Daily Papers

Generative video models have significantly advanced the photorealistic synthesis of adverse weather for autonomous driving; however, they consistently demand massive datasets to learn rare weather scenarios. While 3D-aware editing methods alleviate these data constraints by augmenting existing video footage, they are fundamentally bottlenecked by costly per-scene optimization and suffer from inherent geometric and illumination entanglement. In this work, we introduce AutoWeather4D, a feed-forward 3D-aware weather editing framework designed to explicitly decouple geometry and illumination. At the core of our approach is a G-buffer Dual-pass Editing mechanism. The Geometry Pass leverages explicit structural foundations to enable surface-anchored physical interactions, while the Light Pass analytically resolves light transport, accumulating the contributions of local illuminants into the global illumination to enable dynamic 3D local relighting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AutoWeather4D achieves comparable photorealism and structural consistency to generative baselines while enabling fine-grained parametric physical control, serving as a practical data engine for autonomous driving.

Latent space is rapidly emerging as a native substrate for language-based models. While modern systems are still commonly understood through explicit token-level generation, an increasing body of work shows that many critical internal processes are more naturally carried out in continuous latent space than in human-readable verbal traces. This shift is driven by the structural limitations of explicit-space computation, including linguistic redundancy, discretization bottlenecks, sequential inefficiency, and semantic loss. This survey aims to provide a unified and up-to-date landscape of latent space in language-based models. We organize the survey into five sequential perspectives: Foundation, Evolution, Mechanism, Ability, and Outlook. We begin by delineating the scope of latent space, distinguishing it from explicit or verbal space and from the latent spaces commonly studied in generative visual models. We then trace the field's evolution from early exploratory efforts to the current large-scale expansion. To organize the technical landscape, we examine existing work through the complementary lenses of mechanism and ability. From the perspective of Mechanism, we identify four major lines of development: Architecture, Representation, Computation, and Optimization. From the perspective of Ability, we show how latent space supports a broad capability spectrum spanning Reasoning, Planning, Modeling, Perception, Memory, Collaboration, and Embodiment. Beyond consolidation, we discuss the key open challenges, and outline promising directions for future research. We hope this survey serves not only as a reference for existing work, but also as a foundation for understanding latent space as a general computational and systems paradigm for next-generation intelligence.

Automated analysis for engineering structures offers considerable potential for boosting efficiency by minimizing repetitive tasks. Although AI-driven methods are increasingly common, no systematic framework yet leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) for automatic structural analysis. To address this gap, we propose a novel framework that integrates LLMs with structural analysis software. LLMs serve as the core engine: they parse structural descriptions from text and translate them into executable Python scripts. Moreover, the framework integrates the generative capabilities of LLMs with code-based finite element (FE) tools like OpenSeesPy. It employs domain-specific prompt design and in-context learning strategies to enhance the LLM's problem-solving capabilities and generative stability, enabling fully automated structural analysis from descriptive text to model outputs. In our experiments, we introduce a well-curated small-scale benchmark dataset of 20 structural analysis word problems (SAWPs) with ground-truth solutions and evaluate the performance of different LLMs within our framework in solving these SAWPs. The role of system instructions, crafted by structural engineers, is also investigated to understand their impact on LLM-driven structural analysis. Additionally, the generative stability of our framework is examined. Through multiple validation experiments on the benchmark, our results demonstrate that the proposed framework can substantially increase the level of automation in solving SAWPs compared to traditional methods. Quantitatively, the framework, built on GPT-4o, achieved 100% accuracy, surpassing GPT-4 (85%), Gemini 1.5 Pro (80%), and Llama-3.3 (30%) on the test examples. Furthermore, integrating domain-specific instructions enhanced performance by 30% on problems with asymmetrical structural configurations.

Structural modeling is a fundamental component of computational engineering science, in which even minor physical inconsistencies or specification violations may invalidate downstream simulations. The potential of large language models (LLMs) for automatic generation of modeling code has been demonstrated. However, non-executable or physically inconsistent outputs remain prevalent under stringent engineering constraints. A framework for physics-consistent automatic building modeling is therefore proposed, integrating domain knowledge construction, constraint-oriented model alignment, and verification-driven evaluation. CivilInstruct is introduced as a domain-specific dataset that formalizes structural engineering knowledge and constraint reasoning to enable simulation-ready model generation. A two-stage fine-tuning strategy is further employed to enforce constraint satisfaction and application programming interface compliance, substantially reducing hallucinated and non-conforming outputs. MBEval is presented as a verification-driven benchmark that evaluates executability and structural dynamics consistency through closed-loop validation. Experimental results show consistent improvements over baselines across rigorous verification metrics. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jovanqing/AutoBM.

We propose PROSE-FD, a zero-shot multimodal PDE foundational model for simultaneous prediction of heterogeneous two-dimensional physical systems related to distinct fluid dynamics settings. These systems include shallow water equations and the Navier-Stokes equations with incompressible and compressible flow, regular and complex geometries, and different buoyancy settings. This work presents a new transformer-based multi-operator learning approach that fuses symbolic information to perform operator-based data prediction, i.e. non-autoregressive. By incorporating multiple modalities in the inputs, the PDE foundation model builds in a pathway for including mathematical descriptions of the physical behavior. We pre-train our foundation model on 6 parametric families of equations collected from 13 datasets, including over 60K trajectories. Our model outperforms popular operator learning, computer vision, and multi-physics models, in benchmark forward prediction tasks. We test our architecture choices with ablation studies.

Traditional foundation models are pre-trained on broad datasets to reduce the training resources (e.g., time, energy, labeled samples) needed for fine-tuning a wide range of downstream tasks. However, traditional foundation models struggle with out-of-distribution prediction and can produce outputs that are unrealistic and physically infeasible. We propose the notation of physics-guided foundation models (PGFM), that is, foundation models integrated with broad or general domain (e.g., scientific) physical knowledge applicable to a wide range of downstream tasks.

Recent advances in mechanistic interpretability have revealed that large language models (LLMs) develop internal representations corresponding not only to concrete entities but also distinct, human-understandable abstract concepts and behaviour. Moreover, these hidden features can be directly manipulated to steer model behaviour. However, it remains an open question whether this phenomenon is unique to models trained on inherently structured data (ie. language, images) or if it is a general property of foundation models. In this work, we investigate the internal representations of a large physics-focused foundation model. Inspired by recent work identifying single directions in activation space for complex behaviours in LLMs, we extract activation vectors from the model during forward passes over simulation datasets for different physical regimes. We then compute "delta" representations between the two regimes. These delta tensors act as concept directions in activation space, encoding specific physical features. By injecting these concept directions back into the model during inference, we can steer its predictions, demonstrating causal control over physical behaviours, such as inducing or removing some particular physical feature from a simulation. These results suggest that scientific foundation models learn generalised representations of physical principles. They do not merely rely on superficial correlations and patterns in the simulations. Our findings open new avenues for understanding and controlling scientific foundation models and has implications for AI-enabled scientific discovery.

AI is undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of models (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. We call these models foundation models to underscore their critically central yet incomplete character. This report provides a thorough account of the opportunities and risks of foundation models, ranging from their capabilities (e.g., language, vision, robotics, reasoning, human interaction) and technical principles(e.g., model architectures, training procedures, data, systems, security, evaluation, theory) to their applications (e.g., law, healthcare, education) and societal impact (e.g., inequity, misuse, economic and environmental impact, legal and ethical considerations). Though foundation models are based on standard deep learning and transfer learning, their scale results in new emergent capabilities,and their effectiveness across so many tasks incentivizes homogenization. Homogenization provides powerful leverage but demands caution, as the defects of the foundation model are inherited by all the adapted models downstream. Despite the impending widespread deployment of foundation models, we currently lack a clear understanding of how they work, when they fail, and what they are even capable of due to their emergent properties. To tackle these questions, we believe much of the critical research on foundation models will require deep interdisciplinary collaboration commensurate with their fundamentally sociotechnical nature.

Foundation models have emerged as effective backbones for many vision tasks. However, current self-supervised features entangle high-level semantics with low-level physical factors, such as geometry and illumination, hindering their use in tasks requiring explicit physical reasoning. In this paper, we introduce Φeat, a novel physically-grounded visual backbone that encourages a representation sensitive to material identity, including reflectance cues and geometric mesostructure. Our key idea is to employ a pretraining strategy that contrasts spatial crops and physical augmentations of the same material under varying shapes and lighting conditions. While similar data have been used in high-end supervised tasks such as intrinsic decomposition or material estimation, we demonstrate that a pure self-supervised training strategy, without explicit labels, already provides a strong prior for tasks requiring robust features invariant to external physical factors. We evaluate the learned representations through feature similarity analysis and material selection, showing that Φeat captures physically-grounded structure beyond semantic grouping. These findings highlight the promise of unsupervised physical feature learning as a foundation for physics-aware perception in vision and graphics. These findings highlight the promise of unsupervised physical feature learning as a foundation for physics-aware perception in vision and graphics.

Dense linear layers are the dominant computational bottleneck in foundation models. Identifying more efficient alternatives to dense matrices has enormous potential for building more compute-efficient models, as exemplified by the success of convolutional networks in the image domain. In this work, we systematically explore structured matrices as replacements for dense matrices. We show that different structures often require drastically different initialization scales and learning rates, which are crucial to performance, especially as models scale. Using insights from the Maximal Update Parameterization, we determine the optimal scaling for initialization and learning rates of these unconventional layers. Finally, we measure the scaling laws of different structures to compare how quickly their performance improves with compute. We propose a novel matrix family containing Monarch matrices, the Block Tensor-Train (BTT), which we show performs better than dense matrices for the same compute on multiple tasks. On CIFAR-10/100 with augmentation, BTT achieves exponentially lower training loss than dense when training MLPs and ViTs. BTT matches dense ViT-S/32 performance on ImageNet-1k with 3.8 times less compute and is more efficient than dense for training small GPT-2 language models.

With infinitely many high-quality data points, infinite computational power, an infinitely large foundation model with a perfect training algorithm and guaranteed zero generalization error on the pretext task, can the model be used for everything? This question cannot be answered by the existing theory of representation, optimization or generalization, because the issues they mainly investigate are assumed to be nonexistent here. In this paper, we show that category theory provides powerful machinery to answer this question. We have proved three results. The first one limits the power of prompt-based learning, saying that the model can solve a downstream task with prompts if and only if the task is representable. The second one says fine tuning does not have this limit, as a foundation model with the minimum required power (up to symmetry) can theoretically solve downstream tasks for the category defined by pretext task, with fine tuning and enough resources. Our final result can be seen as a new type of generalization theorem, showing that the foundation model can generate unseen objects from the target category (e.g., images) using the structural information from the source category (e.g., texts). Along the way, we provide a categorical framework for supervised and self-supervised learning, which might be of independent interest.

Adapting pre-trained foundation models for various downstream tasks has been prevalent in artificial intelligence. Due to the vast number of tasks and high costs, adjusting all parameters becomes unfeasible. To mitigate this, several fine-tuning techniques have been developed to update the pre-trained model weights in a more resource-efficient manner, such as through low-rank adjustments. Yet, almost all of these methods focus on linear weights, neglecting the intricacies of parameter spaces in higher dimensions like 4D. Alternatively, some methods can be adapted for high-dimensional parameter space by compressing changes in the original space into two dimensions and then employing low-rank matrix decomposition. However, these approaches destructs the structural integrity of the involved high-dimensional spaces. To tackle the diversity of dimensional spaces across different foundation models and provide a more precise representation of the changes within these spaces, this paper introduces a generalized parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework, FLoRA, designed for various dimensional parameter space. Specifically, utilizing Tucker decomposition, FLoRA asserts that changes in each dimensional parameter space are based on a low-rank core space which maintains the consistent topological structure with the original space. It then models the changes through this core space alongside corresponding weights to reconstruct alterations in the original space. FLoRA effectively preserves the structural integrity of the change of original N-dimensional parameter space, meanwhile decomposes it via low-rank tensor decomposition. Extensive experiments on computer vision, natural language processing and multi-modal tasks validate FLoRA's effectiveness. Codes are available at https://github.com/SJTU-DeepVisionLab/FLoRA.

In this work, we propose a framework that constructs reduced order models for nonlinear structural mechanics in a nonintrusive fashion, and can handle large scale simulations. We identify three steps that are carried out separately in time, and possibly on different devices: (i) the production of high-fidelity solutions by a commercial software, (ii) the offline stage of the model reduction and (iii) the online stage where the reduced order model is exploited. The nonintrusivity assumes that only the displacement field solution is known, and relies on operations on simulation data during the offline phase by using an in-house code. The compatibility with a new commercial code only needs the implementation of a routine converting the mesh and result format into our in-house data format. The nonintrusive capabilities of the framework are demonstrated on numerical experiments using commercial versions of the finite element softwares Zset and Ansys Mechanical. The nonlinear constitutive equations are evaluated by using the same external plugins as for Zset or Ansys Mechanical. The large scale simulations are handled using domain decomposition and parallel computing with distributed memory. The features and performances of the framework are evaluated on two numerical applications involving elastoviscoplastic materials: the second one involves a model of high-pressure blade, where the framework is used to extrapolate cyclic loadings in 6.5 hours, whereas the reference high-fidelity computation would take 9.5 days.

This position paper explores the rapid development of Foundation Models (FMs) in AI and their implications for intelligence and reasoning. It examines the characteristics of FMs, including their training on vast datasets and use of embedding spaces to capture semantic relationships. The paper discusses recent advancements in FMs' reasoning abilities which we argue cannot be attributed to increased model size but to novel training techniques which yield learning phenomena like grokking. It also addresses the challenges in benchmarking FMs and compares their structure to the human brain. We argue that while FMs show promising developments in reasoning and knowledge representation, understanding their inner workings remains a significant challenge, similar to ongoing efforts in neuroscience to comprehend human brain function. Despite having some similarities, fundamental differences between FMs and the structure of human brain warn us against making direct comparisons or expecting neuroscience to provide immediate insights into FM function.

Graph foundation models represent a transformative paradigm for learning transferable representations across diverse graph domains. Recent methods leverage large language models to unify graph and text modalities into a shared representation space using contrastive learning. However, systematic evaluations reveal significant performance degradation at structural boundaries where distinct topological patterns converge, with accuracy losses exceeding 20 percentage points. This issue arises from a key limitation: current methods assume all graph structures can be encoded within a single Euclidean space. In reality, tree structures require hyperbolic geometry to preserve hierarchical branching, while cyclic patterns depend on spherical geometry for closure properties. At structural boundaries, nodes experience conflicting geometric constraints that uniform encoding spaces cannot resolve. This raises a crucial challenge: Can alignment frameworks be designed to respect the intrinsic geometric diversity of graph structures? We introduce GraphShaper, a geometry-aware framework that enhances graph encoding through multi-geometric specialization. Our approach employs expert networks tailored to different geometric spaces, dynamically computing fusion weights to adaptively integrate geometric properties based on local structural characteristics. This adaptive fusion preserves structural integrity before alignment with text embeddings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GraphShaper achieves 9.47\% accuracy improvements on citation networks and 7.63\% on social networks in zero-shot settings.

