Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (DLLMs) offer a compelling alternative to Auto-Regressive models, but their deployment is constrained by high decoding cost. In this work, we identify a key inefficiency in DLLM decoding: while computation is parallelized over token blocks, only a small subset of tokens is decodable at each diffusion step, causing most compute to be wasted on non-decodable tokens. We further observe a strong correlation between attention-derived token importance and token-wise decoding probability. Based on this insight, we propose FOCUS -- an inference system designed for DLLMs. By dynamically focusing computation on decodable tokens and evicting non-decodable ones on-the-fly, FOCUS increases the effective batch size, alleviating compute limitations and enabling scalable throughput. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that FOCUS achieves up to 3.52$\times$ throughput improvement over the production-grade engine LMDeploy, while preserving or improving generation quality across multiple benchmarks. The FOCUS system is publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/sands-lab/FOCUS.
Abstract: Multispecific antibodies offer transformative therapeutic potential by engaging multiple epitopes simultaneously, yet their efficacy is an emergent property governed by complex molecular architectures. Rational design is often bottlenecked by the inability to predict how subtle changes in domain topology influence functional outcomes, a challenge exacerbated by the scarcity of comprehensive experimental data. Here, we introduce a computational framework to address part of this gap. First, we present a generative method for creating large-scale, realistic synthetic functional landscapes that capture non-linear interactions where biological activity depends on domain connectivity. Second, we propose a graph neural network architecture that explicitly encodes these topological constraints, distinguishing between format configurations that appear identical to sequence-only models. We demonstrate that this model, trained on synthetic landscapes, recapitulates complex functional properties and, via transfer learning, has the potential to achieve high predictive accuracy on limited biological datasets. We showcase the model's utility by optimizing trade-offs between efficacy and toxicity in trispecific T-cell engagers and retrieving optimal common light chains. This work provides a robust benchmarking environment for disentangling the combinatorial complexity of multispecifics, accelerating the design of next-generation therapeutics.
Abstract: While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) significantly enhances the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), explicit reasoning chains introduce substantial computational redundancy. Recent latent reasoning methods attempt to mitigate this by compressing reasoning processes into latent space, but often suffer from severe performance degradation due to the lack of appropriate compression guidance. In this study, we propose Rendered CoT-Guided variational Latent Reasoning (ReGuLaR), a simple yet novel latent learning paradigm resolving this issue. Fundamentally, we formulate latent reasoning within the Variational Auto-Encoding (VAE) framework, sampling the current latent reasoning state from the posterior distribution conditioned on previous ones. Specifically, when learning this variational latent reasoning model, we render explicit reasoning chains as images, from which we extract dense visual-semantic representations to regularize the posterior distribution, thereby achieving efficient compression with minimal information loss. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReGuLaR significantly outperforms existing latent reasoning methods across both computational efficiency and reasoning effectiveness, and even surpasses CoT through multi-modal reasoning, providing a new and insightful solution to latent reasoning. Code: https://github.com/FanmengWang/ReGuLaR.
Abstract: We introduce JobResQA, a multilingual Question Answering benchmark for evaluating Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) capabilities of LLMs on HR-specific tasks involving résumés and job descriptions. The dataset comprises 581 QA pairs across 105 synthetic résumé-job description pairs in five languages (English, Spanish, Italian, German, and Chinese), with questions spanning three complexity levels from basic factual extraction to complex cross-document reasoning. We propose a data generation pipeline derived from real-world sources through de-identification and data synthesis to ensure both realism and privacy, while controlled demographic and professional attributes (implemented via placeholders) enable systematic bias and fairness studies. We also present a cost-effective, human-in-the-loop translation pipeline based on the TEaR methodology, incorporating MQM error annotations and selective post-editing to ensure an high-quality multi-way parallel benchmark. We provide a baseline evaluations across multiple open-weight LLM families using an LLM-as-judge approach revealing higher performances on English and Spanish but substantial degradation for other languages, highlighting critical gaps in multilingual MRC capabilities for HR applications. JobResQA provides a reproducible benchmark for advancing fair and reliable LLM-based HR systems. The benchmark is publicly available at: https://github.com/Avature/jobresqa-benchmark
Abstract: Neural audio codecs are at the core of modern conversational speech technologies, converting continuous speech into sequences of discrete tokens that can be processed by LLMs. However, existing codecs typically operate at fixed frame rates, allocating tokens uniformly in time and producing unnecessarily long sequences. In this work, we introduce DyCAST, a Dynamic Character-Aligned Speech Tokenizer that enables variable-frame-rate tokenization through soft character-level alignment and explicit duration modeling. DyCAST learns to associate tokens with character-level linguistic units during training and supports alignment-free inference with direct control over token durations at decoding time. To improve speech resynthesis quality at low frame rates, we further introduce a retrieval-augmented decoding mechanism that enhances reconstruction fidelity without increasing bitrate. Experiments show that DyCAST achieves competitive speech resynthesis quality and downstream performance while using significantly fewer tokens than fixed-frame-rate codecs. Code and checkpoints will be released publicly at https://github.com/lucadellalib/dycast.
Abstract: Autoregressive (AR) large audio language models (LALMs) such as Qwen-2.5-Omni have achieved strong performance on audio understanding and interaction, but scaling them remains costly in data and computation, and strictly sequential decoding limits inference efficiency. Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have recently been shown to make effective use of limited training data, and prior work on DIFFA indicates that replacing an AR backbone with a diffusion counterpart can substantially improve audio understanding under matched settings, albeit at a proof-of-concept scale without large-scale instruction tuning, preference alignment, or practical decoding schemes. We introduce DIFFA-2, a practical diffusion-based LALM for general audio understanding. DIFFA-2 upgrades the speech encoder, employs dual semantic and acoustic adapters, and is trained with a four-stage curriculum that combines semantic and acoustic alignment, large-scale supervised fine-tuning, and variance-reduced preference optimization, using only fully open-source corpora. Experiments on MMSU, MMAU, and MMAR show that DIFFA-2 consistently improves over DIFFA and is competitive to strong AR LALMs under practical training budgets, supporting diffusion-based modeling is a viable backbone for large-scale audio understanding. Our code is available at https://github.com/NKU-HLT/DIFFA.git.
Abstract: Scene understanding with free-form language has been widely explored within diverse modalities such as images, point clouds, and LiDAR. However, related studies on event sensors are scarce or narrowly centered on semantic-level understanding. We introduce SEAL, the first Semantic-aware Segment Any Events framework that addresses Open-Vocabulary Event Instance Segmentation (OV-EIS). Given the visual prompt, our model presents a unified framework to support both event segmentation and open-vocabulary mask classification at multiple levels of granularity, including instance-level and part-level. To enable thorough evaluation on OV-EIS, we curate four benchmarks that cover label granularity from coarse to fine class configurations and semantic granularity from instance-level to part-level understanding. Extensive experiments show that our SEAL largely outperforms proposed baselines in terms of performance and inference speed with a parameter-efficient architecture. In the Appendix, we further present a simple variant of our SEAL achieving generic spatiotemporal OV-EIS that does not require any visual prompts from users in the inference. Check out our project page in https://0nandon.github.io/SEAL
Abstract: As artificial neural networks, and specifically large language models, have improved rapidly in capabilities and quality, they have increasingly been deployed in real-world applications, from customer service to Google search, despite the fact that they frequently make factually incorrect or undesirable statements. This trend has inspired practical and academic interest in model editing, that is, in adjusting the weights of the model to modify its likely outputs for queries relating to a specific fact or set of facts. This may be done either to amend a fact or set of facts, for instance, to fix a frequent error in the training data, or to suppress a fact or set of facts entirely, for instance, in case of dangerous knowledge. Multiple methods have been proposed to do such edits. However, at the same time, it has been shown that such model editing can be brittle and incomplete. Moreover the effectiveness of any model editing method necessarily depends on the data on which the model is trained, and, therefore, a good understanding of the interaction of the training data distribution and the way it is stored in the network is necessary and helpful to reliably perform model editing. However, working with large language models trained on real-world data does not allow us to understand this relationship or fully measure the effects of model editing. We therefore propose Behemoth, a fully synthetic data generation framework. To demonstrate the practical insights from the framework, we explore model editing in the context of simple tabular data, demonstrating surprising findings that, in some cases, echo real-world results, for instance, that in some cases restricting the update rank results in a more effective update. The code is available at https://github.com/IST-DASLab/behemoth.git.
Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve remarkable performance by leveraging reinforcement learning (RL) on reasoning tasks to generate long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. However, this over-optimization often prioritizes compliance, making models vulnerable to harmful prompts. To mitigate this safety degradation, recent approaches rely on external teacher distillation, yet this introduces a distributional discrepancy that degrades native reasoning. We propose ThinkSafe, a self-generated alignment framework that restores safety alignment without external teachers. Our key insight is that while compliance suppresses safety mechanisms, models often retain latent knowledge to identify harm. ThinkSafe unlocks this via lightweight refusal steering, guiding the model to generate in-distribution safety reasoning traces. Fine-tuning on these self-generated responses effectively realigns the model while minimizing distribution shift. Experiments on DeepSeek-R1-Distill and Qwen3 show ThinkSafe significantly improves safety while preserving reasoning proficiency. Notably, it achieves superior safety and comparable reasoning to GRPO, with significantly reduced computational cost. Code, models, and datasets are available at https://github.com/seanie12/ThinkSafe.git.
Abstract: Despite huge successes on a wide range of tasks, neural networks are known to sometimes struggle to generalise to unseen data. Many approaches have been proposed over the years to promote the generalisation ability of neural networks, collectively known as regularisation techniques. These are used as common practice under the assumption that any regularisation added to the pipeline would result in a performance improvement. In this study, we investigate whether this assumption holds in practice. First, we provide a broad review of regularisation techniques, including modern theories such as double descent. We propose a taxonomy of methods under four broad categories, namely: (1) data-based strategies, (2) architecture strategies, (3) training strategies, and (4) loss function strategies. Notably, we highlight the contradictions and correspondences between the approaches in these broad classes. Further, we perform an empirical comparison of the various regularisation techniques on classification tasks for ten numerical and image datasets applied to the multi-layer perceptron and convolutional neural network architectures. Results show that the efficacy of regularisation is dataset-dependent. For example, the use of a regularisation term only improved performance on numeric datasets, whereas batch normalisation improved performance on image datasets only. Generalisation is crucial to machine learning; thus, understanding the effects of applying regularisation techniques, and considering the connections between them is essential to the appropriate use of these methods in practice.
Abstract: We propose VL-DUN, a principled framework for joint All-in-One Medical Image Restoration and Segmentation (AiOMIRS) that bridges the gap between low-level signal recovery and high-level semantic understanding. While standard pipelines treat these tasks in isolation, our core insight is that they are fundamentally synergistic: restoration provides clean anatomical structures to improve segmentation, while semantic priors regularize the restoration process. VL-DUN resolves the sub-optimality of sequential processing through two primary innovations. (1) We formulate AiOMIRS as a unified optimization problem, deriving an interpretable joint unfolding mechanism where restoration and segmentation are mathematically coupled for mutual refinement. (2) We introduce a frequency-aware Mamba mechanism to capture long-range dependencies for global segmentation while preserving the high-frequency textures necessary for restoration. This allows for efficient global context modeling with linear complexity, effectively mitigating the spectral bias of standard architectures. As a pioneering work in the AiOMIRS task, VL-DUN establishes a new state-of-the-art across multi-modal benchmarks, improving PSNR by 0.92 dB and the Dice coefficient by 9.76\%. Our results demonstrate that joint collaborative learning offers a superior, more robust solution for complex clinical workflows compared to isolated task processing. The codes are provided in https://github.com/cipi666/VLDUN.
Abstract: Flow matching is a scalable generative framework for characterizing continuous normalizing flows with wide-range applications. However, current state-of-the-art methods are not well-suited for modeling dynamical systems, as they construct conditional paths using linear interpolants that may not capture the underlying state evolution, especially when learning higher-order dynamics from irregular sampled observations. Constructing unified paths that satisfy multi-marginal constraints across observations is challenging, since naïve higher-order polynomials tend to be unstable and oscillatory. We introduce SplineFlow, a theoretically grounded flow matching algorithm that jointly models conditional paths across observations via B-spline interpolation. Specifically, SplineFlow exploits the smoothness and stability of B-spline bases to learn the complex underlying dynamics in a structured manner while ensuring the multi-marginal requirements are met. Comprehensive experiments across various deterministic and stochastic dynamical systems of varying complexity, as well as on cellular trajectory inference tasks, demonstrate the strong improvement of SplineFlow over existing baselines. Our code is available at: https://github.com/santanurathod/SplineFlow.
Abstract: Generating realistic graph-structured data is challenging due to discrete structures, variable sizes, and class-specific connectivity patterns that resist conventional generative modelling. While recent graph generation methods employ generative adversarial network (GAN) frameworks to handle permutation invariance and irregular topologies, they typically rely on random edge sampling with fixed probabilities, limiting their capacity to capture complex structural dependencies between nodes. We propose a density-aware conditional graph generation framework using Wasserstein GANs (WGAN) that replaces random sampling with a learnable distance-based edge predictor. Our approach embeds nodes into a latent space where proximity correlates with edge likelihood, enabling the generator to learn meaningful connectivity patterns. A differentiable edge predictor determines pairwise relationships directly from node embeddings, while a density-aware selection mechanism adaptively controls edge density to match class-specific sparsity distributions observed in real graphs. We train the model using a WGAN with gradient penalty, employing a GCN-based critic to ensure generated graphs exhibit realistic topology and align with target class distributions. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method produces graphs with superior structural coherence and class-consistent connectivity compared to existing baselines. The learned edge predictor captures complex relational patterns beyond simple heuristics, generating graphs whose density and topology closely match real structural distributions. Our results show improved training stability and controllable synthesis, making the framework effective for realistic graph generation and data augmentation. Source code is publicly available at https://github.com/ava-12/Density_Aware_WGAN.git.
Abstract: Medical calculators are fundamental to quantitative, evidence-based clinical practice. However, their real-world use is an adaptive, multi-stage process, requiring proactive EHR data acquisition, scenario-dependent calculator selection, and multi-step computation, whereas current benchmarks focus only on static single-step calculations with explicit instructions. To address these limitations, we introduce MedMCP-Calc, the first benchmark for evaluating LLMs in realistic medical calculator scenarios through Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration. MedMCP-Calc comprises 118 scenario tasks across 4 clinical domains, featuring fuzzy task descriptions mimicking natural queries, structured EHR database interaction, external reference retrieval, and process-level evaluation. Our evaluation of 23 leading models reveals critical limitations: even top performers like Claude Opus 4.5 exhibit substantial gaps, including difficulty selecting appropriate calculators for end-to-end workflows given fuzzy queries, poor performance in iterative SQL-based database interactions, and marked reluctance to leverage external tools for numerical computation. Performance also varies considerably across clinical domains. Building on these findings, we develop CalcMate, a fine-tuned model incorporating scenario planning and tool augmentation, achieving state-of-the-art performance among open-source models. Benchmark and Codes are available in https://github.com/SPIRAL-MED/MedMCP-Calc.
Abstract: Long chain-of-thought reasoning (Long CoT) is now fundamental to state-of-the-art LLMs, especially in mathematical reasoning. However, LLM generation is highly sequential, and long CoTs lead to a high latency. We propose to train Divide-and-Conquer CoT (DC-CoT) to reduce the latency. With DC-CoT, the model can act as a director that identifies distinct subtasks that can be performed in parallel in its reasoning process, and then spawns workers to execute the subtasks. Our goal is to achieve high accuracy, with a low longest path length, which is a theoretical measure of the latency needed for the response. We start with a long CoT base model (DeepScaleR-1.5B-Preview), and first use SFT with a small curated demonstration set to initialize its ability to spawn workers in a certain format. Because SFT degrades the accuracy significantly, we design a multi-stage RL algorithm, with various data filtering strategies, to recover the accuracy while decreasing the longest path length. Across several benchmarks including AIME 2024 and HMMT 2025, DC-CoT achieves similar accuracy as DeepScaleR-1.5B-Preview while decreasing longest path length by 35-40%. Our code, SFT dataset and models are publicly available at https://github.com/amahankali10/DC_CoT_RL_for_Low_Latency_CoT_with_Parallel_Reasoning.
Abstract: Smart contracts are the backbone of the decentralized web, yet ensuring their functional correctness and security remains a critical challenge. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in code generation, they often struggle with the rigorous requirements of smart contracts, frequently producing code that is buggy or vulnerable. To address this, we propose SolAgent, a novel tool-augmented multi-agent framework that mimics the workflow of human experts. SolAgent integrates a \textbf{dual-loop refinement mechanism}: an inner loop using the \textit{Forge} compiler to ensure functional correctness, and an outer loop leveraging the \textit{Slither} static analyzer to eliminate security vulnerabilities. Additionally, the agent is equipped with file system capabilities to resolve complex project dependencies. Experiments on the SolEval+ Benchmark, a rigorous suite derived from high-quality real-world projects, demonstrate that SolAgent achieves a Pass@1 rate of up to \textbf{64.39\%}, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art LLMs ($\sim$25\%), AI IDEs (e.g., GitHub Copilot), and existing agent frameworks. Moreover, it reduces security vulnerabilities by up to \textbf{39.77\%} compared to human-written baselines. Finally, we demonstrate that the high-quality trajectories generated by SolAgent can be used to distill smaller, open-source models, democratizing access to secure smart contract generation. We release our data and code at https://github.com/openpaperz/SolAgent.
Abstract: Diagnosing the failure mechanisms of Deep Research Agents (DRAs) remains a critical challenge. Existing benchmarks predominantly rely on end-to-end evaluation, obscuring critical intermediate hallucinations, such as flawed planning, that accumulate throughout the research trajectory. To bridge this gap, we propose a shift from outcome-based to process-aware evaluation by auditing the full research trajectory. We introduce the PIES Taxonomy to categorize hallucinations along functional components (Planning vs. Summarization) and error properties (Explicit vs. Implicit). We instantiate this taxonomy into a fine-grained evaluation framework that decomposes the trajectory to rigorously quantify these hallucinations. Leveraging this framework to isolate 100 distinctively hallucination-prone tasks including adversarial scenarios, we curate DeepHalluBench. Experiments on six state-of-theart DRAs reveal that no system achieves robust reliability. Furthermore, our diagnostic analysis traces the etiology of these failures to systemic deficits, specifically hallucination propagation and cognitive biases, providing foundational insights to guide future architectural optimization. Data and code are available at https://github.com/yuhao-zhan/DeepHalluBench.
