How do social animals make effective decisions in the absence of a leader? While coordination can improve accuracy, it also introduces delays as information propagates through the group. In changing environments, these delays can outweigh the benefits of globally coordinated decisions, even when local interactions remain tightly organized. This raises a key question: how can groups implement efficient collective decision-making without central coordination? We address this question using a collective foraging model in which individuals share information and rewards, but each must choose whether to bear the cost of exploring or to remain idle. We show that decentralized collectives can match the performance of centrally controlled groups through a division of labor: a small, heterogeneous subset explores even when expected rewards are negative, acquiring information to enable future foraging, while a coordinated majority forages only when expected rewards are positive. Information redundancy causes the optimal number of explorers to grow sublinearly with group size, so that larger groups need proportionally fewer explorers. The heterogeneity of the group is maximized at intermediate
Building a large sample of kiloparsec (kpc)-scale dual active galactic nuclei (AGNs) amongst merging galaxies is of vital importance to understand the co-evolution between host galaxies and their central super massive black holes (SMBHs). Doing so, with just such a sample, we have developed an innovative method of systematically searching and identifying dual AGNs of amongst kpc scale merging galaxies and selected 222 candidates at redshifts $\leqslant$ 0.25. All the selected candidates have FIRST radio detection and at least one of two cores previously revealed as AGN spectroscopically. We report the first results from A SysTematic seaRch fOr Dual Agns in meRgINg Galaxies (ASTRO-DARING), which consist of spatially resolved long-slit spectroscopic observations of 41 targets selected from our merging galaxies sample carried out between November 2014 and February 2017, using the Yunnan Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera (YFOSC) mounted on the 2.4 meter telescope in Lijiang of Yunnan Observatories. Of these 16 are likely dual AGNs and 15 are newly identified. The efficiency of ASTRO-DARING is thus nearly 40 per cent. With this method, we plan to build the first even sample of more t
The past three decades have seen prodigious advances in astronomy and astrophysics. Beginning with the exploration of our solar system and continuing through the pioneering Explorers and Great Observatories of today, NASA missions have made essential contributions to these advances. This roadmap presents a science-driven 30-year vision for the future of NASA Astrophysics that builds on these achievements to address some of our most ancient and fundamental questions: Are we alone? How did we get here? How does the universe work? The search for the answers constitutes the Enduring Quests of this roadmap. Building on the priorities identified in New Worlds, New Horizons, we envision future science investigations laid out in three Eras, with each representing roughly ten years of mission development in a given field. The immediate Near-Term Era covers ongoing NASA-led activities and planned missions. This will be followed by the missions of the Formative Era, which will build on the preceding technological developments and scientific discoveries, with remarkable capabilities that will enable breakthroughs across the landscape of astrophysics. These will then lay the foundations for the
Foundation models pre-trained through masked reconstruction on large-scale EEG data have emerged as a promising paradigm for learning generalizable neural representations across diverse brain-computer interface applications. However, a critical yet overlooked challenge is that EEG encoders must learn representations invariant to incomplete observations-when different masked views of the same signal have minimal overlap, existing methods fail to constrain them to a consistent latent subspace, leading to degraded transferability. To address this, we propose DARE-EEG, a self-supervised foundation model that explicitly enforces the mask-invariance property through dual-aligned representation learning during pre-training. Specifically, we introduce mask alignment that constrains representations from multiple masked views of the same EEG sample via contrastive learning, complementing anchor alignment that aligns masked representations to momentum-updated complete features for semantic stability. Additionally, we propose conv-linear-probing, a parameter-efficient strategy that adapts pre-trained representations to heterogeneous electrode configurations and sampling rates through decoupled
Reinforcement learning improves the reasoning ability of large language models but remains costly and sample-inefficient, as many rollouts provide weak learning signals. Difficulty-aware data selection methods attempt to address this by prioritizing moderately difficult prompts, yet our analysis reveals three limitations: difficulty estimates become inaccurate under policy drift, data selection alone yields limited final-performance gains, and inference efficiency remains largely unchanged. These findings suggest that efficient and effective RL requires more than filtering by difficulty: the policy should learn to solve hard tasks while producing concise responses for easy ones. To this end, we propose **Dare**, a unified framework that co-evolves difficulty estimation with the policy via self-normalized importance sampling, maintains diverse difficulty coverage through a symmetric Beta sampling distribution, and applies tailored training strategies across difficulty tiers with adaptive compute allocation. Extensive experiments across multiple models and domains demonstrate that **Dare** consistently outperforms existing methods in training efficiency, final effectiveness, and infe