As LLMs advance their reasoning capabilities about the physical world, the absence of rigorous benchmarks for evaluating their ability to generate scientifically valid physical models has become a critical gap. Computational mechanics, which develops and applies mathematical models and numerical methods to predict the behavior of physical systems under forces, deformation, and constraints, provides an ideal foundation for structured scientific reasoning evaluation. Problems follow clear mathematical structure, enforce strict physical and numerical constraints, and support objective verification. The discipline requires constructing explicit models of physical systems and reasoning about geometry, spatial relationships, and material behavior, connecting directly to emerging AI goals in physical reasoning and world modeling. We introduce FEM-Bench, a computational mechanics benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of LLMs to generate correct finite element method (FEM) and related code. FEM-Bench 2025 contains a suite of introductory but nontrivial tasks aligned with material from a first graduate course on computational mechanics. These tasks capture essential numerical and physical modeling challenges while representing only a small fraction of the complexity present in the discipline. Despite their simplicity, state-of-the-art LLMs do not reliably solve all of them. In a five attempt run, the best performing model at function writing, Gemini 3 Pro, completed 30/33 tasks at least once and 26/33 tasks all five times. The best performing model at unit test writing, GPT-5, had an Average Joint Success Rate of 73.8%. Other popular models showed broad performance variation. FEM-Bench establishes a structured foundation for evaluating AI-generated scientific code, and future iterations will incorporate increasingly sophisticated tasks to track progress as models evolve.

Foundation models are premised on the idea that sequence prediction can uncover deeper domain understanding, much like how Kepler's predictions of planetary motion later led to the discovery of Newtonian mechanics. However, evaluating whether these models truly capture deeper structure remains a challenge. We develop a technique for evaluating foundation models that examines how they adapt to synthetic datasets generated from some postulated world model. Our technique measures whether the foundation model's inductive bias aligns with the world model, and so we refer to it as an inductive bias probe. Across multiple domains, we find that foundation models can excel at their training tasks yet fail to develop inductive biases towards the underlying world model when adapted to new tasks. We particularly find that foundation models trained on orbital trajectories consistently fail to apply Newtonian mechanics when adapted to new physics tasks. Further analysis reveals that these models behave as if they develop task-specific heuristics that fail to generalize.

Generative models trained on internet-scale data are capable of generating novel and realistic texts, images, and videos. A natural next question is whether these models can advance science, for example by generating novel stable materials. Traditionally, models with explicit structures (e.g., graphs) have been used in modeling structural relationships in scientific data (e.g., atoms and bonds in crystals), but generating structures can be difficult to scale to large and complex systems. Another challenge in generating materials is the mismatch between standard generative modeling metrics and downstream applications. For instance, common metrics such as the reconstruction error do not correlate well with the downstream goal of discovering stable materials. In this work, we tackle the scalability challenge by developing a unified crystal representation that can represent any crystal structure (UniMat), followed by training a diffusion probabilistic model on these UniMat representations. Our empirical results suggest that despite the lack of explicit structure modeling, UniMat can generate high fidelity crystal structures from larger and more complex chemical systems, outperforming previous graph-based approaches under various generative modeling metrics. To better connect the generation quality of materials to downstream applications, such as discovering novel stable materials, we propose additional metrics for evaluating generative models of materials, including per-composition formation energy and stability with respect to convex hulls through decomposition energy from Density Function Theory (DFT). Lastly, we show that conditional generation with UniMat can scale to previously established crystal datasets with up to millions of crystals structures, outperforming random structure search (the current leading method for structure discovery) in discovering new stable materials.

This paper presents a pioneering methodology, termed StructTuning, to efficiently transform foundation Large Language Models (LLMs) into domain specialists. It significantly minimizes the training corpus requirement to a mere 0.3% while achieving an impressive 50% of traditional knowledge injection performance. Our method is inspired by the educational processes for human students, particularly how structured domain knowledge from textbooks is absorbed and then applied to tackle real-world challenges through specific exercises. Based on this, we propose a novel two-stage knowledge injection strategy: Structure-aware Continual Pre-Training (SCPT) and Structure-aware Supervised Fine-Tuning (SSFT). In the SCPT phase, we organize the training data into an auto-generated taxonomy of domain knowledge, enabling LLMs to effectively memorize textual segments linked to specific expertise within the taxonomy's architecture. Subsequently, in the SSFT phase, we explicitly prompt models to reveal the underlying knowledge structure in their outputs, leveraging this structured domain insight to address practical problems adeptly. Our ultimate method has undergone extensive evaluations across model architectures and scales, using closed-book question-answering tasks on LongBench and MMedBench datasets. Remarkably, our method matches 50% of the improvement displayed by the state-of-the-art MMedLM2 on MMedBench, but with only 0.3% quantity of the training corpus. This breakthrough showcases the potential to scale up our StructTuning for stronger domain-specific LLMs. Code will be made public soon.

Large pre-trained models, or foundation models, have shown impressive performance when adapted to a variety of downstream tasks, often out-performing specialized models. Hypernetworks, neural networks that generate some or all of the parameters of another neural network, have become an increasingly important technique for conditioning and generalizing implicit neural representations (INRs), which represent signals or objects such as audio or 3D shapes using a neural network. However, despite the potential benefits of incorporating foundation models in hypernetwork methods, this research direction has not been investigated, likely due to the dissimilarity of the weight generation task with other visual tasks. To address this gap, we (1) show how foundation models can improve hypernetworks with Transformer-based architectures, (2) provide an empirical analysis of the benefits of foundation models for hypernetworks through the lens of the generalizable INR task, showing that leveraging foundation models improves performance, generalizability, and data efficiency across a variety of algorithms and modalities. We also provide further analysis in examining the design space of foundation model-based hypernetworks, including examining the choice of foundation models, algorithms, and the effect of scaling foundation models.

3D foundation models (3DFMs) have recently transformed 3D vision, enabling joint prediction of depths, poses, and point maps directly from images. Yet their ability to reason under extreme, non-overlapping views remains largely unexplored. In this work, we study their internal representations and find that 3DFMs exhibit an emergent understanding of extreme-view geometry, despite never being trained for such conditions. To further enhance these capabilities, we introduce a lightweight alignment scheme that refines their internal 3D representation by tuning only a small subset of backbone bias terms, leaving all decoder heads frozen. This targeted adaptation substantially improves relative pose estimation under extreme viewpoints without degrading per-image depth or point quality. Additionally, we contribute MegaUnScene, a new benchmark of Internet scenes unseen by existing 3DFMs, with dedicated test splits for both relative pose estimation and dense 3D reconstruction. All code and data will be released.

Structural topology optimization (TO) is central to engineering design but remains computationally intensive due to complex physics and hard constraints. Existing deep-learning methods are limited to fixed square grids, a few hand-coded boundary conditions, and post-hoc optimization, preventing general deployment. We introduce Optimize Any Topology (OAT), a foundation-model framework that directly predicts minimum-compliance layouts for arbitrary aspect ratios, resolutions, volume fractions, loads, and fixtures. OAT combines a resolution- and shape-agnostic autoencoder with an implicit neural-field decoder and a conditional latent-diffusion model trained on OpenTO, a new corpus of 2.2 million optimized structures covering 2 million unique boundary-condition configurations. On four public benchmarks and two challenging unseen tests, OAT lowers mean compliance up to 90% relative to the best prior models and delivers sub-1 second inference on a single GPU across resolutions from 64 x 64 to 256 x 256 and aspect ratios as high as 10:1. These results establish OAT as a general, fast, and resolution-free framework for physics-aware topology optimization and provide a large-scale dataset to spur further research in generative modeling for inverse design. Code & data can be found at https://github.com/ahnobari/OptimizeAnyTopology.

Structure reasoning is a fundamental capability of large language models (LLMs), enabling them to reason about structured commonsense and answer multi-hop questions. However, existing benchmarks for structure reasoning mainly focus on horizontal and coordinate structures (e.g. graphs), overlooking the hierarchical relationships within them. Hierarchical structure reasoning is crucial for human cognition, particularly in memory organization and problem-solving. It also plays a key role in various real-world tasks, such as information extraction and decision-making. To address this gap, we propose HiBench, the first framework spanning from initial structure generation to final proficiency assessment, designed to benchmark the hierarchical reasoning capabilities of LLMs systematically. HiBench encompasses six representative scenarios, covering both fundamental and practical aspects, and consists of 30 tasks with varying hierarchical complexity, totaling 39,519 queries. To evaluate LLMs comprehensively, we develop five capability dimensions that depict different facets of hierarchical structure understanding. Through extensive evaluation of 20 LLMs from 10 model families, we reveal key insights into their capabilities and limitations: 1) existing LLMs show proficiency in basic hierarchical reasoning tasks; 2) they still struggle with more complex structures and implicit hierarchical representations, especially in structural modification and textual reasoning. Based on these findings, we create a small yet well-designed instruction dataset, which enhances LLMs' performance on HiBench by an average of 88.84\% (Llama-3.1-8B) and 31.38\% (Qwen2.5-7B) across all tasks. The HiBench dataset and toolkit are available here, https://github.com/jzzzzh/HiBench, to encourage evaluation.

Foundation models are a strong trend in deep learning and computer vision. These models serve as a base for applications as they require minor or no further fine-tuning by developers to integrate into their applications. Foundation models for zero-shot object segmentation such as Segment Anything (SAM) output segmentation masks from images without any further object information. When they are followed in a pipeline by an object identification model, they can perform object detection without training. Here, we focus on training such an object identification model. A crucial practical aspect for an object identification model is to be flexible in input size. As object identification is an image retrieval problem, a suitable method should handle multi-query multi-gallery situations without constraining the number of input images (e.g. by having fixed-size aggregation layers). The key solution to train such a model is the centroid triplet loss (CTL), which aggregates image features to their centroids. CTL yields high accuracy, avoids misleading training signals and keeps the model input size flexible. In our experiments, we establish a new state of the art on the ArmBench object identification task, which shows general applicability of our model. We furthermore demonstrate an integrated unseen object detection pipeline on the challenging HOPE dataset, which requires fine-grained detection. There, our pipeline matches and surpasses related methods which have been trained on dataset-specific data.

Foundation models are vital tools in various Computer Vision applications. They take as input a single RGB image and output a deep feature representation that is useful for various applications. However, in case we have multiple views of the same 3D scene, they operate on each image independently and do not always produce consistent features for the same 3D point. We propose a way to convert a Foundation Model into a Multi-View Foundation Model. Such a model takes as input a set of images and outputs a feature map for each image such that the features of corresponding points are as consistent as possible. This approach bypasses the need to build a consistent 3D model of the features and allows direct manipulation in the image space. Specifically, we show how to augment Transformers-based foundation models (i.e., DINO, SAM, CLIP) with intermediate 3D-aware attention layers that help match features across different views. As leading examples, we show surface normal estimation and multi-view segmentation tasks. Quantitative experiments show that our method improves feature matching considerably compared to current foundation models.

Foundation models (FMs) are able to leverage large volumes of unlabeled data to demonstrate superior performance across a wide range of tasks. However, FMs developed for biomedical domains have largely remained unimodal, i.e., independently trained and used for tasks on protein sequences alone, small molecule structures alone, or clinical data alone. To overcome this limitation of biomedical FMs, we present BioBridge, a novel parameter-efficient learning framework, to bridge independently trained unimodal FMs to establish multimodal behavior. BioBridge achieves it by utilizing Knowledge Graphs (KG) to learn transformations between one unimodal FM and another without fine-tuning any underlying unimodal FMs. Our empirical results demonstrate that BioBridge can beat the best baseline KG embedding methods (on average by around 76.3%) in cross-modal retrieval tasks. We also identify BioBridge demonstrates out-of-domain generalization ability by extrapolating to unseen modalities or relations. Additionally, we also show that BioBridge presents itself as a general purpose retriever that can aid biomedical multimodal question answering as well as enhance the guided generation of novel drugs.

We consider the matrix composite materials (CM) of either random (statistically homogeneous or inhomogeneous), periodic, or deterministic (neither random nor periodic) structures. CMs exhibit linear or nonlinear behavior, coupled or uncoupled multi-physical phenomena, locally elastic, weakly nonlocal (strain gradient and stress gradient), or strongly nonlocal (strain-type and displacement-type, peridynamics) phase properties. A modified Computational Analytical Micromechanics (CAM) approach introduces an exact Additive General Integral Equation (AGIE) for CMs of any structure and phase properties mentioned above. The unified iteration solution of static AGIEs is adapted to the body force with compact support serving as a fundamentally new universal training parameter. The approach also establishes a critical threshold for filtering out unsuitable sub-datasets of effective parameters through a novel Representative Volume Element (RVE) concept, which extends Hill's classical framework. This RVE concept eliminates sample size, boundary layer, and edge effects, making it applicable to CMs of any structure and phase properties, regardless of local or nonlocal, linear or nonlinear. Incorporating this new RVE concept into machine learning and neural network techniques enables the construction of any unpredefined surrogate nonlocal operators. The methodology is structured as a modular, block-based framework, allowing independent development and refinement of software components. This flexible, robust AGIE-CAM framework integrates data-driven, multi-scale, and multi-physics modeling, accelerating research in CM of any microtopology and phase properties considered. The AGIE-CAM framework represents a groundbreaking paradigm shift in the micromechanics of composites, redefining the very philosophy that underpins our understanding of their behavior at the microscopic level.

The lifting of 3D structure and camera from 2D landmarks is at the cornerstone of the entire discipline of computer vision. Traditional methods have been confined to specific rigid objects, such as those in Perspective-n-Point (PnP) problems, but deep learning has expanded our capability to reconstruct a wide range of object classes (e.g. C3PDO and PAUL) with resilience to noise, occlusions, and perspective distortions. All these techniques, however, have been limited by the fundamental need to establish correspondences across the 3D training data -- significantly limiting their utility to applications where one has an abundance of "in-correspondence" 3D data. Our approach harnesses the inherent permutation equivariance of transformers to manage varying number of points per 3D data instance, withstands occlusions, and generalizes to unseen categories. We demonstrate state of the art performance across 2D-3D lifting task benchmarks. Since our approach can be trained across such a broad class of structures we refer to it simply as a 3D Lifting Foundation Model (3D-LFM) -- the first of its kind.