Abstract: Prevailing medical AI operates on an unrealistic ''one-shot'' model, diagnosing from a complete patient file. However, real-world diagnosis is an iterative inquiry where Clinicians sequentially ask questions and order tests to strategically gather information while managing cost and time. To address this, we first propose Med-Inquire, a new benchmark designed to evaluate an agent's ability to perform multi-turn diagnosis. Built upon a dataset of real-world clinical cases, Med-Inquire simulates the diagnostic process by hiding a complete patient file behind specialized Patient and Examination agents. They force the agent to proactively ask questions and order tests to gather information piece by piece. To tackle the challenges posed by Med-Inquire, we then introduce EvoClinician, a self-evolving agent that learns efficient diagnostic strategies at test time. Its core is a ''Diagnose-Grade-Evolve'' loop: an Actor agent attempts a diagnosis; a Process Grader agent performs credit assignment by evaluating each action for both clinical yield and resource efficiency; finally, an Evolver agent uses this feedback to update the Actor's strategy by evolving its prompt and memory. Our experiments show EvoClinician outperforms continual learning baselines and other self-evolving agents like memory agents. The code is available at https://github.com/yf-he/EvoClinician
Abstract: Data is both the key enabler and a major bottleneck for machine learning in autonomous driving. Effective model training requires not only large quantities of sensor data but also balanced coverage that includes rare yet safety-critical scenarios. Capturing such events demands extensive driving time and efficient selection. This paper introduces the Lambda framework, an edge-native platform that enables on-vehicle data filtering and processing through user-defined functions. The framework provides a serverless-inspired abstraction layer that separates application logic from low-level execution concerns such as scheduling, deployment, and isolation. By adapting Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) principles to resource-constrained automotive environments, it allows developers to implement modular, event-driven filtering algorithms while maintaining compatibility with ROS 2 and existing data recording pipelines. We evaluate the framework on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano and compare it against native ROS 2 deployments. Results show competitive performance, reduced latency and jitter, and confirm that lambda-based abstractions can support real-time data processing in embedded autonomous driving systems. The source code is available at https://github.com/LASFAS/jblambda.
Abstract: Large pre-trained models achieve remarkable success across diverse domains, yet fully fine-tuning incurs prohibitive computational and memory costs. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has thus become a mainstream paradigm. Among them, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) introduces trainable low-rank matrices and shows strong performance, nevertheless, its fixed-rank design limits flexibility. Dynamic rank allocation methods mitigate this issue by pruning redundant directions; however, they often rely on heuristic, element-level metrics that globally sort rank directions without matrix-wise distinction, and they lack mechanisms to expand capacity in layers requiring additional adaptation. To overcome these limitations, we propose FlexLoRA, an entropy-guided flexible low-rank adaptation framework that (i) evaluates matrix importance via spectral energy entropy, (ii) supports rank pruning and expansion under a global budget, and (iii) employs zero-impact initialization for newly added singular directions to ensure stability. By addressing granularity, flexibility, and stability limitations, FlexLoRA provides a more principled solution for PEFT. Extensive experiments show that FlexLoRA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across benchmarks. Codes are available at https://github.com/Chongjie-Si/Subspace-Tuning.
Abstract: Multimodal deep learning (MDL) has achieved remarkable success across various domains, yet its practical deployment is often hindered by incomplete multimodal data. Existing incomplete MDL methods either discard missing modalities, risking the loss of valuable task-relevant information, or recover them, potentially introducing irrelevant noise, leading to the discarding-imputation dilemma. To address this dilemma, in this paper, we propose DyMo, a new inference-time dynamic modality selection framework that adaptively identifies and integrates reliable recovered modalities, fully exploring task-relevant information beyond the conventional discard-or-impute paradigm. Central to DyMo is a novel selection algorithm that maximizes multimodal task-relevant information for each test sample. Since direct estimation of such information at test time is intractable due to the unknown data distribution, we theoretically establish a connection between information and the task loss, which we compute at inference time as a tractable proxy. Building on this, a novel principled reward function is proposed to guide modality selection. In addition, we design a flexible multimodal network architecture compatible with arbitrary modality combinations, alongside a tailored training strategy for robust representation learning. Extensive experiments on diverse natural and medical image datasets show that DyMo significantly outperforms state-of-the-art incomplete/dynamic MDL methods across various missing-data scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com//siyi-wind/DyMo.
Abstract: We study offline reinforcement learning of style-conditioned policies using explicit style supervision via subtrajectory labeling functions. In this setting, aligning style with high task performance is particularly challenging due to distribution shift and inherent conflicts between style and reward. Existing methods, despite introducing numerous definitions of style, often fail to reconcile these objectives effectively. To address these challenges, we propose a unified definition of behavior style and instantiate it into a practical framework. Building on this, we introduce Style-Conditioned Implicit Q-Learning (SCIQL), which leverages offline goal-conditioned RL techniques, such as hindsight relabeling and value learning, and combine it with a new Gated Advantage Weighted Regression mechanism to efficiently optimize task performance while preserving style alignment. Experiments demonstrate that SCIQL achieves superior performance on both objectives compared to prior offline methods. Code, datasets and visuals are available in: https://sciql-iclr-2026.github.io/.
Abstract: The NVFP4 lower-precision format, supported in hardware by NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, promises to allow, for the first time, end-to-end fully-quantized pre-training of massive models such as LLMs. Yet, existing quantized training methods still sacrifice some of the representation capacity of this format in favor of more accurate unbiased quantized gradient estimation by stochastic rounding (SR), losing noticeable accuracy relative to standard FP16 and FP8 training. In this paper, improve the state of the art for quantized training in NVFP4 via a novel unbiased quantization routine for micro-scaled formats, called MS-EDEN, that has more than 2x lower quantization error than SR. We integrate it into a novel fully-NVFP4 quantization scheme for linear layers, called Quartet II. We show analytically that Quartet II achieves consistently better gradient estimation across all major matrix multiplications, both on the forward and on the backward passes. In addition, our proposal synergizes well with recent training improvements aimed specifically at NVFP4. We further validate Quartet II on end-to-end LLM training with up to 1.9B parameters on 38B tokens. We provide kernels for execution on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs with up to 4.2x speedup over BF16. Our code is available at https://github.com/IST-DASLab/Quartet-II .
Abstract: Existing methods for farmland remote sensing image (FRSI) segmentation generally follow a static segmentation paradigm, where analysis relies solely on the limited information contained within a single input patch. Consequently, their reasoning capability is limited when dealing with complex scenes characterized by ambiguity and visual uncertainty. In contrast, human experts, when interpreting remote sensing images in such ambiguous cases, tend to actively query auxiliary images (such as higher-resolution, larger-scale, or temporally adjacent data) to conduct cross-verification and achieve more comprehensive reasoning. Inspired by this, we propose a reasoning-query-driven dynamic segmentation framework for FRSIs, named FarmMind. This framework breaks through the limitations of the static segmentation paradigm by introducing a reasoning-query mechanism, which dynamically and on-demand queries external auxiliary images to compensate for the insufficient information in a single input image. Unlike direct queries, this mechanism simulates the thinking process of human experts when faced with segmentation ambiguity: it first analyzes the root causes of segmentation ambiguities through reasoning, and then determines what type of auxiliary image needs to be queried based on this analysis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FarmMind achieves superior segmentation performance and stronger generalization ability compared with existing methods. The source code and dataset used in this work are publicly available at: https://github.com/WithoutOcean/FarmMind.
Abstract: Code verifiers play a critical role in post-verification for LLM-based code generation, yet existing supervised fine-tuning methods suffer from data scarcity, high failure rates, and poor inference efficiency. While reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising alternative by optimizing models through execution-driven rewards without labeled supervision, our preliminary results show that naive RL with only functionality rewards fails to generate effective unit tests for difficult branches and samples. We first theoretically analyze showing that branch coverage, sample difficulty, syntactic and functional correctness can be jointly modeled as RL rewards, where optimizing these signals can improve the reliability of unit-test-based verification. Guided by this analysis, we design syntax- and functionality-aware rewards and further propose branch- and sample-difficulty--aware RL using exponential reward shaping and static analysis metrics. With this formulation, CVeDRL achieves state-of-the-art performance with only 0.6B parameters, yielding up to 28.97% higher pass rate and 15.08% higher branch coverage than GPT-3.5, while delivering over $20\times$ faster inference than competitive baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/LIGHTCHASER1/CVeDRL.git
Abstract: The pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is a central goal in language model development, in which consciousness-like processing could serve as a key facilitator. While current language models are not conscious, they exhibit behaviors analogous to certain aspects of consciousness. This paper investigates the implementation of a leading theory of consciousness, Integrated Information Theory (IIT), within language models via a reward-based learning paradigm. IIT provides a formal, axiom-based mathematical framework for quantifying consciousness. Drawing inspiration from its core principles, we formulate a novel reward function that quantifies a text's causality, coherence and integration, characteristics associated with conscious processing. Empirically, it is found that optimizing for this IIT-inspired reward leads to more concise text generation. On out of domain tasks, careful tuning achieves up to a 31% reduction in output length while preserving accuracy levels comparable to the base model. In addition to primary task performance, the broader effects of this training methodology on the model's confidence calibration and test-time computational scaling is analyzed. The proposed framework offers significant practical advantages: it is conceptually simple, computationally efficient, requires no external data or auxiliary models, and leverages a general, capability-driven signal rather than task-specific heuristics. Code available at https://github.com/MH-Sameti/LLM_PostTraining.git
Abstract: Molecular generative models, often employing GPT-style language modeling on molecular string representations, have shown promising capabilities when scaled to large datasets and model sizes. However, it remains unclear and subject to debate whether these models adhere to predictable scaling laws under fixed computational budgets, which is a crucial understanding for optimally allocating resources between model size, data volume, and molecular representation. In this study, we systematically investigate the scaling behavior of molecular language models across both pretraining and downstream tasks. We train 300 models and conduct over 10,000 experiments, rigorously controlling compute budgets while independently varying model size, number of training tokens, and molecular representation. Our results demonstrate clear scaling laws in molecular models for both pretraining and downstream transfer, reveal the substantial impact of molecular representation on performance, and explain previously observed inconsistencies in scaling behavior for molecular generation. Additionally, we publicly release the largest library of molecular language models to date to facilitate future research and development. Code and models are available at https://github.com/SZU-ADDG/MLM-Scaling.
Abstract: Robust safety of vision-language large models (VLLMs) under joint multilingual and multimodal inputs remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks are typically multilingual but text-only, or multimodal but monolingual. Recent multilingual multimodal red-teaming efforts render harmful prompts into images, yet rely heavily on typography-style visuals and lack semantically grounded image-text pairs, limiting coverage of realistic cross-modal interactions. We introduce Lingua-SafetyBench, a benchmark of 100,440 harmful image-text pairs across 10 languages, explicitly partitioned into image-dominant and text-dominant subsets to disentangle risk sources. Evaluating 11 open-source VLLMs reveals a consistent asymmetry: image-dominant risks yield higher ASR in high-resource languages, while text-dominant risks are more severe in non-high-resource languages. A controlled study on the Qwen series shows that scaling and version upgrades reduce Attack Success Rate (ASR) overall but disproportionately benefit HRLs, widening the gap between HRLs and Non-HRLs under text-dominant risks. This underscores the necessity of language- and modality-aware safety alignment beyond mere scaling.To facilitate reproducibility and future research, we will publicly release our benchmark, model checkpoints, and source code.The code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/zsxr15/Lingua-SafetyBench.Warning: this paper contains examples with unsafe content.
Abstract: IR-drop is a critical power integrity challenge in modern VLSI designs that can cause timing degradation, reliability issues, and functional failures if not detected early in the design flow. Conventional IR-drop analysis relies on physics-based signoff tools, which provide high accuracy but incur significant computational cost and require near-final layout information, making them unsuitable for rapid early-stage design exploration. In this work, we propose a deep learning-based surrogate modeling approach for early-stage IR-drop estimation using a CNN. The task is formulated as a dense pixel-wise regression problem, where spatial physical layout features are mapped directly to IR-drop heatmaps. A U-Net-based encoder-decoder architecture with skip connections is employed to effectively capture both local and global spatial dependencies within the layout. The model is trained on a physics-inspired synthetic dataset generated by us, which incorporates key physical factors including power grid structure, cell density distribution, and switching activity. Model performance is evaluated using standard regression metrics such as Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can accurately predict IR-drop distributions with millisecond-level inference time, enabling fast pre-signoff screening and iterative design optimization. The proposed framework is intended as a complementary early-stage analysis tool, providing designers with rapid IR-drop insight prior to expensive signoff analysis. The implementation, dataset generation scripts, and the interactive inference application are publicly available at: https://github.com/riteshbhadana/IR-Drop-Predictor. The live application can be accessed at: https://ir-drop-predictor.streamlit.app/.
Abstract: Reconstructing detailed 3D human meshes from a single in-the-wild image remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Existing SMPLX-based methods often suffer from slow inference, produce only coarse body poses, and exhibit misalignments or unnatural artifacts in fine-grained regions such as the face and hands. These issues make current approaches difficult to apply to downstream tasks. To address these challenges, we propose PEAR-a fast and robust framework for pixel-aligned expressive human mesh recovery. PEAR explicitly tackles three major limitations of existing methods: slow inference, inaccurate localization of fine-grained human pose details, and insufficient facial expression capture. Specifically, to enable real-time SMPLX parameter inference, we depart from prior designs that rely on high resolution inputs or multi-branch architectures. Instead, we adopt a clean and unified ViT-based model capable of recovering coarse 3D human geometry. To compensate for the loss of fine-grained details caused by this simplified architecture, we introduce pixel-level supervision to optimize the geometry, significantly improving the reconstruction accuracy of fine-grained human details. To make this approach practical, we further propose a modular data annotation strategy that enriches the training data and enhances the robustness of the model. Overall, PEAR is a preprocessing-free framework that can simultaneously infer EHM-s (SMPLX and scaled-FLAME) parameters at over 100 FPS. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves substantial improvements in pose estimation accuracy compared to previous SMPLX-based approaches. Project page: https://wujh2001.github.io/PEAR
Abstract: The development of large language models (LLMs) is costly and has significant commercial value. Consequently, preventing unauthorized appropriation of open-source LLMs and protecting developers' intellectual property rights have become critical challenges. In this work, we propose the Functional Network Fingerprint (FNF), a training-free, sample-efficient method for detecting whether a suspect LLM is derived from a victim model, based on the consistency between their functional network activity. We demonstrate that models that share a common origin, even with differences in scale or architecture, exhibit highly consistent patterns of neuronal activity within their functional networks across diverse input samples. In contrast, models trained independently on distinct data or with different objectives fail to preserve such activity alignment. Unlike conventional approaches, our method requires only a few samples for verification, preserves model utility, and remains robust to common model modifications (such as fine-tuning, pruning, and parameter permutation), as well as to comparisons across diverse architectures and dimensionalities. FNF thus provides model owners and third parties with a simple, non-invasive, and effective tool for protecting LLM intellectual property. The code is available at https://github.com/WhatAboutMyStar/LLM_ACTIVATION.
Abstract: Zero-shot out-of-vocabulary detection (ZS-OOVD) aims to accurately recognize objects of in-vocabulary (IV) categories provided at zero-shot inference, while simultaneously rejecting undefined ones (out-of-vocabulary, OOV) that lack corresponding category prompts. However, previous methods are prone to overfitting the IV classes, leading to the OOV or undefined classes being misclassified as IV ones with a high confidence score. To address this issue, this paper proposes a zero-shot OOV detector (OOVDet), a novel framework that effectively detects predefined classes while reliably rejecting undefined ones in zero-shot scenes. Specifically, due to the model's lack of prior knowledge about the distribution of OOV data, we synthesize region-level OOV prompts by sampling from the low-likelihood regions of the class-conditional Gaussian distributions in the hidden space, motivated by the assumption that unknown semantics are more likely to emerge in low-density areas of the latent space. For OOV images, we further propose a Dirichlet-based gradient attribution mechanism to mine pseudo-OOV image samples, where the attribution gradients are interpreted as Dirichlet evidence to estimate prediction uncertainty, and samples with high uncertainty are selected as pseudo-OOV images. Building on these synthesized OOV prompts and pseudo-OOV images, we construct the OOV decision boundary through a low-density prior constraint, which regularizes the optimization of OOV classes using Gaussian kernel density estimation in accordance with the above assumption. Experimental results show that our method significantly improves the OOV detection performance in zero-shot scenes. The code is available at https://github.com/binyisu/OOV-detector.
Abstract: We introduce the Visual Personalization Turing Test (VPTT), a new paradigm for evaluating contextual visual personalization based on perceptual indistinguishability, rather than identity replication. A model passes the VPTT if its output (image, video, 3D asset, etc.) is indistinguishable to a human or calibrated VLM judge from content a given person might plausibly create or share. To operationalize VPTT, we present the VPTT Framework, integrating a 10k-persona benchmark (VPTT-Bench), a visual retrieval-augmented generator (VPRAG), and the VPTT Score, a text-only metric calibrated against human and VLM judgments. We show high correlation across human, VLM, and VPTT evaluations, validating the VPTT Score as a reliable perceptual proxy. Experiments demonstrate that VPRAG achieves the best alignment-originality balance, offering a scalable and privacy-safe foundation for personalized generative AI.
Abstract: Full-graph and mini-batch Graph Neural Network (GNN) training approaches have distinct system design demands, making it crucial to choose the appropriate approach to develop. A core challenge in comparing these two GNN training approaches lies in characterizing their model performance (i.e., convergence and generalization) and computational efficiency. While a batch size has been an effective lens in analyzing such behaviors in deep neural networks (DNNs), GNNs extend this lens by introducing a fan-out size, as full-graph training can be viewed as mini-batch training with the largest possible batch size and fan-out size. However, the impact of the batch and fan-out size for GNNs remains insufficiently explored. To this end, this paper systematically compares full-graph vs. mini-batch training of GNNs through empirical and theoretical analyses from the view points of the batch size and fan-out size. Our key contributions include: 1) We provide a novel generalization analysis using the Wasserstein distance to study the impact of the graph structure, especially the fan-out size. 2) We uncover the non-isotropic effects of the batch size and the fan-out size in GNN convergence and generalization, providing practical guidance for tuning these hyperparameters under resource constraints. Finally, full-graph training does not always yield better model performance or computational efficiency than well-tuned smaller mini-batch settings. The implementation can be found in the github link: https://github.com/LIUMENGFAN-gif/GNN_fullgraph_minibatch_training.
Abstract: Language model (LM)-based embodied agents are increasingly deployed in real-world settings. Yet, their adaptability remains limited in dynamic environments, where constructing accurate and flexible world models is crucial for effective reasoning and decision-making. To address this challenge, we extend the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) paradigm to embodied agents. While conventional MoE architectures modularize knowledge into expert components with pre-trained routing, they remain rigid once deployed, making them less effective for adapting to unseen domains in dynamic environments. We therefore propose Test-time Mixture of World Models (TMoW), a framework that enhances adaptability to unseen and evolving domains. TMoW updates its routing function over world models at test time, unlike conventional MoE where the function remains fixed, enabling agents to recombine existing models and integrate new ones for continual adaptation. It achieves this through (i) multi-granular prototype-based routing, which adapts mixtures across object- to scene-level similarities, (ii) test-time refinement that aligns unseen domain features with prototypes during inference, and (iii) distilled mixture-based augmentation, which efficiently constructs new models from few-shot data and existing prototypes. We evaluate TMoW on VirtualHome, ALFWorld, and RLBench benchmarks, demonstrating strong performance in both zero-shot adaptation and few-shot expansion scenarios, and showing that it enables embodied agents to operate effectively in dynamic environments.
