Inference-Time Refinement Closes the Synthetic-Real Gap in Tabular Diffusion

Diffusion-based generators set the current state of the art for synthetic tabular data. These methods approach but rarely exceed real-data utility, and closing this synthetic-real gap has so far been pursued exclusively at training time, via architectural advances, scaling, and retraining of monolithic generators. The inference-time alternative, i.e., refining the outputs of a pre-trained backbone with parameters left untouched, has remained largely unexplored for tabular synthesis. We introduce TARDIS (Tabular generation through Refinement, Distillation, and Inference-time Sampling), an inference-time refinement framework that operates on a frozen pre-trained backbone, configured per dataset by a Tree-structured Parzen Estimator search over score-level guidance during reverse diffusion, with each trial's objective set by an inner grid search over post-hoc sample selectors and an optional soft-label distillation step. The search space encodes a single mathematical pattern we name Bidirectional Chamfer Refinement (BCR): the symmetric Chamfer functional between synthetic and real samples is minimized both continuously, via a score-level gradient, and discretely, via batch-ranking post-generation. The per-dataset search recovers BCR-aligned configurations on most datasets, evidence for BCR as the dominant refinement pattern. Across 15 binary, multiclass, and regression benchmarks TARDIS achieves a median +8.6% downstream-task improvement over models trained on real data (95% CI [+3.3, +16.4], Wilcoxon p=0.016, 11/15 strict wins) and improves over the TabDiff backbone on all 15 datasets (mean +12.9%, p<10^-4), matching the backbone on manifold fidelity, diversity, and sample-level privacy. Inference-time refinement of a pre-trained tabular diffusion backbone reaches and exceeds real-data utility in 1 to 80 minutes on a single consumer-grade GPU.

EmbodiedLGR: Integrating Lightweight Graph Representation and Retrieval for Semantic-Spatial Memory in Robotic Agents

As the world of agentic artificial intelligence applied to robotics evolves, the need for agents capable of building and retrieving memories and observations efficiently is increasing. Robots operating in complex environments must build memory structures to enable useful human-robot interactions by leveraging the mnemonic representation of the current operating context. People interacting with robots may expect the embodied agent to provide information about locations, events, or objects, which requires the agent to provide precise answers within human-like inference times to be perceived as responsive. We propose the Embodied Light Graph Retrieval Agent (EmbodiedLGR-Agent), a visual-language model (VLM)-driven agent architecture that constructs dense and efficient representations of robot operating environments. EmbodiedLGR-Agent directly addresses the need for an efficient memory representation of the environment by providing a hybrid building-retrieval approach built on parameter-efficient VLMs that store low-level information about objects and their positions in a semantic graph, while retaining high-level descriptions of the observed scenes with a traditional retrieval-augmented architecture. EmbodiedLGR-Agent is evaluated on the popular NaVQA dataset, achieving state-of-the-art performance in inference and querying times for embodied agents, while retaining competitive accuracy on the global task relative to the current state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, EmbodiedLGR-Agent was successfully deployed on a physical robot, showing practical utility in real-world contexts through human-robot interaction, while running the visual-language model and the building-retrieval pipeline locally.

SGR-OCC: Evolving Monocular Priors for Embodied 3D Occupancy Prediction via Soft-Gating Lifting and Semantic-Adaptive Geometric Refinement

3D semantic occupancy prediction is a cornerstone for embodied AI, enabling agents to perceive dense scene geometry and semantics incrementally from monocular video streams. However, current online frameworks face two critical bottlenecks: the inherent depth ambiguity of monocular estimation that causes "feature bleeding" at object boundaries , and the "cold start" instability where uninitialized temporal fusion layers distort high-quality spatial priors during early training stages. In this paper, we propose SGR-OCC (Soft-Gating and Ray-refinement Occupancy), a unified framework driven by the philosophy of "Inheritance and Evolution". To perfectly inherit monocular spatial expertise, we introduce a Soft-Gating Feature Lifter that explicitly models depth uncertainty via a Gaussian gate to probabilistically suppress background noise. Furthermore, a Dynamic Ray-Constrained Anchor Refinement module simplifies complex 3D displacement searches into efficient 1D depth corrections along camera rays, ensuring sub-voxel adherence to physical surfaces. To ensure stable evolution toward temporal consistency, we employ a Two-Phase Progressive Training Strategy equipped with identity-initialized fusion, effectively resolving the cold start problem and shielding spatial priors from noisy early gradients. Extensive experiments on the EmbodiedOcc-ScanNet and Occ-ScanNet benchmarks demonstrate that SGR-OCC achieves state-of-the-art performance. In local prediction tasks, SGR-OCC achieves a completion IoU of 58.55$\%$ and a semantic mIoU of 49.89$\%$, surpassing the previous best method, EmbodiedOcc++, by 3.65$\%$ and 3.69$\%$ respectively. In challenging embodied prediction tasks, our model reaches 55.72$\%$ SC-IoU and 46.22$\%$ mIoU. Qualitative results further confirm our model's superior capability in preserving structural integrity and boundary sharpness in complex indoor environments.

