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Fields · this week
All fields1987Multimodal333Frontier LLMs257Recursive self improvement213Inference & serving163Agents & indirect prompt injection159Neural operators138Robotics135Clinical reasoning125Forecasting time94Linear bandits69Voice AI59AI safety36Molecular property prediction33Character recognition OCR33Federated learning27All 23 fields

Rising research topics

  • Diffusion priors20−4.8%
  • Voice AI59−14.5%
  • Character recognition OCR33−17.5%
  • Spiking neural networks6−25.0%
  • Quantum machine learning23−25.8%
  • Channel state information14−30.0%
  • Forecasting time94−35.6%
  • Algorithmic fairness7−36.4%

Papers

  • arXiv cs.LGSep 29

    Where Root Cause Analysis Fails: A Retrieval-Reranking Decomposition

    Hada Melino Muhammad, Luan Pham, Laure Barrière, Sachin Shetty, Leonardo Pulga +1

    Identifying the root cause of an anomaly among hundreds of sensors is critical for preventing safety incidents and costly downtime in complex monitored systems. Existing studies evaluate root cause analysis (RCA) methods using top@k accuracy. We show that this metric has a fundamental blind spot: it conflates two failure modes, retrieval failure, where the true cause is never considered, and reranking failure, where it is considered but ranked too low. In this work, we introduce a retrieval-reranking decomposition and audit four well-known benchmarks to expose this blind spot. Our experiments show that, on benchmarks with complex faults, statistical baselines mis-rank the true cause 79-100% of the time, and graph-based methods never clearly beat the best statistical baseline, whether their causal graphs are learned on short fault windows, on retrieved candidate pools guaranteed to contain the cause, or on multi-day normal-operation data. Meanwhile, on simple benchmarks where faults manifest significantly at their origin, retrieval is nearly solved (98-100%). Guided by the decomposition, we build a two-stage pipeline combining a multi-signal retriever with an LLM reranker that, as…

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  • arXiv cs.CVSep 29

    When Semantics Matter: Reliability-Aware Semantic-Rhythm Control for Co-Speech Gesture Generation

    Zhirui Xing, Long Ye, Kaige Li, Ziyi Xu, Ming Meng

    Co-speech gesture generation aims to synthesize natural gestures that are both temporally synchronized with speech and semantically consistent with the spoken content. Although recent methods can generate rhythmically plausible motions, they often rely heavily on acoustic prosody while underutilizing textual semantics, especially when semantic annotations are incomplete, noisy, or unavailable. Consequently, the generated gestures may follow speech rhythm while failing to express the intended semantics. To address this problem, we propose a reliability-aware semantic-rhythm control framework for co-speech gesture generation. We first learn a discrete motion prior that represents continuous gestures in a compact and structured motion-code space. We then introduce a dual-branch semantic contribution estimation mechanism consisting of a full multimodal branch and an audio-only branch. Their distributional discrepancy is formulated as conditional information gain to quantify how much textual semantics changes the predicted motion. Based on this estimate, a controllable semantic-rhythm objective selectively strengthens semantic guidance in content-relevant segments while limiting…

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  • arXiv cs.CLSep 29▲ 20

    ProgressCompass: Embodied Progress Reward Models Are Lost Without the Right Context

    Jianshu Zhang, Keliang Wu, Chengxuan Qian, Xiyuan Yang, Ce Zhang +4

    Embodied agents now take on ever longer tasks. For long tasks, knowing only whether a task finally succeeds or fails says little; the steps along the way matter. Progress Reward Models (PRMs) score how far a task has come at every step, and serve as dense rewards, verifiers and monitors. Yet in long tasks the current frame alone often cannot tell how far the task has come, because progress depends on what happened before. We call this problem context-dependent progress estimation. Existing benchmarks on progress estimation mostly focus on short tasks whose progress can be read from the current observation, and whether PRMs can estimate progress when context is needed remains underexplored. We therefore build ContextProgress-Bench, with 24 manipulation tasks for 120 episodes. The benchmark covers three settings: (i) State Recall, where information needed for progress appeared earlier but is not in the current frame; (ii) Sequence Tracking, where steps follow a fixed order, so progress requires knowing which steps are done and which comes next; and (iii) Recurrence Disambiguation, where look-alike frames sit at very different progress. We then run a paired diagnosis: each PRM keeps…