Artificial intelligence in construction increasingly depends on structured representations such as Building Information Models and knowledge graphs, yet early-stage building designs are predominantly created as flexible boundary-representation (B-rep) models that lack explicit spatial, semantic, and performance structure. This paper presents a robust, fully automated framework that transforms unstructured B-rep geometry into knowledge-graph-based Building Information Models and further into executable Building Energy Models. The framework enables artificial intelligence to explicitly interpret building elements, spatial topology, and their associated thermal and performance attributes. It integrates automated geometry cleansing, multiple auto space-generation strategies, graph-based extraction of space and element topology, ontology-aligned knowledge modeling, and reversible transformation between ontology-based BIM and EnergyPlus energy models. Validation on parametric, sketch-based, and real-world building datasets demonstrates high robustness, consistent topological reconstruction, and reliable performance-model generation. By bridging design models, BIM, and BEM, the framework provides an AI-oriented infrastructure that extends BIM- and graph-based intelligence pipelines to flexible early-stage design geometry, enabling performance-driven design exploration and optimization by learning-based methods.

Machine learning (ML) is increasingly used in structural engineering and design, yet its broader adoption is hampered by the lack of openly accessible datasets of structural systems. We introduce BridgeNet, a publicly available graph-based dataset of 20,000 form-found bridge structures aimed at enabling Graph ML and multi-modal learning in the context of conceptual structural design. Each datapoint consists of (i) a pin-jointed equilibrium wireframe model generated with the Combinatorial Equilibrium Modeling (CEM) form-finding method, (ii) a volumetric 3D mesh obtained through force-informed materialization, and (iii) rendered images from two canonical camera angles. The resulting dataset is modality-rich and application-agnostic, supporting tasks such as CEM-specific edge classification and parameter inference, surrogate modeling of form-finding, cross-modal reconstruction between graphs, meshes and images, and generative structural design. BridgeNet addresses a key bottleneck in data-driven applications for structural engineering and design by providing a dataset that facilitates the development of new ML-based approaches for equilibrium bridge structures.

Tabular foundation models represent a growing paradigm in structured data learning, extending the benefits of large-scale pretraining to tabular domains. However, their adoption remains limited due to heterogeneous preprocessing pipelines, fragmented APIs, inconsistent fine-tuning procedures, and the absence of standardized evaluation for deployment-oriented metrics such as calibration and fairness. We present TabTune, a unified library that standardizes the complete workflow for tabular foundation models through a single interface. TabTune provides consistent access to seven state-of-the-art models supporting multiple adaptation strategies, including zero-shot inference, meta-learning, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). The framework automates model-aware preprocessing, manages architectural heterogeneity internally, and integrates evaluation modules for performance, calibration, and fairness. Designed for extensibility and reproducibility, TabTune enables consistent benchmarking of adaptation strategies of tabular foundation models. The library is open source and available at https://github.com/Lexsi-Labs/TabTune .

Foundation models encompass an extensive knowledge base and offer remarkable transferability. However, this knowledge becomes outdated or insufficient over time. The challenge lies in continuously updating foundation models to accommodate novel information while retaining their original capabilities. Leveraging the fact that foundation models have initial knowledge on various tasks and domains, we propose a novel approach that, instead of updating all parameters equally, localizes the updates to a sparse set of parameters relevant to the task being learned. We strike a balance between efficiency and new task performance, while maintaining the transferability and generalizability of foundation models. We extensively evaluate our method on foundational vision-language models with a diverse spectrum of continual learning tasks. Our method achieves improvements on the accuracy of the newly learned tasks up to 7% while preserving the pretraining knowledge with a negligible decrease of 0.9% on a representative control set accuracy.

Artefact descriptions are the primary carriers of engineering design knowledge that is both an outcome and a driver of the design process. While an artefact could be described in different connotations, the design process requires a description to embody engineering design knowledge, which is expressed in the text through intricate placement of entities and relationships. As large-language models learn from all kinds of text merely as a sequence of characters/tokens, these are yet to generate text that embodies explicit engineering design facts. Existing ontological design theories are less likely to guide the large-language models whose applications are currently limited to ideation and learning purposes. In this article, we explicate engineering design knowledge as knowledge graphs from a large sample of 33,881 patent documents. We examine the constituents of these knowledge graphs to understand the linguistic and structural basis of engineering design knowledge. In terms of linguistic basis, we observe that entities and relationships could be generalised to 64 and 24 linguistic syntaxes. While relationships mainly capture attributes ('of'), structure ('in', 'with'), purpose ('to', 'for'), hierarchy ('include'), exemplification ('such as'), and behaviour ('to', 'from'), the hierarchical relationships could specifically be identified using 75 unique syntaxes. To understand the structural basis, we draw inspiration from various studies on biological/ecological networks and discover motifs from patent knowledge graphs. We identify four 3-node and four 4-node patterns that could further be converged and simplified into sequence [->...->], aggregation [->...<-], and hierarchy [<-...->]. Expected to guide large-language model based design tools, we propose few regulatory precepts for concretising abstract entities and relationships within subgraphs, while explicating hierarchical structures.

Foundation models (FMs) have shown transformative potential in radiology by performing diverse, complex tasks across imaging modalities. Here, we developed CT-FM, a large-scale 3D image-based pre-trained model designed explicitly for various radiological tasks. CT-FM was pre-trained using 148,000 computed tomography (CT) scans from the Imaging Data Commons through label-agnostic contrastive learning. We evaluated CT-FM across four categories of tasks, namely, whole-body and tumor segmentation, head CT triage, medical image retrieval, and semantic understanding, showing superior performance against state-of-the-art models. Beyond quantitative success, CT-FM demonstrated the ability to cluster regions anatomically and identify similar anatomical and structural concepts across scans. Furthermore, it remained robust across test-retest settings and indicated reasonable salient regions attached to its embeddings. This study demonstrates the value of large-scale medical imaging foundation models and by open-sourcing the model weights, code, and data, aims to support more adaptable, reliable, and interpretable AI solutions in radiology.

Large-scale foundation models have demonstrated exceptional performance in language and vision tasks. However, the numerous dense matrix-vector operations involved in these large networks pose significant computational challenges during inference. To address these challenges, we introduce the Block-Level Adaptive STructured (BLAST) matrix, designed to learn and leverage efficient structures prevalent in the weight matrices of linear layers within deep learning models. Compared to existing structured matrices, the BLAST matrix offers substantial flexibility, as it can represent various types of structures that are either learned from data or computed from pre-existing weight matrices. We demonstrate the efficiency of using the BLAST matrix for compressing both language and vision tasks, showing that (i) for medium-sized models such as ViT and GPT-2, training with BLAST weights boosts performance while reducing complexity by 70% and 40%, respectively; and (ii) for large foundation models such as Llama-7B and DiT-XL, the BLAST matrix achieves a 2x compression while exhibiting the lowest performance degradation among all tested structured matrices. Our code is available at https://github.com/changwoolee/BLAST.

Structural biology relies on accurate three-dimensional biomolecular structures to advance our understanding of biological functions, disease mechanisms, and therapeutics. While recent advances in deep learning have enabled the development of all-atom foundation models for molecular modeling and generation, existing approaches face challenges in generalization due to the multi-modal nature of atomic data and the lack of comprehensive analysis of training and sampling strategies. To address these limitations, we propose PharMolixFM, a unified framework for constructing all-atom foundation models based on multi-modal generative techniques. Our framework includes three variants using state-of-the-art multi-modal generative models. By formulating molecular tasks as a generalized denoising process with task-specific priors, PharMolixFM achieves robust performance across various structural biology applications. Experimental results demonstrate that PharMolixFM-Diff achieves competitive prediction accuracy in protein-small-molecule docking (83.9% vs. 90.2% RMSD < 2Å, given pocket) with significantly improved inference speed. Moreover, we explore the empirical inference scaling law by introducing more sampling repeats or steps. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/PharMolix/OpenBioMed.

Despite the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, they still struggle with tasks that require generating complex, structured outputs. In this study, we assess the capability of Current LLMs in generating complex structured data and propose a structure-aware fine-tuning approach as a solution to improve this ability. To perform a comprehensive evaluation, we propose Struc-Bench, include five representative LLMs (i.e., GPT-NeoX 20B, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Vicuna) and evaluate them on our carefully constructed datasets spanning raw text, HTML, and LaTeX tables. Based on our analysis of current model performance, we identify specific common formatting errors and areas of potential improvement. To address complex formatting requirements, we utilize FormatCoT (Chain-of-Thought) to generate format instructions from target outputs. Our experiments show that our structure-aware fine-tuning method, when applied to LLaMA-7B, significantly improves adherence to natural language constraints, outperforming other evaluated LLMs. Based on these results, we present an ability map of model capabilities from six dimensions (i.e., coverage, formatting, reasoning, comprehension, pragmatics, and hallucination). This map highlights the weaknesses of LLMs in handling complex structured outputs and suggests promising directions for future work. Our code and models can be found at https://github.com/gersteinlab/Struc-Bench.

Relational Databases (RDBs) are the backbone of modern business, yet they lack foundation models comparable to those in text or vision. A key obstacle is that high-quality RDBs are private, scarce and structurally heterogeneous, making internet-scale pre-training infeasible. To overcome this data scarcity, We introduce RDB-PFN, the first relational foundation model trained purely via synthetic data. Inspired by Prior-Data Fitted Networks (PFNs) where synthetic data generated from Structural Causal Models (SCMs) enables reasoning on single tables, we design a Relational Prior Generator to create an infinite stream of diverse RDBs from scratch. Pre-training on over 2 million synthetic single-table and relational tasks, RDB-PFN learns to adapt to any new database instantly via genuine in-context learning. Experiments verify RDB-PFN achieves strong few-shot performance on 19 real-world relational prediction tasks, outperforming graph-based and single-table foundation-model baselines (given the same DFS-linearized inputs), while using a lightweight architecture and fast inference. The code is available at https://github.com/MuLabPKU/RDBPFN

With the rise of powerful foundation models, a pre-training-fine-tuning paradigm becomes increasingly popular these days: A foundation model is pre-trained using a huge amount of data from various sources, and then the downstream users only need to fine-tune and adapt it to specific downstream tasks. However, due to the high computation complexity of adversarial training, it is not feasible to fine-tune the foundation model to improve its robustness on the downstream task. Observing the above challenge, we want to improve the downstream robustness without updating/accessing the weights in the foundation model. Inspired from existing literature in robustness inheritance (Kim et al., 2020), through theoretical investigation, we identify a close relationship between robust contrastive learning with the adversarial robustness of supervised learning. To further validate and utilize this theoretical insight, we design a simple-yet-effective robust auto-encoder as a data pre-processing method before feeding the data into the foundation model. The proposed approach has zero access to the foundation model when training the robust auto-encoder. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in improving the robustness of downstream tasks, verifying the connection between the feature robustness (implied by small adversarial contrastive loss) and the robustness of the downstream task.

Neural surrogates and operator networks for solving partial differential equation (PDE) problems have attracted significant research interest in recent years. However, most existing approaches are limited in their ability to generalize solutions across varying non-parametric geometric domains. In this work, we address this challenge in the context of Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) bottle buckling analysis, a representative packaging design problem conventionally solved using computationally expensive finite element analysis (FEA). We introduce a hybrid DeepONet-Transolver framework that simultaneously predicts nodal displacement fields and the time evolution of reaction forces during top load compression. Our methodology is evaluated on two families of bottle geometries parameterized by two and four design variables. Training data is generated using nonlinear FEA simulations in Abaqus for 254 unique designs per family. The proposed framework achieves mean relative L^{2} errors of 2.5-13% for displacement fields and approximately 2.4% for time-dependent reaction forces for the four-parameter bottle family. Point-wise error analyses further show absolute displacement errors on the order of 10^{-4}-10^{-3}, with the largest discrepancies confined to localized geometric regions. Importantly, the model accurately captures key physical phenomena, such as buckling behavior, across diverse bottle geometries. These results highlight the potential of our framework as a scalable and computationally efficient surrogate, particularly for multi-task predictions in computational mechanics and applications requiring rapid design evaluation.

Humans possess an extraordinary ability to create and utilize tools, allowing them to overcome physical limitations and explore new frontiers. With the advent of foundation models, AI systems have the potential to be equally adept in tool use as humans. This paradigm, i.e., tool learning with foundation models, combines the strengths of specialized tools and foundation models to achieve enhanced accuracy, efficiency, and automation in problem-solving. Despite its immense potential, there is still a lack of a comprehensive understanding of key challenges, opportunities, and future endeavors in this field. To this end, we present a systematic investigation of tool learning in this paper. We first introduce the background of tool learning, including its cognitive origins, the paradigm shift of foundation models, and the complementary roles of tools and models. Then we recapitulate existing tool learning research into tool-augmented and tool-oriented learning. We formulate a general tool learning framework: starting from understanding the user instruction, models should learn to decompose a complex task into several subtasks, dynamically adjust their plan through reasoning, and effectively conquer each sub-task by selecting appropriate tools. We also discuss how to train models for improved tool-use capabilities and facilitate the generalization in tool learning. Considering the lack of a systematic tool learning evaluation in prior works, we experiment with 18 representative tools and show the potential of current foundation models in skillfully utilizing tools. Finally, we discuss several open problems that require further investigation for tool learning. In general, we hope this paper could inspire future research in integrating tools with foundation models.

Large unimodal foundation models for vision and language encode rich semantic structures, yet aligning them typically requires computationally intensive multimodal fine-tuning. Such approaches depend on large-scale parameter updates, are resource intensive, and can perturb pretrained representations. Emerging evidence suggests, however, that independently trained foundation models may already exhibit latent semantic compatibility, reflecting shared structures in the data they model. This raises a fundamental question: can cross-modal alignment be achieved without modifying the models themselves? Here we introduce HDFLIM (HyperDimensional computing with Frozen Language and Image Models), a framework that establishes cross-modal mappings while keeping pretrained vision and language models fully frozen. HDFLIM projects unimodal embeddings into a shared hyperdimensional space and leverages lightweight symbolic operations -- binding, bundling, and similarity-based retrieval to construct associative cross-modal representations in a single pass over the data. Caption generation emerges from high-dimensional memory retrieval rather than iterative gradient-based optimization. We show that HDFLIM achieves performance comparable to end-to-end vision-language training methods and produces captions that are more semantically grounded than zero-shot baselines. By decoupling alignment from parameter tuning, our results suggest that semantic mapping across foundation models can be realized through symbolic operations on hyperdimensional encodings of the respective embeddings. More broadly, this work points toward an alternative paradigm for foundation model alignment in which frozen models are integrated through structured representational mappings rather than through large-scale retraining. The codebase for our implementation can be found at https://github.com/Abhishek-Dalvi410/HDFLIM.