SNPgen: Phenotype-Supervised Genotype Representation and Synthetic Data Generation via Latent Diffusion

Polygenic risk scores and other genomic analyses require large individual-level genotype datasets, yet strict data access restrictions impede sharing. Synthetic genotype generation offers a privacy-preserving alternative, but most existing methods operate unconditionally, producing samples without phenotype alignment, or rely on unsupervised compression, creating a gap between statistical fidelity and downstream task utility. We present SNPgen, a two-stage conditional latent diffusion framework for generating phenotype-supervised synthetic genotypes. SNPgen combines GWAS-guided variant selection (1,024-2,048 trait-associated SNPs) with a variational autoencoder for genotype compression and a latent diffusion model conditioned on binary disease labels via classifier-free guidance. Evaluated on 458,724 UK Biobank individuals across four complex diseases (coronary artery disease, breast cancer, type 1 and type 2 diabetes), models trained on synthetic data matched real-data predictive performance in a train-on-synthetic, test-on-real protocol, approaching genome-wide PRS methods that use $2$-$6\times$ more variants. Privacy analysis confirmed zero identical matches, near-random membership inference (AUC $\approx 0.50$), preserved linkage disequilibrium structure, and high allele frequency correlation ($r \geq 0.95$) with source data. A controlled simulation with known causal effects verified faithful recovery of the imposed genetic association structure.

Act, Think or Abstain: Complexity-Aware Adaptive Inference for Vision-Language-Action Models

Current research on Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models predominantly focuses on enhancing generalization through established reasoning techniques. While effective, these improvements invariably increase computational complexity and inference latency. Furthermore, these mechanisms are typically applied indiscriminately, resulting in the inefficient allocation of resources for trivial tasks while simultaneously failing to provide the uncertainty estimation necessary to prevent catastrophic failure on out-of-distribution tasks. Inspired by human cognition, we propose an adaptive framework that dynamically routes VLA execution based on the complexity of the perceived state. Our approach transforms the VLA's vision-language backbone into an active detection tool by projecting latent embeddings into an ensemble of parametric and non-parametric estimators. This allows the system to execute known tasks immediately (Act), reason about ambiguous scenarios (Think), and preemptively halt execution when encountering significant physical or semantic anomalies (Abstain). In our empirical analysis, we observe a phenomenon where visual embeddings alone are superior for inferring task complexity due to the semantic invariance of language. Evaluated on the LIBERO and LIBERO-PRO benchmarks as well as on a real robot, our vision-only configuration achieves 80% F1-Score using as little as 5% of training data, establishing itself as a reliable and efficient task complexity detector.

QuAIL: Quality-Aware Inertial Learning for Robust Training under Data Corruption

Tabular machine learning systems are frequently trained on data affected by non-uniform corruption, including noisy measurements, missing entries, and feature-specific biases. In practice, these defects are often documented only through column-level reliability indicators rather than instance-wise quality annotations, limiting the applicability of many robustness and cleaning techniques. We present QuAIL, a quality-informed training mechanism that incorporates feature reliability priors directly into the learning process. QuAIL augments existing models with a learnable feature-modulation layer whose updates are selectively constrained by a quality-dependent proximal regularizer, thereby inducing controlled adaptation across features of varying trustworthiness. This stabilizes optimization under structured corruption without explicit data repair or sample-level reweighting. Empirical evaluation across 50 classification and regression datasets demonstrates that QuAIL consistently improves average performance over neural baselines under both random and value-dependent corruption, with especially robust behavior in low-data and systematically biased settings. These results suggest that incorporating feature reliability information directly into optimization dynamics is a practical and effective approach for resilient tabular learning.