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  • arXiv cs.LGSep 29

    MARCO: Multi-Round Agentic Reinforcement for Conditional Molecular Optimization

    Shicheng Fang, Yuxin Wang, Zhuo Yang, Xiaohu Xu, Jiahao Lu +4

    Molecular optimization is inherently iterative: a candidate is proposed, evaluated against several objectives, and revised while preserving a relationship to the source molecule. Most instruction-following models instead emit one edited molecule, forcing validity, property improvement, and similarity control into a single response. We introduce MARCO, an evaluator-grounded reinforcement-learning framework that trains molecular editors on bounded proposal--feedback--revision trajectories. MARCO aggregates shaped turn rewards into an undiscounted trajectory return for group-relative policy optimization. We evaluate two consequences of this training: Same-1 tests the trained policy under a one-response budget, while Same-5 tests whether the same policy can use verifier feedback when up to five responses are available. Across the three-objective MuMOInstruct benchmark, three Qwen backbones, and seen/unseen instruction splits, SFT-initialized MARCO obtains the highest product of property success rate and similarity in every reported primary setting. Same-5 further improves the observed score under the tested budget, while four-objective and public-checkpoint experiments test transfer…

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  • arXiv cs.CVSep 29

    Reprogramming Vision-Language Models via Structured Prompt Reparameterization

    Zizhao Li, Chengyi Cai, Mohammed Yaqoob Ansari, Feng Liu, Joseph West +1

    Visual reprogramming adapts pretrained models to downstream tasks by modifying their input and output interfaces while keeping the backbone fixed. In vision-language models, existing methods mainly rely on intra-class prompt aggregation and do not explicitly model relationships among classes. However, fine-grained categories often exhibit highly overlapping attribute descriptions and strong inter-class correlation in the text embedding space, where discriminative cues lie in subtle low-variance components. We propose Reparameterized Inter-Class Visual Reprogramming (RVP), a structured framework that aggregates multiple text prompts within each class and applies residual correction across classes. We also show that CLIP-based visual reprogramming with input-independent linear output aggregation can be expressed as a linear mapping from frozen image embeddings to downstream logits, and use this view to design a structured reparameterization that models shared semantic components and class-specific differences. RVP uses only a single visual prompt and can be reparameterized at inference into a frozen backbone followed by a linear classifier, incurring nearly zero computational…

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  • arXiv cs.AISep 29

    MLToolBench: Learning Tool-Augmented Agents for Machine Learning Development

    Xin Yu, Lizhu Zhang, Jiamu Bai, Yanhong Wu, Zellux Wang +5

    Machine learning engineering (MLE) agents have made substantial progress, but learning through ML experimentation remains costly in time and computation. Synthetic environments reduce these costs while introducing variations in data and experimental settings that require task-specific diagnosis. Access to diagnostic tools alone does not ensure that agents learn when to use them or how to act on their findings. We introduce ToolMLBench, a suite of executable tools for data inspection, code verification, and experiment diagnosis, together with an SFT and RL pipeline for learning their use. Diagnostic calls acquire evidence whose value depends on subsequent decisions, so final outcomes provide limited guidance on which calls to reinforce. We address this challenge with SPICE, which measures how privileged context changes the likelihood of a sampled tool action and uses this difference as a turn-level reward alongside the final outcome. We train on 80 synthetic tasks and evaluate on 25 in-domain and 10 out-of-domain tasks. Providing tool interfaces and descriptions alone yields inconsistent gains across unadapted models. With the same diagnostic interface, our training pipeline…