Test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) enables large language models (LLMs) to self-improve on unlabeled inputs, but its effectiveness critically depends on how reward signals are estimated without ground-truth supervision. Most existing TTRL methods rely on majority voting (MV) over rollouts to produce deterministic rewards, implicitly assuming that the majority rollout provides a reliable learning signal. We show that this assumption is fragile: MV reduces the rollout distribution into a single outcome, discarding information about non-majority but correct actions candidates, and yields systematically biased reward estimates. To address this, we propose Distribution-AwareReward Estimation (DARE), which shifts reward estimation from a single majority outcome to the full empirical rollout distribution. DARE further augments this distribution-based reward with an exploration bonus and a distribution pruning mechanism for non-majority rollout exploration and reward denoise, yielding a more informative and robust reward estimation. Extensive experiments on challenging reasoning benchmarks show that DARE improves optimization stability and final performance over recent baselines, achi
The fast-growing demands in using Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle complex multi-step data science tasks create an emergent need for accurate benchmarking. There are two major gaps in existing benchmarks: (i) the lack of standardized, process-aware evaluation that captures instruction adherence and process fidelity, and (ii) the scarcity of accurately labeled training data. To bridge these gaps, we introduce DARE-bench, a benchmark designed for machine learning modeling and data science instruction following. Unlike many existing benchmarks that rely on human- or model-based judges, all tasks in DARE-bench have verifiable ground truth, ensuring objective and reproducible evaluation. To cover a broad range of tasks and support agentic tools, DARE-bench consists of 6,300 Kaggle-derived tasks and provides both large-scale training data and evaluation sets. Extensive evaluations show that even highly capable models such as gpt-o4-mini struggle to achieve good performance, especially in machine learning modeling tasks. Using DARE-bench training tasks for fine-tuning can substantially improve model performance. For example, supervised fine-tuning boosts Qwen3-32B's accuracy by 1.83
Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to auto-regressive (AR) models, offering greater expressive capacity and potential for parallel generation and faster inference. However, open-source dLLMs remain immature, lagging behind AR models in both efficiency and quality. We identify an underexplored property of dLLMs: *token-wise redundancy* in bi-directional self-attention. Self-attention activations are highly correlated across tokens, and temporal changes in query representations can predict redundancy in corresponding key, value, and output activations. We introduce DARE, with two complementary mechanisms: DARE-KV, which reuses cached key-value (KV) activations, and DARE-O, which reuses output activations to reduce redundant computation while preserving quality. DARE achieves up to 1.20x per-layer latency reduction and reuses up to 87% of attention activations, with negligible degradation on reasoning and code-generation benchmarks. DARE-KV and DARE-O incur average performance drops of only 2.0% and 1.2%, respectively. Combined with techniques such as prefix caching and Fast-dLLM, DARE provides additive gains without retraining. These resul
Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are emerging as a compelling alternative to dominant autoregressive models, replacing strictly sequential token generation with iterative denoising and parallel generation dynamics. However, their open-source ecosystem remains fragmented across model families and, in particular, across post-training pipelines, where reinforcement learning objectives, rollout implementations and evaluation scripts are often released as paper-specific codebases. This fragmentation slows research iteration, raises the engineering burden of reproduction, and makes fair comparison across algorithms difficult. We present \textbf{DARE} (\textbf{d}LLMs \textbf{A}lignment and \textbf{R}einforcement \textbf{E}xecutor), an open framework for post-training and evaluating dLLMs. Built on top of verl~\cite{sheng2024hybridflow} and OpenCompass~\cite{2023opencompass}, DARE unifies supervised fine-tuning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, preference optimization, and dLLM-specific reinforcement learning under a shared execution stack for both masked and block diffusion language models. Across representative model families including LLaDA, Dream, SDAR, and LLaDA2.x, DARE provid
