Geological CO2 storage (GCS) involves injecting captured CO2 into deep subsurface formations to support climate goals. The effective management of GCS relies on adaptive injection planning to dynamically control injection rates and well pressures to balance both storage safety and efficiency. Prior literature, including numerical optimization methods and surrogate-optimization methods, is limited by real-world GCS requirements of smooth state transitions and goal-directed planning within limited time. To address these limitations, we propose a Brownian Bridge–augmented framework for surrogate simulation and injection planning in GCS and develop two insights (i) Brownian bridge as smooth state regularizer for better surrogate simulator; (ii) Brownian bridge as goal-time-conditioned planning guidance for better injection planning. Our method has three stages: (i) learning deep Brownian bridge representations with contrastive and reconstructive losses from historical reservoir and utility trajectories, (ii) incorporating Brownian bridge-based next state interpolation for simulator regularization (iii) guiding injection planning with Brownian utility-conditioned trajectories to generate high-quality injection plans. Experimental results across multiple datasets collected from diverse GCS settings demonstrate that our framework consistently improves simulation fidelity and planning effectiveness while maintaining low computational overhead.

Reasoning is a key component of language understanding in Large Language Models. While Chain-of-Thought prompting enhances performance via explicit intermediate steps, it suffers from sufficient token overhead and a fixed reasoning trajectory, preventing step-wise refinement. Recent advances in latent reasoning address these limitations by refining internal reasoning processes directly in the model’s latent space, without producing explicit outputs. However, a key challenge remains: how to effectively update reasoning embeddings during post-training to guide the model toward more accurate solutions. To overcome this challenge, we propose a lightweight post-training framework that refines latent reasoning trajectories using two novel strategies: (1) Contrastive reasoning feedback, which compares reasoning embeddings against strong and weak baselines to infer effective update directions via embedding enhancement; (2) Residual embedding refinement, which stabilizes updates by progressively integrating current and historical gradients, enabling fast yet controlled convergence. Extensive experiments and case studies are conducted on five reasoning benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Notably, a +5% accuracy gain on MathQA without additional training.

Tabular data is one of the most widely used formats across industries, driving critical applications in areas such as finance, healthcare, and marketing. In the era of data-centric AI, improving data quality and representation has become essential for enhancing model performance, particularly in applications centered around tabular data. This survey examines the key aspects of tabular data-centric AI, emphasizing feature selection and feature generation as essential techniques for data space refinement. We provide a systematic review of feature selection methods, which identify and retain the most relevant data attributes, and feature generation approaches, which create new features to simplify the capture of complex data patterns. This survey offers a comprehensive overview of current methodologies through an analysis of recent advancements, practical applications, and the strengths and limitations of these techniques. Finally, we outline open challenges and suggest future perspectives to inspire continued innovation in this field.

Feature transformation involves generating a new set of features from the original dataset to enhance the data's utility. In certain domains like material performance screening, dimensionality is large and collecting labels is expensive and lengthy. It highly necessitates transforming feature spaces efficiently and without supervision to enhance data readiness and AI utility. However, existing methods fall short in efficient navigation of a vast space of feature combinations, and are mostly designed for supervised settings. To fill this gap, our unique perspective is to leverage a generator-critic duet-play teaming framework using LLM agents and in-context learning to derive pseudo-supervision from unsupervised data. The framework consists of three interconnected steps: (1) Critic agent diagnoses data to generate actionable advice, (2) Generator agent produces tokenized feature transformations guided by the critic's advice, and (3) Iterative refinement ensures continuous improvement through feedback between agents. The generator-critic framework can be generalized to human-agent collaborative generation, by replacing the critic agent with human experts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms even supervised baselines in feature transformation efficiency, robustness, and practical applicability across diverse datasets. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/NanxuGong/LPFG.

Feature Transformation (FT) crafts new features from original ones via mathematical operations to enhance dataset expressiveness for downstream models. However, existing FT methods exhibit critical limitations: discrete search struggles with enormous combinatorial spaces, impeding practical use; and continuous search, being highly sensitive to initialization and step sizes, often becomes trapped in local optima, restricting global exploration. To overcome these limitations, DIFFT redefines FT as a reward-guided generative task. It first learns a compact and expressive latent space for feature sets using a Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE). A Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) then navigates this space to generate high-quality feature embeddings, its trajectory guided by a performance evaluator towards task-specific optima. This synthesis of global distribution learning (from LDM) and targeted optimization (reward guidance) produces potent embeddings, which a novel semi-autoregressive decoder efficiently converts into structured, discrete features, preserving intra-feature dependencies while allowing parallel inter-feature generation. Extensive experiments on 14 benchmark datasets show DIFFT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in predictive accuracy and robustness, with significantly lower training and inference times.