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit substantial parameter redundancy, particularly in Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs). Existing pruning methods suffer from two primary limitations. First, reliance on dataset-specific calibration introduces significant data dependency and computational overhead. Second, being predominantly static, they fail to account for the evolving subset of knowledge neurons in LLMs during autoregressive generation as the context evolves. To address this, we introduce DART, i.e., Dynamic Attention-Guided Runtime Tracing), a lightweight, training-free method that performs on-the-fly context-based pruning. DART monitors shifts in attention score distributions to infer context changes, dynamically updating neuron-level masks to retain salient parameters. Across ten benchmarks, DART outperforms prior dynamic baseline, achieving accuracy gains of up to 14.5% on LLAMA-3.1-8B at 70% FFN sparsity. Furthermore, DART achieves up to 3x better ROUGE-L scores with respect to static-masked pruning on summarization tasks, with its performance comparable to the original dense models. We conclusively demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively adapts to diverse semantic contexts, preserves model capabilities across both general and domain-specific tasks while running at less than 10MBs of memory for LLAMA-3.1-8B(16GBs) with 0.1% FLOPs overhead. The code is available at https://github.com/seeder-research/DART.
Abstract: The application of data-driven remaining useful life (RUL) prediction has long been constrained by the availability of large amount of degradation data. Mainstream solutions such as domain adaptation and meta-learning still rely on large amounts of historical degradation data from equipment that is identical or similar to the target, which imposes significant limitations in practical applications. This study investigates PEFT-MuTS, a Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning framework for few-shot RUL prediction, built on cross-domain pre-trained time-series representation models. Contrary to the widely held view that knowledge transfer in RUL prediction can only occur within similar devices, we demonstrate that substantial benefits can be achieved through pre-training process with large-scale cross-domain time series datasets. A independent feature tuning network and a meta-variable-based low rank multivariate fusion mechanism are developed to enable the pre-trained univariate time-series representation backbone model to fully exploit the multivariate relationships in degradation data for downstream RUL prediction task. Additionally, we introduce a zero-initialized regressor that stabilizes the fine-tuning process under few-shot conditions. Experiments on aero-engine and industrial bearing datasets demonstrate that our method can achieve effective RUL prediction even when less than 1\% of samples of target equipment are used. Meanwhile, it substantially outperforms conventional supervised and few-shot approaches while markedly reducing the data required to achieve high predictive accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/fuen1590/PEFT-MuTS.
Abstract: Autoregressive models with continuous tokens form a promising paradigm for visual generation, especially for text-to-image (T2I) synthesis, but they suffer from high computational cost. We study how to design compute-efficient linear attention within this framework. Specifically, we conduct a systematic empirical analysis of scaling behavior with respect to parameter counts under different design choices, focusing on (1) normalization paradigms in linear attention (division-based vs. subtraction-based) and (2) depthwise convolution for locality augmentation. Our results show that although subtraction-based normalization is effective for image classification, division-based normalization scales better for linear generative transformers. In addition, incorporating convolution for locality modeling plays a crucial role in autoregressive generation, consistent with findings in diffusion models. We further extend gating mechanisms, commonly used in causal linear attention, to the bidirectional setting and propose a KV gate. By introducing data-independent learnable parameters to the key and value states, the KV gate assigns token-wise memory weights, enabling flexible memory management similar to forget gates in language models. Based on these findings, we present LINA, a simple and compute-efficient T2I model built entirely on linear attention, capable of generating high-fidelity 1024x1024 images from user instructions. LINA achieves competitive performance on both class-conditional and T2I benchmarks, obtaining 2.18 FID on ImageNet (about 1.4B parameters) and 0.74 on GenEval (about 1.5B parameters). A single linear attention module reduces FLOPs by about 61 percent compared to softmax attention. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/techmonsterwang/LINA.
Abstract: Test-Time Training offers a promising way to improve the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) by adapting the model using only the test questions. However, existing methods struggle with difficult reasoning problems for two reasons: raw test questions are often too difficult to yield high-quality pseudo-labels, and the limited size of test sets makes continuous online updates prone to instability. To address these limitations, we propose TTCS, a co-evolving test-time training framework. Specifically, TTCS initializes two policies from the same pretrained model: a question synthesizer and a reasoning solver. These policies evolve through iterative optimization: the synthesizer generates progressively challenging question variants conditioned on the test questions, creating a structured curriculum tailored to the solver's current capability, while the solver updates itself using self-consistency rewards computed from multiple sampled responses on both original test and synthetic questions. Crucially, the solver's feedback guides the synthesizer to generate questions aligned with the model's current capability, and the generated question variants in turn stabilize the solver's test-time training. Experiments show that TTCS consistently strengthens the reasoning ability on challenging mathematical benchmarks and transfers to general-domain tasks across different LLM backbones, highlighting a scalable path towards dynamically constructing test-time curricula for self-evolving. Our code and implementation details are available at https://github.com/XMUDeepLIT/TTCS.
Abstract: Query-based universal sound separation is fundamental to intelligent auditory systems, aiming to isolate specific sources from mixtures. Despite recent advances, existing methods continue to suffer from residual interference in complex acoustic scenes. This performance limitation stems largely from a data bottleneck: in-the-wild datasets contain weak labels and severe co-occurrence of events. These flaws induce models to learn spurious correlations between background noise and target categories instead of robust acoustic features. To address this, we propose an automated pipeline that eliminates co-occurrence of events by mining high-purity single-event segments from in-the-wild datasets via a semantically consistent synthesis protocol. Utilizing this pipeline, we constructed Hive, a high-quality synthetic dataset comprising 2.4k hours of raw audio. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with the state-of-the-art model SAM-Audio which was trained on a huge dataset $\sim$500 times larger than Hive, certain open-source models trained on Hive achieve competitive separation accuracy and perceptual quality. Moreover, these models exhibited remarkable zero-shot generalization on out-of-distribution evaluation benchmarks. These findings highlight that prioritizing purity of supervised signals enables significant data efficiency, offering a new paradigm for training robust auditory foundation models with reduced computational costs. Code and dataset are available at https://shandaai.github.io/Hive.
Abstract: With the advancement of automated software engineering, research focus is increasingly shifting toward practical tasks reflecting the day-to-day work of software engineers. Among these tasks, software migration, a critical process of adapting code to evolving environments, has been largely overlooked. In this study, we introduce TimeMachine-bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate software migration in real-world Python projects. Our benchmark consists of GitHub repositories whose tests begin to fail in response to dependency updates. The construction process is fully automated, enabling live updates of the benchmark. Furthermore, we curated a human-verified subset to ensure problem solvability. We evaluated agent-based baselines built on top of 11 models, including both strong open-weight and state-of-the-art LLMs on this verified subset. Our results indicated that, while LLMs show some promise for migration tasks, they continue to face substantial reliability challenges, including spurious solutions that exploit low test coverage and unnecessary edits stemming from suboptimal tool-use strategies. Our dataset and implementation are available at https://github.com/tohoku-nlp/timemachine-bench.
Abstract: Urban spatio-temporal prediction under extreme conditions (e.g., heavy rain) is challenging due to event rarity and dynamics. Existing data-driven approaches that incorporate weather as auxiliary input often rely on coarse-grained descriptors and lack dedicated mechanisms to capture fine-grained spatio-temporal effects. Although recent methods adopt causal techniques to improve out-of-distribution generalization, they typically overlook temporal dynamics or depend on fixed confounder stratification. To address these limitations, we propose WED-Net (Weather-Effect Disentanglement Network), a dual-branch Transformer architecture that separates intrinsic and weather-induced traffic patterns via self- and cross-attention, enhanced with memory banks and fused through adaptive gating. To further promote disentanglement, we introduce a discriminator that explicitly distinguishes weather conditions. Additionally, we design a causal data augmentation strategy that perturbs non-causal parts while preserving causal structures, enabling improved generalization under rare scenarios. Experiments on taxi-flow datasets from three cities demonstrate that WED-Net delivers robust performance under extreme weather conditions, highlighting its potential to support safer mobility, highlighting its potential to support safer mobility, disaster preparedness, and urban resilience in real-world settings. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/HQ-LV/WED-Net.
Abstract: Group-relative policy optimization methods train language models by generating multiple rollouts per prompt and normalizing rewards with a shared mean reward baseline. In resource-constrained settings where the rollout budget is small, accuracy often degrades. We find that noise in the shared baseline induces advantage sign flips, where some rollouts receive an incorrect advantage sign, and the update direction is reversed. To address this, we propose Median-Centered Group Relative Policy Optimization (MC-GRPO), a simple and effective solution for small-rollout training. Our main idea is to replace the mean baseline with a median baseline: the median is far less sensitive to outlier rewards than the mean, mitigating the sign flips under small rollout size (G). We generate one additional rollout for median reference (G+1), and compute advantages by using the group median. With an odd-sized group, exactly one completion is the median and receives zero advantage, we exclude this pivot rollout from backpropagation so the number of gradient-contributing samples per prompt remains G, preserving the core update cost of standard G-rollout training. Across various GRPO-family methods and a wide range of models and scales, this median-centered training consistently improves stability and final accuracy in the low-rollout regime, reducing the gap between G=2 and G=8 to within 1%. Code is available at https://github.com/lotusroot-kim/MC-GRPO
Abstract: Although cross-domain few-shot learning (CDFSL) for hyper-spectral image (HSI) classification has attracted significant research interest, existing works often rely on an unrealistic data augmentation procedure in the form of external noise to enlarge the sample size, thus greatly simplifying the issue of data scarcity. They involve a large number of parameters for model updates, being prone to the overfitting problem. To the best of our knowledge, none has explored the strength of the foundation model, having strong generalization power to be quickly adapted to downstream tasks. This paper proposes the MIxup FOundation MOdel (MIFOMO) for CDFSL of HSI classifications. MIFOMO is built upon the concept of a remote sensing (RS) foundation model, pre-trained across a large scale of RS problems, thus featuring generalizable features. The notion of coalescent projection (CP) is introduced to quickly adapt the foundation model to downstream tasks while freezing the backbone network. The concept of mixup domain adaptation (MDM) is proposed to address the extreme domain discrepancy problem. Last but not least, the label smoothing concept is implemented to cope with noisy pseudo-label problems. Our rigorous experiments demonstrate the advantage of MIFOMO, where it beats prior arts with up to 14% margin. The source code of MIFOMO is open-sourced in https://github.com/Naeem- Paeedeh/MIFOMO for reproducibility and convenient further study.
Abstract: This work proposes Bonnet, an ultra-fast sparse-volume pipeline for whole-body bone segmentation from CT scans. Accurate bone segmentation is important for surgical planning and anatomical analysis, but existing 3D voxel-based models such as nnU-Net and STU-Net require heavy computation and often take several minutes per scan, which limits time-critical use. The proposed Bonnet addresses this by integrating a series of novel framework components including HU-based bone thresholding, patch-wise inference with a sparse spconv-based U-Net, and multi-window fusion into a full-volume prediction. Trained on TotalSegmentator and evaluated without additional tuning on RibSeg, CT-Pelvic1K, and CT-Spine1K, Bonnet achieves high Dice across ribs, pelvis, and spine while running in only 2.69 seconds per scan on an RTX A6000. Compared to strong voxel baselines, Bonnet attains a similar accuracy but reduces inference time by roughly 25x on the same hardware and tiling setup. The toolkit and pre-trained models will be released at https://github.com/HINTLab/Bonnet.
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models excel at offline audio-visual understanding, but their ability to serve as mobile assistants in continuous real-world streams remains underexplored. In daily phone use, mobile assistants must track streaming audio-visual inputs and respond at the right time, yet existing benchmarks are often restricted to multiple-choice questions or use shorter videos. In this paper, we introduce PhoStream, the first mobile-centric streaming benchmark that unifies on-screen and off-screen scenarios to evaluate video, audio, and temporal reasoning. PhoStream contains 5,572 open-ended QA pairs from 578 videos across 4 scenarios and 10 capabilities. We build it with an Automated Generative Pipeline backed by rigorous human verification, and evaluate models using a realistic Online Inference Pipeline and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation for open-ended responses. Experiments reveal a temporal asymmetry in LLM-judged scores (0-100): models perform well on Instant and Backward tasks (Gemini 3 Pro exceeds 80), but drop sharply on Forward tasks (16.40), largely due to early responses before the required visual and audio cues appear. This highlights a fundamental limitation: current MLLMs struggle to decide when to speak, not just what to say. Code and datasets used in this work will be made publicly accessible at https://github.com/Lucky-Lance/PhoStream.
Abstract: The advancement of Large Language Model (LLM)-powered agents has enabled automated task processing through reasoning and tool invocation capabilities. However, existing frameworks often operate under the idealized assumption that tool executions are invariably successful, relying solely on textual descriptions that fail to distinguish precise performance boundaries and cannot adapt to iterative tool updates. This gap introduces uncertainty in planning and execution, particularly in domains like visual content generation (AIGC), where nuanced tool performance significantly impacts outcomes. To address this, we propose PerfGuard, a performance-aware agent framework for visual content generation that systematically models tool performance boundaries and integrates them into task planning and scheduling. Our framework introduces three core mechanisms: (1) Performance-Aware Selection Modeling (PASM), which replaces generic tool descriptions with a multi-dimensional scoring system based on fine-grained performance evaluations; (2) Adaptive Preference Update (APU), which dynamically optimizes tool selection by comparing theoretical rankings with actual execution rankings; and (3) Capability-Aligned Planning Optimization (CAPO), which guides the planner to generate subtasks aligned with performance-aware strategies. Experimental comparisons against state-of-the-art methods demonstrate PerfGuard's advantages in tool selection accuracy, execution reliability, and alignment with user intent, validating its robustness and practical utility for complex AIGC tasks. The project code is available at https://github.com/FelixChan9527/PerfGuard.
Abstract: Selective prediction aims to endow predictors with a reject option, to avoid low confidence predictions. However, existing literature has primarily focused on closed-set tasks, such as visual question answering with predefined options or fixed-category classification. This paper considers selective prediction for visual language foundation models, addressing a taxonomy of tasks ranging from closed to open set and from finite to unbounded vocabularies, as in image captioning. We seek training-free approaches of low-complexity, applicable to any foundation model and consider methods based on external vision-language model embeddings, like CLIP. This is denoted as Plug-and-Play Selective Prediction (PaPSP). We identify two key challenges: (1) instability of the visual-language representations, leading to high variance in image-text embeddings, and (2) poor calibration of similarity scores. To address these issues, we propose a memory augmented PaPSP (MA-PaPSP) model, which augments PaPSP with a retrieval dataset of image-text pairs. This is leveraged to reduce embedding variance by averaging retrieved nearest-neighbor pairs and is complemented by the use of contrastive normalization to improve score calibration. Through extensive experiments on multiple datasets, we show that MA-PaPSP outperforms PaPSP and other selective prediction baselines for selective captioning, image-text matching, and fine-grained classification. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/kingston-aditya/MA-PaPSP.
Abstract: Real-time path planning in constrained environments remains a fundamental challenge for autonomous systems. Traditional classical planners, while effective under perfect perception assumptions, are often sensitive to real-world perception constraints and rely on online search procedures that incur high computational costs. In complex surroundings, this renders real-time deployment prohibitive. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) framework for real-time path planning in parking scenarios. In particular, we focus on challenging scenes with tight spaces that require a high number of reversal maneuvers and adjustments. Unlike classical planners, our solution does not require ideal and structured perception, and in principle, could avoid the need for additional modules such as localization and tracking, resulting in a simpler and more practical implementation. Also, at test time, the policy generates actions through a single forward pass at each step, which is lightweight enough for real-time deployment. The task is formulated as a sequential decision-making problem grounded in a bicycle model dynamics, enabling the agent to directly learn navigation policies that respect vehicle kinematics and environmental constraints in the closed-loop setting. A new benchmark is developed to support both training and evaluation, capturing diverse and challenging scenarios. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art success rates and efficiency, surpassing classical planner baselines by +96% in success rate and +52% in efficiency. Furthermore, we release our benchmark as an open-source resource for the community to foster future research in autonomous systems. The benchmark and accompanying tools are available at https://github.com/dqm5rtfg9b-collab/Constrained_Parking_Scenarios.
Abstract: Endoscopic image analysis is vital for colorectal cancer screening, yet real-world conditions often suffer from lens fogging, motion blur, and specular highlights, which severely compromise automated polyp detection. We propose EndoCaver, a lightweight transformer with a unidirectional-guided dual-decoder architecture, enabling joint multi-task capability for image deblurring and segmentation while significantly reducing computational complexity and model parameters. Specifically, it integrates a Global Attention Module (GAM) for cross-scale aggregation, a Deblurring-Segmentation Aligner (DSA) to transfer restoration cues, and a cosine-based scheduler (LoCoS) for stable multi-task optimisation. Experiments on the Kvasir-SEG dataset show that EndoCaver achieves 0.922 Dice on clean data and 0.889 under severe image degradation, surpassing state-of-the-art methods while reducing model parameters by 90%. These results demonstrate its efficiency and robustness, making it well-suited for on-device clinical deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/ReaganWu/EndoCaver.
Abstract: A major challenge in training TableQA agents, compared to standard text- and image-based agents, is that answers cannot be inferred from a static input but must be reasoned through stepwise transformations of the table state, introducing multi-step reasoning complexity and environmental interaction. This leads to a research question: Can explicit feedback on table transformation action improve model reasoning capability? In this work, we introduce RE-Tab, a plug-and-play framework that architecturally enhances trajectory search via lightweight, training-free reward modeling by formulating the problem as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process. We demonstrate that providing explicit verifiable rewards during State Transition (``What is the best action?'') and Simulative Reasoning (``Am I sure about the output?'') is crucial to steer the agent's navigation in table states. By enforcing stepwise reasoning with reward feedback in table transformations, RE-Tab achieves state-of-the-art performance in TableQA with almost 25\% drop in inference cost. Furthermore, a direct plug-and-play implementation of RE-Tab brings up to 41.77% improvement in QA accuracy and 33.33% drop in test-time inference samples for consistent answer. Consistent improvement pattern across various LLMs and state-of-the-art benchmarks further confirms RE-Tab's generalisability. The repository is available at https://github.com/ThomasK1018/RE_Tab .