Large Language Model (LLM) agents can automate data-science workflows, but many rigorous statistical methods implemented in R remain underused because LLMs struggle with statistical knowledge and tool retrieval. Existing retrieval-augmented approaches focus on function-level semantics and ignore data distribution, producing suboptimal matches. We propose DARE (Distribution-Aware Retrieval Embedding), a lightweight, plug-and-play retrieval model that incorporates data distribution information into function representations for R package retrieval. Our main contributions are: (i) RPKB, a curated R Package Knowledge Base derived from 8,191 high-quality CRAN packages; (ii) DARE, an embedding model that fuses distributional features with function metadata to improve retrieval relevance; and (iii) RCodingAgent, an R-oriented LLM agent for reliable R code generation and a suite of statistical analysis tasks for systematically evaluating LLM agents in realistic analytical scenarios. Empirically, DARE achieves an NDCG at 10 of 93.47%, outperforming state-of-the-art open-source embedding models by up to 17% on package retrieval while using substantially fewer parameters. Integrating DARE into
Art plagiarism detection plays a crucial role in protecting artists' copyrights and intellectual property, yet it remains a challenging problem in forensic analysis. In this paper, we address the task of recognizing plagiarized paintings and explaining the detected plagarisms by retrieving visually similar authentic artworks. To support this study, we construct a dataset by collecting painting photos and synthesizing plagiarized versions using generative AI, tailored to specific artists' styles. We first establish a baseline approach using off-the-shelf features from the visual foundation model DINOv2 to retrieve the most similar images in the database and classify plagiarism based on a similarity threshold. Surprisingly, this non-learned method achieves a high recognition accuracy of 97.2\% but suffers from low retrieval precision 29.0\% average precision (AP). To improve retrieval quality, we finetune DINOv2 with a metric learning loss using positive and negative sample pairs sampled in the database. The finetuned model greatly improves retrieval performance by 12\% AP over the baseline, though it unexpectedly results in a lower recognition accuracy (92.7\%). We conclude with ins
Deformable medical image registration is a fundamental task in medical image analysis. While deep learning-based methods have demonstrated superior accuracy and computational efficiency compared to traditional techniques, they often overlook the critical role of regularization in ensuring robustness and anatomical plausibility. We propose DARE (Deformable Adaptive Regularization Estimator), a novel registration framework that dynamically adjusts elastic regularization based on the gradient norm of the deformation field. Our approach integrates strain and shear energy terms, which are adaptively modulated to balance stability and flexibility. To ensure physically realistic transformations, DARE includes a folding-prevention mechanism that penalizes regions with negative deformation Jacobian. This strategy mitigates non-physical artifacts such as folding, avoids over-smoothing, and improves both registration accuracy and anatomical plausibility
In the theory of time scales, given $\mathbb{T}$ a time scale with at least two distinct elements, an integration theory is developed using ideas already well known as Riemann sums. Another, more daring, approach is to treat an integration theory on this scale from the point of view of the Lebesgue integral, which generalizes the previous perspective. A great tool obtained when studying the integral of a scale $\mathbb{T}$ as a Lebesgue integral is the possibility of converting the ``$Δ$-integral of $\mathbb{T}$'' to a classical integral of $\mathbb{R}$. In this way, we are able to migrate from a calculation that is sometimes not so intuitive to a more friendly calculation. A question that arises, then, is whether the same result can be obtained just using the ideas of integration via Riemann sums, without the need to develop the Lebesgue integral for $\mathbb{T}$. And, in this article, we answer this question affirmatively: In fact, for integrable functions an analogous result is valid by converting a $Δ$-integral over $\mathbb{T}$ to a riemannian integral of $\mathbb{R}$.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is driving transformative changes across numerous fields, revolutionizing conventional processes and creating new opportunities for innovation. The development of mechatronic systems is undergoing a similar transformation. Over the past decade, modeling, simulation, and optimization techniques have become integral to the design process, paving the way for the adoption of AI-based methods. In this paper, we examine the potential for integrating AI into the engineering design process, using the V-model from the VDI guideline 2206, considered the state-of-the-art in product design, as a foundation. We identify and classify AI methods based on their suitability for specific stages within the engineering product design workflow. Furthermore, we present a series of application examples where AI-assisted design has been successfully implemented by the authors. These examples, drawn from research projects within the DFG Priority Program \emph{SPP~2353: Daring More Intelligence - Design Assistants in Mechanics and Dynamics}, showcase a diverse range of applications across mechanics and mechatronics, including areas such as acoustics and robotics.