This open access book provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in research and applications of Foundation Models and is intended for readers familiar with basic Natural Language Processing (NLP) concepts. Over the recent years, a revolutionary new paradigm has been developed for training models for NLP. These models are first pre-trained on large collections of text documents to acquire general syntactic knowledge and semantic information. Then, they are fine-tuned for specific tasks, which they can often solve with superhuman accuracy. When the models are large enough, they can be instructed by prompts to solve new tasks without any fine-tuning. Moreover, they can be applied to a wide range of different media and problem domains, ranging from image and video processing to robot control learning. Because they provide a blueprint for solving many tasks in artificial intelligence, they have been called Foundation Models. After a brief introduction to basic NLP models the main pre-trained language models BERT, GPT and sequence-to-sequence transformer are described, as well as the concepts of self-attention and context-sensitive embedding. Then, different approaches to improving these models are discussed, such as expanding the pre-training criteria, increasing the length of input texts, or including extra knowledge. An overview of the best-performing models for about twenty application areas is then presented, e.g., question answering, translation, story generation, dialog systems, generating images from text, etc. For each application area, the strengths and weaknesses of current models are discussed, and an outlook on further developments is given. In addition, links are provided to freely available program code. A concluding chapter summarizes the economic opportunities, mitigation of risks, and potential developments of AI.

Existing foundation models (FMs) in the medical domain often require extensive fine-tuning or rely on training resource-intensive decoders, while many existing encoders are pretrained with objectives biased toward specific tasks. This illustrates a need for a strong, task-agnostic foundation model that requires minimal fine-tuning beyond feature extraction. In this work, we introduce a suite of task-agnostic pretraining of CT foundation models (TAP-CT): a simple yet effective adaptation of Vision Transformers (ViTs) and DINOv2 for volumetric data, enabling scalable self-supervised pretraining directly on 3D CT volumes. Our approach incorporates targeted modifications to patch embeddings, positional encodings, and volumetric augmentations, making the architecture depth-aware while preserving the simplicity of the underlying architectures. We show that large-scale 3D pretraining on an extensive in-house CT dataset (105K volumes) yields stable, robust frozen representations that generalize strongly across downstream tasks. To promote transparency and reproducibility, and to establish a powerful, low-resource baseline for future research in medical imaging, we will release all pretrained models, experimental configurations, and downstream benchmark code at https://huggingface.co/fomofo/tap-ct-b-3d.

This work addresses the task of zero-shot monocular depth estimation. A recent advance in this field has been the idea of utilising Text-to-Image foundation models, such as Stable Diffusion. Foundation models provide a rich and generic image representation, and therefore, little training data is required to reformulate them as a depth estimation model that predicts highly-detailed depth maps and has good generalisation capabilities. However, the realisation of this idea has so far led to approaches which are, unfortunately, highly inefficient at test-time due to the underlying iterative denoising process. In this work, we propose a different realisation of this idea and present PrimeDepth, a method that is highly efficient at test time while keeping, or even enhancing, the positive aspects of diffusion-based approaches. Our key idea is to extract from Stable Diffusion a rich, but frozen, image representation by running a single denoising step. This representation, we term preimage, is then fed into a refiner network with an architectural inductive bias, before entering the downstream task. We validate experimentally that PrimeDepth is two orders of magnitude faster than the leading diffusion-based method, Marigold, while being more robust for challenging scenarios and quantitatively marginally superior. Thereby, we reduce the gap to the currently leading data-driven approach, Depth Anything, which is still quantitatively superior, but predicts less detailed depth maps and requires 20 times more labelled data. Due to the complementary nature of our approach, even a simple averaging between PrimeDepth and Depth Anything predictions can improve upon both methods and sets a new state-of-the-art in zero-shot monocular depth estimation. In future, data-driven approaches may also benefit from integrating our preimage.

Realistic simulation of dynamic scenes requires accurately capturing diverse material properties and modeling complex object interactions grounded in physical principles. However, existing methods are constrained to basic material types with limited predictable parameters, making them insufficient to represent the complexity of real-world materials. We introduce a novel approach that leverages multi-modal foundation models and video diffusion to achieve enhanced 4D dynamic scene simulation. Our method utilizes multi-modal models to identify material types and initialize material parameters through image queries, while simultaneously inferring 3D Gaussian splats for detailed scene representation. We further refine these material parameters using video diffusion with a differentiable Material Point Method (MPM) and optical flow guidance rather than render loss or Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) loss. This integrated framework enables accurate prediction and realistic simulation of dynamic interactions in real-world scenarios, advancing both accuracy and flexibility in physics-based simulations.

Foundation models have revolutionized natural language processing through a ``train once, deploy anywhere'' paradigm, where a single pre-trained model adapts to countless downstream tasks without retraining. Access to a Physics Foundation Model (PFM) would be transformative -- democratizing access to high-fidelity simulations, accelerating scientific discovery, and eliminating the need for specialized solver development. Yet current physics-aware machine learning approaches remain fundamentally limited to single, narrow domains and require retraining for each new system. We present the General Physics Transformer (GPhyT), trained on 1.8 TB of diverse simulation data, that demonstrates foundation model capabilities are achievable for physics. Our key insight is that transformers can learn to infer governing dynamics from context, enabling a single model to simulate fluid-solid interactions, shock waves, thermal convection, and multi-phase dynamics without being told the underlying equations. GPhyT achieves three critical breakthroughs: (1) superior performance across multiple physics domains, outperforming specialized architectures by up to 29x, (2) zero-shot generalization to entirely unseen physical systems through in-context learning, and (3) stable long-term predictions through 50-timestep rollouts. By establishing that a single model can learn generalizable physical principles from data alone, this work opens the path toward a universal PFM that could transform computational science and engineering.

We report a flexible multi-modal mechanics language model, MeLM, applied to solve various nonlinear forward and inverse problems, that can deal with a set of instructions, numbers and microstructure data. The framework is applied to various examples including bio-inspired hierarchical honeycomb design, carbon nanotube mechanics, and protein unfolding. In spite of the flexible nature of the model-which allows us to easily incorporate diverse materials, scales, and mechanical features-it performs well across disparate forward and inverse tasks. Based on an autoregressive attention-model, MeLM effectively represents a large multi-particle system consisting of hundreds of millions of neurons, where the interaction potentials are discovered through graph-forming self-attention mechanisms that are then used to identify relationships from emergent structures, while taking advantage of synergies discovered in the training data. We show that the model can solve complex degenerate mechanics design problems and determine novel material architectures across a range of hierarchical levels, providing an avenue for materials discovery and analysis. Looking beyond the demonstrations reported in this paper, we discuss other opportunities in applied mechanics and general considerations about the use of large language models in modeling, design, and analysis that can span a broad spectrum of material properties from mechanical, thermal, optical, to electronic.

Foundation Models (FMs) are models trained on large corpora of data that, at very large scale, can generalize to new tasks without any task-specific finetuning. As these models continue to grow in size, innovations continue to push the boundaries of what these models can do on language and image tasks. This paper aims to understand an underexplored area of FMs: classical data tasks like cleaning and integration. As a proof-of-concept, we cast five data cleaning and integration tasks as prompting tasks and evaluate the performance of FMs on these tasks. We find that large FMs generalize and achieve SoTA performance on data cleaning and integration tasks, even though they are not trained for these data tasks. We identify specific research challenges and opportunities that these models present, including challenges with private and domain specific data, and opportunities to make data management systems more accessible to non-experts. We make our code and experiments publicly available at: https://github.com/HazyResearch/fm_data_tasks.

In this paper, we provide two case studies to demonstrate how artificial intelligence can empower civil engineering. In the first case, a machine learning-assisted framework, BRAILS, is proposed for city-scale building information modeling. Building information modeling (BIM) is an efficient way of describing buildings, which is essential to architecture, engineering, and construction. Our proposed framework employs deep learning technique to extract visual information of buildings from satellite/street view images. Further, a novel machine learning (ML)-based statistical tool, SURF, is proposed to discover the spatial patterns in building metadata. The second case focuses on the task of soft-story building classification. Soft-story buildings are a type of buildings prone to collapse during a moderate or severe earthquake. Hence, identifying and retrofitting such buildings is vital in the current earthquake preparedness efforts. For this task, we propose an automated deep learning-based procedure for identifying soft-story buildings from street view images at a regional scale. We also create a large-scale building image database and a semi-automated image labeling approach that effectively annotates new database entries. Through extensive computational experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This paper presents a framework that leverages pre-trained foundation models for robotic manipulation without domain-specific training. The framework integrates off-the-shelf models, combining multimodal perception from foundation models with a general-purpose reasoning model capable of robust task sequencing. Scene graphs, dynamically maintained within the framework, provide spatial awareness and enable consistent reasoning about the environment. The framework is evaluated through a series of tabletop robotic manipulation experiments, and the results highlight its potential for building robotic manipulation systems directly on top of off-the-shelf foundation models.

Foundation models (FMs) are pre-trained on large-scale datasets and then fine-tuned on a downstream task for a specific application. The most successful and most commonly used fine-tuning method is to update the pre-trained weights via a low-rank adaptation (LoRA). LoRA introduces new weight matrices that are usually initialized at random with a uniform rank distribution across model weights. Recent works focus on weight-driven initialization or learning of adaptive ranks during training. Both approaches have only been investigated in isolation, resulting in slow convergence or a uniform rank distribution, in turn leading to sub-optimal performance. We propose to enhance LoRA by initializing the new weights in a data-driven manner by computing singular value decomposition on minibatches of activation vectors. Then, we initialize the LoRA matrices with the obtained right-singular vectors and re-distribute ranks among all weight matrices to explain the maximal amount of variance and continue the standard LoRA fine-tuning procedure. This results in our new method Explained Variance Adaptation (EVA). We apply EVA to a variety of fine-tuning tasks ranging from language generation and understanding to image classification and reinforcement learning. EVA exhibits faster convergence than competitors and attains the highest average score across a multitude of tasks per domain.

Recent advances in large-scale pretraining have yielded visual foundation models with strong capabilities. Not only can recent models generalize to arbitrary images for their training task, their intermediate representations are useful for other visual tasks such as detection and segmentation. Given that such models can classify, delineate, and localize objects in 2D, we ask whether they also represent their 3D structure? In this work, we analyze the 3D awareness of visual foundation models. We posit that 3D awareness implies that representations (1) encode the 3D structure of the scene and (2) consistently represent the surface across views. We conduct a series of experiments using task-specific probes and zero-shot inference procedures on frozen features. Our experiments reveal several limitations of the current models. Our code and analysis can be found at https://github.com/mbanani/probe3d.

Lattices are architected metamaterials whose properties strongly depend on their geometrical design. The analogy between lattices and graphs enables the use of graph neural networks (GNNs) as a faster surrogate model compared to traditional methods such as finite element modelling. In this work, we generate a big dataset of structure-property relationships for strut-based lattices. The dataset is made available to the community which can fuel the development of methods anchored in physical principles for the fitting of fourth-order tensors. In addition, we present a higher-order GNN model trained on this dataset. The key features of the model are (i) SE(3) equivariance, and (ii) consistency with the thermodynamic law of conservation of energy. We compare the model to non-equivariant models based on a number of error metrics and demonstrate its benefits in terms of predictive performance and reduced training requirements. Finally, we demonstrate an example application of the model to an architected material design task. The methods which we developed are applicable to fourth-order tensors beyond elasticity such as piezo-optical tensor etc.

Foundation models (FMs), such as GPT-4 and AlphaFold, are reshaping the landscape of scientific research. Beyond accelerating tasks such as hypothesis generation, experimental design, and result interpretation, they prompt a more fundamental question: Are FMs merely enhancing existing scientific methodologies, or are they redefining the way science is conducted? In this paper, we argue that FMs are catalyzing a transition toward a new scientific paradigm. We introduce a three-stage framework to describe this evolution: (1) Meta-Scientific Integration, where FMs enhance workflows within traditional paradigms; (2) Hybrid Human-AI Co-Creation, where FMs become active collaborators in problem formulation, reasoning, and discovery; and (3) Autonomous Scientific Discovery, where FMs operate as independent agents capable of generating new scientific knowledge with minimal human intervention. Through this lens, we review current applications and emerging capabilities of FMs across existing scientific paradigms. We further identify risks and future directions for FM-enabled scientific discovery. This position paper aims to support the scientific community in understanding the transformative role of FMs and to foster reflection on the future of scientific discovery. Our project is available at https://github.com/usail-hkust/Awesome-Foundation-Models-for-Scientific-Discovery.

3D modeling is moving from virtual to physical. Existing 3D generation primarily emphasizes geometries and textures while neglecting physical-grounded modeling. Consequently, despite the rapid development of 3D generative models, the synthesized 3D assets often overlook rich and important physical properties, hampering their real-world application in physical domains like simulation and embodied AI. As an initial attempt to address this challenge, we propose PhysX, an end-to-end paradigm for physical-grounded 3D asset generation. 1) To bridge the critical gap in physics-annotated 3D datasets, we present PhysXNet - the first physics-grounded 3D dataset systematically annotated across five foundational dimensions: absolute scale, material, affordance, kinematics, and function description. In particular, we devise a scalable human-in-the-loop annotation pipeline based on vision-language models, which enables efficient creation of physics-first assets from raw 3D assets.2) Furthermore, we propose PhysXGen, a feed-forward framework for physics-grounded image-to-3D asset generation, injecting physical knowledge into the pre-trained 3D structural space. Specifically, PhysXGen employs a dual-branch architecture to explicitly model the latent correlations between 3D structures and physical properties, thereby producing 3D assets with plausible physical predictions while preserving the native geometry quality. Extensive experiments validate the superior performance and promising generalization capability of our framework. All the code, data, and models will be released to facilitate future research in generative physical AI.

We present DictaLM, a large-scale language model tailored for Modern Hebrew. Boasting 7B parameters, this model is predominantly trained on Hebrew-centric data. As a commitment to promoting research and development in the Hebrew language, we release both the foundation model and the instruct-tuned model under a Creative Commons license. Concurrently, we introduce DictaLM-Rab, another foundation model geared towards Rabbinic/Historical Hebrew. These foundation models serve as ideal starting points for fine-tuning various Hebrew-specific tasks, such as instruction, Q&A, sentiment analysis, and more. This release represents a preliminary step, offering an initial Hebrew LLM model for the Hebrew NLP community to experiment with.

Stereo foundation models achieve strong zero-shot generalization but remain computationally prohibitive for real-time applications. Efficient stereo architectures, on the other hand, sacrifice robustness for speed and require costly per-domain fine-tuning. To bridge this gap, we present Fast-FoundationStereo, a family of architectures that achieve, for the first time, strong zero-shot generalization at real-time frame rate. We employ a divide-and-conquer acceleration strategy with three components: (1) knowledge distillation to compress the hybrid backbone into a single efficient student; (2) blockwise neural architecture search for automatically discovering optimal cost filtering designs under latency budgets, reducing search complexity exponentially; and (3) structured pruning for eliminating redundancy in the iterative refinement module. Furthermore, we introduce an automatic pseudo-labeling pipeline used to curate 1.4M in-the-wild stereo pairs to supplement synthetic training data and facilitate knowledge distillation. The resulting model can run over 10x faster than FoundationStereo while closely matching its zero-shot accuracy, thus establishing a new state-of-the-art among real-time methods. Project page: https://nvlabs.github.io/Fast-FoundationStereo/

AI-assisted radiological interpretation is based on predominantly narrow, single-task models. This approach is impractical for covering the vast spectrum of imaging modalities, diseases, and radiological findings. Foundation models (FMs) hold the promise of broad generalization across modalities and in low-data settings. However, this potential has remained largely unrealized in radiology. We introduce Curia, a foundation model trained on the entire cross-sectional imaging output of a major hospital over several years, which to our knowledge is the largest such corpus of real-world data-encompassing 150,000 exams (130 TB). On a newly curated 19-task external validation benchmark, Curia accurately identifies organs, detects conditions like brain hemorrhages and myocardial infarctions, and predicts outcomes in tumor staging. Curia meets or surpasses the performance of radiologists and recent foundation models, and exhibits clinically significant emergent properties in cross-modality, and low-data regimes. To accelerate progress, we release our base model's weights at https://huggingface.co/raidium/curia.