Abstract: Discrete flow models (DFMs) have been proposed to learn the data distribution on a finite state space, offering a flexible framework as an alternative to discrete diffusion models. A line of recent work has studied samplers for discrete diffusion models, such as tau-leaping and Euler solver. However, these samplers require a large number of iterations to control discretization error, since the transition rates are frozen in time and evaluated at the initial state within each time interval. Moreover, theoretical results for these samplers often require boundedness conditions of the transition rate or they focus on a specific type of source distributions. To address those limitations, we establish non-asymptotic discretization error bounds for those samplers without any restriction on transition rates and source distributions, under the framework of discrete flow models. Furthermore, by analyzing a one-step lower bound of the Euler sampler, we propose two corrected samplers: \textit{time-corrected sampler} and \textit{location-corrected sampler}, which can reduce the discretization error of tau-leaping and Euler solver with almost no additional computational cost. We rigorously show that the location-corrected sampler has a lower iteration complexity than existing parallel samplers. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed method by demonstrating improved generation quality and reduced inference time on both simulation and text-to-image generation tasks. Code can be found in https://github.com/WanZhengyan/Corrected-Samplers-for-Discrete-Flow-Models.
Abstract: Composed Video Retrieval (CoVR) aims to retrieve a target video from a large gallery using a reference video and a textual query specifying visual modifications. However, existing benchmarks consider only visual changes, ignoring videos that differ in audio despite visual similarity. To address this limitation, we introduce Composed retrieval for Video with its Audio CoVA, a new retrieval task that accounts for both visual and auditory variations. To support this, we construct AV-Comp, a benchmark consisting of video pairs with cross-modal changes and corresponding textual queries that describe the differences. We also propose AVT Compositional Fusion (AVT), which integrates video, audio, and text features by selectively aligning the query to the most relevant modality. AVT outperforms traditional unimodal fusion and serves as a strong baseline for CoVA. Examples from the proposed dataset, including both visual and auditory information, are available at https://perceptualai-lab.github.io/CoVA/.
Abstract: Floorplanning determines the coordinate and shape of each module in Integrated Circuits. With the scaling of technology nodes, in floorplanning stage especially 3D scenarios with multiple stacked layers, it has become increasingly challenging to adhere to complex hardware design rules. Current methods are only capable of handling specific and limited design rules, while violations of other rules require manual and meticulous adjustment. This leads to labor-intensive and time-consuming post-processing for expert engineers. In this paper, we propose an all-in-one deep reinforcement learning-based approach to tackle these challenges, and design novel representations for real-world IC design rules that have not been addressed by previous approaches. Specifically, the processing of various hardware design rules is unified into a single framework with three key components: 1) novel matrix representations to model the design rules, 2) constraints on the action space to filter out invalid actions that cause rule violations, and 3) quantitative analysis of constraint satisfaction as reward signals. Experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and validity of our approach. Furthermore, transferability is well demonstrated on unseen circuits. Our framework is extensible to accommodate new design rules, thus providing flexibility to address emerging challenges in future chip design. Code will be available at: https://github.com/Thinklab-SJTU/EDA-AI
Abstract: Despite progress in Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs), object hallucination remains a critical issue in image captioning task, where models generate descriptions of non-existent objects, compromising their reliability. Previous work attributes this to LVLMs' over-reliance on language priors and attempts to mitigate it through logits calibration. However, they still lack a thorough analysis of the over-reliance. To gain a deeper understanding of over-reliance, we conduct a series of preliminary experiments, indicating that as the generation length increases, LVLMs' over-reliance on language priors leads to inflated probability of hallucinated object tokens, consequently exacerbating object hallucination. To circumvent this issue, we propose Language-Prior-Free Verification to enable LVLMs to faithfully verify the confidence of object existence. Based on this, we propose a novel training-free Self-Validation Framework to counter the over-reliance trap. It first validates objects' existence in sampled candidate captions and further mitigates object hallucination via caption selection or aggregation. Experiment results demonstrate that our framework mitigates object hallucination significantly in image captioning task (e.g., 65.6% improvement on CHAIRI metric with LLaVA-v1.5-7B), surpassing the previous SOTA methods. This result highlights a novel path towards mitigating hallucination by unlocking the inherent potential within LVLMs themselves.
Abstract: RLVR is now a standard way to train LLMs on reasoning tasks with verifiable outcomes, but when rollout generation dominates the cost, efficiency depends heavily on which prompts you sample and when. In practice, prompt pools are often static or only loosely tied to the model's learning progress, so uniform sampling can't keep up with the shifting capability frontier and ends up wasting rollouts on prompts that are already solved or still out of reach. Existing approaches improve efficiency through filtering, curricula, adaptive rollout allocation, or teacher guidance, but they typically assume a fixed pool-which makes it hard to support stable on-policy pool growth-or they add extra teacher cost and latency. We introduce HeaPA (Heap Sampling and On-Policy Query Augmentation), which maintains a bounded, evolving pool, tracks the frontier using heap-based boundary sampling, expands the pool via on-policy augmentation with lightweight asynchronous validation, and stabilizes correlated queries through topology-aware re-estimation of pool statistics and controlled reinsertion. Across two training corpora, two training recipes, and seven benchmarks, HeaPA consistently improves accuracy and reaches target performance with fewer computations while keeping wall-clock time comparable. Our analyses suggest these gains come from frontier-focused sampling and on-policy pool growth, with the benefits becoming larger as model scale increases. Our code is available at https://github.com/horizon-rl/HeaPA.
Abstract: Large language models are increasingly applied to materials science reasoning, yet their behavior under physically structured distribution shifts remains poorly understood. We introduce SCALAR (Structural Consistency And Logic Across Regimes), a benchmark for evaluating geometric scale generalization and its connection to structural hallucination, consistency, and reasoning in materials foundation models. Given canonical crystal representations, models must reason about derived nanoparticle structures obtained through supercell expansion and geometric truncation across length scales spanning a few atoms to over 18,000 atoms, totaling $\approx$100,000 structures from DFT-validated unit cells. SCALAR defines three tasks. (i) CIF to property prediction. (ii) A Chain-of-Thought variant with explicit physics-grounded reasoning. (iii) Inverse retrieval identifying crystals from candidates given target properties. Outputs are evaluated via structured metrics capturing numeric error, hallucination, cross-prompt consistency, monotonic reasoning, output validity, and retrieval regret. Experiments across diverse foundation models reveal large, model-dependent shifts under explicit reasoning, often reducing hallucination and error, but frequently destabilizing consistency or validity. These results demonstrate that geometric scale generalization cannot be inferred from accuracy alone. Supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/KurbanIntelligenceLab/SCALAR.
Abstract: Automatic workflow generation is the process of automatically synthesizing sequences of LLM calls, tool invocations, and post-processing steps for complex end-to-end tasks. Most prior methods cast this task as an optimization problem with limited theoretical grounding. We propose to cast workflow generation as Bayesian inference over a posterior distribution on workflows, and introduce \textbf{Bayesian Workflow Generation (BWG)}, a sampling framework that builds workflows step-by-step using parallel look-ahead rollouts for importance weighting and a sequential in-loop refiner for pool-wide improvements. We prove that, without the refiner, the weighted empirical distribution converges to the target posterior. We instantiate BWG as \textbf{BayesFlow}, a training-free algorithm for workflow construction. Across six benchmark datasets, BayesFlow improves accuracy by up to 9 percentage points over SOTA workflow generation baselines and by up to 65 percentage points over zero-shot prompting, establishing BWG as a principled upgrade to search-based workflow design. Code will be available on https://github.com/BoYuanVisionary/BayesFlow.
Abstract: Traditional rendering pipelines rely on complex assets, accurate materials and lighting, and substantial computational resources to produce realistic imagery, yet they still face challenges in scalability and realism for populated dynamic scenes. We present C2R (Coarse-to-Real), a generative rendering framework that synthesizes real-style urban crowd videos from coarse 3D simulations. Our approach uses coarse 3D renderings to explicitly control scene layout, camera motion, and human trajectories, while a learned neural renderer generates realistic appearance, lighting, and fine-scale dynamics guided by text prompts. To overcome the lack of paired training data between coarse simulations and real videos, we adopt a two-phase mixed CG-real training strategy that learns a strong generative prior from large-scale real footage and introduces controllability through shared implicit spatio-temporal features across domains. The resulting system supports coarse-to-fine control, generalizes across diverse CG and game inputs, and produces temporally consistent, controllable, and realistic urban scene videos from minimal 3D input. We will release the model and project webpage at https://gonzalognogales.github.io/coarse2real/.
Abstract: Multi-agent systems often operate in dynamic and uncertain environments, where agents must not only pursue individual goals but also safeguard collective functionality. This challenge is especially acute in mixed-motive multi-agent systems. This work focuses on cooperative resilience, the ability of agents to anticipate, resist, recover, and transform in the face of disruptions, a critical yet underexplored property in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning. We study how reward function design influences resilience in mixed-motive settings and introduce a novel framework that learns reward functions from ranked trajectories, guided by a cooperative resilience metric. Agents are trained in a suite of social dilemma environments using three reward strategies: i) traditional individual reward; ii) resilience-inferred reward; and iii) hybrid that balance both. We explore three reward parameterizations-linear models, hand-crafted features, and neural networks, and employ two preference-based learning algorithms to infer rewards from behavioral rankings. Our results demonstrate that hybrid strategy significantly improve robustness under disruptions without degrading task performance and reduce catastrophic outcomes like resource overuse. These findings underscore the importance of reward design in fostering resilient cooperation, and represent a step toward developing robust multi-agent systems capable of sustaining cooperation in uncertain environments.
Abstract: Vector-quantized variational autoencoders (VQ-VAEs) are central to models that rely on high reconstruction fidelity, from neural compression to generative pipelines. Hierarchical extensions, such as VQ-VAE2, are often credited with superior reconstruction performance because they split global and local features across multiple levels. However, since higher levels derive all their information from lower levels, they should not carry additional reconstructive content beyond what the lower-level already encodes. Combined with recent advances in training objectives and quantization mechanisms, this leads us to ask whether a single-level VQ-VAE, with matched representational budget and no codebook collapse, can equal the reconstruction fidelity of its hierarchical counterpart. Although the multi-scale structure of hierarchical models may improve perceptual quality in downstream tasks, the effect of hierarchy on reconstruction accuracy, isolated from codebook utilization and overall representational capacity, remains empirically underexamined. We revisit this question by comparing a two-level VQ-VAE and a capacity-matched single-level model on high-resolution ImageNet images. Consistent with prior observations, we confirm that inadequate codebook utilization limits single-level VQ-VAEs and that overly high-dimensional embeddings destabilize quantization and increase codebook collapse. We show that lightweight interventions such as initialization from data, periodic reset of inactive codebook vectors, and systematic tuning of codebook hyperparameters significantly reduce collapse. Our results demonstrate that when representational budgets are matched, and codebook collapse is mitigated, single-level VQ-VAEs can match the reconstruction fidelity of hierarchical variants, challenging the assumption that hierarchical quantization is inherently superior for high-quality reconstructions.
Abstract: This paper revisits the role of positional embeddings (PEs) within vision transformers (ViTs) from a geometric perspective. We show that PEs are not mere token indices but effectively function as geometric priors that shape the spatial structure of the representation. We introduce token-level diagnostics that measure how multi-view geometric consistency in ViT representation depends on consitent PEs. Through extensive experiments on 14 foundation ViT models, we reveal how PEs influence multi-view geometry and spatial reasoning. Our findings clarify the role of PEs as a causal mechanism that governs spatial structure in ViT representations. Our code is provided in https://github.com/shijianjian/vit-geometry-probes
Abstract: Current genomic foundation models (GFMs) rely on extensive neural computation to implicitly approximate conserved biological motifs from single-nucleotide inputs. We propose Gengram, a conditional memory module that introduces an explicit and highly efficient lookup primitive for multi-base motifs via a genomic-specific hashing scheme, establishing genomic "syntax". Integrated into the backbone of state-of-the-art GFMs, Gengram achieves substantial gains (up to 14%) across several functional genomics tasks. The module demonstrates robust architectural generalization, while further inspection of Gengram's latent space reveals the emergence of meaningful representations that align closely with fundamental biological knowledge. By establishing structured motif memory as a modeling primitive, Gengram simultaneously boosts empirical performance and mechanistic interpretability, providing a scalable and biology-aligned pathway for the next generation of GFMs. The code is available at https://github.com/zhejianglab/Genos, and the model checkpoint is available at https://huggingface.co/ZhejiangLab/Gengram.
Abstract: In tacit coordination games with multiple outcomes, purely rational solution concepts, such as Nash equilibria, provide no guidance for which equilibrium to choose. Shelling's theory explains how, in these settings, humans coordinate by relying on focal points: solutions or outcomes that naturally arise because they stand out in some way as salient or prominent to all players. This work studies Large Language Models (LLMs) as players in tacit coordination games, and addresses how, when, and why focal points emerge. We compare and quantify the coordination capabilities of LLMs in cooperative and competitive games for which human experiments are available. We also introduce several learning-free strategies to improve the coordination of LLMs, with themselves and with humans. On a selection of heterogeneous open-source models, including Llama, Qwen, and GPT-oss, we discover that LLMs have a remarkable capability to coordinate and often outperform humans, yet fail on common-sense coordination that involves numbers or nuanced cultural archetypes. This paper constitutes the first large-scale assessment of LLMs' tacit coordination within the theoretical and psychological framework of focal points.
Abstract: Multimodal large language models are playing an increasingly significant role in empowering the financial domain, however, the challenges they face, such as multimodal and high-density information and cross-modal multi-hop reasoning, go beyond the evaluation scope of existing multimodal benchmarks. To address this gap, we propose UniFinEval, the first unified multimodal benchmark designed for high-information-density financial environments, covering text, images, and videos. UniFinEval systematically constructs five core financial scenarios grounded in real-world financial systems: Financial Statement Auditing, Company Fundamental Reasoning, Industry Trend Insights, Financial Risk Sensing, and Asset Allocation Analysis. We manually construct a high-quality dataset consisting of 3,767 question-answer pairs in both chinese and english and systematically evaluate 10 mainstream MLLMs under Zero-Shot and CoT settings. Results show that Gemini-3-pro-preview achieves the best overall performance, yet still exhibits a substantial gap compared to financial experts. Further error analysis reveals systematic deficiencies in current models. UniFinEval aims to provide a systematic assessment of MLLMs' capabilities in fine-grained, high-information-density financial environments, thereby enhancing the robustness of MLLMs applications in real-world financial scenarios. Data and code are available at https://github.com/aifinlab/UniFinEval.
Abstract: Cybersecurity operations demand assistant LLMs that support diverse workflows without exposing sensitive data. Existing solutions either rely on proprietary APIs with privacy risks or on open models lacking domain adaptation. To bridge this gap, we curate 11.8B tokens of cybersecurity-focused continual pretraining data via large-scale web filtering and manual collection of high-quality resources, spanning 28.6K documents across frameworks, offensive techniques, and security tools. Building on this, we design an agentic augmentation pipeline that simulates expert workflows to generate 266K multi-turn cybersecurity samples for supervised fine-tuning. Combined with general open-source LLM data, these resources enable the training of RedSage, an open-source, locally deployable cybersecurity assistant with domain-aware pretraining and post-training. To rigorously evaluate the models, we introduce RedSage-Bench, a benchmark with 30K multiple-choice and 240 open-ended Q&A items covering cybersecurity knowledge, skills, and tool expertise. RedSage is further evaluated on established cybersecurity benchmarks (e.g., CTI-Bench, CyberMetric, SECURE) and general LLM benchmarks to assess broader generalization. At the 8B scale, RedSage achieves consistently better results, surpassing the baseline models by up to +5.59 points on cybersecurity benchmarks and +5.05 points on Open LLM Leaderboard tasks. These findings demonstrate that domain-aware agentic augmentation and pre/post-training can not only enhance cybersecurity-specific expertise but also help to improve general reasoning and instruction-following. All models, datasets, and code are publicly available.
Abstract: Agentic Reinforcement Learning (Agentic RL) has achieved notable success in enabling agents to perform complex reasoning and tool use. However, most methods still relies on sparse outcome-based reward for training. Such feedback fails to differentiate intermediate reasoning quality, leading to suboptimal training results. In this paper, we introduce Agent Reasoning Reward Model (Agent-RRM), a multi-faceted reward model that produces structured feedback for agentic trajectories, including (1) an explicit reasoning trace , (2) a focused critique that provides refinement guidance by highlighting reasoning flaws, and (3) an overall score that evaluates process performance. Leveraging these signals, we systematically investigate three integration strategies: Reagent-C (text-augmented refinement), Reagent-R (reward-augmented guidance), and Reagent-U (unified feedback integration). Extensive evaluations across 12 diverse benchmarks demonstrate that Reagent-U yields substantial performance leaps, achieving 43.7% on GAIA and 46.2% on WebWalkerQA, validating the effectiveness of our reasoning reward model and training schemes. Code, models, and datasets are all released to facilitate future research.
Abstract: Manipulating dynamic objects remains an open challenge for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, which, despite strong generalization in static manipulation, struggle in dynamic scenarios requiring rapid perception, temporal anticipation, and continuous control. We present DynamicVLA, a framework for dynamic object manipulation that integrates temporal reasoning and closed-loop adaptation through three key designs: 1) a compact 0.4B VLA using a convolutional vision encoder for spatially efficient, structurally faithful encoding, enabling fast multimodal inference; 2) Continuous Inference, enabling overlapping reasoning and execution for lower latency and timely adaptation to object motion; and 3) Latent-aware Action Streaming, which bridges the perception-execution gap by enforcing temporally aligned action execution. To fill the missing foundation of dynamic manipulation data, we introduce the Dynamic Object Manipulation (DOM) benchmark, built from scratch with an auto data collection pipeline that efficiently gathers 200K synthetic episodes across 2.8K scenes and 206 objects, and enables fast collection of 2K real-world episodes without teleoperation. Extensive evaluations demonstrate remarkable improvements in response speed, perception, and generalization, positioning DynamicVLA as a unified framework for general dynamic object manipulation across embodiments.