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are widely applied across domains and have shown strong effectiveness. As DNN workloads increasingly run on CPUs, dedicated Matrix Processing Units (MPUs) and Matrix Instruction Set Architectures (ISAs) have been introduced. At the same time, sparsity techniques are widely adopted in algorithms to reduce computational cost. Despite these advances, insufficient hardware-algorithm co-optimization leads to suboptimal performance. On the memory side, sparse DNNs incur irregular access patterns that cause high cache miss rates. While runahead execution is a promising prefetching technique, its direct application to MPUs is often ineffective due to significant prefetch redundancy. On the compute side, stride constraints in current Matrix ISAs prevent the densification of multiple logically related sparse operations, resulting in poor utilization of MPU processing elements. To address these irregularities, we propose DARE, an irregularity-tolerant MPU with a Densifying ISA and filtered Runahead Execution. DARE extends the ISA to support densifying sparse operations and equips a lightweight runahead mechanism with filtering capability. Experimental results show
Non-linear detection schemes can substantially improve the achievable throughput and connectivity capabilities of uplink MU-MIMO systems that employ linear detection. However, the complexity requirements of existing non-linear soft detectors that provide substantial gains compared to linear ones are at least an order of magnitude more complex, making their adoption challenging. In particular, joint soft information computation involves solving multiple vector minimization problems, each with a complexity that scales exponentially with the number of users. This work introduces a novel ultra-low-complexity, non-linear detection scheme that performs joint Detection and Approximate Reliability Estimation (DARE). For the first time, DARE can substantially improve the achievable throughput (e.g., 40%) with less than 2x the complexity of linear MMSE, making non-linear processing extremely practical. To enable this, DARE includes a novel procedure to approximate the reliability of the received bits based on the region of the received observable that can efficiently approach the accurately calculated soft detection performance. In addition, we show that DARE can achieve a better throughput
Autonomous robot exploration requires a robot to efficiently explore and map unknown environments. Compared to conventional methods that can only optimize paths based on the current robot belief, learning-based methods show the potential to achieve improved performance by drawing on past experiences to reason about unknown areas. In this paper, we propose DARE, a novel generative approach that leverages diffusion models trained on expert demonstrations, which can explicitly generate an exploration path through one-time inference. We build DARE upon an attention-based encoder and a diffusion policy model, and introduce ground truth optimal demonstrations for training to learn better patterns for exploration. The trained planner can reason about the partial belief to recognize the potential structure in unknown areas and consider these areas during path planning. Our experiments demonstrate that DARE achieves on-par performance with both conventional and learning-based state-of-the-art exploration planners, as well as good generalizability in both simulations and real-life scenarios.
We analyse the scientific research carried out at the Institute of Physics of the National University of La Plata in the first half of the 20th century, and the cultural and social context in which they were immersed. We focus especially on the activities carried out by the Argentine physicist Ramon G. Loyarte, who was an emblematic personality in the scientific, educational, cultural and political world of Argentina in those years. We discuss his most important works in experimental physics and quantum mechanics, his activities in the management and promotion of science and the international impact of his scientific proposals, as well as the origin of the controversies unleashed by his most daring ideas. For the latter topics we employ a novel tool: we examine the comments on his work published in prestigious international scientific review journals, which help to understand Loyarte's findings in a more comprehensive and contemporary way.
Robotic-assisted surgery (RAS) relies on accurate depth estimation for 3D reconstruction and visualization. While foundation models like Depth Anything Models (DAM) show promise, directly applying them to surgery often yields suboptimal results. Fully fine-tuning on limited surgical data can cause overfitting and catastrophic forgetting, compromising model robustness and generalization. Although Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) addresses some adaptation issues, its uniform parameter distribution neglects the inherent feature hierarchy, where earlier layers, learning more general features, require more parameters than later ones. To tackle this issue, we introduce Depth Anything in Robotic Endoscopic Surgery (DARES), a novel approach that employs a new adaptation technique, Vector Low-Rank Adaptation (Vector-LoRA) on the DAM V2 to perform self-supervised monocular depth estimation in RAS scenes. To enhance learning efficiency, we introduce Vector-LoRA by integrating more parameters in earlier layers and gradually decreasing parameters in later layers. We also design a reprojection loss based on the multi-scale SSIM error to enhance depth perception by better tailoring the foundation model
Offline-to-online reinforcement learning (O2O RL) faces a central challenge between retaining offline conservatism and adapting to online feedback under distribution shift. This challenge arises because data behavior evolves during fine-tuning, rendering data origin a misleading basis for constraint handling and thereby leading to objective-data mismatch. We therefore propose Dynamic Alignment for RElaxation (DARE), a distribution-aware framework for sample-level constraint relaxation based on the behavioral consistency with a behavior model. To our knowledge, DARE is the first to condition constraint relaxation on behavioral consistency via a posterior-induced exchange mechanism, moving beyond a binary offline/online data distinction. Importantly, DARE requires only per-sample behavioral alignment, enabling instantiation on top of many offline algorithms with flexible choices of behavior models and fine-tuning objectives. We provide a theoretical analysis showing that behavior-based sample exchange consistently improves the distinction between offline-like and online-like subsets. Experiments on D4RL demonstrate that DARE consistently improves fine-tuning stability and achieves su