Foundation models (FMs) are increasingly used to bridge language and action in embodied agents, yet the operational characteristics of different FM integration strategies remain under-explored -- particularly for complex instruction following and versatile action generation in changing environments. This paper examines three paradigms for building robotic systems: end-to-end vision-language-action (VLA) models that implicitly integrate perception and planning, and modular pipelines incorporating either vision-language models (VLMs) or multimodal large language models (LLMs). We evaluate these paradigms through two focused case studies: a complex instruction grounding task assessing fine-grained instruction understanding and cross-modal disambiguation, and an object manipulation task targeting skill transfer via VLA finetuning. Our experiments in zero-shot and few-shot settings reveal trade-offs in generalization and data efficiency. By exploring performance limits, we distill design implications for developing language-driven physical agents and outline emerging challenges and opportunities for FM-powered robotics in real-world conditions.

Think about how human handles complex reading tasks: marking key points, inferring their relationships, and structuring information to guide understanding and responses. Likewise, can a large language model benefit from text structure to enhance text-processing performance? To explore it, in this work, we first introduce Structure of Thought (SoT), a prompting technique that explicitly guides models to construct intermediate text structures, consistently boosting performance across eight tasks and three model families. Building upon this insight, we present T2S-Bench, the first benchmark designed to evaluate and improve text-to-structure capabilities of models. T2S-Bench includes 1.8K samples across 6 scientific domains and 32 structural types, rigorously constructed to ensure accuracy, fairness, and quality. Evaluation on 45 mainstream models reveals substantial improvement potential: the average accuracy on the multi-hop reasoning task is only 52.1%, and even the most advanced model achieves 58.1% node accuracy in end-to-end extraction. Furthermore, on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, SoT alone yields an average +5.7% improvement across eight diverse text-processing tasks, and fine-tuning on T2S-Bench further increases this gain to +8.6%. These results highlight the value of explicit text structuring and the complementary contributions of SoT and T2S-Bench. Dataset and eval code have been released at https://t2s-bench.github.io/T2S-Bench-Page/.

3D geometric information is essential for manipulation tasks, as robots need to perceive the 3D environment, reason about spatial relationships, and interact with intricate spatial configurations. Recent research has increasingly focused on the explicit extraction of 3D features, while still facing challenges such as the lack of large-scale robotic 3D data and the potential loss of spatial geometry. To address these limitations, we propose the Lift3D framework, which progressively enhances 2D foundation models with implicit and explicit 3D robotic representations to construct a robust 3D manipulation policy. Specifically, we first design a task-aware masked autoencoder that masks task-relevant affordance patches and reconstructs depth information, enhancing the 2D foundation model's implicit 3D robotic representation. After self-supervised fine-tuning, we introduce a 2D model-lifting strategy that establishes a positional mapping between the input 3D points and the positional embeddings of the 2D model. Based on the mapping, Lift3D utilizes the 2D foundation model to directly encode point cloud data, leveraging large-scale pretrained knowledge to construct explicit 3D robotic representations while minimizing spatial information loss. In experiments, Lift3D consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods across several simulation benchmarks and real-world scenarios.

In this study, we introduce FEET, a standardized protocol designed to guide the development and benchmarking of foundation models. While numerous benchmark datasets exist for evaluating these models, we propose a structured evaluation protocol across three distinct scenarios to gain a comprehensive understanding of their practical performance. We define three primary use cases: frozen embeddings, few-shot embeddings, and fully fine-tuned embeddings. Each scenario is detailed and illustrated through two case studies: one in sentiment analysis and another in the medical domain, demonstrating how these evaluations provide a thorough assessment of foundation models' effectiveness in research applications. We recommend this protocol as a standard for future research aimed at advancing representation learning models.

Foundation models, particularly those that incorporate Transformer architectures, have demonstrated exceptional performance in domains such as natural language processing and image processing. Adapting these models to structured data, like tables, however, introduces significant challenges. These difficulties are even more pronounced when addressing multi-table data linked via foreign key, which is prevalent in the enterprise realm and crucial for empowering business use cases. Despite its substantial impact, research focusing on such linked business tables within enterprise settings remains a significantly important yet underexplored domain. To address this, we introduce a curated dataset sourced from an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, featuring extensive linked tables. This dataset is specifically designed to support research endeavors in table representation learning. By providing access to authentic enterprise data, our goal is to potentially enhance the effectiveness and applicability of models for real-world business contexts.

Foundation models in language and vision have the ability to run inference on any textual and visual inputs thanks to the transferable representations such as a vocabulary of tokens in language. Knowledge graphs (KGs) have different entity and relation vocabularies that generally do not overlap. The key challenge of designing foundation models on KGs is to learn such transferable representations that enable inference on any graph with arbitrary entity and relation vocabularies. In this work, we make a step towards such foundation models and present ULTRA, an approach for learning universal and transferable graph representations. ULTRA builds relational representations as a function conditioned on their interactions. Such a conditioning strategy allows a pre-trained ULTRA model to inductively generalize to any unseen KG with any relation vocabulary and to be fine-tuned on any graph. Conducting link prediction experiments on 57 different KGs, we find that the zero-shot inductive inference performance of a single pre-trained ULTRA model on unseen graphs of various sizes is often on par or better than strong baselines trained on specific graphs. Fine-tuning further boosts the performance.

Seismic processing plays a crucial role in transforming raw data into high-quality subsurface images, pivotal for various geoscience applications. Despite its importance, traditional seismic processing techniques face challenges such as noisy and damaged data and the reliance on manual, time-consuming workflows. The emergence of deep learning approaches has introduced effective and user-friendly alternatives, yet many of these deep learning approaches rely on synthetic datasets and specialized neural networks. Recently, foundation models have gained traction in the seismic domain, due to their success in the natural image domain. Therefore, we investigate the application of natural image foundation models on the three seismic processing tasks: demultiple, interpolation, and denoising. We evaluate the impact of different model characteristics, such as pre-training technique and neural network architecture, on performance and efficiency. Rather than proposing a single seismic foundation model, we critically examine various natural image foundation models and suggest some promising candidates for future exploration.

Foundation models for interactive segmentation in 2D natural images and videos have sparked significant interest in building 3D foundation models for medical imaging. However, the domain gaps and clinical use cases for 3D medical imaging require a dedicated model that diverges from existing 2D solutions. Specifically, such foundation models should support a full workflow that can actually reduce human effort. Treating 3D medical images as sequences of 2D slices and reusing interactive 2D foundation models seems straightforward, but 2D annotation is too time-consuming for 3D tasks. Moreover, for large cohort analysis, it's the highly accurate automatic segmentation models that reduce the most human effort. However, these models lack support for interactive corrections and lack zero-shot ability for novel structures, which is a key feature of "foundation". While reusing pre-trained 2D backbones in 3D enhances zero-shot potential, their performance on complex 3D structures still lags behind leading 3D models. To address these issues, we present VISTA3D, Versatile Imaging SegmenTation and Annotation model, that targets to solve all these challenges and requirements with one unified foundation model. VISTA3D is built on top of the well-established 3D segmentation pipeline, and it is the first model to achieve state-of-the-art performance in both 3D automatic (supporting 127 classes) and 3D interactive segmentation, even when compared with top 3D expert models on large and diverse benchmarks. Additionally, VISTA3D's 3D interactive design allows efficient human correction, and a novel 3D supervoxel method that distills 2D pretrained backbones grants VISTA3D top 3D zero-shot performance. We believe the model, recipe, and insights represent a promising step towards a clinically useful 3D foundation model. Code and weights are publicly available at https://github.com/Project-MONAI/VISTA.

Structure-from-motion (SfM) is a long-standing problem in the computer vision community, which aims to reconstruct the camera poses and 3D structure of a scene from a set of unconstrained 2D images. Classical frameworks solve this problem in an incremental manner by detecting and matching keypoints, registering images, triangulating 3D points, and conducting bundle adjustment. Recent research efforts have predominantly revolved around harnessing the power of deep learning techniques to enhance specific elements (e.g., keypoint matching), but are still based on the original, non-differentiable pipeline. Instead, we propose a new deep pipeline VGGSfM, where each component is fully differentiable and thus can be trained in an end-to-end manner. To this end, we introduce new mechanisms and simplifications. First, we build on recent advances in deep 2D point tracking to extract reliable pixel-accurate tracks, which eliminates the need for chaining pairwise matches. Furthermore, we recover all cameras simultaneously based on the image and track features instead of gradually registering cameras. Finally, we optimise the cameras and triangulate 3D points via a differentiable bundle adjustment layer. We attain state-of-the-art performance on three popular datasets, CO3D, IMC Phototourism, and ETH3D.

Large foundation models have demonstrated a great ability to achieve general human-level intelligence far beyond traditional approaches. As the technique keeps attracting attention from the AI community, more and more large foundation models have become publically available. However, most of those models exhibit a major deficiency in specialized-task applications, where the step of finetuning is still required for obtaining satisfactory performance. As the number of available models and specialized tasks keeps growing, the job of general finetuning becomes highly nontrivial. In this paper, we take the first step to address this issue. We introduce an extensible and lightweight toolkit, LMFlow, which aims to simplify the finetuning and inference of general large foundation models. LMFlow offers a complete finetuning workflow for a large foundation model to support personalized training with limited computing resources. Furthermore, it supports continuous pretraining, instruction tuning, parameter-efficient finetuning, alignment tuning, and large model inference, along with carefully designed and extensible APIs. This toolkit has been thoroughly tested and is available at https://github.com/OptimalScale/LMFlow.

Foundation models are redefining how AI systems are built. Practitioners now follow a standard procedure to build their machine learning solutions: from a pre-trained foundation model, they fine-tune the weights on the target task of interest. So, the Internet is swarmed by a handful of foundation models fine-tuned on many diverse tasks: these individual fine-tunings exist in isolation without benefiting from each other. In our opinion, this is a missed opportunity, as these specialized models contain rich and diverse features. In this paper, we thus propose model ratatouille, a new strategy to recycle the multiple fine-tunings of the same foundation model on diverse auxiliary tasks. Specifically, we repurpose these auxiliary weights as initializations for multiple parallel fine-tunings on the target task; then, we average all fine-tuned weights to obtain the final model. This recycling strategy aims at maximizing the diversity in weights by leveraging the diversity in auxiliary tasks. Empirically, it improves the state of the art on the reference DomainBed benchmark for out-of-distribution generalization. Looking forward, this work contributes to the emerging paradigm of updatable machine learning where, akin to open-source software development, the community collaborates to reliably update machine learning models.

Large language model (LLM)-based agentic frameworks increasingly adopt the paradigm of dynamically generating task-specific agents. We suggest that not only agents but also specialized software modules for scientific and engineering tasks can be generated on demand. We demonstrate this concept in the field of solid mechanics. There, so-called constitutive models are required to describe the relationship between mechanical stress and body deformation. Constitutive models are essential for both the scientific understanding and industrial application of materials. However, even recent data-driven methods of constitutive modeling, such as constitutive artificial neural networks (CANNs), still require substantial expert knowledge and human labor. We present a framework in which an LLM generates a CANN on demand, tailored to a given material class and dataset provided by the user. The framework covers LLM-based architecture selection, integration of physical constraints, and complete code generation. Evaluation on three benchmark problems demonstrates that LLM-generated CANNs achieve accuracy comparable to or greater than manually engineered counterparts, while also exhibiting reliable generalization to unseen loading scenarios and extrapolation to large deformations. These findings indicate that LLM-based generation of physics-constrained neural networks can substantially reduce the expertise required for constitutive modeling and represent a step toward practical end-to-end automation.

The rapid development of AI systems has been greatly influenced by the emergence of foundation models. A common approach for targeted problems involves fine-tuning these pre-trained foundation models for specific target tasks, resulting in a rapid spread of models fine-tuned across a diverse array of tasks. This work focuses on the problem of merging multiple fine-tunings of the same foundation model derived from a spectrum of auxiliary tasks. We introduce a new simple method, Model Breadcrumbs, which consists of a sparsely defined set of weights that carve out a trajectory within the weight space of a pre-trained model, enhancing task performance when traversed. These breadcrumbs are constructed by subtracting the weights from a pre-trained model before and after fine-tuning, followed by a sparsification process that eliminates weight outliers and negligible perturbations. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of Model Breadcrumbs to simultaneously improve performance across multiple tasks. This contribution aligns with the evolving paradigm of updatable machine learning, reminiscent of the collaborative principles underlying open-source software development, fostering a community-driven effort to reliably update machine learning models. Our method is shown to be more efficient and unlike previous proposals does not require hyperparameter tuning for each new task added. Through extensive experimentation involving various models, tasks, and modalities we establish that integrating Model Breadcrumbs offers a simple, efficient, and highly effective approach for constructing multi-task models and facilitating updates to foundation models.

Scientific archives now contain hundreds of petabytes of data across genomics, ecology, climate, and molecular biology that could reveal undiscovered patterns if systematically analyzed at scale. Large-scale, weakly-supervised datasets in language and vision have driven the development of foundation models whose internal representations encode structure (patterns, co-occurrences and statistical regularities) beyond their training objectives. Most existing methods extract structure only for pre-specified targets; they excel at confirmation but do not support open-ended discovery of unknown patterns. We ask whether sparse autoencoders (SAEs) can enable open-ended feature discovery from foundation model representations. We evaluate this question in controlled rediscovery studies, where the learned SAE features are tested for alignment with semantic concepts on a standard segmentation benchmark and compared against strong label-free alternatives on concept-alignment metrics. Applied to ecological imagery, the same procedure surfaces fine-grained anatomical structure without access to segmentation or part labels, providing a scientific case study with ground-truth validation. While our experiments focus on vision with an ecology case study, the method is domain-agnostic and applicable to models in other sciences (e.g., proteins, genomics, weather). Our results indicate that sparse decomposition provides a practical instrument for exploring what scientific foundation models have learned, an important prerequisite for moving from confirmation to genuine discovery.