Abstract: Neural networks have been successfully applied in various resource-constrained edge devices, where usually central processing units (CPUs) instead of graphics processing units exist due to limited power availability. State-of-the-art research still focuses on efficiently executing enormous numbers of multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations. However, CPUs themselves are not good at executing such mathematical operations on a large scale, since they are more suited to execute control flow logic, i.e., computer algorithms. To enhance the computation efficiency of neural networks on CPUs, in this paper, we propose to convert them into logic flows for execution. Specifically, neural networks are first converted into equivalent decision trees, from which decision paths with constant leaves are then selected and compressed into logic flows. Such logic flows consist of if and else structures and a reduced number of MAC operations. Experimental results demonstrate that the latency can be reduced by up to 14.9 % on a simulated RISC-V CPU without any accuracy degradation. The code is open source at https://github.com/TUDa-HWAI/NN2Logic
Abstract: Reasoning-oriented Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, yet they remain fundamentally limited by a \emph{blind self-thinking} paradigm: performing extensive internal reasoning even when critical information is missing or ambiguous. We propose Proactive Interactive Reasoning (PIR), a new reasoning paradigm that transforms LLMs from passive solvers into proactive inquirers that interleave reasoning with clarification. Unlike existing search- or tool-based frameworks that primarily address knowledge uncertainty by querying external environments, PIR targets premise- and intent-level uncertainty through direct interaction with the user. PIR is implemented via two core components: (1) an uncertainty-aware supervised fine-tuning procedure that equips models with interactive reasoning capability, and (2) a user-simulator-based policy optimization framework driven by a composite reward that aligns model behavior with user intent. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning, code generation, and document editing demonstrate that PIR consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving up to 32.70\% higher accuracy, 22.90\% higher pass rate, and 41.36 BLEU improvement, while reducing nearly half of the reasoning computation and unnecessary interaction turns. Further reliability evaluations on factual knowledge, question answering, and missing-premise scenarios confirm the strong generalization and robustness of PIR. Model and code are publicly available at: \href{https://github.com/SUAT-AIRI/Proactive-Interactive-R1}
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a 3D asset-referenced diffusion model for image generation, exploring how to integrate 3D assets into image diffusion models. Existing reference-based image generation methods leverage large-scale pretrained diffusion models and demonstrate strong capability in generating diverse images conditioned on a single reference image. However, these methods are limited to single-image references and cannot leverage 3D assets, constraining their practical versatility. To address this gap, we present a cross-domain diffusion model with dual-branch perception that leverages multi-view RGB images and point maps of 3D assets to jointly model their colors and canonical-space coordinates, achieving precise consistency between generated images and the 3D references. Our spatially aligned dual-branch generation architecture and domain-decoupled generation mechanism ensure the simultaneous generation of two spatially aligned but content-disentangled outputs, RGB images and point maps, linking 2D image attributes with 3D asset attributes. Experiments show that our approach effectively uses 3D assets as references to produce images consistent with the given assets, opening new possibilities for combining diffusion models with 3D content creation.
Abstract: We present mjlab, a lightweight, open-source framework for robot learning that combines GPU-accelerated simulation with composable environments and minimal setup friction. mjlab adopts the manager-based API introduced by Isaac Lab, where users compose modular building blocks for observations, rewards, and events, and pairs it with MuJoCo Warp for GPU-accelerated physics. The result is a framework installable with a single command, requiring minimal dependencies, and providing direct access to native MuJoCo data structures. mjlab ships with reference implementations of velocity tracking, motion imitation, and manipulation tasks.
Abstract: Long-context reasoning has significantly empowered large language models (LLMs) to tackle complex tasks, yet it introduces severe efficiency bottlenecks due to the computational complexity. Existing efficient approaches often rely on complex additional training or external models for compression, which limits scalability and discards critical fine-grained information. In this paper, we propose VTC-R1, a new efficient reasoning paradigm that integrates vision-text compression into the reasoning process. Instead of processing lengthy textual traces, VTC-R1 renders intermediate reasoning segments into compact images, which are iteratively fed back into vision-language models as "optical memory." We construct a training dataset based on OpenR1-Math-220K achieving 3.4x token compression and fine-tune representative VLMs-Glyph and Qwen3-VL. Extensive experiments on benchmarks such as MATH500, AIME25, AMC23 and GPQA-D demonstrate that VTC-R1 consistently outperforms standard long-context reasoning. Furthermore, our approach significantly improves inference efficiency, achieving 2.7x speedup in end-to-end latency, highlighting its potential as a scalable solution for reasoning-intensive applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/w-yibo/VTC-R1.
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a broad range of vision tasks. However, constrained by the capacity of their internal world knowledge, prior work has proposed augmenting MLLMs by ``reasoning-then-tool-call'' for visual and textual search engines to obtain substantial gains on tasks requiring extensive factual information. However, these approaches typically define multimodal search in a naive setting, assuming that a single full-level or entity-level image query and few text query suffices to retrieve the key evidence needed to answer the question, which is unrealistic in real-world scenarios with substantial visual noise. Moreover, they are often limited in the reasoning depth and search breadth, making it difficult to solve complex questions that require aggregating evidence from diverse visual and textual sources. Building on this, we propose Vision-DeepResearch, which proposes one new multimodal deep-research paradigm, i.e., performs multi-turn, multi-entity and multi-scale visual and textual search to robustly hit real-world search engines under heavy noise. Our Vision-DeepResearch supports dozens of reasoning steps and hundreds of engine interactions, while internalizing deep-research capabilities into the MLLM via cold-start supervision and RL training, resulting in a strong end-to-end multimodal deep-research MLLM. It substantially outperforming existing multimodal deep-research MLLMs, and workflows built on strong closed-source foundation model such as GPT-5, Gemini-2.5-pro and Claude-4-Sonnet. The code will be released in https://github.com/Osilly/Vision-DeepResearch.
Abstract: Scaling has powered recent advances in vision foundation models, yet extending this paradigm to metric depth estimation remains challenging due to heterogeneous sensor noise, camera-dependent biases, and metric ambiguity in noisy cross-source 3D data. We introduce Metric Anything, a simple and scalable pretraining framework that learns metric depth from noisy, diverse 3D sources without manually engineered prompts, camera-specific modeling, or task-specific architectures. Central to our approach is the Sparse Metric Prompt, created by randomly masking depth maps, which serves as a universal interface that decouples spatial reasoning from sensor and camera biases. Using about 20M image-depth pairs spanning reconstructed, captured, and rendered 3D data across 10000 camera models, we demonstrate-for the first time-a clear scaling trend in the metric depth track. The pretrained model excels at prompt-driven tasks such as depth completion, super-resolution and Radar-camera fusion, while its distilled prompt-free student achieves state-of-the-art results on monocular depth estimation, camera intrinsics recovery, single/multi-view metric 3D reconstruction, and VLA planning. We also show that using pretrained ViT of Metric Anything as a visual encoder significantly boosts Multimodal Large Language Model capabilities in spatial intelligence. These results show that metric depth estimation can benefit from the same scaling laws that drive modern foundation models, establishing a new path toward scalable and efficient real-world metric perception. We open-source MetricAnything at http://metric-anything.github.io/metric-anything-io/ to support community research.
Abstract: In recent years, multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) have become an inseparable part of daily life, making it crucial for them to master the rules of conversational language in order to communicate effectively with users. While previous work has evaluated LLMs' understanding of figurative language in high-resource languages, their performance in low-resource languages remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce MasalBench, a comprehensive benchmark for assessing LLMs' contextual and cross-cultural understanding of Persian proverbs, which are a key component of conversation in this low-resource language. We evaluate eight state-of-the-art LLMs on MasalBench and find that they perform well in identifying Persian proverbs in context, achieving accuracies above 0.90. However, their performance drops considerably when tasked with identifying equivalent English proverbs, with the best model achieving 0.79 accuracy. Our findings highlight the limitations of current LLMs in cultural knowledge and analogical reasoning, and they provide a framework for assessing cross-cultural understanding in other low-resource languages. MasalBench is available at https://github.com/kalhorghazal/MasalBench.
Abstract: Streaming reconstruction from monocular image sequences remains challenging, as existing methods typically favor either high-quality rendering or accurate geometry, but rarely both. We present PLANING, an efficient on-the-fly reconstruction framework built on a hybrid representation that loosely couples explicit geometric primitives with neural Gaussians, enabling geometry and appearance to be modeled in a decoupled manner. This decoupling supports an online initialization and optimization strategy that separates geometry and appearance updates, yielding stable streaming reconstruction with substantially reduced structural redundancy. PLANING improves dense mesh Chamfer-L2 by 18.52% over PGSR, surpasses ARTDECO by 1.31 dB PSNR, and reconstructs ScanNetV2 scenes in under 100 seconds, over 5x faster than 2D Gaussian Splatting, while matching the quality of offline per-scene optimization. Beyond reconstruction quality, the structural clarity and computational efficiency of \modelname~make it well suited for a broad range of downstream applications, such as enabling large-scale scene modeling and simulation-ready environments for embodied AI. Project page: https://city-super.github.io/PLANING/ .
Abstract: We introduce a new multivariate statistical problem that we refer to as the Ensemble Inverse Problem (EIP). The aim of EIP is to invert for an ensemble that is distributed according to the pushforward of a prior under a forward process. In high energy physics (HEP), this is related to a widely known problem called unfolding, which aims to reconstruct the true physics distribution of quantities, such as momentum and angle, from measurements that are distorted by detector effects. In recent applications, the EIP also arises in full waveform inversion (FWI) and inverse imaging with unknown priors. We propose non-iterative inference-time methods that construct posterior samplers based on a new class of conditional generative models, which we call ensemble inverse generative models. For the posterior modeling, these models additionally use the ensemble information contained in the observation set on top of single measurements. Unlike existing methods, our proposed methods avoid explicit and iterative use of the forward model at inference time via training across several sets of truth-observation pairs that are consistent with the same forward model, but originate from a wide range of priors. We demonstrate that this training procedure implicitly encodes the likelihood model. The use of ensemble information helps posterior inference and enables generalization to unseen priors. We benchmark the proposed method on several synthetic and real datasets in inverse imaging, HEP, and FWI. The codes are available at https://github.com/ZhengyanHuan/The-Ensemble-Inverse-Problem--Applications-and-Methods.
Abstract: Imbalanced Domain Generalization (IDG) focuses on mitigating both domain and label shifts, both of which fundamentally shape the model's decision boundaries, particularly under heterogeneous long-tailed distributions across domains. Despite its practical significance, it remains underexplored, primarily due to the technical complexity of handling their entanglement and the paucity of theoretical foundations. In this paper, we begin by theoretically establishing the generalization bound for IDG, highlighting the role of posterior discrepancy and decision margin. This bound motivates us to focus on directly steering decision boundaries, marking a clear departure from existing methods. Subsequently, we technically propose a novel Negative-Dominant Contrastive Learning (NDCL) for IDG to enhance discriminability while enforce posterior consistency across domains. Specifically, inter-class decision-boundary separation is enhanced by placing greater emphasis on negatives as the primary signal in our contrastive learning, naturally amplifying gradient signals for minority classes to avoid the decision boundary being biased toward majority classes. Meanwhile, intra-class compactness is encouraged through a re-weighted cross-entropy strategy, and posterior consistency across domains is enforced through a prediction-central alignment strategy. Finally, rigorous yet challenging experiments on benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our NDCL. The code is available at https://github.com/Alrash/NDCL.
Abstract: This work highlights that video world modeling, alongside vision-language pre-training, establishes a fresh and independent foundation for robot learning. Intuitively, video world models provide the ability to imagine the near future by understanding the causality between actions and visual dynamics. Inspired by this, we introduce LingBot-VA, an autoregressive diffusion framework that learns frame prediction and policy execution simultaneously. Our model features three carefully crafted designs: (1) a shared latent space, integrating vision and action tokens, driven by a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture, (2) a closed-loop rollout mechanism, allowing for ongoing acquisition of environmental feedback with ground-truth observations, (3) an asynchronous inference pipeline, parallelizing action prediction and motor execution to support efficient control. We evaluate our model on both simulation benchmarks and real-world scenarios, where it shows significant promise in long-horizon manipulation, data efficiency in post-training, and strong generalizability to novel configurations. The code and model are made publicly available to facilitate the community.
Abstract: Discovering superior circuit topologies requires navigating an exponentially large design space-a challenge traditionally reserved for human experts. Existing AI methods either select from predefined templates or generate novel topologies at a limited scale without rigorous verification, leaving large-scale performance-driven discovery underexplored. We present PowerGenie, a framework for automated discovery of higher-performance reconfigurable power converters at scale. PowerGenie introduces: (1) an automated analytical framework that determines converter functionality and theoretical performance limits without component sizing or SPICE simulation, and (2) an evolutionary finetuning method that co-evolves a generative model with its training distribution through fitness selection and uniqueness verification. Unlike existing methods that suffer from mode collapse and overfitting, our approach achieves higher syntax validity, function validity, novelty rate, and figure-of-merit (FoM). PowerGenie discovers a novel 8-mode reconfigurable converter with 23% higher FoM than the best training topology. SPICE simulations confirm average absolute efficiency gains of 10% across 8 modes and up to 17% at a single mode. Code is available at https://github.com/xz-group/PowerGenie.
Abstract: Recent work has explored optimizing LLM collaboration through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). However, most MARL fine-tuning approaches rely on predefined execution protocols, which often require centralized execution. Decentralized LLM collaboration is more appealing in practice, as agents can run inference in parallel with flexible deployments. Also, current approaches use Monte Carlo methods for fine-tuning, which suffer from high variance and thus require more samples to train effectively. Actor-critic methods are prevalent in MARL for dealing with these issues, so we developed Multi-Agent Actor-Critic (MAAC) methods to optimize decentralized LLM collaboration. In this paper, we analyze when and why these MAAC methods are beneficial. We propose 2 MAAC approaches, \textbf{CoLLM-CC} with a \textbf{C}entralized \textbf{C}ritic and \textbf{CoLLM-DC} with \textbf{D}ecentralized \textbf{C}ritics. Our experiments across writing, coding, and game-playing domains show that Monte Carlo methods and CoLLM-DC can achieve performance comparable to CoLLM-CC in short-horizon and dense-reward settings. However, they both underperform CoLLM-CC on long-horizon or sparse-reward tasks, where Monte Carlo methods require substantially more samples and CoLLM-DC struggles to converge. Our code is available at https://github.com/OpenMLRL/CoMLRL/releases/tag/v1.3.2.
Abstract: Drug discovery can be viewed as a combinatorial search over an immense chemical space, motivating the development of deep generative models for de novo molecular design. Among these, GPT-based molecular language models (MLM) have shown strong molecular design performance by learning chemical syntax and semantics from large-scale data. However, existing MLMs face two fundamental limitations: they inadequately capture the graph-structured nature of molecules when formulated as next-token prediction problems, and they typically lack explicit mechanisms for target-aware generation. Here, we propose SoftMol, a unified framework that co-designs molecular representation, model architecture, and search strategy for target-aware molecular generation. SoftMol introduces soft fragments, a rule-free block representation of SMILES that enables diffusion-native modeling, and develops SoftBD, the first block-diffusion molecular language model that combines local bidirectional diffusion with autoregressive generation under molecular structural constraints. To favor generated molecules with high drug-likeness and synthetic accessibility, SoftBD is trained on a carefully curated dataset named ZINC-Curated. SoftMol further integrates a gated Monte Carlo tree search to assemble fragments in a target-aware manner. Experimental results show that, compared with current state-of-the-art models, SoftMol achieves 100% chemical validity, improves binding affinity by 9.7%, yields a 2-3x increase in molecular diversity, and delivers a 6.6x speedup in inference efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/szu-aicourse/softmol
Abstract: We introduce PaddleOCR-VL-1.5, an upgraded model achieving a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy of 94.5% on OmniDocBench v1.5. To rigorously evaluate robustness against real-world physical distortions, including scanning, skew, warping, screen-photography, and illumination, we propose the Real5-OmniDocBench benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate that this enhanced model attains SOTA performance on the newly curated benchmark. Furthermore, we extend the model's capabilities by incorporating seal recognition and text spotting tasks, while remaining a 0.9B ultra-compact VLM with high efficiency. Code: https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR
Abstract: Localizing partial deepfake audio, where only segments of speech are manipulated, remains challenging due to the subtle and scattered nature of these modifications. Existing approaches typically rely on frame-level predictions to identify spoofed segments, and some recent methods improve performance by concentrating on the transitions between real and fake audio. However, we observe that these models tend to over-rely on boundary artifacts while neglecting the manipulated content that follows. We argue that effective localization requires understanding the entire segments beyond just detecting transitions. Thus, we propose Segment-Aware Learning (SAL), a framework that encourages models to focus on the internal structure of segments. SAL introduces two core techniques: Segment Positional Labeling, which provides fine-grained frame supervision based on relative position within a segment; and Cross-Segment Mixing, a data augmentation method that generates diverse segment patterns. Experiments across multiple deepfake localization datasets show that SAL consistently achieves strong performance in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings, with notable gains in non-boundary regions and reduced reliance on transition artifacts. The code is available at https://github.com/SentryMao/SAL.
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a promising paradigm for optimizing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in complex reasoning tasks. However, traditional outcome-based RL approaches often suffer from reward sparsity and inefficient credit assignment, as coarse-grained scalar rewards fail to identify specific erroneous steps within long-horizon trajectories. This ambiguity frequently leads to "process hallucinations", where models reach correct answers through flawed logic or redundant retrieval steps. Although recent process-aware approaches attempt to mitigate this via static preference learning or heuristic reward shaping, they often lack the on-policy exploration capabilities required to decouple step-level credit from global outcomes. To address these challenges, we propose ProRAG, a process-supervised reinforcement learning framework designed to integrate learned step-level supervision into the online optimization loop. Our framework consists of four stages: (1) Supervised Policy Warmup to initialize the model with a structured reasoning format; (2) construction of an MCTS-based Process Reward Model (PRM) to quantify intermediate reasoning quality; (3) PRM-Guided Reasoning Refinement to align the policy with fine-grained process preferences; and (4) Process-Supervised Reinforcement Learning with a dual-granularity advantage mechanism. By aggregating step-level process rewards with global outcome signals, ProRAG provides precise feedback for every action. Extensive experiments on five multi-hop reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that ProRAG achieves superior overall performance compared to strong outcome-based and process-aware RL baselines, particularly on complex long-horizon tasks, validating the effectiveness of fine-grained process supervision. The code and model are available at https://github.com/lilinwz/ProRAG.
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit social biases that reinforce harmful stereotypes, limiting their safe deployment. Most existing debiasing methods adopt a suppressive paradigm by modifying parameters, prompts, or neurons associated with biased behavior; however, such approaches are often brittle, weakly generalizable, data-inefficient, and prone to degrading general capability. We propose \textbf{KnowBias}, a lightweight and conceptually distinct framework that mitigates bias by strengthening, rather than suppressing, neurons encoding bias-knowledge. KnowBias identifies neurons encoding bias knowledge using a small set of bias-knowledge questions via attribution-based analysis, and selectively enhances them at inference time. This design enables strong debiasing while preserving general capabilities, generalizes across bias types and demographics, and is highly data efficient, requiring only a handful of simple yes/no questions and no retraining. Experiments across multiple benchmarks and LLMs demonstrate consistent state-of-the-art debiasing performance with minimal utility degradation. Data and code are available at https://github.com/JP-25/KnowBias.
Abstract: Determinism is indispensable for reproducibility in large language model (LLM) training, yet it often exacts a steep performance cost. In widely used attention implementations such as FlashAttention-3, the deterministic backward pass can incur up to a 37.9% throughput reduction relative to its non-deterministic counterpart, primarily because gradient accumulation operations must be serialized to guarantee numerical consistency. This performance loss stems from suboptimal scheduling of compute and gradient-reduction phases, leading to significant hardware underutilization. To address this challenge, we formulate the backward pass of deterministic attention as a scheduling problem on a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) and derive schedules that minimize the critical path length. Building on this formulation, we present DASH (Deterministic Attention Scheduling for High-Throughput), which encapsulates two complementary scheduling strategies: (i) Descending Q-Tile Iteration, a reversed query-block traversal that shrinks pipeline stalls in causal attention, and (ii) Shift Scheduling, a theoretically optimal schedule within our DAG model that reduces pipeline stalls for both full and causal masks. Our empirical evaluations on NVIDIA H800 GPUs demonstrate that DASH narrows the performance gap of deterministic attention. The proposed strategies improve the throughput of the attention backward pass by up to 1.28$\times$ compared to the baseline, significantly advancing the efficiency of reproducible LLM training. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/SJTU-Liquid/deterministic-FA3.
