AI chatbots are increasingly used for answering health-related questions. This study examines the role of topic type discussed with an AI chatbot and individual characteristics on perceived benefits and risks, intention to use an AI chatbot, and willingness to self-disclose health information. We conducted an online experiment with a 2 (topic type: physical versus psychological, between-subjects) x 2 (topic sensitivity: low versus high, within-subjects) mixed design among a Dutch representative sample (N = 1,388). Results showed that perceived benefits were positively associated with intention and willingness to self-disclose, while perceived risks were negatively associated. Moreover, participants reported higher usage intentions for low-sensitive topics compared to high-sensitive topics. Furthermore, perceptions, intention, and willingness to self-disclose varied by individual characteristics. Overall, our findings suggest that intentions to use AI chatbots and self-disclosure of health-related information are primarily related to perceived benefits and risks and to personal characteristics rather than to topic type.
The current state of the art in AI/ML rests on deep neural architectures, which, in general, suffer from a lack of interpretability. Interpretability is crucial to gleaning insights while analyzing experimental data, where quantitative predictions may not be adequate for a scientist. We present a three layer neural architecture, SAMPAT (Smooth Approximation via Multivariate Polynomials and Analytic Transformations), that can provably learn a continuous, everywhere differentiable function, that can approximate any smooth function arbitrarily closely. SAMPAT's approximant can be expressed as a closed and compact algebraic, analytic expression, providing complete interpretability. Experiments on synthetic and benchmark datasets indicate that SAMPAT yields competitive performance with simpler representations. For many tasks, a two layer SAMPAT suffices. By imposing restrictions on the connectivity between neurons, SAMPAT may be used to provide a range of approximants, including regular and trigonometric polynomials, rational expressions, Gaussians, mixtures of Gaussians, as well as arbitrary combinations of the same; without restrictions, it learns a suitable structure. SAMPAT may be used to factorize polynomials and model nonlinear systems. With the addition of skip connections, a 4 to 6 layer SAMPAT is adequate to represent a substantive range of methods widely used in AI/ML, allowing the choice of a model's family, not just its parameters, to also be optimized as part of the learning process.
Recent 3D geometric foundation models, such as VGGT, provide robust feed-forward 3D reconstruction by directly predicting camera poses and 3D scene points from input images. However, their results remain inaccurate, and scaling them to long sequences or large unordered image sets typically requires chunk-wise processing, which can introduce drift and inconsistency. We present Glob3R, a global SfM-style reconstruction built on 3D foundation models. Our key idea is to explicitly optimize feed-forward geometric predictions. To this end, we augment a frozen Pi3X backbone with a lightweight dense matching head that predicts image warps between selected reference frames and neighboring views. These dense warps are converted into sparse but reliable multi-view feature tracks, which provide correspondence constraints for global optimization. We further introduce a keyframe-based sliding-window association strategy that propagates tracks and relative poses across overlapping windows, enabling scalable reconstruction. Finally, we perform global motion averaging and bundle adjustment to refine camera poses, reduce scale inconsistencies, and recover dense scene geometry. Extensive experiments on indoor, outdoor, large-scale driving, and unordered SfM benchmarks demonstrate that Glob3R achieves robust and accurate reconstruction. It consistently improves over feed-forward foundation-model baselines and recent scalable reconstruction methods, while being more robust than classical SfM pipelines. The refined poses also lead to higher-quality neural rendering, validating the benefit of combining foundation-model priors with global geometric optimization. Project page: https://junyuandeng.github.io/Glob3r
Version control systems are essential for collaborative software development, yet tools like git remain challenging for many practitioners. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising capabilities for interpreting developer intent, but their effectiveness in repository management tasks is limited by the need for formal reasoning. This work introduces Git-Assistant, an AI-based assistant that combines LLMs with automated planning to support developers in executing non-trivial git operations. The assistant analyzes repository context, translates natural language requests into actionable command sequences, and incorporates planning techniques to ensure correctness and safety. We present a systematic evaluation methodology using synthetic and randomized git environments, comparing the performance of LLM-only and planning-augmented variants across multiple metrics. Experimental results demonstrate that integrating formal reasoning with LLMs improves reliability and reduces errors in repository management, highlighting the potential of hybrid AI approaches for intelligent developer assistance.