Foundation Models are neural networks that are capable of simultaneously solving many problems. Large Language Foundation Models like ChatGPT have revolutionized many aspects of daily life, but their impact for science is not yet clear. In this paper, we use a new Foundation Model for hadronic jets to solve three key challenges in collider physics. In particular, we show how experiments can (1) save significant computing power when developing reconstruction algorithms, (2) perform a complete uncertainty quantification for high-dimensional measurements, and (3) search for new physics with model agnostic methods using low-level inputs. In each case, there are significant computational or methodological challenges with current methods that limit the science potential of deep learning algorithms. By solving each problem, we take jet Foundation Models beyond proof-of-principle studies and into the toolkit of practitioners.

Tremendous progress has been made in deep stereo matching to excel on benchmark datasets through per-domain fine-tuning. However, achieving strong zero-shot generalization - a hallmark of foundation models in other computer vision tasks - remains challenging for stereo matching. We introduce FoundationStereo, a foundation model for stereo depth estimation designed to achieve strong zero-shot generalization. To this end, we first construct a large-scale (1M stereo pairs) synthetic training dataset featuring large diversity and high photorealism, followed by an automatic self-curation pipeline to remove ambiguous samples. We then design a number of network architecture components to enhance scalability, including a side-tuning feature backbone that adapts rich monocular priors from vision foundation models to mitigate the sim-to-real gap, and long-range context reasoning for effective cost volume filtering. Together, these components lead to strong robustness and accuracy across domains, establishing a new standard in zero-shot stereo depth estimation. Project page: https://nvlabs.github.io/FoundationStereo/

Following its success for vision and text, the "foundation model" (FM) paradigm -- pretraining large models on massive data, then fine-tuning on target tasks -- has rapidly expanded to domains in the sciences, engineering, healthcare, and beyond. Has this achieved what the original FMs accomplished, i.e. the supplanting of traditional supervised learning in their domains? To answer we look at three modalities -- genomics, satellite imaging, and time series -- with multiple recent FMs and compare them to a standard supervised learning workflow: model development, hyperparameter tuning, and training, all using only data from the target task. Across these three specialized domains, we find that it is consistently possible to train simple supervised models -- no more complicated than a lightly modified wide ResNet or UNet -- that match or even outperform the latest foundation models. Our work demonstrates that the benefits of large-scale pretraining have yet to be realized in many specialized areas, reinforces the need to compare new FMs to strong, well-tuned baselines, and introduces two new, easy-to-use, open-source, and automated workflows for doing so.

Current visual foundation models are trained purely on unstructured 2D data, limiting their understanding of 3D structure of objects and scenes. In this work, we show that fine-tuning on 3D-aware data improves the quality of emerging semantic features. We design a method to lift semantic 2D features into an efficient 3D Gaussian representation, which allows us to re-render them for arbitrary views. Using the rendered 3D-aware features, we design a fine-tuning strategy to transfer such 3D awareness into a 2D foundation model. We demonstrate that models fine-tuned in that way produce features that readily improve downstream task performance in semantic segmentation and depth estimation through simple linear probing. Notably, though fined-tuned on a single indoor dataset, the improvement is transferable to a variety of indoor datasets and out-of-domain datasets. We hope our study encourages the community to consider injecting 3D awareness when training 2D foundation models. Project page: https://ywyue.github.io/FiT3D.

We introduce IntFold, a controllable foundation model for both general and specialized biomolecular structure prediction. IntFold demonstrates predictive accuracy comparable to the state-of-the-art AlphaFold3, while utilizing a superior customized attention kernel. Beyond standard structure prediction, IntFold can be adapted to predict allosteric states, constrained structures, and binding affinity through the use of individual adapters. Furthermore, we introduce a novel confidence head to estimate docking quality, offering a more nuanced assessment for challenging targets such as antibody-antigen complexes. Finally, we share insights gained during the training process of this computationally intensive model.

Foundation Models (FMs) serve as a general class for the development of artificial intelligence systems, offering broad potential for generalization across a spectrum of downstream tasks. Despite extensive research into self-supervised learning as the cornerstone of FMs, several outstanding issues persist in Graph Foundation Models that rely on graph self-supervised learning, namely: 1) Homogenization. The extent of generalization capability on downstream tasks remains unclear. 2) Scalability. It is unknown how effectively these models can scale to large datasets. 3) Efficiency. The training time and memory usage of these models require evaluation. 4) Training Stop Criteria. Determining the optimal stopping strategy for pre-training across multiple tasks to maximize performance on downstream tasks. To address these questions, we have constructed a rigorous benchmark that thoroughly analyzes and studies the generalization and scalability of self-supervised Graph Neural Network (GNN) models. Regarding generalization, we have implemented and compared the performance of various self-supervised GNN models, trained to generate node representations, across tasks such as node classification, link prediction, and node clustering. For scalability, we have compared the performance of various models after training using full-batch and mini-batch strategies. Additionally, we have assessed the training efficiency of these models by conducting experiments to test their GPU memory usage and throughput. Through these experiments, we aim to provide insights to motivate future research. The code for this benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/NYUSHCS/GraphFM.

Advancements in LLMs have recently unveiled challenges tied to computational efficiency and continual scalability due to their requirements of huge parameters, making the applications and evolution of these models on devices with limited computation resources and scenarios requiring various abilities increasingly cumbersome. Inspired by modularity within the human brain, there is a growing tendency to decompose LLMs into numerous functional modules, allowing for inference with part of modules and dynamic assembly of modules to tackle complex tasks, such as mixture-of-experts. To highlight the inherent efficiency and composability of the modular approach, we coin the term brick to represent each functional module, designating the modularized structure as configurable foundation models. In this paper, we offer a comprehensive overview and investigation of the construction, utilization, and limitation of configurable foundation models. We first formalize modules into emergent bricks - functional neuron partitions that emerge during the pre-training phase, and customized bricks - bricks constructed via additional post-training to improve the capabilities and knowledge of LLMs. Based on diverse functional bricks, we further present four brick-oriented operations: retrieval and routing, merging, updating, and growing. These operations allow for dynamic configuration of LLMs based on instructions to handle complex tasks. To verify our perspective, we conduct an empirical analysis on widely-used LLMs. We find that the FFN layers follow modular patterns with functional specialization of neurons and functional neuron partitions. Finally, we highlight several open issues and directions for future research. Overall, this paper aims to offer a fresh modular perspective on existing LLM research and inspire the future creation of more efficient and scalable foundational models.

Deep learning-based methods have been widely researched in the areas of language and vision, demonstrating their capacity to understand long sequences of data and their usefulness in numerous helio-physics applications. Foundation models (FMs), which are pre-trained on a large-scale datasets, form the basis for a variety of downstream tasks. These models, especially those based on transformers in vision and language, show exceptional potential for adapting to a wide range of downstream applications. In this paper, we provide our perspective on the criteria for designing an FM for heliophysics and associated challenges and applications using the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) dataset. We believe that this is the first study to design an FM in the domain of heliophysics.

We introduce a novel dataset designed to benchmark the physical and spatial reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLM) based on topology optimization, a method for computing optimal material distributions within a design space under prescribed loads and supports. In this dataset, LLMs are provided with conditions such as 2D boundary, applied forces and supports, and must reason about the resulting optimal material distribution. The dataset includes a variety of tasks, ranging from filling in masked regions within partial structures to predicting complete material distributions. Solving these tasks requires understanding the flow of forces and the required material distribution under given constraints, without access to simulation tools or explicit physical models, challenging models to reason about structural stability and spatial organization. Our dataset targets the evaluation of spatial and physical reasoning abilities in 2D settings, offering a complementary perspective to traditional language and logic benchmarks.

We present IntPhys 2, a video benchmark designed to evaluate the intuitive physics understanding of deep learning models. Building on the original IntPhys benchmark, IntPhys 2 focuses on four core principles related to macroscopic objects: Permanence, Immutability, Spatio-Temporal Continuity, and Solidity. These conditions are inspired by research into intuitive physical understanding emerging during early childhood. IntPhys 2 offers a comprehensive suite of tests, based on the violation of expectation framework, that challenge models to differentiate between possible and impossible events within controlled and diverse virtual environments. Alongside the benchmark, we provide performance evaluations of several state-of-the-art models. Our findings indicate that while these models demonstrate basic visual understanding, they face significant challenges in grasping intuitive physics across the four principles in complex scenes, with most models performing at chance levels (50%), in stark contrast to human performance, which achieves near-perfect accuracy. This underscores the gap between current models and human-like intuitive physics understanding, highlighting the need for advancements in model architectures and training methodologies.

We present a multi-modal foundation model for astrophysical galaxy data, designed to map between simulation- and observation-based galactic features. Our encoder-only transformer flexibly ingests scalar quantities (e.g., redshifts, galaxy masses) and vectors (e.g., star formation histories, spectra), supporting multi-task training that includes within-modality reconstruction and cross-modality prediction. With a dynamic masking strategy, the model can query arbitrary galaxy properties from partial inputs -- including predicting spectra from redshift and mass, or estimating photometric redshifts from broadband magnitudes -- while also recovering missing segments within a modality. Trained on 185,000 simulated galaxies from a gigaparsec-scale Cosmology simulation, the model yields a 50% improvement in redshift estimation when combining LSST and SPHEREx photometry over LSST photometry alone, and a 63% improvement in stellar mass inference when combining late-time SFH with LSST photometry over early-time SFH with LSST photometry. The model demonstrates strong generalization across multi-modal tasks and lays the groundwork for future integration of higher-dimensional and structured data such as images, merger trees, and 3D fields. This approach provides a unified framework for connecting simulations and observations, advancing the development of generalizable astrophysical foundation models.

Softmax attention is the principle backbone of foundation models for various artificial intelligence applications, yet its quadratic complexity in sequence length can limit its inference throughput in long-context settings. To address this challenge, alternative architectures such as linear attention, State Space Models (SSMs), and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been considered as more efficient alternatives. While connections between these approaches exist, such models are commonly developed in isolation and there is a lack of theoretical understanding of the shared principles underpinning these architectures and their subtle differences, greatly influencing performance and scalability. In this paper, we introduce the Dynamical Systems Framework (DSF), which allows a principled investigation of all these architectures in a common representation. Our framework facilitates rigorous comparisons, providing new insights on the distinctive characteristics of each model class. For instance, we compare linear attention and selective SSMs, detailing their differences and conditions under which both are equivalent. We also provide principled comparisons between softmax attention and other model classes, discussing the theoretical conditions under which softmax attention can be approximated. Additionally, we substantiate these new insights with empirical validations and mathematical arguments. This shows the DSF's potential to guide the systematic development of future more efficient and scalable foundation models.

Foundation models are transitioning from offline predictors to deployed systems expected to operate over long time horizons. In real deployments, objectives are not fixed: domains drift, user preferences evolve, and new tasks appear after the model has shipped. This elevates continual learning and instant personalization from optional features to core architectural requirements. Yet most adaptation pipelines still follow a static weight paradigm: after training (or after any adaptation step), inference executes a single parameter vector regardless of user intent, domain, or instance-specific constraints. This treats the trained or adapted model as a single point in parameter space. In heterogeneous and continually evolving regimes, distinct objectives can induce separated feasible regions over parameters, forcing any single shared update into compromise, interference, or overspecialization. As a result, continual learning and personalization are often implemented as repeated overwriting of shared weights, risking degradation of previously learned behaviors. We propose HY-WU (Weight Unleashing), a memory-first adaptation framework that shifts adaptation pressure away from overwriting a single shared parameter point. HY-WU implements functional (operator-level) memory as a neural module: a generator that synthesizes weight updates on-the-fly from the instance condition, yielding instance-specific operators without test-time optimization.

Leveraging multimodal data to drive breakthroughs in e-commerce applications through Multimodal Foundation Models (MFMs) is gaining increasing attention from the research community. However, there are significant challenges that hinder the optimal use of multimodal e-commerce data by foundation models: (1) the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality multimodal benchmark datasets; and (2) the lack of effective multimodal information integration methods. To address these challenges, in this paper, we introduce MMECInstruct, the first-ever, large-scale, and high-quality multimodal instruction dataset for e-commerce. We also develop CASLIE, a simple, lightweight, yet effective framework for integrating multimodal information for e-commerce. Leveraging MMECInstruct, we fine-tune a series of e-commerce MFMs within CASLIE, denoted as CASLIE models. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that CASLIE models substantially outperform 5 categories of advanced baseline models in the in-domain evaluation. Moreover, CASLIE models show strong generalizability to out-of-domain settings. MMECInstruct and CASLIE models are publicly accessible through https://ninglab.github.io/CASLIE/.

This paper introduces a generative model designed for multimodal control over text-to-image foundation generative AI models such as Stable Diffusion, specifically tailored for engineering design synthesis. Our model proposes parametric, image, and text control modalities to enhance design precision and diversity. Firstly, it handles both partial and complete parametric inputs using a diffusion model that acts as a design autocomplete co-pilot, coupled with a parametric encoder to process the information. Secondly, the model utilizes assembly graphs to systematically assemble input component images, which are then processed through a component encoder to capture essential visual data. Thirdly, textual descriptions are integrated via CLIP encoding, ensuring a comprehensive interpretation of design intent. These diverse inputs are synthesized through a multimodal fusion technique, creating a joint embedding that acts as the input to a module inspired by ControlNet. This integration allows the model to apply robust multimodal control to foundation models, facilitating the generation of complex and precise engineering designs. This approach broadens the capabilities of AI-driven design tools and demonstrates significant advancements in precise control based on diverse data modalities for enhanced design generation.

Learning complex dynamics driven by partial differential equations directly from data holds great promise for fast and accurate simulations of complex physical systems. In most cases, this problem can be formulated as an operator learning task, where one aims to learn the operator representing the physics of interest, which entails discretization of the continuous system. However, preserving key continuous properties at the discrete level, such as boundary conditions, and addressing physical systems with complex geometries is challenging for most existing approaches. We introduce a family of operator learning architectures, structure-preserving operator networks (SPONs), that allows to preserve key mathematical and physical properties of the continuous system by leveraging finite element (FE) discretizations of the input-output spaces. SPONs are encode-process-decode architectures that are end-to-end differentiable, where the encoder and decoder follows from the discretizations of the input-output spaces. SPONs can operate on complex geometries, enforce certain boundary conditions exactly, and offer theoretical guarantees. Our framework provides a flexible way of devising structure-preserving architectures tailored to specific applications, and offers an explicit trade-off between performance and efficiency, all thanks to the FE discretization of the input-output spaces. Additionally, we introduce a multigrid-inspired SPON architecture that yields improved performance at higher efficiency. Finally, we release a software to automate the design and training of SPON architectures.