Abstract: Internet memes have become pervasive carriers of digital culture on social platforms. However, their heavy reliance on metaphors and sociocultural context also makes them subtle vehicles for harmful content, posing significant challenges for automated content moderation. Existing approaches primarily focus on intra-modal and inter-modal signal analysis, while the understanding of implicit toxicity often depends on background knowledge that is not explicitly present in the meme itself. To address this challenge, we propose KID, a Knowledge-Injected Dual-Head Learning framework for knowledge-grounded harmful meme detection. KID adopts a label-constrained distillation paradigm to decompose complex meme understanding into structured reasoning chains that explicitly link visual evidence, background knowledge, and classification labels. These chains guide the learning process by grounding external knowledge in meme-specific contexts. In addition, KID employs a dual-head architecture that jointly optimizes semantic generation and classification objectives, enabling aligned linguistic reasoning while maintaining stable decision boundaries. Extensive experiments on five multilingual datasets spanning English, Chinese, and low-resource Bengali demonstrate that KID achieves SOTA performance on both binary and multi-label harmful meme detection tasks, improving over previous best methods by 2.1%--19.7% across primary evaluation metrics. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of knowledge injection and dual-head joint learning, highlighting their complementary contributions to robust and generalizable meme understanding. The code and data are available at https://github.com/PotatoDog1669/KID.
Abstract: Three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of ships is an important part of maritime monitoring, allowing improved visualization, inspection, and decision-making in real-world monitoring environments. However, most state-ofthe-art 3D reconstruction methods require multi-view supervision, annotated 3D ground truth, or are computationally intensive, making them impractical for real-time maritime deployment. In this work, we present an efficient pipeline for single-view 3D reconstruction of real ships by training entirely on synthetic data and requiring only a single view at inference. Our approach uses the Splatter Image network, which represents objects as sparse sets of 3D Gaussians for rapid and accurate reconstruction from single images. The model is first fine-tuned on synthetic ShapeNet vessels and further refined with a diverse custom dataset of 3D ships, bridging the domain gap between synthetic and real-world imagery. We integrate a state-of-the-art segmentation module based on YOLOv8 and custom preprocessing to ensure compatibility with the reconstruction network. Postprocessing steps include real-world scaling, centering, and orientation alignment, followed by georeferenced placement on an interactive web map using AIS metadata and homography-based mapping. Quantitative evaluation on synthetic validation data demonstrates strong reconstruction fidelity, while qualitative results on real maritime images from the ShipSG dataset confirm the potential for transfer to operational maritime settings. The final system provides interactive 3D inspection of real ships without requiring real-world 3D annotations. This pipeline provides an efficient, scalable solution for maritime monitoring and highlights a path toward real-time 3D ship visualization in practical applications. Interactive demo: https://dlr-mi.github.io/ship3d-demo/.
Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) presents a core challenge: grounding high-level linguistic instructions into precise, safe, and long-horizon spatial actions. Explicit topological maps have proven to be a vital solution for providing robust spatial memory in such tasks. However, existing topological planning methods suffer from a "Granularity Rigidity" problem. Specifically, these methods typically rely on fixed geometric thresholds to sample nodes, which fails to adapt to varying environmental complexities. This rigidity leads to a critical mismatch: the model tends to over-sample in simple areas, causing computational redundancy, while under-sampling in high-uncertainty regions, increasing collision risks and compromising precision. To address this, we propose DGNav, a framework for Dynamic Topological Navigation, introducing a context-aware mechanism to modulate map density and connectivity on-the-fly. Our approach comprises two core innovations: (1) A Scene-Aware Adaptive Strategy that dynamically modulates graph construction thresholds based on the dispersion of predicted waypoints, enabling "densification on demand" in challenging environments; (2) A Dynamic Graph Transformer that reconstructs graph connectivity by fusing visual, linguistic, and geometric cues into dynamic edge weights, enabling the agent to filter out topological noise and enhancing instruction adherence. Extensive experiments on the R2R-CE and RxR-CE benchmarks demonstrate DGNav exhibits superior navigation performance and strong generalization capabilities. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm that our framework achieves an optimal trade-off between navigation efficiency and safe exploration. The code is available at https://github.com/shannanshouyin/DGNav.
Abstract: Individual agents in multi-agent (MA) systems often lack robustness, tending to blindly conform to misleading peers. We show this weakness stems from both sycophancy and inadequate ability to evaluate peer reliability. To address this, we first formalize the learning problem of history-aware reference, introducing the historical interactions of peers as additional input, so that agents can estimate peer reliability and learn from trustworthy peers when uncertain. This shifts the task from evaluating peer reasoning quality to estimating peer reliability based on interaction history. We then develop Epistemic Context Learning (ECL): a reasoning framework that conditions predictions on explicitly-built peer profiles from history. We further optimize ECL by reinforcement learning using auxiliary rewards. Our experiments reveal that our ECL enables small models like Qwen 3-4B to outperform a history-agnostic baseline 8x its size (Qwen 3-30B) by accurately identifying reliable peers. ECL also boosts frontier models to near-perfect (100%) performance. We show that ECL generalizes well to various MA configurations and we find that trust is modeled well by LLMs, revealing a strong correlation in trust modeling accuracy and final answer quality.
Abstract: Evaluation of Image Quality Assessment (IQA) models has long been dominated by global correlation metrics, such as Pearson Linear Correlation Coefficient (PLCC) and Spearman Rank-Order Correlation Coefficient (SRCC). While widely adopted, these metrics reduce performance to a single scalar, failing to capture how ranking consistency varies across the local quality spectrum. For example, two IQA models may achieve identical SRCC values, yet one ranks high-quality images (related to high Mean Opinion Score, MOS) more reliably, while the other better discriminates image pairs with small quality/MOS differences (related to $|Δ$MOS$|$). Such complementary behaviors are invisible under global metrics. Moreover, SRCC and PLCC are sensitive to test-sample quality distributions, yielding unstable comparisons across test sets. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{Granularity-Modulated Correlation (GMC)}, which provides a structured, fine-grained analysis of IQA performance. GMC includes: (1) a \textbf{Granularity Modulator} that applies Gaussian-weighted correlations conditioned on absolute MOS values and pairwise MOS differences ($|Δ$MOS$|$) to examine local performance variations, and (2) a \textbf{Distribution Regulator} that regularizes correlations to mitigate biases from non-uniform quality distributions. The resulting \textbf{correlation surface} maps correlation values as a joint function of MOS and $|Δ$MOS$|$, providing a 3D representation of IQA performance. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that GMC reveals performance characteristics invisible to scalar metrics, offering a more informative and reliable paradigm for analyzing, comparing, and deploying IQA models. Codes are available at https://github.com/Dniaaa/GMC.
Abstract: In this article, we present a formalization of spherically complete spaces, which is a fundamental notion in non-archimedean functional analysis. This work includes the equivalent definitions of spherically complete spaces, their basic properties, examples and non-examples such as the field $\mathbf{C}_p$ of $p$-adic complex numbers. As applications, we formalize the Birkhoff-James orthogonality, Hahn-Banach extension theorem and the spherical completion for non-archimedean Banach spaces. Code available at https://github.com/YijunYuan/SphericalCompleteness
Abstract: Deep time series models are vulnerable to noisy data ubiquitous in real-world applications. Existing robustness strategies either prune data or rely on costly prior quantification, failing to balance effectiveness and efficiency. In this paper, we introduce DropoutTS, a model-agnostic plugin that shifts the paradigm from "what" to learn to "how much" to learn. DropoutTS employs a Sample-Adaptive Dropout mechanism: leveraging spectral sparsity to efficiently quantify instance-level noise via reconstruction residuals, it dynamically calibrates model learning capacity by mapping noise to adaptive dropout rates - selectively suppressing spurious fluctuations while preserving fine-grained fidelity. Extensive experiments across diverse noise regimes and open benchmarks show DropoutTS consistently boosts superior backbones' performance, delivering advanced robustness with negligible parameter overhead and no architectural modifications. Our code is available at https://github.com/CityMind-Lab/DropoutTS.
Abstract: Character image animation aims to synthesize high-fidelity videos by transferring motion from a driving sequence to a static reference image. Despite recent advancements, existing methods suffer from two fundamental challenges: (1) suboptimal motion injection strategies that lead to a trade-off between identity preservation and motion consistency, manifesting as a "see-saw", and (2) an over-reliance on explicit pose priors (e.g., skeletons), which inadequately capture intricate dynamics and hinder generalization to arbitrary, non-humanoid characters. To address these challenges, we present DreamActor-M2, a universal animation framework that reimagines motion conditioning as an in-context learning problem. Our approach follows a two-stage paradigm. First, we bridge the input modality gap by fusing reference appearance and motion cues into a unified latent space, enabling the model to jointly reason about spatial identity and temporal dynamics by leveraging the generative prior of foundational models. Second, we introduce a self-bootstrapped data synthesis pipeline that curates pseudo cross-identity training pairs, facilitating a seamless transition from pose-dependent control to direct, end-to-end RGB-driven animation. This strategy significantly enhances generalization across diverse characters and motion scenarios. To facilitate comprehensive evaluation, we further introduce AW Bench, a versatile benchmark encompassing a wide spectrum of characters types and motion scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DreamActor-M2 achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering superior visual fidelity and robust cross-domain generalization. Project Page: https://grisoon.github.io/DreamActor-M2/
Abstract: Attention patterns play a crucial role in both training and inference of large language models (LLMs). Prior works have identified individual patterns such as retrieval heads, sink heads, and diagonal traces, yet these observations remain fragmented and lack a unifying explanation. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{Temporal Attention Pattern Predictability Analysis (TAPPA), a unifying framework that explains diverse attention patterns by analyzing their underlying mathematical formulations} from a temporally continuous perspective. TAPPA both deepens the understanding of attention behavior and guides inference acceleration approaches. Specifically, TAPPA characterizes attention patterns as predictable patterns with clear regularities and unpredictable patterns that appear effectively random. Our analysis further reveals that this distinction can be explained by the degree of query self-similarity along the temporal dimension. Focusing on the predictable patterns, we further provide a detailed mathematical analysis of three representative cases through the joint effect of queries, keys, and Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE). We validate TAPPA by applying its insights to KV cache compression and LLM pruning tasks. Across these tasks, a simple metric motivated by TAPPA consistently improves performance over baseline methods. The code is available at https://github.com/MIRALab-USTC/LLM-TAPPA.
Abstract: Charts are a fundamental visualization format for structured data analysis. Enabling end-to-end chart editing according to user intent is of great practical value, yet remains challenging due to the need for both fine-grained control and global structural consistency. Most existing approaches adopt pipeline-based designs, where natural language or code serves as an intermediate representation, limiting their ability to faithfully execute complex edits. We introduce ChartE$^{3}$, an End-to-End Chart Editing benchmark that directly evaluates models without relying on intermediate natural language programs or code-level supervision. ChartE$^{3}$ focuses on two complementary editing dimensions: local editing, which involves fine-grained appearance changes such as font or color adjustments, and global editing, which requires holistic, data-centric transformations including data filtering and trend line addition. ChartE$^{3}$ contains over 1,200 high-quality samples constructed via a well-designed data pipeline with human curation. Each sample is provided as a triplet of a chart image, its underlying code, and a multimodal editing instruction, enabling evaluation from both objective and subjective perspectives. Extensive benchmarking of state-of-the-art multimodal large language models reveals substantial performance gaps, particularly on global editing tasks, highlighting critical limitations in current end-to-end chart editing capabilities.
Abstract: Disentangled representation learning aims to map independent factors of variation to independent representation components. On one hand, purely unsupervised approaches have proven successful on fully disentangled synthetic data, but fail to recover semantic factors from real data without strong inductive biases. On the other hand, supervised approaches are unstable and hard to scale to large attribute sets because they rely on adversarial objectives or auxiliary classifiers. We introduce \textsc{XFactors}, a weakly-supervised VAE framework that disentangles and provides explicit control over a chosen set of factors. Building on the Disentangled Information Bottleneck perspective, we decompose the representation into a residual subspace $\mathcal{S}$ and factor-specific subspaces $\mathcal{T}_1,\ldots,\mathcal{T}_K$ and a residual subspace $\mathcal{S}$. Each target factor is encoded in its assigned $\mathcal{T}_i$ through contrastive supervision: an InfoNCE loss pulls together latents sharing the same factor value and pushes apart mismatched pairs. In parallel, KL regularization imposes a Gaussian structure on both $\mathcal{S}$ and the aggregated factor subspaces, organizing the geometry without additional supervision for non-targeted factors and avoiding adversarial training and classifiers. Across multiple datasets, with constant hyperparameters, \textsc{XFactors} achieves state-of-the-art disentanglement scores and yields consistent qualitative factor alignment in the corresponding subspaces, enabling controlled factor swapping via latent replacement. We further demonstrate that our method scales correctly with increasing latent capacity and evaluate it on the real-world dataset CelebA. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/ICML26-anon/XFactors}{github.com/ICML26-anon/XFactors}.
Abstract: Deep learning has emerged as a promising paradigm for spatio-temporal modeling of fluid dynamics. However, existing approaches often suffer from limited generalization to unseen flow conditions and typically require retraining when applied to new scenarios. In this paper, we present LLM4Fluid, a spatio-temporal prediction framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) as generalizable neural solvers for fluid dynamics. The framework first compresses high-dimensional flow fields into a compact latent space via reduced-order modeling enhanced with a physics-informed disentanglement mechanism, effectively mitigating spatial feature entanglement while preserving essential flow structures. A pretrained LLM then serves as a temporal processor, autoregressively predicting the dynamics of physical sequences with time series prompts. To bridge the modality gap between prompts and physical sequences, which can otherwise degrade prediction accuracy, we propose a dedicated modality alignment strategy that resolves representational mismatch and stabilizes long-term prediction. Extensive experiments across diverse flow scenarios demonstrate that LLM4Fluid functions as a robust and generalizable neural solver without retraining, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy while exhibiting powerful zero-shot and in-context learning capabilities. Code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/qisongxiao/LLM4Fluid.
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are a major focus of recent AI research. However, most prior work focuses on static image understanding, while their ability to process sequential audio-video data remains underexplored. This gap highlights the need for a high-quality benchmark to systematically evaluate MLLM performance in a real-world setting. We introduce SONIC-O1, a comprehensive, fully human-verified benchmark spanning 13 real-world conversational domains with 4,958 annotations and demographic metadata. SONIC-O1 evaluates MLLMs on key tasks, including open-ended summarization, multiple-choice question (MCQ) answering, and temporal localization with supporting rationales (reasoning). Experiments on closed- and open-source models reveal limitations. While the performance gap in MCQ accuracy between two model families is relatively small, we observe a substantial 22.6% performance difference in temporal localization between the best performing closed-source and open-source models. Performance further degrades across demographic groups, indicating persistent disparities in model behavior. Overall, SONIC-O1 provides an open evaluation suite for temporally grounded and socially robust multimodal understanding. We release SONIC-O1 for reproducibility and research: Project page: https://vectorinstitute.github.io/sonic-o1/ Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/vector-institute/sonic-o1 Github: https://github.com/vectorinstitute/sonic-o1 Leaderboard: https://huggingface.co/spaces/vector-institute/sonic-o1-leaderboard
Abstract: Subword tokenization methods, such as Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE), significantly impact the performance and efficiency of large language models (LLMs). The standard approach involves training a general-purpose tokenizer that uniformly processes all textual data during both training and inference. However, the use of a generic set of tokens can incur inefficiencies when applying the model to specific domains or languages. To address this limitation, we propose a post-training adaptation strategy that selectively replaces low-utility tokens with more relevant ones based on their frequency in an adaptation corpus. Our algorithm identifies the token inventory that most effectively encodes the adaptation corpus for a given target vocabulary size. Extensive experiments on generation and classification tasks across multiple languages demonstrate that our adapted tokenizers compress test corpora more effectively than baselines using the same vocabulary size. This method serves as a lightweight adaptation mechanism, akin to a vocabulary fine-tuning process, enabling optimized tokenization for specific domains or tasks. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/vijini/Adapt-BPE.git.
Abstract: Clustering tabular data is a fundamental yet challenging problem due to heterogeneous feature types, diverse data-generating mechanisms, and the absence of transferable inductive biases across datasets. Prior-fitted networks (PFNs) have recently demonstrated strong generalization in supervised tabular learning by amortizing Bayesian inference under a broad synthetic prior. Extending this paradigm to clustering is nontrivial: clustering is unsupervised, admits a combinatorial and permutation-invariant output space, and requires inferring the number of clusters. We introduce TabClustPFN, a prior-fitted network for tabular data clustering that performs amortized Bayesian inference over both cluster assignments and cluster cardinality. Pretrained on synthetic datasets drawn from a flexible clustering prior, TabClustPFN clusters unseen datasets in a single forward pass, without dataset-specific retraining or hyperparameter tuning. The model naturally handles heterogeneous numerical and categorical features and adapts to a wide range of clustering structures. Experiments on synthetic data and curated real-world tabular benchmarks show that TabClustPFN outperforms classical, deep, and amortized clustering baselines, while exhibiting strong robustness in out-of-the-box exploratory settings. Code is available at https://github.com/Tianqi-Zhao/TabClustPFN.
Abstract: Open-source AI is scaling rapidly, and model hubs now host millions of artifacts. Each foundation model can spawn large numbers of fine-tunes, adapters, quantizations, merges, and forks. We take the position that compute efficiency alone is insufficient for sustainability in open-source AI: lower per-run costs can accelerate experimentation and deployment, increasing aggregate environmental footprint unless impacts are measurable and comparable across derivative lineages. However, the energy use, water consumption, and emissions of these derivative lineages are rarely measured or disclosed in a consistent, comparable manner, leaving ecosystem-level impact largely invisible. We argue that sustainable open-source AI requires coordination infrastructure that tracks impacts across model lineages, not only base models. We propose Data and Impact Accounting (DIA), a lightweight, non-restrictive transparency layer that (i) standardizes carbon and water reporting metadata, (ii) integrates low-friction measurement into common training and inference pipelines, and (iii) aggregates reports through public dashboards to summarize cumulative impacts across releases and derivatives. DIA makes derivative costs visible and supports ecosystem-level accountability while preserving openness. https://vectorinstitute.github.io/ai-impact-accounting/
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are advancing computational pathology with superior visual understanding capabilities. However, current systems often reduce diagnosis to directly output conclusions without verifiable evidence-linked reasoning, which severely limits clinical trust and hinders expert error rectification. To address these barriers, we construct PathReasoner, the first large-scale dataset of whole-slide image (WSI) reasoning. Unlike previous work reliant on unverified distillation, we develop a rigorous knowledge-guided generation pipeline. By leveraging medical knowledge graphs, we explicitly align structured pathological findings and clinical reasoning with diagnoses, generating over 20K high-quality instructional samples. Based on the database, we propose PathReasoner-R1, which synergizes trajectory-masked supervised fine-tuning with reasoning-oriented reinforcement learning to instill structured chain-of-thought capabilities. To ensure medical rigor, we engineer a knowledge-aware multi-granular reward function incorporating an Entity Reward mechanism strictly aligned with knowledge graphs. This effectively guides the model to optimize for logical consistency rather than mere outcome matching, thereby enhancing robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PathReasoner-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on both PathReasoner and public benchmarks across various image scales, equipping pathology models with transparent, clinically grounded reasoning capabilities. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/cyclexfy/PathReasoner-R1.