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  • arXiv cs.LGSep 29

    Understanding Private Evolution as Learning-Augmented Clustering

    Audra McMillan, Kunal Talwar, Felix Zhou

    Private Evolution (PE) is a differentially private algorithm for synthetic data generation. While it can be viewed as a Wasserstein learning algorithm, it performs much better in practice than worst-case Wasserstein analyses would predict. We recast PE as generative model-augmented Wasserstein learning. We show theoretically that when we take into account the use of a generative model that is able to capture something about the true distribution, then we can obtain much better performance bounds. For example, if the generator gives samples in the same low-dimensional space as the distribution, then sample complexity depends on intrinsic, not ambient, dimension. We also show that standard variants of PE can fail to converge on simple well-clustered instances, and propose a new geometry-aware version of PE with provable convergence on such instances. Experimentally, we show that our new algorithm is competitive with standard baselines and can improve recall.

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  • arXiv cs.CVSep 29

    ReWorld-Track: A Recursive Event World Model for Language-Guided Multi-Camera Tracking

    Haoyang Wu, Shoudong Han, Chaoyue Li, Sijia Chen, Zhenyang Xie +1

    Language-guided multi-camera tracking must preserve a target identity across unobserved gaps, where similar candidates and uncertain returns can make early associations unreliable. A wrong match can corrupt the history used to predict later observations and propagate identity errors across subsequent camera handoffs. We propose ReWorld-Track, a recursive event world model that carries association uncertainty into future predictions. Candidate matches and continued waiting define alternative target states, whose posterior probabilities are used to update a persistent recurrent belief. This representation preserves uncertainty about alternative trajectories through successive observations. This belief predicts the next camera, arrival time, and entry region, while appearance and language evidence guide association. By training across successive handoffs, the model learns to retain uncertainty that remains useful for later predictions and identity decisions. ReWorld-Track achieves HOTA scores of 65.19 on CityFlowV2 and 45.36 on MTMMC, with improved identity continuity across repeated handoffs. On MTMMC, its structured posterior update gains 0.50 HOTA points over a similarly sized…

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  • arXiv cs.CLAgentsSep 29

    Gödel Forest: Balancing Search Depth and Breadth for Data-Centric Recursive Self-Improvement

    Ziqi Zhao, Fanqing Meng, Haocheng Lu, Lingxiao Du, Qiguang Chen +2

    Recursive self-improvement (RSI) aims to achieve compounding gains by having models improve themselves. While most existing RSI systems optimize external agent harnesses or prompts around a frozen base model, data-centric RSI directly updates the model's own parameters by training on agent-generated data. However, because validating data strategies requires expensive model training, existing methods face a fundamental dilemma: a single agent gets trapped in narrow directions and lacks exploration breadth, while naive parallel search or heavy trace sharing sacrifices long-horizon search depth. To address this challenge, we introduce G"odel Forest, a multi-agent framework that organizes recursive self-improvement as an ensemble of co-evolving search trees. In G"odel Forest, each agent autonomously grows a persistent tree, deepening, branching, or pruning data strategies based on model feedback to secure depth, while parallel trees explore distinct regions of the data space to expand breadth. Crucially, rather than leaving trees isolated or flooding them with heavy execution logs, a dynamically co-evolving memory connects the forest: agents continuously distill their successes and…

    AITraining & fine-tuning80PDF
  • arXiv cs.CLSep 29

    CAST: Cost-Aware Speculative Trees from One-Pass Block Drafters

    Jungseob Lee, Sugyeong Eo

    Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference by drafting future tokens cheaply and verifying them with the target model in parallel. Block drafters score a whole block of future tokens in one forward pass, yet standard decoding verifies only the top-scoring chain and discards the other candidates. Because these candidates are already scored, verifying more of them adds target computation but no extra drafting. We introduce CAST (Cost-Aware Speculative Trees), which packs these candidates into a tree and verifies it in a single target pass, leaving the target model, drafter weights, and decoding rule untouched. To decide how wide the tree should be, CAST adds candidates while the expected gain from the next one outweighs the verification time it adds. The width therefore adapts to each deployment from a latency measurement, without sweeping over widths. We evaluate CAST across five domains on three GPU generations and two model families. At its predicted width, CAST is faster than the standard chain in all eight settings, by up to 43%. We also find that the best width depends strongly on the deployment. Where verification cost jumps at a kernel boundary, a…