The interactive segmentation task consists in the creation of object segmentation masks based on user interactions. The most common way to guide a model towards producing a correct segmentation consists in clicks on the object and background. The recently published Segment Anything Model (SAM) supports a generalized version of the interactive segmentation problem and has been trained on an object segmentation dataset which contains 1.1B masks. Though being trained extensively and with the explicit purpose of serving as a foundation model, we show significant limitations of SAM when being applied for interactive segmentation on novel domains or object types. On the used datasets, SAM displays a failure rate FR_{30}@90 of up to 72.6 %. Since we still want such foundation models to be immediately applicable, we present a framework that can adapt SAM during immediate usage. For this we will leverage the user interactions and masks, which are constructed during the interactive segmentation process. We use this information to generate pseudo-labels, which we use to compute a loss function and optimize a part of the SAM model. The presented method causes a relative reduction of up to 48.1 % in the FR_{20}@85 and 46.6 % in the FR_{30}@90 metrics.

Depth estimation is a fundamental task in 3D computer vision, crucial for applications such as 3D reconstruction, free-viewpoint rendering, robotics, autonomous driving, and AR/VR technologies. Traditional methods relying on hardware sensors like LiDAR are often limited by high costs, low resolution, and environmental sensitivity, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. Recent advances in vision-based methods offer a promising alternative, yet they face challenges in generalization and stability due to either the low-capacity model architectures or the reliance on domain-specific and small-scale datasets. The emergence of scaling laws and foundation models in other domains has inspired the development of "depth foundation models": deep neural networks trained on large datasets with strong zero-shot generalization capabilities. This paper surveys the evolution of deep learning architectures and paradigms for depth estimation across the monocular, stereo, multi-view, and monocular video settings. We explore the potential of these models to address existing challenges and provide a comprehensive overview of large-scale datasets that can facilitate their development. By identifying key architectures and training strategies, we aim to highlight the path towards robust depth foundation models, offering insights into their future research and applications.

Multimodal foundation models that can holistically process text alongside images, video, audio, and other sensory modalities are increasingly used in a variety of real-world applications. However, it is challenging to characterize and study progress in multimodal foundation models, given the range of possible modeling decisions, tasks, and domains. In this paper, we introduce Holistic Evaluation of Multimodal Models (HEMM) to systematically evaluate the capabilities of multimodal foundation models across a set of 3 dimensions: basic skills, information flow, and real-world use cases. Basic multimodal skills are internal abilities required to solve problems, such as learning interactions across modalities, fine-grained alignment, multi-step reasoning, and the ability to handle external knowledge. Information flow studies how multimodal content changes during a task through querying, translation, editing, and fusion. Use cases span domain-specific challenges introduced in real-world multimedia, affective computing, natural sciences, healthcare, and human-computer interaction applications. Through comprehensive experiments across the 30 tasks in HEMM, we (1) identify key dataset dimensions (e.g., basic skills, information flows, and use cases) that pose challenges to today's models, and (2) distill performance trends regarding how different modeling dimensions (e.g., scale, pre-training data, multimodal alignment, pre-training, and instruction tuning objectives) influence performance. Our conclusions regarding challenging multimodal interactions, use cases, and tasks requiring reasoning and external knowledge, the benefits of data and model scale, and the impacts of instruction tuning yield actionable insights for future work in multimodal foundation models.

This work presents a systematic investigation into the latent knowledge encoded within Network Foundation Models (NFMs) that focuses on hidden representations analysis rather than pure downstream task performance. Different from existing efforts, we analyze the models through a three-part evaluation: Embedding Geometry Analysis to assess representation space utilization, Metric Alignment Assessment to measure correspondence with domain-expert features, and Causal Sensitivity Testing to evaluate robustness to protocol perturbations. Using five diverse network datasets spanning controlled and real-world environments, we evaluate four state-of-the-art NFMs, revealing that they all exhibit significant anisotropy, inconsistent feature sensitivity patterns, an inability to separate the high-level context, payload dependency, and other properties. Our work identifies numerous limitations across all models and demonstrates that addressing them can significantly improve model performance (by up to +0.35 F_1 score without architectural changes).

The foundational pretraining phase determines a model's capability ceiling, as post-training struggles to overcome capability foundations established during pretraining, yet it remains critically under-explored. This stems from a structural paradox: organizations with computational resources operate under commercial pressures that inhibit transparent disclosure, while academic institutions possess research freedom but lack pretraining-scale computational resources. daVinci-LLM occupies this unexplored intersection, combining industrial-scale resources with full research freedom to advance the science of pretraining. We adopt a fully-open paradigm that treats openness as scientific methodology, releasing complete data processing pipelines, full training processes, and systematic exploration results. Recognizing that the field lacks systematic methodology for data processing, we employ the Data Darwinism framework, a principled L0-L9 taxonomy from filtering to synthesis. We train a 3B-parameter model from random initialization across 8T tokens using a two-stage adaptive curriculum that progressively shifts from foundational capabilities to reasoning-intensive enhancement. Through 200+ controlled ablations, we establish that: processing depth systematically enhances capabilities, establishing it as a critical dimension alongside volume scaling; different domains exhibit distinct saturation dynamics, necessitating adaptive strategies from proportion adjustments to format shifts; compositional balance enables targeted intensification while preventing performance collapse; how evaluation protocol choices shape our understanding of pretraining progress. By releasing the complete exploration process, we enable the community to build upon our findings and systematic methodologies to form accumulative scientific knowledge in pretraining.

While computer science has seen remarkable advancements in foundation models, which remain underexplored in geoscience. Addressing this gap, we introduce a workflow to develop geophysical foundation models, including data preparation, model pre-training, and adaption to downstream tasks. From 192 globally collected 3-D seismic volumes, we create a carefully curated dataset of 2,286,422 2-D seismic images. Fully using these unlabeled images, we employ the self-supervised learning to pre-train a Transformer-based Seismic Foundation Model (SFM) for producing all-purpose seismic features that work across various tasks and surveys. Through experiments on seismic facies classification, geobody identification, interpolation, denoising, and inversion, our pre-trained model demonstrates versatility, generalization, scalability, and superior performance over baseline models. Conclusively, we provide a foundation model and vast dataset to advance AI in geophysics, addressing challenges (poor generalization, lacking labels, and repetitive training for task-specified models) of applying AI in geophysics and paving the way for future innovations in geoscience.

Developing Foundation Models for medical image analysis is essential to overcome the unique challenges of radiological tasks. The first challenges of this kind for 3D brain MRI, SSL3D and FOMO25, were held at MICCAI 2025. Our solution ranked first in tracks of both contests. It relies on a U-Net CNN architecture combined with strategies leveraging anatomical priors and neuroimaging domain knowledge. Notably, our models trained 1-2 orders of magnitude faster and were 10 times smaller than competing transformer-based approaches. Models are available here: https://github.com/jbanusco/BrainFM4Challenges.

We present the NCS-models, a family of seismic foundation models pretrained on a large share of full-stack seismic cubes from the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS) available through the public DISKOS database. The model weights are open-sourced for the wider geoscience community. Foundation models trained with large-scale self-supervision are emerging as a promising basis for automatic seismic interpretation. However, most existing seismic models rely on limited or proprietary datasets, and it remains unclear how well natural-image foundation models transfer to seismic data. Our goals are to develop basin-scale seismic foundation models, provide practical recipes for scalable 3D training, and quantify the effects of basin-targeted pretraining and token dimensionality on downstream interpretation performance. Using masked autoencoders with Vision Transformer backbones, we pretrain models on a DISKOS-derived corpus of 3D time- and depth-migrated seismic volumes. The NCS-model variants use 2D, 2.5D multi-view, and 3D tokenization within a matched training setup. Transfer is evaluated on interpretation benchmarks using frozen backbones and a simple k-nearest neighbor classifier. Baselines include an ImageNet-pretrained MAE, a frontier vision foundation model, and a globally pretrained seismic model. Natural-image pretrained models do not reliably transfer, reflecting the large domain gap between natural images and seismic data. Seismic pretraining is necessary for robust transfer, and large-scale basin-targeted pretraining yields further gains over a smaller globally pretrained seismic baseline. The NCS-models achieve the best overall performance without fine-tuning, while 2.5D tokenization offers the strongest accuracy-efficiency tradeoff and the embeddings support similarity search for interactive interpretation.

Large foundation models have recently emerged as a prominent focus of interest, attaining superior performance in widespread scenarios. Due to the scarcity of 3D data, many efforts have been made to adapt pre-trained transformers from vision to 3D domains. However, such 2D-to-3D approaches are still limited, due to the potential loss of spatial geometries and high computation cost. More importantly, their frameworks are mainly designed for 2D models, lacking a general any-to-3D paradigm. In this paper, we introduce Any2Point, a parameter-efficient method to empower any-modality large models (vision, language, audio) for 3D understanding. Given a frozen transformer from any source modality, we propose a 3D-to-any (1D or 2D) virtual projection strategy that correlates the input 3D points to the original 1D or 2D positions within the source modality. This mechanism enables us to assign each 3D token with a positional encoding paired with the pre-trained model, which avoids 3D geometry loss caused by the true projection and better motivates the transformer for 3D learning with 1D/2D positional priors. Then, within each transformer block, we insert an any-to-3D guided adapter module for parameter-efficient fine-tuning. The adapter incorporates prior spatial knowledge from the source modality to guide the local feature aggregation of 3D tokens, compelling the semantic adaption of any-modality transformers. We conduct extensive experiments to showcase the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. Code and models are released at https://github.com/Ivan-Tang-3D/Any2Point.

Tabular foundation models such as TabPFN have revolutionized predictive machine learning for tabular data. At the same time, the driving factors of this revolution are hard to understand. Existing open-source tabular foundation models are implemented in complicated pipelines boasting over 10,000 lines of code, lack architecture documentation or code quality. In short, the implementations are hard to understand, not beginner-friendly, and complicated to adapt for new experiments. We introduce nanoTabPFN, a simplified and lightweight implementation of the TabPFN v2 architecture and a corresponding training loop that uses pre-generated training data. nanoTabPFN makes tabular foundation models more accessible to students and researchers alike. For example, restricted to a small data setting it achieves a performance comparable to traditional machine learning baselines within one minute of pre-training on a single GPU (160,000x faster than TabPFN v2 pretraining). This eliminated requirement of large computational resources makes pre-training tabular foundation models accessible for educational purposes. Our code is available at https://github.com/automl/nanoTabPFN.

Recent advances in AI weather forecasting have led to the emergence of so-called "foundation models", typically defined by expensive pretraining and minimal fine-tuning for downstream tasks. However, in the natural sciences, a desirable foundation model should also encode meaningful statistical relationships between the underlying physical variables. This study evaluates the performance of the state-of-the-art Aurora foundation model in predicting hydrological variables, which were not considered during pretraining. We introduce a lightweight approach using shallow decoders trained on the latent representations of the pretrained model to predict these new variables. As a baseline, we compare this to fine-tuning the full model, which allows further optimization of the latent space while incorporating new variables into both inputs and outputs. The decoder-based approach requires 50% less training time and 35% less memory, while achieving strong accuracy across various hydrological variables and preserving desirable properties of the foundation model, such as autoregressive stability. Notably, decoder accuracy depends on the physical correlation between the new variables and those used during pretraining, indicating that Aurora's latent space captures meaningful physical relationships. In this sense, we argue that an important quality metric for foundation models in Earth sciences is their ability to be extended to new variables without a full fine-tuning. This provides a new perspective for making foundation models more accessible to communities with limited computational resources, while supporting broader adoption in Earth sciences.

Visual foundation models (VFMs) have become increasingly popular due to their state-of-the-art performance. However, interpretability remains crucial for critical applications. In this sense, self-explainable models (SEM) aim to provide interpretable classifiers that decompose predictions into a weighted sum of interpretable concepts. Despite their promise, recent studies have shown that these explanations often lack faithfulness. In this work, we combine VFMs with a novel prototypical architecture and specialized training objectives. By training only a lightweight head (approximately 1M parameters) on top of frozen VFMs, our approach (ProtoFM) offers an efficient and interpretable solution. Evaluations demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive classification performance while outperforming existing models across a range of interpretability metrics derived from the literature. Code is available at https://github.com/hturbe/proto-fm.

We present a computational framework that transforms single images into 3D physical objects. The visual geometry of a physical object in an image is determined by three orthogonal attributes: mechanical properties, external forces, and rest-shape geometry. Existing single-view 3D reconstruction methods often overlook this underlying composition, presuming rigidity or neglecting external forces. Consequently, the reconstructed objects fail to withstand real-world physical forces, resulting in instability or undesirable deformation -- diverging from their intended designs as depicted in the image. Our optimization framework addresses this by embedding physical compatibility into the reconstruction process. We explicitly decompose the three physical attributes and link them through static equilibrium, which serves as a hard constraint, ensuring that the optimized physical shapes exhibit desired physical behaviors. Evaluations on a dataset collected from Objaverse demonstrate that our framework consistently enhances the physical realism of 3D models over existing methods. The utility of our framework extends to practical applications in dynamic simulations and 3D printing, where adherence to physical compatibility is paramount.

Current foundation models exhibit impressive capabilities when prompted either with text only or with both image and text inputs. But do their capabilities change depending on the input modality? In this work, we propose IsoBench, a benchmark dataset containing problems from four major areas: math, science, algorithms, and games. Each example is presented with multiple isomorphic representations of inputs, such as visual, textual, and mathematical presentations. IsoBench provides fine-grained feedback to diagnose performance gaps caused by the form of the representation. Across various foundation models, we observe that on the same problem, models have a consistent preference towards textual representations. Most prominently, when evaluated on all IsoBench problems, Claude-3 Opus performs 28.7 points worse when provided with images instead of text; similarly, GPT-4 Turbo is 18.7 points worse and Gemini Pro is 14.9 points worse. Finally, we present two prompting techniques, IsoCombination and IsoScratchPad, which improve model performance by considering combinations of, and translations between, different input representations.

Recent advances in foundation models have highlighted the significant benefits of multi-stage training, with a particular emphasis on the emergence of mid-training as a vital stage that bridges pre-training and post-training. Mid-training is distinguished by its use of intermediate data and computational resources, systematically enhancing specified capabilities such as mathematics, coding, reasoning, and long-context extension, while maintaining foundational competencies. This survey provides a formal definition of mid-training for large language models (LLMs) and investigates optimization frameworks that encompass data curation, training strategies, and model architecture optimization. We analyze mainstream model implementations in the context of objective-driven interventions, illustrating how mid-training serves as a distinct and critical stage in the progressive development of LLM capabilities. By clarifying the unique contributions of mid-training, this survey offers a comprehensive taxonomy and actionable insights, supporting future research and innovation in the advancement of LLMs.

Foundation model development attracts a rapidly expanding body of contributors, scientists, and applications. To help shape responsible development practices, we introduce the Foundation Model Development Cheatsheet: a growing collection of 250+ tools and resources spanning text, vision, and speech modalities. We draw on a large body of prior work to survey resources (e.g. software, documentation, frameworks, guides, and practical tools) that support informed data selection, processing, and understanding, precise and limitation-aware artifact documentation, efficient model training, advance awareness of the environmental impact from training, careful model evaluation of capabilities, risks, and claims, as well as responsible model release, licensing and deployment practices. We hope this curated collection of resources helps guide more responsible development. The process of curating this list, enabled us to review the AI development ecosystem, revealing what tools are critically missing, misused, or over-used in existing practices. We find that (i) tools for data sourcing, model evaluation, and monitoring are critically under-serving ethical and real-world needs, (ii) evaluations for model safety, capabilities, and environmental impact all lack reproducibility and transparency, (iii) text and particularly English-centric analyses continue to dominate over multilingual and multi-modal analyses, and (iv) evaluation of systems, rather than just models, is needed so that capabilities and impact are assessed in context.