Abstract: Bootstrap-based Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has achieved remarkable progress in audio understanding. However, existing methods typically operate at a single level of granularity, limiting their ability to model the diverse temporal and spectral structures inherent in complex audio signals. Furthermore, bootstrapping representations from scratch is computationally expensive, often requiring extensive training to converge. In this work, we propose the Convolutional Audio Transformer (CAT), a unified framework designed to address these challenges. First, to capture hierarchical audio features, CAT incorporates a Multi-resolution Block that aggregates information across varying granularities. Second, to enhance training efficiency, we introduce a Representation Regularization objective. Drawing inspiration from generative modeling, this auxiliary task guides the student model by aligning its predictions with high-quality semantic representations from frozen, pre-trained external encoders. Experimental results demonstrate that CAT significantly outperforms baselines on audio understanding benchmarks. Notably, it achieves competitive performance on the AudioSet 20k dataset with 5 times faster convergence than existing methods. Codes and checkpoints will be released soon at https://github.com/realzhouchushu/CAT.
Abstract: Aiming at efficient and dense chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, latent reasoning methods fine-tune Large Language Models (LLMs) to substitute discrete language tokens with continuous latent tokens. These methods consume fewer tokens compared to the conventional language CoT reasoning and have the potential to plan in a dense latent space. However, current latent tokens are generally supervised based on imitating language labels. Considering that there can be multiple equivalent but diverse CoT labels for a question, passively imitating an arbitrary one may lead to inferior latent token representations and latent reasoning policies, undermining the potential planning ability and resulting in clear gaps between training and testing. In this work, we emphasize the importance of active planning over the representation space of latent tokens in achieving the optimal latent reasoning policy. So, we propose the \underline{A}c\underline{t}ive Latent \underline{P}lanning method (ATP-Latent), which models the supervision process of latent tokens as a conditional variational auto-encoder (VAE) to obtain a smoother latent space. Moreover, to facilitate the most reasonable latent reasoning policy, ATP-Latent conducts reinforcement learning (RL) with an auxiliary coherence reward, which is calculated based on the consistency between VAE-decoded contents of latent tokens, enabling a guided RL process. In experiments on LLaMA-1B, ATP-Latent demonstrates +4.1\% accuracy and -3.3\% tokens on four benchmarks compared to advanced baselines. Codes are available on https://github.com/zz1358m/ATP-Latent-master.
Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) has become a powerful, data-efficient paradigm for text classification using large language models. However, its robustness against realistic adversarial threats remains largely unexplored. We introduce ICL-Evader, a novel black-box evasion attack framework that operates under a highly practical zero-query threat model, requiring no access to model parameters, gradients, or query-based feedback during attack generation. We design three novel attacks, Fake Claim, Template, and Needle-in-a-Haystack, that exploit inherent limitations of LLMs in processing in-context prompts. Evaluated across sentiment analysis, toxicity, and illicit promotion tasks, our attacks significantly degrade classifier performance (e.g., achieving up to 95.3% attack success rate), drastically outperforming traditional NLP attacks which prove ineffective under the same constraints. To counter these vulnerabilities, we systematically investigate defense strategies and identify a joint defense recipe that effectively mitigates all attacks with minimal utility loss (<5% accuracy degradation). Finally, we translate our defensive insights into an automated tool that proactively fortifies standard ICL prompts against adversarial evasion. This work provides a comprehensive security assessment of ICL, revealing critical vulnerabilities and offering practical solutions for building more robust systems. Our source code and evaluation datasets are publicly available at: https://github.com/ChaseSecurity/ICL-Evader .
Abstract: The success of Hyper-Connections (HC) in neural networks (NN) has also highlighted issues related to its training instability and restricted scalability. The Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC) mitigate these challenges by projecting the residual connection space onto a Birkhoff polytope, however, it faces two issues: 1) its iterative Sinkhorn-Knopp (SK) algorithm does not always yield exact doubly stochastic residual matrices; 2) mHC incurs a prohibitive $\mathcal{O}(n^3C)$ parameter complexity with $n$ as the width of the residual stream and $C$ as the feature dimension. The recently proposed mHC-lite reparametrizes the residual matrix via the Birkhoff-von-Neumann theorem to guarantee double stochasticity, but also faces a factorial explosion in its parameter complexity, $\mathcal{O} \left( nC \cdot n! \right)$. To address both challenges, we propose \textbf{KromHC}, which uses the \underline{Kro}necker products of smaller doubly stochastic matrices to parametrize the residual matrix in \underline{mHC}. By enforcing manifold constraints across the factor residual matrices along each mode of the tensorized residual stream, KromHC guarantees exact double stochasticity of the residual matrices while reducing parameter complexity to $\mathcal{O}(n^2C)$. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that KromHC matches or even outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) mHC variants, while requiring significantly fewer trainable parameters. The code is available at \texttt{https://github.com/wz1119/KromHC}.
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as tool-augmented agents for multi-step decision making, yet training robust tool-using agents remains challenging. Existing methods still require manual intervention, depend on non-verifiable simulated environments, rely exclusively on either supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL), and struggle with stable long-horizon, multi-turn learning. To address these challenges, we introduce ASTRA, a fully automated end-to-end framework for training tool-augmented language model agents via scalable data synthesis and verifiable reinforcement learning. ASTRA integrates two complementary components. First, a pipeline that leverages the static topology of tool-call graphs synthesizes diverse, structurally grounded trajectories, instilling broad and transferable tool-use competence. Second, an environment synthesis framework that captures the rich, compositional topology of human semantic reasoning converts decomposed question-answer traces into independent, code-executable, and rule-verifiable environments, enabling deterministic multi-turn RL. Based on this method, we develop a unified training methodology that integrates SFT with online RL using trajectory-level rewards to balance task completion and interaction efficiency. Experiments on multiple agentic tool-use benchmarks demonstrate that ASTRA-trained models achieve state-of-the-art performance at comparable scales, approaching closed-source systems while preserving core reasoning ability. We release the full pipelines, environments, and trained models at https://github.com/LianjiaTech/astra.
Abstract: Effective clinical history taking is a foundational yet underexplored component of clinical reasoning. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise on static benchmarks, they often fall short in dynamic, multi-turn diagnostic settings that require iterative questioning and hypothesis refinement. To address this gap, we propose \method{}, a note-driven framework that trains LLMs to conduct structured history taking and diagnosis by learning from widely available medical notes. Instead of relying on scarce and sensitive dialogue data, we convert real-world medical notes into high-quality doctor-patient dialogues using a decision tree-guided generation and refinement pipeline. We then propose a three-stage fine-tuning strategy combining supervised learning, simulated data augmentation, and preference learning. Furthermore, we propose a novel single-turn reasoning paradigm that reframes history taking as a sequence of single-turn reasoning problems. This design enhances interpretability and enables local supervision, dynamic adaptation, and greater sample efficiency. Experimental results show that our method substantially improves clinical reasoning, achieving gains of +16.9 F1 and +21.0 Top-1 diagnostic accuracy over GPT-4o. Our code and dataset can be found at https://github.com/zhentingsheng/Note2Chat.
Abstract: Real-world time series exhibit complex and evolving dynamics, making accurate forecasting extremely challenging. Recent multi-modal forecasting methods leverage textual information such as news reports to improve prediction, but most rely on token-level fusion that mixes temporal patches with language tokens in a shared embedding space. However, such fusion can be ill-suited when high-quality time-text pairs are scarce and when time series exhibit substantial variation in scale and characteristics, thus complicating cross-modal alignment. In parallel, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have proven effective for both time series modeling and multi-modal learning, yet many existing MoE-based modality integration methods still depend on token-level fusion. To address this, we propose Expert Modulation, a new paradigm for multi-modal time series prediction that conditions both routing and expert computation on textual signals, enabling direct and efficient cross-modal control over expert behavior. Through comprehensive theoretical analysis and experiments, our proposed method demonstrates substantial improvements in multi-modal time series prediction. The current code is available at https://github.com/BruceZhangReve/MoME
Abstract: Hyperbolic space is quickly gaining traction as a promising geometry for hierarchical and robust representation learning. A core open challenge is the development of a mathematical formulation of hyperbolic neural networks that is both efficient and captures the key properties of hyperbolic space. The Lorentz model of hyperbolic space has been shown to enable both fast forward and backward propagation. However, we prove that, with the current formulation of Lorentz linear layers, the hyperbolic norms of the outputs scale logarithmically with the number of gradient descent steps, nullifying the key advantage of hyperbolic geometry. We propose a new Lorentz linear layer grounded in the well-known ``distance-to-hyperplane" formulation. We prove that our formulation results in the usual linear scaling of output hyperbolic norms with respect to the number of gradient descent steps. Our new formulation, together with further algorithmic efficiencies through Lorentzian activation functions and a new caching strategy results in neural networks fully abiding by hyperbolic geometry while simultaneously bridging the computation gap to Euclidean neural networks. Code available at: https://github.com/robertdvdk/hyperbolic-fully-connected.
Abstract: We introduce KAPSO, a modular framework for autonomous program synthesis and optimization. Given a natural language goal and an evaluation method, KAPSO iteratively performs ideation, code synthesis and editing, execution, evaluation, and learning to improve a runnable artifact toward measurable objectives. Rather than treating synthesis as the endpoint, KAPSO uses synthesis as an operator within a long-horizon optimization loop, where progress is defined by evaluator outcomes. KAPSO targets long-horizon failures common in coding agents, including lost experimental state, brittle debugging, and weak reuse of domain expertise, by integrating three tightly coupled components. First, a git-native experimentation engine isolates each attempt as a branch, producing reproducible artifacts and preserving provenance across iterations. Second, a knowledge system ingests heterogeneous sources, including repositories, internal playbooks, and curated external resources such as documentation, scientific papers, and web search results, and organizes them into a structured representation that supports retrieval over workflows, implementations, and environment constraints. Third, a cognitive memory layer coordinates retrieval and maintains an episodic store of reusable lessons distilled from experiment traces (run logs, diffs, and evaluator feedback), reducing repeated error modes and accelerating convergence. We evaluated KAPSO on MLE-Bench (Kaggle-style ML competitions) and ALE-Bench (AtCoder heuristic optimization), and report end-to-end performance. Code Available at: https://github.com/Leeroo-AI/kapso
Abstract: In this paper, we present the first attempt to estimate the necessity of debulking coronary artery calcifications from computed tomography (CT) images. We formulate this task as a Multiple-instance Learning (MIL) problem. The difficulty of this task lies in that physicians adjust their focus and decision criteria for device usage according to tabular data representing each patient's condition. To address this issue, we propose a hypernetwork-based adaptive aggregation transformer (HyperAdAgFormer), which adaptively modifies the feature aggregation strategy for each patient based on tabular data through a hypernetwork. The experiments using the clinical dataset demonstrated the effectiveness of HyperAdAgFormer. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Shiku-Kaito/HyperAdAgFormer.
Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) show significant potential in hardware engineering, current benchmarks suffer from saturation and limited task diversity, failing to reflect LLMs' performance in real industrial workflows. To address this gap, we propose a comprehensive benchmark for AI-aided chip design that rigorously evaluates LLMs across three critical tasks: Verilog generation, debugging, and reference model generation. Our benchmark features 44 realistic modules with complex hierarchical structures, 89 systematic debugging cases, and 132 reference model samples across Python, SystemC, and CXXRTL. Evaluation results reveal substantial performance gaps, with state-of-the-art Claude-4.5-opus achieving only 30.74\% on Verilog generation and 13.33\% on Python reference model generation, demonstrating significant challenges compared to existing saturated benchmarks where SOTA models achieve over 95\% pass rates. Additionally, to help enhance LLM reference model generation, we provide an automated toolbox for high-quality training data generation, facilitating future research in this underexplored domain. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhongkaiyu/ChipBench.git.
Abstract: The efficiency of long-video inference remains a critical bottleneck, mainly due to the dense computation in the prefill stage of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). Existing methods either compress visual embeddings or apply sparse attention on a single GPU, yielding limited acceleration or degraded performance and restricting LMMs from handling longer, more complex videos. To overcome these issues, we propose Spava, a sequence-parallel framework with optimized attention that accelerates long-video inference across multiple GPUs. By distributing approximate attention, Spava reduces computation and increases parallelism, enabling efficient processing of more visual embeddings without compression and thereby improving task performance. System-level optimizations, such as load balancing and fused forward passes, further unleash the potential of Spava, delivering speedups of 12.72x, 1.70x, and 1.18x over FlashAttn, ZigZagRing, and APB, without notable performance loss. Code available at https://github.com/thunlp/APB
Abstract: In this paper, we address a fundamental gap between pre-training and fine-tuning of deep neural networks: while pre-training has shifted from unimodal to multimodal learning with enhanced visual understanding, fine-tuning predominantly remains unimodal, limiting the benefits of rich pre-trained representations. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel approach that transforms unimodal datasets into multimodal ones using Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to generate synthetic image captions for fine-tuning models with a multimodal objective. Our method employs carefully designed prompts incorporating class labels and domain context to produce high-quality captions tailored for classification tasks. Furthermore, we introduce a supervised contrastive loss function that explicitly encourages clustering of same-class representations during fine-tuning, along with a new inference technique that leverages class-averaged text embeddings from multiple synthetic captions per image. Extensive experiments across 13 image classification benchmarks demonstrate that our approach outperforms baseline methods, with particularly significant improvements in few-shot learning scenarios. Our work establishes a new paradigm for dataset enhancement that effectively bridges the gap between multimodal pre-training and fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/s-enmt/MMFT.
Abstract: Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning as an agent relies on trial and error to learn an optimal policy. However, when rewards are sparse, naive exploration strategies, like noise injection, are often insufficient. Intrinsic rewards can also provide principled guidance for exploration by, for example, combining them with extrinsic rewards to optimize a policy or using them to train subpolicies for hierarchical learning. However, the former approach suffers from unstable credit assignment, while the latter exhibits sample inefficiency and sub-optimality. We propose a policy optimization framework that leverages multiple intrinsic rewards to directly optimize a policy for an extrinsic reward without pretraining subpolicies. Our algorithm -- intrinsic reward policy optimization (IRPO) -- achieves this by using a surrogate policy gradient that provides a more informative learning signal than the true gradient in sparse-reward environments. We demonstrate that IRPO improves performance and sample efficiency relative to baselines in discrete and continuous environments, and formally analyze the optimization problem solved by IRPO. Our code is available at https://github.com/Mgineer117/IRPO.
Abstract: Objective evaluation of synthetic speech quality remains a critical challenge. Human listening tests are the gold standard, but costly and impractical at scale. Fréchet Distance has emerged as a promising alternative, yet its reliability depends heavily on the choice of embeddings and experimental settings. In this work, we comprehensively evaluate Fréchet Speech Distance (FSD) and its variant Speech Maximum Mean Discrepancy (SMMD) under varied embeddings and conditions. We further incorporate human listening evaluations alongside TTS intelligibility and synthetic-trained ASR WER to validate the perceptual relevance of these metrics. Our findings show that WavLM Base+ features yield the most stable alignment with human ratings. While FSD and SMMD cannot fully replace subjective evaluation, we show that they can serve as complementary, cost-efficient, and reproducible measures, particularly useful when large-scale or direct listening assessments are infeasible. Code is available at https://github.com/kaen2891/FrechetSpeechDistance.
Abstract: In this report, we introduce Qwen3-ASR family, which includes two powerful all-in-one speech recognition models and a novel non-autoregressive speech forced alignment model. Qwen3-ASR-1.7B and Qwen3-ASR-0.6B are ASR models that support language identification and ASR for 52 languages and dialects. Both of them leverage large-scale speech training data and the strong audio understanding ability of their foundation model Qwen3-Omni. We conduct comprehensive internal evaluation besides the open-sourced benchmarks as ASR models might differ little on open-sourced benchmark scores but exhibit significant quality differences in real-world scenarios. The experiments reveal that the 1.7B version achieves SOTA performance among open-sourced ASR models and is competitive with the strongest proprietary APIs while the 0.6B version offers the best accuracy-efficiency trade-off. Qwen3-ASR-0.6B can achieve an average TTFT as low as 92ms and transcribe 2000 seconds speech in 1 second at a concurrency of 128. Qwen3-ForcedAligner-0.6B is an LLM based NAR timestamp predictor that is able to align text-speech pairs in 11 languages. Timestamp accuracy experiments show that the proposed model outperforms the three strongest force alignment models and takes more advantages in efficiency and versatility. To further accelerate the community research of ASR and audio understanding, we release these models under the Apache 2.0 license.
Abstract: This brief proposes \emph{White-Op}, an interpretable operational amplifier (op-amp) parameter design framework based on the human-mimicking reasoning of large-language-model agents. We formalize the implicit human reasoning mechanism into explicit steps of \emph{\textbf{introducing hypothetical constraints}}, and develop an iterative, human-like \emph{\textbf{hypothesis-verification-decision}} workflow. Specifically, the agent is guided to introduce hypothetical constraints to derive and properly regulate positions of symbolically tractable poles and zeros, thus formulating a closed-form mathematical optimization problem, which is then solved programmatically and verified via simulation. Theory-simulation result analysis guides the decision-making for refinement. Experiments on 9 op-amp topologies show that, unlike the uninterpretable black-box baseline which finally fails in 5 topologies, White-Op achieves reliable, interpretable behavioral-level designs with only 8.52\% theoretical prediction error and the design functionality retains after transistor-level mapping for all topologies. White-Op is open-sourced at \textcolor{blue}{https://github.com/zhchenfdu/whiteop}.