Whole-arm manipulation involves direct contact with the environment while the robot completes a task by distributing contact across multiple links as contacts form, slide, and break. This setting breaks common implicit assumptions in many learning-based manipulation pipelines: arm configuration tightly couples motion and contact forces, contact state is partially observed under occlusion, and purely learned rollouts can become physically inconsistent under distribution shift because many multi-link contact configurations are sparsely represented in the data. To address this, we propose TACTIC (Tactile and Vision Conditioned Contact-Centric Control), a receding-horizon controller for whole-arm manipulation. TACTIC uses a contact-centric hybrid predictive model that combines RGB-D, distributed tactile sensing, and a compact 2D proximity representation. The model couples a learned, action-conditioned latent dynamics model with analytical kinematics through contact Jacobians, enabling rollouts of future contact configurations and interaction forces. TACTIC integrates these rollouts into a sampling-based MPC planner with contact-aware action sampling: contact Jacobian-based projections steer sampled action sequences toward force-modulating directions, and objectives defined over predicted proximity and interaction forces trade task progress against whole-arm force regulation. We evaluate TACTIC in simulation against state-of-the-art model-based and model-free methods, and perform ablations that isolate the contribution of each design choice. TACTIC consistently outperforms other methods. We further demonstrate real-world performance on a robot with distributed tactile sensing across three whole-arm manipulation tasks that require multi-contact trajectories: turning over and repositioning a manikin, and goal-reaching in a 3D dynamic maze. Website: https://emprise.cs.cornell.edu/tactic
In this system paper, we present OpenProver, an open-source system for LLM-driven automated theorem proving (ATP) with integrated Lean 4 formal verification. OpenProver integrates a Planner-Worker-Verifier architecture inspired by recent ATP agentic systems such as Aletheia. A Planner agent maintains a compact Whiteboard scratchpad and an unbounded Repository of intermediate findings, and decomposes mathematical work into parallel Workers. OpenProver is fully open-source, offers reproducible evaluation through automatic formal verification of generated proofs, and provides an interactive terminal interface for human-guided proof search. In interactive mode, OpenProver allows the human operator to monitor and steer the proof search process, motivated by the established human-AI synergy in interactive code generation. To showcase the potential for quantitative ablation experiments enabled by automatic formal verification, we evaluate OpenProver on ProofNet and compare it with a simple baseline. OpenProver is publicly available at https://github.com/kripner/OpenProver.
The rapid expansion of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems has increased the need for reliable and scalable fault classification, as manual inspection is impractical at scale. Thermal infrared (IR) imaging provides a non-contact solution for identifying PV faults; however, accurate classification remains challenging due to class imbalance, limited texture information, and subtle thermal differences. In this work, we investigate the applicability of Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) for thermal IR PV fault classification across various scenarios and propose JEFFNet (JEPA-EFFicientNet), a multibranch architecture that combines JEPA-based self-supervised representation learning with EfficientNetV2-S-based supervised convolutional feature extraction. JEFFNet fuses semantic representations from a JEPA-pretrained Vision Transformer with convolutional features from EfficientNetV2-S, enabling complementary feature learning. JEFFNet is evaluated on two public thermal IR datasets, PVF-10 and InfraredSolarModules (ISM), for both multiclass and derived binary (healthy/faulty) classification. On PVF-10, JEFFNet achieves an F1-score of $93.21$ and an accuracy of $94.33$ in the 10-class task, and an F1-score of $97.53$ and an accuracy of $96.41$ in the derived 2-class task. On ISM, JEFFNet achieves an F1-score of $72.60$ and an accuracy of $83.88$ in the 12-class task, and an F1-score of $94.69$ and an accuracy of $94.78$ in the derived 2-class task. JEFFNet also uses only 108.6M parameters versus 205.91M for GEPFNet, a 47.2\% reduction. These results demonstrate that combining self-supervised semantic and supervised convolutional features provides an effective, parameter-efficient solution for thermal IR PV fault classification. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Azimi2kht/JEFFNet
Pretrained language models often exhibit structured weight spectra, suggesting that training may repeatedly produce similar layerwise and component-wise organization. We ask whether these recurring spectral patterns can be reused as an initialization signal for GPT-2-style language-model pretraining. First, we analyze eleven pretrained GPT-2-style checkpoints that vary in size, language, tokenizer, and training corpus, measuring Frobenius norm and effective-rank entropy across layers and Transformer subcomponents. The checkpoints show shared depth trends, especially increasing scale and stronger spectral concentration in residual-writing matrices. We then construct initialization schemes that imitate the component-wise magnitudes and spectral profiles of pretrained models, and compare them with several weight initialization methods. These initializers visibly change the model's structural spectral patterns, but the evaluation results do not show a corresponding performance advantage. Pretrained-weight reuse remains competitive, while coarse spectral matching alone is not a reliable optimization strategy. Our results suggest that pretrained spectra are useful diagnostics of trained model structure, but that effective reuse likely requires preserving richer information than component-wise scale and singular-value shape.
