here we propose a video diffusion model, trained on atmospheric reanalysis, to synthetize long MJO sequences conditioned on key low-dimensional metrics. The generated MJOs capture key features including composites, power spectra and multiscale structures including convectively coupled waves, despite some bias. We then prompt the model to generate more tractable MJOs based on intentionally idealized low-dimensional conditionings, for example a perpetual MJO, an isolated modulation by seasons and/or the El Nino-Southern Oscillation, and so on. This enables deconstructing the underlying processes and identifying physical drivers. The present approach provides a practical framework for bridging the gap between low-dimensional MJO theory and high-resolution atmospheric complexity and will help tropical atmosphere prediction.

Towards Automated Community Notes Generation with Large Vision Language Models for Combating Contextual Deception

Community Notes have emerged as an effective crowd-sourced mechanism for combating online deception on social media platforms. However, its reliance on human contributors limits both the timeliness and scalability. In this work, we study the automated Community Notes generation method for image-based contextual deception, where an authentic image is paired with misleading context (e.g., time, entity, and event). Unlike prior work that primarily focuses on deception detection (i.e., judging whether a post is true or false in a binary manner), Community Notes-style systems need to generate concise and grounded notes that help users recover the missing or corrected context. This problem remains underexplored due to three reasons: (i) datasets that support the research are scarce; (ii) methods must handle the dynamic nature of contextual deception; (iii) evaluation is difficult because standard metrics do not capture whether notes actually improve user understanding. To address these gaps, we curate a real-world dataset, XCheck, comprising X posts with associated Community Notes and external contexts. We further propose the Automated Context-Corrective Note generation method, named ACCNote, which is a retrieval-augmented, multi-agent collaboration framework built on large vision-language models. Finally, we introduce a new evaluation metric, Context Helpfulness Score (CHS), that aligns with user study outcomes rather than relying on lexical overlap. Experiments on our XCheck dataset show that the proposed ACCNote improves both deception detection and note generation performance over baselines, and exceeds a commercial tool GPT5-mini. Together, our dataset, method, and metric advance practical automated generation of context-corrective notes toward more responsible online social networks.

A Large-Scale Dataset for Molecular Structure-Language Description via a Rule-Regularized Method

Molecular function is largely determined by structure. Accurately aligning molecular structure with natural language is therefore essential for enabling large language models (LLMs) to reason about downstream chemical tasks. However, the substantial cost of human annotation makes it infeasible to construct large-scale, high-quality datasets of structure-grounded descriptions. In this work, we propose a fully automated annotation framework for generating precise molecular structure descriptions at scale. Our approach builds upon and extends a rule-based chemical nomenclature parser to interpret IUPAC names and construct enriched, structured XML metadata that explicitly encodes molecular structure. This metadata is then used to guide LLMs in producing accurate natural-language descriptions. Using this framework, we curate a large-scale dataset of approximately $163$k molecule-description pairs. A rigorous validation protocol combining LLM-based and expert human evaluation on a subset of $2,000$ molecules demonstrates a high description precision of $98.6\%$. The resulting dataset provides a reliable foundation for future molecule-language alignment, and the proposed annotation method is readily extensible to larger datasets and broader chemical tasks that rely on structural descriptions.

Bonnet: Ultra-fast whole-body bone segmentation from CT scans

This work proposes Bonnet, an ultra-fast sparse-volume pipeline for whole-body bone segmentation from CT scans. Accurate bone segmentation is important for surgical planning and anatomical analysis, but existing 3D voxel-based models such as nnU-Net and STU-Net require heavy computation and often take several minutes per scan, which limits time-critical use. The proposed Bonnet addresses this by integrating a series of novel framework components including HU-based bone thresholding, patch-wise inference with a sparse spconv-based U-Net, and multi-window fusion into a full-volume prediction. Trained on TotalSegmentator and evaluated without additional tuning on RibSeg, CT-Pelvic1K, and CT-Spine1K, Bonnet achieves high Dice across ribs, pelvis, and spine while running in only 2.69 seconds per scan on an RTX A6000. Compared to strong voxel baselines, Bonnet attains a similar accuracy but reduces inference time by roughly 25x on the same hardware and tiling setup. The toolkit and pre-trained models will be released at https://github.com/HINTLab/Bonnet.

FlexMap: Generalized HD Map Construction from Flexible Camera Configurations

High-definition (HD) maps provide essential semantic information of road structures for autonomous driving systems, yet current HD map construction methods require calibrated multi-camera setups and either implicit or explicit 2D-to-BEV transformations, making them fragile when sensors fail or camera configurations vary across vehicle fleets. We introduce FlexMap, unlike prior methods that are fixed to a specific N-camera rig, our approach adapts to variable camera configurations without any architectural changes or per-configuration retraining. Our key innovation eliminates explicit geometric projections by using a geometry-aware foundation model with cross-frame attention to implicitly encode 3D scene understanding in feature space. FlexMap features two core components: a spatial-temporal enhancement module that separates cross-view spatial reasoning from temporal dynamics, and a camera-aware decoder with latent camera tokens, enabling view-adaptive attention without the need for projection matrices. Experiments demonstrate that FlexMap outperforms existing methods across multiple configurations while maintaining robustness to missing views and sensor variations, enabling more practical real-world deployment.