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  • arXiv cs.CLSep 29

    Refusal Localizes, the Damage Relocates: Safety Layers Under Few-Sample Fine-Tuning

    Jungseob Lee, Dongyub Jude Lee, Sugyeong Eo, Seongtae Hong, Seungyoon Lee +1

    Fine-tuning adapts aligned large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks, but a few dozen harmful examples can remove their refusal of harmful requests. Prior work localizes safety-related behavior to specific layers, directions, and tokens, suggesting targets for protection. We test whether successful localization and recovery support defenses that survive changes in the attack. Across six checkpoints from four model families, harmful and benign prompts remain linearly separable after attack, and patching full clean hidden states into the compromised model restores refusal at a reproducible transition depth. Building on a prior layer-freezing defense, we freeze every layer up to this depth and repeat the attack. At a hundred harmful examples, refusal remains near zero on all six checkpoints, with recovery transitions above the frozen boundary. In a second study, removing the update's top two singular directions restores refusal after short attention-only fine-tunes on four checkpoints. On Llama-3.1-8B, ordinary training changes weaken this repair and an attacker who spreads the update defeats it. A spectral detector calibrated on benign Llama fine-tunes misses most repair…

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  • arXiv cs.LGSep 29

    Human-inspired, Task-Dimension-Guided Exploration for Efficient Learning in High Dimensions

    Fanyu Zhu, Jiahui An, Ni Ji

    Efficient exploration in high-dimensional decision spaces remains a central challenge for decision-making systems. Humans, in contrast, can navigate large decision spaces with remarkable efficiency. Recent behavioral studies suggest that humans reduce dimensionality in large decision spaces by probing candidate feature dimensions, identifying reward-relevant ones, and restricting the effective decision space. Inspired by this mechanism, we propose TDGE (Task-Dimension-Guided Exploration), a human-inspired, model-agnostic algorithm with an automatically constructed task-dimension--feature--item hierarchy. TDGE follows a top-down exploration strategy: it first selects task-relevant feature dimensions, then identifies informative features within those dimensions, and finally recommends concrete items based on the selected features. Experiments on MovieLens-20M, LastFM, and Amazon recommendation datasets show that TDGE substantially improves exploration efficiency and cold-start adaptation over baseline algorithms. Comparisons with other structured algorithms and ablation studies attribute these gains to TDGE's hierarchical structure and semantic feature-space exploration, with…

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  • arXiv cs.AISep 29

    FairDiff: Mitigating the Self-Reinforcing Matthew Effect in Diffusion Recommender Models

    Song-Li Wu, Xianquan Wang, Zhaocheng Du, Weinan Gan, Jingyi Wang

    While the "Matthew Effect" and filter bubbles are widely recognized outcome-level biases in recommender systems, we reveal that Diffusion Recommender Models (DRMs) uniquely compound this issue through their generative dynamics. Rather than merely inheriting data imbalances, DRMs trigger a self-reinforcing amplification of popularity bias. We identify that this phenomenon is driven by two compounding mechanisms. First, while optimization loss is universally dominated by high-frequency items across recommenders, DRMs suffer from a unique structural prior mismatch during generation. Because the forward terminal distribution of long-tailed data deviates significantly from the standard Gaussian prior, reverse sampling trajectories inherently collapse toward high-density popular items, fundamentally suppressing niche item generation. To dismantle this self-reinforcing loop, we propose FairDiff, a plug-and-play fairness-aware diffusion framework. To overcome the popularity-dominated loss, we introduce Popularity Condition Guidance (PCG). Rather than altering the training objective, PCG acts as an inference-time distributional reweighting mechanism, mathematically reshaping the…

