PINP: Physics-Informed Neural Predictor with latent estimation of fluid flows

Accurately predicting fluid dynamics and evolution has been a long-standing challenge in physical sciences. Conventional deep learning methods often rely on the nonlinear modeling capabilities of neural networks to establish mappings between past and future states, overlooking the fluid dynamics, or only modeling the velocity field, neglecting the coupling of multiple physical quantities. In this paper, we propose a new physics-informed learning approach that incorporates coupled physical quantities into the prediction process to assist with forecasting. Central to our method lies in the discretization of physical equations, which are directly integrated into the model architecture and loss function. This integration enables the model to provide robust, long-term future predictions. By incorporating physical equations, our model demonstrates temporal extrapolation and spatial generalization capabilities. Experimental results show that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance in spatiotemporal prediction across both numerical simulations and real-world extreme-precipitation nowcasting benchmarks.

Guaranteeing consistency in evidence fusion: A novel perspective on credibility

It is explored that available credible evidence fusion schemes suffer from the potential inconsistency because credibility calculation and Dempster's combination rule-based fusion are sequentially performed in an open-loop style. This paper constructs evidence credibility from the perspective of the degree of support for events within the framework of discrimination (FOD) and proposes an iterative credible evidence fusion (ICEF) to overcome the inconsistency in view of close-loop control. On one hand, the ICEF introduces the fusion result into credibility assessment to establish the correlation between credibility and the fusion result. On the other hand, arithmetic-geometric divergence is promoted based on the exponential normalization of plausibility and belief functions to measure evidence conflict, called plausibility-belief arithmetic-geometric divergence (PBAGD), which is superior in capturing the correlation and difference of FOD subsets, identifying abnormal sources, and reducing their fusion weights. The ICEF is compared with traditional methods by combining different evidence difference measure forms via numerical examples to verify its performance. Simulations on numerical examples and benchmark datasets reflect the adaptability of PBAGD to the proposed fusion strategy.

Control Map Distribution using Map Query Bank for Online Map Generation

Reliable autonomous driving systems require high-definition (HD) map that contains detailed map information for planning and navigation. However, pre-build HD map requires a large cost. Visual-based Online Map Generation (OMG) has become an alternative low-cost solution to build a local HD map. Query-based BEV Transformer has been a base model for this task. This model learns HD map predictions from an initial map queries distribution which is obtained by offline optimization on training set. Besides the quality of BEV feature, the performance of this model also highly relies on the capacity of initial map query distribution. However, this distribution is limited because the limited query number. To make map predictions optimal on each test sample, it is essential to generate a suitable initial distribution for each specific scenario. This paper proposes to decompose the whole HD map distribution into a set of point representations, namely map query bank (MQBank). To build specific map query initial distributions of different scenarios, low-cost standard definition map (SD map) data is introduced as a kind of prior knowledge. Moreover, each layer of map decoder network learns instance-level map query features, which will lose detailed information of each point. However, BEV feature map is a point-level dense feature. It is important to keep point-level information in map queries when interacting with BEV feature map. This can also be solved with map query bank method. Final experiments show a new insight on SD map prior and a new record on OpenLaneV2 benchmark with 40.5%, 45.7% mAP on vehicle lane and pedestrian area.

Disentangled 4D Gaussian Splatting: Towards Faster and More Efficient Dynamic Scene Rendering

Novel-view synthesis (NVS) for dynamic scenes from 2D images presents significant challenges due to the spatial complexity and temporal variability of such scenes. Recently, inspired by the remarkable success of NVS using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), researchers have sought to extend 3D Gaussian models to four dimensions (4D) for dynamic novel-view synthesis. However, methods based on 4D rotation and scaling introduce spatiotemporal deformation into the 4D covariance matrix, necessitating the slicing of 4D Gaussians into 3D Gaussians. This process increases redundant computations as timestamps change-an inherent characteristic of dynamic scene rendering. Additionally, performing calculations on a four-dimensional matrix is computationally intensive. In this paper, we introduce Disentangled 4D Gaussian Splatting (Disentangled4DGS), a novel representation and rendering approach that disentangles temporal and spatial deformations, thereby eliminating the reliance on 4D matrix computations. We extend the 3DGS rendering process to 4D, enabling the projection of temporal and spatial deformations into dynamic 2D Gaussians in ray space. Consequently, our method facilitates faster dynamic scene synthesis. Moreover, it reduces storage requirements by at least 4.5\% due to our efficient presentation method. Our approach achieves an unprecedented average rendering speed of 343 FPS at a resolution of $1352\times1014$ on an RTX 3090 GPU, with experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrating its competitive performance in both monocular and multi-view scenarios.