ShadowGS: Shadow-Aware 3D Gaussian Splatting for Satellite Imagery

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a novel paradigm for 3D reconstruction from satellite imagery. However, in multi-temporal satellite images, prevalent shadows exhibit significant inconsistencies due to varying illumination conditions. To address this, we propose ShadowGS, a novel framework based on 3DGS. It leverages a physics-based rendering equation from remote sensing, combined with an efficient ray marching technique, to precisely model geometrically consistent shadows while maintaining efficient rendering. Additionally, it effectively disentangles different illumination components and apparent attributes in the scene. Furthermore, we introduce a shadow consistency constraint that significantly enhances the geometric accuracy of 3D reconstruction. We also incorporate a novel shadow map prior to improve performance with sparse-view inputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ShadowGS outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in shadow decoupling accuracy, 3D reconstruction precision, and novel view synthesis quality, with only a few minutes of training. ShadowGS exhibits robust performance across various settings, including RGB, pansharpened, and sparse-view satellite inputs.

FairAgent: Democratizing Fairness-Aware Machine Learning with LLM-Powered Agents

Training fair and unbiased machine learning models is crucial for high-stakes applications, yet it presents significant challenges. Effective bias mitigation requires deep expertise in fairness definitions, metrics, data preprocessing, and machine learning techniques. In addition, the complex process of balancing model performance with fairness requirements while properly handling sensitive attributes makes fairness-aware model development inaccessible to many practitioners. To address these challenges, we introduce FairAgent, an LLM-powered automated system that significantly simplifies fairness-aware model development. FairAgent eliminates the need for deep technical expertise by automatically analyzing datasets for potential biases, handling data preprocessing and feature engineering, and implementing appropriate bias mitigation strategies based on user requirements. Our experiments demonstrate that FairAgent achieves significant performance improvements while significantly reducing development time and expertise requirements, making fairness-aware machine learning more accessible to practitioners.

DisPatch: Disarming Adversarial Patches in Object Detection with Diffusion Models

Object detection is fundamental to various real-world applications, such as security monitoring and surveillance video analysis. Despite their advancements, state-of-theart object detectors are still vulnerable to adversarial patch attacks, which can be easily applied to real-world objects to either conceal actual items or create non-existent ones, leading to severe consequences. Given the current diversity of adversarial patch attacks and potential unknown threats, an ideal defense method should be effective, generalizable, and robust against adaptive attacks. In this work, we introduce DISPATCH, the first diffusion-based defense framework for object detection. Unlike previous works that aim to "detect and remove" adversarial patches, DISPATCH adopts a "regenerate and rectify" strategy, leveraging generative models to disarm attack effects while preserving the integrity of the input image. Specifically, we utilize the in-distribution generative power of diffusion models to regenerate the entire image, aligning it with benign data. A rectification process is then employed to identify and replace adversarial regions with their regenerated benign counterparts. DISPATCH is attack-agnostic and requires no prior knowledge of the existing patches. Extensive experiments across multiple detectors and attacks demonstrate that DISPATCH consistently outperforms state-of-the-art defenses on both hiding attacks and creating attacks, achieving the best overall mAP.5 score of 89.3% on hiding attacks, and lowering the attack success rate to 24.8% on untargeted creating attacks. Moreover, it maintains strong robustness against adaptive attacks, making it a practical and reliable defense for object detection systems.

Implicit Neural Representation for Video Restoration

High-resolution (HR) videos play a crucial role in many computer vision applications. Although existing video restoration (VR) methods can significantly enhance video quality by exploiting temporal information across video frames, they are typically trained for fixed upscaling factors and lack the flexibility to handle scales or degradations beyond their training distribution. In this paper, we introduce VR-INR, a novel video restoration approach based on Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) that is trained only on a single upscaling factor ($\times 4$) but generalizes effectively to arbitrary, unseen super-resolution scales at test time. Notably, VR-INR also performs zero-shot denoising on noisy input, despite never having seen noisy data during training. Our method employs a hierarchical spatial-temporal-texture encoding framework coupled with multi-resolution implicit hash encoding, enabling adaptive decoding of high-resolution and noise-suppressed frames from low-resolution inputs at any desired magnification. Experimental results show that VR-INR consistently maintains high-quality reconstructions at unseen scales and noise during training, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art approaches in sharpness, detail preservation, and denoising efficacy.