Recently, the astonishing performance of large language models (LLMs) in natural language comprehension and generation tasks triggered lots of exploration of using them as central controllers to build agent systems. Multiple studies focus on bridging the LLMs to external tools to extend the application scenarios. However, the current LLMs' ability to perceive tool use is limited to a single text query, which may result in ambiguity in understanding the users' real intentions. LLMs are expected to eliminate that by perceiving the information in the visual-or auditory-grounded instructions. Therefore, in this paper, we propose MLLM-Tool, a system incorporating open-source LLMs and multi-modal encoders so that the learned LLMs can be conscious of multi-modal input instruction and then select the function-matched tool correctly. To facilitate the evaluation of the model's capability, we collect a dataset featuring multi-modal input tools from HuggingFace. Another essential feature of our dataset is that it also contains multiple potential choices for the same instruction due to the existence of identical functions and synonymous functions, which provides more potential solutions for the same query. The experiments reveal that our MLLM-Tool is capable of recommending appropriate tools for multi-modal instructions. Codes and data are available at github.com/MLLM-Tool/MLLM-Tool.

Indoor scene generation aims at creating shape-compatible, style-consistent furniture arrangements within a spatially reasonable layout. However, most existing approaches primarily focus on generating plausible furniture layouts without incorporating specific details related to individual furniture. To address this limitation, we propose a two-stage model integrating shape priors into the indoor scene generation by encoding furniture as anchor latent representations. In the first stage, we employ discrete vector quantization to encode each piece of furniture as anchor-latents. Based on the anchor-latents representation, the shape and location information of furniture was characterized by a concatenation of location, size, orientation, class, and our anchor latent. In the second stage, we leverage a transformer model to predict indoor scenes configuration autoregressively. Thanks to the proposed anchor-latents representations, our generative model can synthesis furniture in diverse shapes and produce physically plausible arrangements with shape-compatible and style-consistent furniture. Furthermore, our method facilitates various human interaction applications, such as style-consistent scene completion, object mismatch correction, and controllable object-level editing. Experimental results on the 3D-Front dataset demonstrate that our approach can generate more consistent and compatible indoor scenes compared to existing methods, even without shape retrieval. Additionally, extensive ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of our design choices in the indoor scene generation model.

Sequential video understanding, as an emerging video understanding task, has driven lots of researchers' attention because of its goal-oriented nature. This paper studies weakly supervised sequential video understanding where the accurate time-stamp level text-video alignment is not provided. We solve this task by borrowing ideas from CLIP. Specifically, we use a transformer to aggregate frame-level features for video representation and use a pre-trained text encoder to encode the texts corresponding to each action and the whole video, respectively. To model the correspondence between text and video, we propose a multiple granularity loss, where the video-paragraph contrastive loss enforces matching between the whole video and the complete script, and a fine-grained frame-sentence contrastive loss enforces the matching between each action and its description. As the frame-sentence correspondence is not available, we propose to use the fact that video actions happen sequentially in the temporal domain to generate pseudo frame-sentence correspondence and supervise the network training with the pseudo labels. Extensive experiments on video sequence verification and text-to-video matching show that our method outperforms baselines by a large margin, which validates the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Code is available at https://github.com/svip-lab/WeakSVR.

Counting repetitive actions are widely seen in human activities such as physical exercise. Existing methods focus on performing repetitive action counting in short videos, which is tough for dealing with longer videos in more realistic scenarios. In the data-driven era, the degradation of such generalization capability is mainly attributed to the lack of long video datasets. To complement this margin, we introduce a new large-scale repetitive action counting dataset covering a wide variety of video lengths, along with more realistic situations where action interruption or action inconsistencies occur in the video. Besides, we also provide a fine-grained annotation of the action cycles instead of just counting annotation along with a numerical value. Such a dataset contains 1,451 videos with about 20,000 annotations, which is more challenging. For repetitive action counting towards more realistic scenarios, we further propose encoding multi-scale temporal correlation with transformers that can take into account both performance and efficiency. Furthermore, with the help of fine-grained annotation of action cycles, we propose a density map regression-based method to predict the action period, which yields better performance with sufficient interpretability. Our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on all datasets and also achieves better performance on the unseen dataset without fine-tuning. The dataset and code are available11https://svip-lab.github.io/dataset/RepCount_dataset.html.