Continual learning commonly relies on post-hoc mechanisms such as replay, elastic regularization, or distillation. This work argues that forgetting should instead be modeled directly as interference between tasks. In the frozen-feature regime, forgetting from learning a new task is exactly the interference energy induced on the old task. In deep networks, the same quantity is recovered through path-averaged curvature with minimal additional forward passes. When task supports are disjoint, forgetting can be eliminated structurally and when task supports overlap in conflicting directions, a non-zero distortion floor is unavoidable. The same geometry optimally merges models through task-aware orthogonalization. From this analysis we derive Interference-Gated Functional Allocation (IGFA), a replay-free, Fisher-free method that shares directions when tasks align and protects them when they conflict. Across benchmarks, IGFA achieves lossless retention when tasks are structurally separable and moves unavoidable cost from irreversible forgetting into deferred but recoverable plasticity when they are not. It matches the strongest replay-free structural baselines on dissimilar-task streams and improves on unconditional projection when similarity makes transfer worth preserving.
Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly expected to play a central role in AI-driven scientific discovery. Equipped with broad knowledge, flexible reasoning, and tool use, they have the potential to autonomously explore and solve scientific problems by repeatedly proposing hypotheses, testing them, and revising their beliefs in the light of the evidence. In current agents, however, these hypotheses, tests, and belief updates are buried in unstructured logs, and no mechanism lets the agent or the human researcher audit that process. Here we propose the Hypothesis Evolution Protocol (HEP), an agent harness that provides hypothesis generation, evaluation, and evolution as explicit, auditable operations. On materials-science research tasks, a HEP-equipped agent operates the hypothesis--test--evidence--belief cycle that planning-style agents lack, generalizes across research questions, and exploits the protocol more fully as the base LLM becomes more capable. These results mark a step toward auditable AI scientists, whose scientific reasoning can be inspected, verified, and built upon.
Real-world sRGB image denoising remains challenging due to the nonlinear characteristics of sensor noise and the difficulty of acquiring aligned clean-noisy image pairs. Supervised denoisers often overfit to limited paired datasets, while self-supervised methods still depend on sufficiently diverse noisy observations. These limitations motivate scalable noise synthesis methods that can model real-world noise without clean ground truth or camera metadata. We propose YeTI, a real-world sRGB noise generation framework that learns from only two noisy observations of the same scene. YeTI uses a Reconstruction Autoencoder to disentangle scene structure and noise characteristics, and models the latent noise distribution with a one-step Conditional Diffusion Transformer trained using consistency objectives. Given a single noisy input at inference time, YeTI generates realistic, signal-dependent noise while preserving the underlying scene content. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of YeTI across real-world benchmarks. We evaluate noise generation on SIDD and further assess generalization on SIDD+, MAI2021, and SID, covering smartphone and diverse consumer-camera sensors. Downstream denoising results on DND further show that denoisers trained with YeTI-synthesized images achieve strong real-world performance, highlighting the practical value of clean-image-free and metadata-free noise generation.
Aerial-Ground Person Re-IDentification (AG-ReID) aims to retrieve the same person across heterogeneous aerial and ground camera platforms. Although great progress has been made, existing methods remain suboptimal due to the direct feature alignment across views, overlooking view-specific cues. To address this issue, we propose a novel Hierarchical Hyperbolic Representation (HiHR) framework for AG-ReID. More specifically, we first extract multi-granularity features based on pre-trained visual-text encoders. Then, we propose a Text-guided Multi-granularity Fusion (TMF) to fuse multi-granularity features and enhance the representation ability of identity features. Furthermore, we introduce the Hierarchical Hyperbolic Learning (HHL) to construct a hierarchical feature structure in a hyperbolic space. This hierarchy includes a coarse level that ensures identity separability and cross-view consistency, and a fine level that preserves view-specific discriminative cues. As a result, our proposed framework can effectively aggregate view-invariant and view-specific discriminative features for AG-ReID. Extensive experiments on four AG-ReID benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. The source code is available at https://github.com/YangQiWei3/HiHR.