New capabilities in foundation models are owed in large part to massive, widely-sourced, and under-documented training data collections. Existing practices in data collection have led to challenges in documenting data transparency, tracing authenticity, verifying consent, privacy, representation, bias, copyright infringement, and the overall development of ethical and trustworthy foundation models. In response, regulation is emphasizing the need for training data transparency to understand foundation models' limitations. Based on a large-scale analysis of the foundation model training data landscape and existing solutions, we identify the missing infrastructure to facilitate responsible foundation model development practices. We examine the current shortcomings of common tools for tracing data authenticity, consent, and documentation, and outline how policymakers, developers, and data creators can facilitate responsible foundation model development by adopting universal data provenance standards.

Incorporating modular designs into neural networks demonstrates superior out-of-generalization, learning efficiency, etc. Existing modular neural networks are generally explicit because their modular architectures are pre-defined, and individual modules are expected to implement distinct functions. Conversely, recent works reveal that there exist implicit modular structures in standard pre-trained transformers, namely Emergent Modularity. They indicate that such modular structures exhibit during the early pre-training phase and are totally spontaneous. However, most transformers are still treated as monolithic models with their modular natures underutilized. Therefore, given the excellent properties of explicit modular architecture, we explore whether and how dense pre-trained transformers can benefit from emergent modular structures. To study this question, we construct Emergent Mixture-of-Experts (EMoE). Without introducing additional parameters, EMoE can be seen as the modular counterpart of the original model and can be effortlessly incorporated into downstream tuning. Extensive experiments (we tune 1785 models) on various downstream tasks (vision and language) and models (22M to1.5B) demonstrate that EMoE effectively boosts in-domain and out-of-domain generalization abilities. Further analysis and ablation study suggest that EMoE mitigates negative knowledge transfer and is robust to various configurations. Code is available at https://github.com/qiuzh20/EMoE

The emergent phenomena of large foundation models have revolutionized natural language processing. However, evaluating these models presents significant challenges due to their size, capabilities, and deployment across diverse applications. Existing literature often focuses on individual aspects, such as benchmark performance or specific tasks, but fails to provide a cohesive process that integrates the nuances of diverse use cases with broader ethical and operational considerations. This work focuses on three key aspects: (1) Formalizing the Evaluation Process by providing a structured framework tailored to specific use-case contexts, (2) Offering Actionable Tools and Frameworks such as checklists and templates to ensure thorough, reproducible, and practical evaluations, and (3) Surveying Recent Work with a targeted review of advancements in LLM evaluation, emphasizing real-world applications.

Foundation vision or vision-language models are trained on large unlabeled or noisy data and learn robust representations that can achieve impressive zero- or few-shot performance on diverse tasks. Given these properties, they are a natural fit for active learning (AL), which aims to maximize labeling efficiency. However, the full potential of foundation models has not been explored in the context of AL, specifically in the low-budget regime. In this work, we evaluate how foundation models influence three critical components of effective AL, namely, 1) initial labeled pool selection, 2) ensuring diverse sampling, and 3) the trade-off between representative and uncertainty sampling. We systematically study how the robust representations of foundation models (DINOv2, OpenCLIP) challenge existing findings in active learning. Our observations inform the principled construction of a new simple and elegant AL strategy that balances uncertainty estimated via dropout with sample diversity. We extensively test our strategy on many challenging image classification benchmarks, including natural images as well as out-of-domain biomedical images that are relatively understudied in the AL literature. We also provide a highly performant and efficient implementation of modern AL strategies (including our method) at https://github.com/sanketx/AL-foundation-models.

Foundation models applied to bio-molecular space hold promise to accelerate drug discovery. Molecular representation is key to building such models. Previous works have typically focused on a single representation or view of the molecules. Here, we develop a multi-view foundation model approach, that integrates molecular views of graph, image and text. Single-view foundation models are each pre-trained on a dataset of up to 200M molecules and then aggregated into combined representations. Our multi-view model is validated on a diverse set of 18 tasks, encompassing ligand-protein binding, molecular solubility, metabolism and toxicity. We show that the multi-view models perform robustly and are able to balance the strengths and weaknesses of specific views. We then apply this model to screen compounds against a large (>100 targets) set of G Protein-Coupled receptors (GPCRs). From this library of targets, we identify 33 that are related to Alzheimer's disease. On this subset, we employ our model to identify strong binders, which are validated through structure-based modeling and identification of key binding motifs.

A handful of visual foundation models (VFMs) have recently emerged as the backbones for numerous downstream tasks. VFMs like CLIP, DINOv2, SAM are trained with distinct objectives, exhibiting unique characteristics for various downstream tasks. We find that despite their conceptual differences, these models can be effectively merged into a unified model through multi-teacher distillation. We name this approach AM-RADIO (Agglomerative Model -- Reduce All Domains Into One). This integrative approach not only surpasses the performance of individual teacher models but also amalgamates their distinctive features, such as zero-shot vision-language comprehension, detailed pixel-level understanding, and open vocabulary segmentation capabilities. In pursuit of the most hardware-efficient backbone, we evaluated numerous architectures in our multi-teacher distillation pipeline using the same training recipe. This led to the development of a novel architecture (E-RADIO) that exceeds the performance of its predecessors and is at least 7x faster than the teacher models. Our comprehensive benchmarking process covers downstream tasks including ImageNet classification, ADE20k semantic segmentation, COCO object detection and LLaVa-1.5 framework. Code: https://github.com/NVlabs/RADIO

This study proposes a modularized deep learning-based loading protocol for optimal parameter estimation of Bouc-Wen (BW) class models. The protocol consists of two key components: optimal loading history construction and CNN-based rapid parameter estimation. Each component is decomposed into independent sub-modules tailored to distinct hysteretic behaviors-basic hysteresis, structural degradation, and pinching effect-making the protocol adaptable to diverse hysteresis models. Three independent CNN architectures are developed to capture the path-dependent nature of these hysteretic behaviors. By training these CNN architectures on diverse loading histories, minimal loading sequences, termed loading history modules, are identified and then combined to construct an optimal loading history. The three CNN models, trained on the respective loading history modules, serve as rapid parameter estimators. Numerical evaluation of the protocol, including nonlinear time history analysis of a 3-story steel moment frame and fragility curve construction for a 3-story reinforced concrete frame, demonstrates that the proposed protocol significantly reduces total analysis time while maintaining or improving estimation accuracy. The proposed protocol can be extended to other hysteresis models, suggesting a systematic approach for identifying general hysteresis models.

Foundation models (FMs) are transforming computational pathology by offering new ways to analyze histopathology images. However, FMs typically require weeks of training on large databases, making their creation a resource-intensive process. In this paper, we present a training for foundation models from whole slide images using supervised, end-to-end, multitask learning on slide-level labels. Notably, it is the first model to incorporate cancer subtyping, risk estimation, and genetic mutation prediction into one model. The presented model outperforms self-supervised models on seven benchmark tasks while the training only required 5% of the computational resources. The results not only show that supervised training can outperform self-supervision with less data, but also offer a solution to annotation problems, as patient-based labels are widely available through routine clinical processes. Furthermore, an attention module provides a layer of explainability across different tasks and serves as a tumor detector for unseen cancer types. To address the issue of closed-source datasets, the model was fully trained on openly available data. The code and model weights are made available under https://github.com/FraunhoferMEVIS/MedicalMultitaskModeling.

In contrast to numerous NLP and 2D vision foundational models, learning a 3D foundational model poses considerably greater challenges. This is primarily due to the inherent data variability and diversity of downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce a novel universal 3D pre-training framework designed to facilitate the acquisition of efficient 3D representation, thereby establishing a pathway to 3D foundational models. Considering that informative 3D features should encode rich geometry and appearance cues that can be utilized to render realistic images, we propose to learn 3D representations by differentiable neural rendering. We train a 3D backbone with a devised volumetric neural renderer by comparing the rendered with the real images. Notably, our approach seamlessly integrates the learned 3D encoder into various downstream tasks. These tasks encompass not only high-level challenges such as 3D detection and segmentation but also low-level objectives like 3D reconstruction and image synthesis, spanning both indoor and outdoor scenarios. Besides, we also illustrate the capability of pre-training a 2D backbone using the proposed methodology, surpassing conventional pre-training methods by a large margin. For the first time, PonderV2 achieves state-of-the-art performance on 11 indoor and outdoor benchmarks, implying its effectiveness. Code and models are available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/PonderV2.

The rapid growth of medical imaging has fueled the development of Foundation Models (FMs) to reduce the growing, unsustainable workload on radiologists. While recent FMs have shown the power of large-scale pre-training to CT and MRI analysis, there remains significant room to optimize how these models learn from complex radiological volumes. Building upon the Curia framework, this work introduces Curia-2, which significantly improves the original pre-training strategy and representation quality to better capture the specificities of radiological data. The proposed methodology enables scaling the architecture up to billion-parameter Vision Transformers, marking a first for multi-modal CT and MRI FMs. Furthermore, we formalize the evaluation of these models by extending and restructuring CuriaBench into two distinct tracks: a 2D track tailored for slice-based vision models and a 3D track for volumetric benchmarking. Our results demonstrate that Curia-2 outperforms all FMs on vision-focused tasks and fairs competitively to vision-language models on clinically complex tasks such as finding detection. Weights will be made publicly available to foster further research.

Research and practice in Intelligent Design (ID) have significantly enhanced engineering innovation, efficiency, quality, and productivity over recent decades, fundamentally reshaping how engineering designers think, behave, and interact with design processes. The recent emergence of Foundation Models (FMs), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), has demonstrated general knowledge-based reasoning capabilities, and open new paths and avenues for further transformation in engineering design. In this context, this paper introduces Intelligent Design 4.0 (ID 4.0) as an emerging paradigm empowered by agentic AI systems. We review the historical evolution of ID across four distinct stages: rule-based expert systems, task-specific machine learning models, large-scale foundation AI models, and the recent emerging paradigm of multi-agent collaboration. We propose a conceptual framework for ID 4.0 and discuss its potential to support end-to-end automation of engineering design processes through coordinated, autonomous multi-agent-based systems. Furthermore, we discuss future perspectives to enhance and fully realize ID 4.0's potential, including more complex design scenarios, more practical design implementations, novel agent coordination mechanisms, and autonomous design goal-setting with better human value alignment. In sum, these insights lay a foundation for advancing Intelligent Design toward greater adaptivity, autonomy, and effectiveness in addressing increasingly complex design challenges.

Machine learning for differential equations paves the way for computationally efficient alternatives to numerical solvers, with potentially broad impacts in science and engineering. Though current algorithms typically require simulated training data tailored to a given setting, one may instead wish to learn useful information from heterogeneous sources, or from real dynamical systems observations that are messy or incomplete. In this work, we learn general-purpose representations of PDEs from heterogeneous data by implementing joint embedding methods for self-supervised learning (SSL), a framework for unsupervised representation learning that has had notable success in computer vision. Our representation outperforms baseline approaches to invariant tasks, such as regressing the coefficients of a PDE, while also improving the time-stepping performance of neural solvers. We hope that our proposed methodology will prove useful in the eventual development of general-purpose foundation models for PDEs.

Foundation multi-modal models are often designed by stitching of multiple existing pretrained uni-modal models: for example, an image classifier with an text model. This stitching process is performed by training a connector module that aims to align the representation spaces of these uni-modal models towards a multi-modal objective. However, given the complexity of training such connectors on large scale web-based datasets coupled with the ever-increasing number of available pretrained uni-modal models, the task of uni-modal models selection and subsequent connector module training becomes computationally demanding. To address this under-studied critical problem, we propose Hypernetwork Model Alignment (Hyma), a novel all-in-one solution for optimal uni-modal model selection and connector training by leveraging hypernetworks. Specifically, our framework utilizes the parameter prediction capability of a hypernetwork to obtain jointly trained connector modules for N times M combinations of uni-modal models. In our experiments, Hyma reduces the cost of searching for the best performing uni-modal model pair by 10times, while matching the ranking and trained connector performance obtained via grid search across a suite of diverse multi-modal benchmarks.

The field of natural language processing (NLP) has witnessed significant progress in recent years, with a notable focus on improving large language models' (LLM) performance through innovative prompting techniques. Among these, prompt engineering coupled with structures has emerged as a promising paradigm, with designs such as Chain-of-Thought, Tree of Thoughts, or Graph of Thoughts, in which the overall LLM reasoning is guided by a structure such as a graph. As illustrated with numerous examples, this paradigm significantly enhances the LLM's capability to solve numerous tasks, ranging from logical or mathematical reasoning to planning or creative writing. To facilitate the understanding of this growing field and pave the way for future developments, we devise a general blueprint for effective and efficient LLM reasoning schemes. For this, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the prompt execution pipeline, clarifying and clearly defining different concepts. We then build the first taxonomy of structure-enhanced LLM reasoning schemes. We focus on identifying fundamental classes of harnessed structures, and we analyze the representations of these structures, algorithms executed with these structures, and many others. We refer to these structures as reasoning topologies, because their representation becomes to a degree spatial, as they are contained within the LLM context. Our study compares existing prompting schemes using the proposed taxonomy, discussing how certain design choices lead to different patterns in performance and cost. We also outline theoretical underpinnings, relationships between prompting and others parts of the LLM ecosystem such as knowledge bases, and the associated research challenges. Our work will help to advance future prompt engineering techniques.

Foundation models have made significant strides in various applications, including text-to-image generation, panoptic segmentation, and natural language processing. This paper presents Instruct2Act, a framework that utilizes Large Language Models to map multi-modal instructions to sequential actions for robotic manipulation tasks. Specifically, Instruct2Act employs the LLM model to generate Python programs that constitute a comprehensive perception, planning, and action loop for robotic tasks. In the perception section, pre-defined APIs are used to access multiple foundation models where the Segment Anything Model (SAM) accurately locates candidate objects, and CLIP classifies them. In this way, the framework leverages the expertise of foundation models and robotic abilities to convert complex high-level instructions into precise policy codes. Our approach is adjustable and flexible in accommodating various instruction modalities and input types and catering to specific task demands. We validated the practicality and efficiency of our approach by assessing it on robotic tasks in different scenarios within tabletop manipulation domains. Furthermore, our zero-shot method outperformed many state-of-the-art learning-based policies in several tasks. The code for our proposed approach is available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/Instruct2Act, serving as a robust benchmark for high-level robotic instruction tasks with assorted modality inputs.