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  • arXiv cs.AISep 29

    FineSID: Scalable and Efficient Semantic Identifier Learning for Generative Recommendation

    Song-Li Wu, Weinan Gan, Zhaocheng Du, Xianquan Wang, Jingyi Wang

    A critical prerequisite of generative recommendation is designing semantic identifiers (SIDs) that are both scalable to large item sets and efficiently learnable. Existing SID learning methods fundamentally rely on Top-1 hard assignment during vector quantization. While heuristic strategies -- such as clustering-based initialization or forced post-hoc collision resolution -- can artificially inflate codebook coverage, they often disrupt end-to-end semantic alignment and fail to address the underlying optimization bottleneck: sparse gradient propagation. In standard Top-1 assignment, gradients concentrate on a narrow subset of frequently selected codewords, leaving the majority inherently under-trained and causing severe SID collisions. To overcome this limitation natively without relying on complex initialization priors, we propose FineSID, a unified quantization framework that moves beyond Top-1 assignment by enabling fine-grained gradient propagation across the entire codebook. Instead of updating only a single selected codeword, FineSID distributes learning signals to all codewords in a soft, differentiable manner. This design promotes globally balanced codebook optimization…

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  • arXiv cs.LGSep 29

    Stochastic Heavy Ball with Polyak Step Size and Armijo Line Search: A General Convergence Analysis

    Jiawei Zhang, Qitan Shi, Yuantao Gu

    Polyak step size (PS) and Armijo line search (ALS) have received increasing attention in stochastic optimization, with encouraging empirical performance and theoretical guarantees. However, their convergence theory for stochastic heavy ball (SHB) methods remains limited. In this work, we develop a unified convergence analysis for SHB equipped with PS and ALS. To this end, we introduce a modified Armijo rule that closely parallels the Polyak step size, together with a decoupling analysis that isolates the historical dependence induced by momentum. For SHB with standard PS and ALS, we establish expected convergence for strongly convex, convex, and non-convex objectives without interpolation or restrictive conditions on the momentum parameter. Under interpolation or strong growth, we further strengthen the results to almost sure rates and last-iterate convergence. Moreover, for general settings beyond interpolation, we prove almost sure convergence to the exact optimum or to stationarity for SHB with diminishing variants of PS and ALS. These results provide a more comprehensive theoretical view of Polyak step size and Armijo line search for stochastic heavy ball methods.

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  • arXiv cs.CVSep 29

    EgoRefine: Ego-Referenced Predictive Alignment and Trajectory-Conditioned Reliability-Aware Fusion for Asynchronous Collaborative Perception

    Lingzhao Kong, Yongsheng Zang, Yu Kang, Kailun Yang, Jie Fu +2

    Collaborative perception enables connected agents to share complementary observations for 3D object detection, extending sensing range and mitigating occlusion. Under asynchronous communication, however, cooperative features arrive with temporal delay. Existing prediction-based methods compensate for these features mainly from the transmitting agent's own history, leaving residual misalignment with the ego agent's current observation; subsequent fusion also often overlooks spatial variations in alignment quality. We propose EgoRefine, an ego-referenced predictive alignment and reliability-aware fusion framework for asynchronous collaborative perception. Its Ego-referenced Predictive Alignment module uses the current ego feature to guide cooperative trajectory-field prediction and refines the sampling offsets along an ego-referenced trajectory direction. Its Trajectory-conditioned Reliability-aware Fusion module treats the trajectory discrepancy between the ego and cooperative streams and the directional refinement magnitude as alignment cues, using them to condition the relation between aligned features and adaptively reweight the two streams before convolutional fusion.…

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  • arXiv cs.LGSep 29

    GenLimitLib: A Formal Library for Language Generation in the Limit and AI-Assisted Mathematical Research

    Shuangping Li, Peng Zhang

    We present GenLimitLib, a source-aligned Lean 4 library for language generation in the limit. Introduced by Kleinberg and Mullainathan at NeurIPS 2024, language generation in the limit studies a theoretical question motivated by LLMs: how to generate valid new strings from observed examples. This young and rapidly evolving field offers a natural testbed for studying large-scale formalization. GenLimitLib contains formal developments for 30 papers. It extracts shared definitions and reusable proof components while preserving paper-specific assumptions and statements, and records relationships across papers. In this way, GenLimitLib provides a concrete and structured view of the literature. We show through mathematical case studies and LLM experiments how our library can support both human mathematical research and AI-assisted research. Our Library: https://github.com/pengzhang91/generation-in-the-limit-lib.