Learnable cut flow

Neural networks have emerged as a powerful paradigm for tasks in high energy physics, yet their opaque training process renders them as a black box. In contrast, the traditional cut flow method offers simplicity and interpretability but demands human effort to identify optimal boundaries. To merge the strengths of both approaches, we propose the Learnable Cut Flow (LCF), a neural network that transforms the traditional cut selection into a fully differentiable, data-driven process. LCF implements two cut strategies-parallel, where observable distributions are treated independently, and sequential, where prior cuts shape subsequent ones-to flexibly determine optimal boundaries. Building on this, we introduce the Learnable Importance, a metric that quantifies feature importance and adjusts their contributions to the loss accordingly, offering model-driven insights unlike ad-hoc metrics. To ensure differentiability, a modified loss function replaces hard cuts with mask operations, preserving data shape throughout the training process. LCF is tested on six varied mock datasets and a realistic diboson vs. QCD dataset. Results demonstrate that LCF (1) accurately learns cut boundaries across typical feature distributions in both parallel and sequential strategies, (2) assigns higher importance to discriminative features with minimal overlap, (3) handles redundant or correlated features robustly, and (4) performs effectively in real-world scenarios. In diboson dataset, LCF initially underperforms boosted decision trees and multiplayer perceptrons when using all observables. However, pruning less critical features-guided by learned importance-boosts its performance to match or exceed these baselines. LCF bridges the gap between traditional cut flow method and modern black-box neural networks, delivering actionable insights into the training process and feature importance.

FlexWorld: Progressively Expanding 3D Scenes for Flexiable-View Synthesis

Generating flexible-view 3D scenes, including 360{\deg} rotation and zooming, from single images is challenging due to a lack of 3D data. To this end, we introduce FlexWorld, a novel framework consisting of two key components: (1) a strong video-to-video (V2V) diffusion model to generate high-quality novel view images from incomplete input rendered from a coarse scene, and (2) a progressive expansion process to construct a complete 3D scene. In particular, leveraging an advanced pre-trained video model and accurate depth-estimated training pairs, our V2V model can generate novel views under large camera pose variations. Building upon it, FlexWorld progressively generates new 3D content and integrates it into the global scene through geometry-aware scene fusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FlexWorld in generating high-quality novel view videos and flexible-view 3D scenes from single images, achieving superior visual quality under multiple popular metrics and datasets compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. Qualitatively, we highlight that FlexWorld can generate high-fidelity scenes with flexible views like 360{\deg} rotations and zooming. Project page: https://ml-gsai.github.io/FlexWorld.