SurvKAN: A Fully Parametric Survival Model Based on Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

Accurate prediction of time-to-event outcomes is critical for clinical decision-making, treatment planning, and resource allocation in modern healthcare. While classical survival models such as Cox remain widely adopted in standard practice, they rely on restrictive assumptions, including linear covariate relationships and proportional hazards over time, that often fail to capture real-world clinical dynamics. Recent deep learning approaches like DeepSurv and DeepHit offer improved expressivity but sacrifice interpretability, limiting clinical adoption where trust and transparency are paramount. Hybrid models incorporating Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs), such as CoxKAN, have begun to address this trade-off but remain constrained by the semi-parametric Cox framework. In this work we introduce SurvKAN, a fully parametric, time-continuous survival model based on KAN architectures that eliminates the proportional hazards constraint. SurvKAN treats time as an explicit input to a KAN that directly predicts the log-hazard function, enabling end-to-end training on the full survival likelihood. Our architecture preserves interpretability through learnable univariate functions that indicate how individual features influence risk over time. Extensive experiments on standard survival benchmarks demonstrate that SurvKAN achieves competitive or superior performance compared to classical and state-of-the-art baselines across concordance and calibration metrics. Additionally, interpretability analyses reveal clinically meaningful patterns that align with medical domain knowledge.

Auto-Comp: An Automated Pipeline for Scalable Compositional Probing of Contrastive Vision-Language Models

Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit a critical flaw in compositional reasoning, often confusing "a red cube and a blue sphere" with "a blue cube and a red sphere". Disentangling the visual and linguistic roots of these failures is a fundamental challenge for robust evaluation. To enable fine-grained, controllable analysis, we introduce Auto-Comp, a fully automated and synthetic pipeline for generating scalable benchmarks. Its controllable nature is key to dissecting and isolating different reasoning skills. Auto-Comp generates paired images from Minimal (e.g., "a monitor to the left of a bicycle on a white background") and LLM-generated Contextual captions (e.g., "In a brightly lit photography studio, a monitor is positioned to the left of a bicycle"), allowing a controlled A/B test to disentangle core binding ability from visio-linguistic complexity. Our evaluation of 20 VLMs on novel benchmarks for color binding and spatial relations reveals universal compositional failures in both CLIP and SigLIP model families. Crucially, our novel "Confusion Benchmark" reveals a deeper flaw beyond simple attribute swaps: models are highly susceptible to low-entropy distractors (e.g., repeated objects or colors), demonstrating their compositional failures extend beyond known bag-of-words limitations. we uncover a surprising trade-off: visio-linguistic context, which provides global scene cues, aids spatial reasoning but simultaneously hinders local attribute binding by introducing visual clutter. We release the Auto-Comp pipeline to facilitate future benchmark creation, alongside all our generated benchmarks (https://huggingface.co/AutoComp).

BTGenBot-2: Efficient Behavior Tree Generation with Small Language Models

Recent advances in robot learning increasingly rely on LLM-based task planning, leveraging their ability to bridge natural language with executable actions. While prior works showcased great performances, the widespread adoption of these models in robotics has been challenging as 1) existing methods are often closed-source or computationally intensive, neglecting the actual deployment on real-world physical systems, and 2) there is no universally accepted, plug-and-play representation for robotic task generation. Addressing these challenges, we propose BTGenBot-2, a 1B-parameter open-source small language model that directly converts natural language task descriptions and a list of robot action primitives into executable behavior trees in XML. Unlike prior approaches, BTGenBot-2 enables zero-shot BT generation, error recovery at inference and runtime, while remaining lightweight enough for resource-constrained robots. We further introduce the first standardized benchmark for LLM-based BT generation, covering 52 navigation and manipulation tasks in NVIDIA Isaac Sim. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that BTGenBot-2 consistently outperforms GPT-5, Claude Opus 4.1, and larger open-source models across both functional and non-functional metrics, achieving average success rates of 90.38% in zero-shot and 98.07% in one-shot, while delivering up to 16x faster inference compared to the previous BTGenBot.

PolyGen: Fully Synthetic Vision-Language Training via Multi-Generator Ensembles

Synthetic data offers a scalable solution for vision-language pre-training, yet current state-of-the-art methods typically rely on scaling up a single generative backbone, which introduces generator-specific spectral biases and limits feature diversity. In this work, we introduce PolyGen, a framework that redefines synthetic data construction by prioritizing manifold coverage and compositional rigor over simple dataset size. PolyGen employs a Polylithic approach to train on the intersection of architecturally distinct generators, effectively marginalizing out model-specific artifacts. Additionally, we introduce a Programmatic Hard Negative curriculum that enforces fine-grained syntactic understanding. By structurally reallocating the same data budget from unique captions to multi-source variations, PolyGen achieves a more robust feature space, outperforming the leading single-source baseline (SynthCLIP) by +19.0% on aggregate multi-task benchmarks and on the SugarCrepe++ compositionality benchmark (+9.1%). These results demonstrate that structural diversity is a more data-efficient scaling law than simply increasing the volume of single-source samples.