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  • arXiv cs.LGSep 29

    AutoLoCo: Communication Efficient Distributed LLM Training via Adaptive Synchronization

    Pengyu He, Yan Zhang, Ruien Li, Guangwen Yang

    The pre-training of Large Language Models (LLMs) is increasingly conducted across multiple data centers. As training scales to a larger number of accelerators, the fraction of time spent on computation decreases, while the fraction spent on communication increases. Therefore, frequent synchronization becomes a growing bottleneck. Local update methods reduce this cost by allowing workers to perform several optimizer steps between synchronizations. Most local update methods set the number of local optimizer steps between synchronizations before training and keep this interval fixed throughout the run. However, the best interval can change during the entire train process. If the interval and optimizer are adapted to the current training state, the communication frequency is reduced while maintaining the training performance. In this work, we introduce AutoLoCo, an adaptive training framework to reduce communication in LLM training. It adapts the local interval using scalar training statistics and corrects each outer update. Our method is motivated by two observations: 1) the appropriate local interval varies across training stages, and 2) changing the number of inner steps per…

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  • arXiv cs.CVSep 29

    You Only Reprogram Once: Rethinking Prolonged Training for Visual Reprogramming

    Zizhao Li, Mohammed Yaqoob Ansari, Xinyu Su, Jiayang Ao, Joseph West +1

    Visual reprogramming is a parameter-efficient method for adapting pretrained models, yet its training can remain computationally expensive: even with a frozen backbone, visual prompts are often optimized through the full model for hundreds of epochs. Before changing what the pretrained model sees, we ask whether we are fully using what it already tells us. We find that modeling the full source response can already yield strong downstream predictions without prompt optimization. Motivated by this observation, we introduce You Only Reprogram Once (YORO), which constructs a downstream predictor from the frozen response space in a single forward-only traversal. Its Bayesian Discriminant Mapping (BDM) derives a covariance-aware affine mapping from streaming class statistics, requiring no backpropagation, optimizer updates, or repeated visits to the training set. When further input adaptation helps, YORO-FP optionally refines the visual prompt for 20 epochs. BDM also extends naturally to CLIP by treating attribute-prompt similarities as source responses. Across three full-data settings, YORO improves average accuracy over the strongest prior gradient-free mapping by 18.4--24.4\%. On…

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  • arXiv cs.LGSep 29

    Byzantine-Robust Federated Representation Learning

    Leonardo F. Toso, James Anderson, Rafael Pinot, Nirupam Gupta

    We study federated learning (FL) with adversarial clients, where the goal is to minimize the average loss of the honest (non-adversarial) clients without knowing their identity. Under heterogeneity, a single shared model parameter is statistically inappropriate: it cannot capture the distinct data-generating processes across clients, incurring an irreducible model-heterogeneity bias and severely limiting robustness to adversarial clients (a.k.a. Byzantine-robustness). We address this problem through representation learning, where each client learns a personalized linear head, while collaboratively estimating a shared nonlinear representation through Byzantine-robust aggregation. We demonstrate that the heterogeneity among honest representation gradients is controlled by the representation error and statistical errors that decay either with the number of data samples per client ($τ$) or the number of iterations ($T$). In particular, our non-asymptotic parameter recovery error bound reveals three terms: (i) an initialization-dependent error that goes away with $T$, (ii) finite-sample noise terms that decreases with $τ$ and the number of honest clients, and (iii) a stochastic…

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