Siamese Foundation Models for Crystal Structure Prediction

Crystal Structure Prediction (CSP), which aims to generate stable crystal structures from compositions, represents a critical pathway for discovering novel materials. While structure prediction tasks in other domains, such as proteins, have seen remarkable progress, CSP remains a relatively underexplored area due to the more complex geometries inherent in crystal structures. In this paper, we propose Siamese foundation models specifically designed to address CSP. Our pretrain-finetune framework, named DAO, comprises two complementary foundation models: DAO-G for structure generation and DAO-P for energy prediction. Experiments on CSP benchmarks (MP-20 and MPTS-52) demonstrate that our DAO-G significantly surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods across all metrics. Extensive ablation studies further confirm that DAO-G excels in generating diverse polymorphic structures, and the dataset relaxation and energy guidance provided by DAO-P are essential for enhancing DAO-G's performance. When applied to three real-world superconductors ($\text{CsV}_3\text{Sb}_5$, $ \text{Zr}_{16}\text{Rh}_8\text{O}_4$ and $\text{Zr}_{16}\text{Pd}_8\text{O}_4$) that are known to be challenging to analyze, our foundation models achieve accurate critical temperature predictions and structure generations. For instance, on $\text{CsV}_3\text{Sb}_5$, DAO-G generates a structure close to the experimental one with an RMSE of 0.0085; DAO-P predicts the $T_c$ value with high accuracy (2.26 K vs. the ground-truth value of 2.30 K). In contrast, conventional DFT calculators like Quantum Espresso only successfully derive the structure of the first superconductor within an acceptable time, while the RMSE is nearly 8 times larger, and the computation speed is more than 1000 times slower. These compelling results collectively highlight the potential of our approach for advancing materials science research and development.

PIMRL: Physics-Informed Multi-Scale Recurrent Learning for Spatiotemporal Prediction

Simulation of spatiotemporal systems governed by partial differential equations is widely applied in fields such as biology, chemistry, aerospace dynamics, and meteorology. Traditional numerical methods incur high computational costs due to the requirement of small time steps for accurate predictions. While machine learning has reduced these costs, long-term predictions remain challenged by error accumulation, particularly in scenarios with insufficient data or varying time scales, where stability and accuracy are compromised. Existing methods often neglect the effective utilization of multi-scale data, leading to suboptimal robustness in predictions. To address these issues, we propose a novel multi-scale learning framework, namely, the Physics-Informed Multi-Scale Recurrent Learning (PIMRL), to effectively leverage multi-scale data for spatiotemporal dynamics prediction. The PIMRL framework comprises two modules: the micro-scale module embeds physical knowledge into neural networks via pretraining, and the macro-scale module adopts a data-driven approach to learn the temporal evolution of physics in the latent space. Experimental results demonstrate that the PIMRL framework consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across five benchmark datasets ranging from one to three dimensions, showing average improvements of over 9\% in both RMSE and MAE evaluation metrics, with maximum enhancements reaching up to 80%.

A Token-level Text Image Foundation Model for Document Understanding

In recent years, general visual foundation models (VFMs) have witnessed increasing adoption, particularly as image encoders for popular multi-modal large language models (MLLMs). However, without semantically fine-grained supervision, these models still encounter fundamental prediction errors in the context of downstream text-image-related tasks, i.e., perception, understanding and reasoning with images containing small and dense texts. To bridge this gap, we develop TokenOCR, the first token-level visual foundation model specifically tailored for text-image-related tasks, designed to support a variety of traditional downstream applications. To facilitate the pretraining of TokenOCR, we also devise a high-quality data production pipeline that constructs the first token-level image text dataset, TokenIT, comprising 20 million images and 1.8 billion token-mask pairs. Furthermore, leveraging this foundation with exceptional image-as-text capability, we seamlessly replace previous VFMs with TokenOCR to construct a document-level MLLM, TokenVL, for VQA-based document understanding tasks. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of TokenOCR and TokenVL. Code, datasets, and weights will be available at https://token-family.github.io/TokenOCR_project.

Automatic Prompt Optimization via Heuristic Search: A Survey

Recent advances in Large Language Models have led to remarkable achievements across a variety of Natural Language Processing tasks, making prompt engineering increasingly central to guiding model outputs. While manual methods can be effective, they typically rely on intuition and do not automatically refine prompts over time. In contrast, automatic prompt optimization employing heuristic-based search algorithms can systematically explore and improve prompts with minimal human oversight. This survey proposes a comprehensive taxonomy of these methods, categorizing them by where optimization occurs, what is optimized, what criteria drive the optimization, which operators generate new prompts, and which iterative search algorithms are applied. We further highlight specialized datasets and tools that support and accelerate automated prompt refinement. We conclude by discussing key open challenges pointing toward future opportunities for more robust and versatile LLM applications.