Abstract: Urban Air Mobility (UAM) has emerged as a transformative solution to alleviate urban congestion by utilizing low-altitude airspace, thereby reducing pressure on ground transportation networks. To enable truly efficient and seamless door-to-door travel experiences, UAM requires close integration with existing ground transportation infrastructure. However, current research on optimal integrated routing strategies for passengers in air-ground mobility systems remains limited, with a lack of systematic exploration.To address this gap, we first propose a unified optimization model that integrates strategy selection for both air and ground transportation. This model captures the dynamic characteristics of multimodal transport networks and incorporates real-time traffic conditions alongside passenger decision-making behavior. Building on this model, we propose a Unified Air-Ground Mobility Coordination (UAGMC) framework, which leverages deep reinforcement learning (RL) and Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication to optimize vertiport selection and dynamically plan air taxi routes. Experimental results demonstrate that UAGMC achieves a 34\% reduction in average travel time compared to conventional proportional allocation methods, enhancing overall travel efficiency and providing novel insights into the integration and optimization of multimodal transportation systems. This work lays a solid foundation for advancing intelligent urban mobility solutions through the coordination of air and ground transportation modes. The related code can be found at https://github.com/Traffic-Alpha/UAGMC.
Abstract: Recently, the problem of music plagiarism has emerged as an even more pressing social issue. As music information retrieval research advances, there is a growing effort to address issues related to music plagiarism. However, many studies, including our previous work, have conducted research without clearly defining what the music plagiarism detection task actually involves. This lack of a clear definition has slowed research progress and made it hard to apply results to real-world scenarios. To fix this situation, we defined how Music Plagiarism Detection is different from other MIR tasks and explained what problems need to be solved. We introduce the Similar Music Pair dataset to support this newly defined task. In addition, we propose a method based on segment transcription as one way to solve the task. Our demo and dataset are available at https://github.com/Mippia/ICASSP2026-MPD.
Abstract: Advancing beyond single monolithic language models (LMs), recent research increasingly recognizes the importance of model collaboration, where multiple LMs collaborate, compose, and complement each other. Existing research on this topic has mostly been disparate and disconnected, from different research communities, and lacks rigorous comparison. To consolidate existing research and establish model collaboration as a school of thought, we present MoCo: a one-stop Python library of executing, benchmarking, and comparing model collaboration algorithms at scale. MoCo features 26 model collaboration methods, spanning diverse levels of cross-model information exchange such as routing, text, logit, and model parameters. MoCo integrates 25 evaluation datasets spanning reasoning, QA, code, safety, and more, while users could flexibly bring their own data. Extensive experiments with MoCo demonstrate that most collaboration strategies outperform models without collaboration in 61.0% of (model, data) settings on average, with the most effective methods outperforming by up to 25.8%. We further analyze the scaling of model collaboration strategies, the training/inference efficiency of diverse methods, highlight that the collaborative system solves problems where single LMs struggle, and discuss future work in model collaboration, all made possible by MoCo. We envision MoCo as a valuable toolkit to facilitate and turbocharge the quest for an open, modular, decentralized, and collaborative AI future.
Abstract: AutoRegressive Visual Generation (ARVG) models retain an architecture compatible with language models, while achieving performance comparable to diffusion-based models. Quantization is commonly employed in neural networks to reduce model size and computational latency. However, applying quantization to ARVG remains largely underexplored, and existing quantization methods fail to generalize effectively to ARVG models. In this paper, we explore this issue and identify three key challenges: (1) severe outliers at channel-wise level, (2) highly dynamic activations at token-wise level, and (3) mismatched distribution information at sample-wise level. To these ends, we propose PTQ4ARVG, a training-free post-training quantization (PTQ) framework consisting of: (1) Gain-Projected Scaling (GPS) mitigates the channel-wise outliers, which expands the quantization loss via a Taylor series to quantify the gain of scaling for activation-weight quantization, and derives the optimal scaling factor through differentiation.(2) Static Token-Wise Quantization (STWQ) leverages the inherent properties of ARVG, fixed token length and position-invariant distribution across samples, to address token-wise variance without incurring dynamic calibration overhead.(3) Distribution-Guided Calibration (DGC) selects samples that contribute most to distributional entropy, eliminating the sample-wise distribution mismatch. Extensive experiments show that PTQ4ARVG can effectively quantize the ARVG family models to 8-bit and 6-bit while maintaining competitive performance. Code is available at http://github.com/BienLuky/PTQ4ARVG .
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) suffer from cross-modal hallucinations, where one modality inappropriately influences generation about another, leading to fabricated output. This exposes a more fundamental deficiency in modality-interaction control. To address this, we propose Modality-Adaptive Decoding (MAD), a training-free method that adaptively weights modality-specific decoding branches based on task requirements. MAD leverages the model's inherent ability to self-assess modality relevance by querying which modalities are needed for each task. The extracted modality probabilities are then used to adaptively weight contrastive decoding branches, enabling the model to focus on relevant information while suppressing cross-modal interference. Extensive experiments on CMM and AVHBench demonstrate that MAD significantly reduces cross-modal hallucinations across multiple audio-visual language models (7.8\% and 2.0\% improvements for VideoLLaMA2-AV, 8.7\% and 4.7\% improvements for Qwen2.5-Omni). Our approach demonstrates that explicit modality awareness through self-assessment is crucial for robust multimodal reasoning, offering a principled extension to existing contrastive decoding methods. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/top-yun/MAD}{https://github.com/top-yun/MAD}
Abstract: This work studies the challenging problem of acquiring high-quality underwater images via 4-D light field (LF) imaging. To this end, we propose GeoDiff-LF, a novel diffusion-based framework built upon SD-Turbo to enhance underwater 4-D LF imaging by leveraging its spatial-angular structure. GeoDiff-LF consists of three key adaptations: (1) a modified U-Net architecture with convolutional and attention adapters to model geometric cues, (2) a geometry-guided loss function using tensor decomposition and progressive weighting to regularize global structure, and (3) an optimized sampling strategy with noise prediction to improve efficiency. By integrating diffusion priors and LF geometry, GeoDiff-LF effectively mitigates color distortion in underwater scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing methods across both visual fidelity and quantitative performance, advancing the state-of-the-art in enhancing underwater imaging. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/linlos1234/GeoDiff-LF.
Abstract: High-resolution remote sensing imagery is characterized by densely distributed land-cover objects and complex boundaries, which places higher demands on both geometric localization and semantic prediction. Existing training-free open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) methods typically fuse CLIP and vision foundation models (VFMs) using "one-way injection" and "shallow post-processing" strategies, making it difficult to satisfy these requirements. To address this issue, we propose a spatial-regularization-aware dual-branch collaborative inference framework for training-free OVSS, termed SDCI. First, during feature encoding, SDCI introduces a cross-model attention fusion (CAF) module, which guides collaborative inference by injecting self-attention maps into each other. Second, we propose a bidirectional cross-graph diffusion refinement (BCDR) module that enhances the reliability of dual-branch segmentation scores through iterative random-walk diffusion. Finally, we incorporate low-level superpixel structures and develop a convex-optimization-based superpixel collaborative prediction (CSCP) mechanism to further refine object boundaries. Experiments on multiple remote sensing semantic segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves better performance than existing approaches. Moreover, ablation studies further confirm that traditional object-based remote sensing image analysis methods leveraging superpixel structures remain effective within deep learning frameworks. Code: https://github.com/yu-ni1989/SDCI.
Abstract: Computer-Using Agents (CUAs) aim to autonomously operate computer systems to complete real-world tasks. However, existing agentic systems remain difficult to scale and lag behind human performance. A key limitation is the absence of reusable and structured skill abstractions that capture how humans interact with graphical user interfaces and how to leverage these skills. We introduce CUA-Skill, a computer-using agentic skill base that encodes human computer-use knowledge as skills coupled with parameterized execution and composition graphs. CUA-Skill is a large-scale library of carefully engineered skills spanning common Windows applications, serving as a practical infrastructure and tool substrate for scalable, reliable agent development. Built upon this skill base, we construct CUA-Skill Agent, an end-to-end computer-using agent that supports dynamic skill retrieval, argument instantiation, and memory-aware failure recovery. Our results demonstrate that CUA-Skill substantially improves execution success rates and robustness on challenging end-to-end agent benchmarks, establishing a strong foundation for future computer-using agent development. On WindowsAgentArena, CUA-Skill Agent achieves state-of-the-art 57.5% (best of three) successful rate while being significantly more efficient than prior and concurrent approaches. The project page is available at https://microsoft.github.io/cua_skill/.
Abstract: Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are typically evaluated under fixed training conditions. We investigate whether training-time safety guarantees transfer to deployment under distribution shift, using diabetes management as a safety-critical testbed. We benchmark safe RL algorithms on a unified clinical simulator and reveal a safety generalization gap: policies satisfying constraints during training frequently violate safety requirements on unseen patients. We demonstrate that test-time shielding, which filters unsafe actions using learned dynamics models, effectively restores safety across algorithms and patient populations. Across eight safe RL algorithms, three diabetes types, and three age groups, shielding achieves Time-in-Range gains of 13--14\% for strong baselines such as PPO-Lag and CPO while reducing clinical risk index and glucose variability. Our simulator and benchmark provide a platform for studying safety under distribution shift in safety-critical control domains. Code is available at https://github.com/safe-autonomy-lab/GlucoSim and https://github.com/safe-autonomy-lab/GlucoAlg.
Abstract: Planning effective interventions in biological systems requires treatment-effect models that adapt to unseen biological contexts by identifying their specific underlying mechanisms. Yet single-cell perturbation datasets span only a handful of biological contexts, and existing methods cannot leverage new interventional evidence at inference time to adapt beyond their training data. To meta-learn a perturbation effect estimator, we present MapPFN, a prior-data fitted network (PFN) pretrained on synthetic data generated from a prior over causal perturbations. Given a set of experiments, MapPFN uses in-context learning to predict post-perturbation distributions, without gradient-based optimization. Despite being pretrained on in silico gene knockouts alone, MapPFN identifies differentially expressed genes, matching the performance of models trained on real single-cell data. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/marvinsxtr/MapPFN.
Abstract: As large language models improve, so do their offensive applications: frontier agents now generate working exploits for under $50 in compute (Heelan, 2026). Defensive incident response (IR) agents must keep pace, but existing benchmarks conflate action execution with correct execution, hiding calibration failures when agents process adversarial evidence. We introduce OpenSec, a dual-control reinforcement learning environment that evaluates IR agents under realistic prompt injection scenarios. Unlike static capability benchmarks, OpenSec scores world-state-changing containment actions under adversarial evidence via execution-based metrics: time-to-first-containment (TTFC), blast radius (false positives per episode), and injection violation rates. Evaluating four frontier models on 40 standard-tier episodes, we find consistent over-triggering in this setting: GPT-5.2, Gemini 3, and DeepSeek execute containment in 100% of episodes with 90-97% false positive rates. Claude Sonnet 4.5 shows partial calibration (85% containment, 72% FP), demonstrating that OpenSec surfaces a calibration failure mode hidden by aggregate success metrics. Code available at https://github.com/jbarnes850/opensec-env.
Abstract: Current foundation model for photoplethysmography (PPG) signals is challenged by the intrinsic redundancy and noise of the signal. Standard masked modeling often yields trivial solutions while contrastive methods lack morphological precision. To address these limitations, we propose a Statistical-prior Informed Generative Masking Architecture (SIGMA-PPG), a generative foundation model featuring a Prior-Guided Adversarial Masking mechanism, where a reinforcement learning-driven teacher leverages statistical priors to create challenging learning paths that prevent overfitting to noise. We also incorporate a semantic consistency constraint via vector quantization to ensure that physiologically identical waveforms (even those altered by recording artifacts or minor perturbations) map to shared indices. This enhances codebook semantic density and eliminates redundant feature structures. Pre-trained on over 120,000 hours of data, SIGMA-PPG achieves superior average performance compared to five state-of-the-art baselines across 12 diverse downstream tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/ZonghengGuo/SigmaPPG.
Abstract: Multi-turn jailbreak attacks have emerged as a critical threat to Large Language Models (LLMs), bypassing safety mechanisms by progressively constructing adversarial contexts from scratch and incrementally refining prompts. However, existing methods suffer from the inefficiency of incremental context construction that requires step-by-step LLM interaction, and often stagnate in suboptimal regions due to surface-level optimization. In this paper, we characterize the Intent-Context Coupling phenomenon, revealing that LLM safety constraints are significantly relaxed when a malicious intent is coupled with a semantically congruent context pattern. Driven by this insight, we propose ICON, an automated multi-turn jailbreak framework that efficiently constructs an authoritative-style context via prior-guided semantic routing. Specifically, ICON first routes the malicious intent to a congruent context pattern (e.g., Scientific Research) and instantiates it into an attack prompt sequence. This sequence progressively builds the authoritative-style context and ultimately elicits prohibited content. In addition, ICON incorporates a Hierarchical Optimization Strategy that combines local prompt refinement with global context switching, preventing the attack from stagnating in ineffective contexts. Experimental results across eight SOTA LLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of ICON, achieving a state-of-the-art average Attack Success Rate (ASR) of 97.1\%. Code is available at https://github.com/xwlin-roy/ICON.
Abstract: With LLMs increasingly deployed in corporate data management, it is crucial to ensure that these models do not leak sensitive information. In the context of corporate data management, the concept of sensitivity awareness has been introduced, enabling LLMs to adhere to predefined access rights rules. However, it remains unclear how sensitivity awareness relates to established notions of privacy, such as differential privacy (DP), thereby making it difficult to deploy meaningfully in real-world applications. In this work, we formalize the notion of sensitivity awareness and theoretically establish its connection to DP. Additionally, we develop a supervised fine-tuning recipe to make existing, four-bit quantized LLMs more sensitivity-aware. With a performance boost of up to 21.7%, the finetuned LLMs not only substantially improve over their baseline but also outperform other full-precision open-source and commercial models of similar size in achieving sensitivity awareness, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed approach. At the same time, our method also largely preserves the models' performance on other tasks, such as general instruction-following, mathematical, and common-sense reasoning.
Abstract: Identifying metabolic sites where cytochrome P450 enzymes metabolize small-molecule drugs is essential for drug discovery. Although existing computational approaches have been proposed for site-of-metabolism prediction, they typically ignore cytochrome P450 isoform identity or model isoforms independently, thereby failing to fully capture inherent cross-isoform metabolic patterns. In addition, prior evaluations often rely on top-k metrics, where false positive atoms may be included among the top predictions, underscoring the need for complementary metrics that more directly assess binary atom-level discrimination under severe class imbalance. We propose ATTNSOM, an atom-level site-of-metabolism prediction framework that integrates intrinsic molecular reactivity with cross-isoform relationships. The model combines a shared graph encoder, molecule-conditioned atom representations, and a cross-attention mechanism to capture correlated metabolic patterns across cytochrome P450 isoforms. The model is evaluated on two benchmark datasets annotated with site-of-metabolism labels at atom resolution. Across these benchmarks, the model achieves consistently strong top-k performance across multiple cytochrome P450 isoforms. Relative to ablated variants, the model yields higher Matthews correlation coefficient, indicating improved discrimination of true metabolic sites. These results support the importance of explicitly modeling cross-isoform relationships for site-of-metabolism prediction. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/dmis-lab/ATTNSOM.
Abstract: Morphing techniques generate artificial biometric samples that combine features from multiple individuals, allowing each contributor to be verified against a single enrolled template. While extensively studied in face recognition, this vulnerability remains largely unexplored in voice biometrics. Prior work on voice morphing is computationally expensive, non-scalable, and limited to acoustically similar identity pairs, constraining practical deployment. Moreover, existing sound-morphing methods target audio textures, music, or environmental sounds and are not transferable to voice identity manipulation. We propose VoxMorph, a zero-shot framework that produces high-fidelity voice morphs from as little as five seconds of audio per subject without model retraining. Our method disentangles vocal traits into prosody and timbre embeddings, enabling fine-grained interpolation of speaking style and identity. These embeddings are fused via Spherical Linear Interpolation (Slerp) and synthesized using an autoregressive language model coupled with a Conditional Flow Matching network. VoxMorph achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering a 2.6x gain in audio quality, a 73% reduction in intelligibility errors, and a 67.8% morphing attack success rate on automated speaker verification systems under strict security thresholds. This work establishes a practical and scalable paradigm for voice morphing with significant implications for biometric security. The code and dataset are available on our project page: https://vcbsl.github.io/VoxMorph/
Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are inherently suited for continuous learning due to their event-driven temporal dynamics; however, their application to Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) has been hindered by catastrophic forgetting and the temporal misalignment of spike patterns. In this work, we introduce Spiking Temporal Alignment with Experience Replay (STAER), a novel framework that explicitly preserves temporal structure to bridge the performance gap between SNNs and ANNs. Our approach integrates a differentiable Soft-DTW alignment loss to maintain spike timing fidelity and employs a temporal expansion and contraction mechanism on output logits to enforce robust representation learning. Implemented on a deep ResNet19 spiking backbone, STAER achieves state-of-the-art performance on Sequential-MNIST and Sequential-CIFAR10. Empirical results demonstrate that our method matches or outperforms strong ANN baselines (ER, DER++) while preserving biologically plausible dynamics. Ablation studies further confirm that explicit temporal alignment is critical for representational stability, positioning STAER as a scalable solution for spike-native lifelong learning. Code is available at https://github.com/matteogianferrari/staer.
Abstract: Prompt tuning has achieved remarkable progress in vision-language models (VLMs) and is recently being adopted for audio-language models (ALMs). However, its generalization ability in ALMs remains largely underexplored. We observe that conventional prompt tuning for ALMs also suffers from the Base-New Tradeoff, and we identify that this issue stems from the disrupted semantic structure of the embedding space. To address this issue, we propose Semantically Expanded Prompt Tuning (SEPT)-a plug-and-play framework that explicitly regularizes the prompt embedding space by incorporating semantic neighbors generated by large language models. SEPT introduces a novel semantic expansion loss with margin constraints that promote intra-class compactness and inter-class separability, thereby enhancing the semantic structure of the prompt embedding space. For comprehensive evaluation, we establish the first benchmark setup for prompt generalization in ALMs, covering both base-to-new generalization and cross-dataset transferability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SEPT consistently improves generalization performance across multiple prompt tuning baselines, while maintaining computational cost during inference. Codes are available in https://github.com/jhyukjang/SEPT.
Abstract: Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting have advanced novel view synthesis, yet still rely on dense inputs and often degrade at extrapolated views. Recent approaches leverage generative models, such as diffusion models, to provide additional supervision, but face a trade-off between generalization and fidelity: fine-tuning diffusion models for artifact removal improves fidelity but risks overfitting, while fine-tuning-free methods preserve generalization but often yield lower fidelity. We introduce FreeFix, a fine-tuning-free approach that pushes the boundary of this trade-off by enhancing extrapolated rendering with pretrained image diffusion models. We present an interleaved 2D-3D refinement strategy, showing that image diffusion models can be leveraged for consistent refinement without relying on costly video diffusion models. Furthermore, we take a closer look at the guidance signal for 2D refinement and propose a per-pixel confidence mask to identify uncertain regions for targeted improvement. Experiments across multiple datasets show that FreeFix improves multi-frame consistency and achieves performance comparable to or surpassing fine-tuning-based methods, while retaining strong generalization ability.
Abstract: Traditional machine learning systems are typically designed for static data distributions, which suffer from catastrophic forgetting when learning from evolving data streams. Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) addresses this challenge by enabling learning systems to continuously learn new classes while preserving prior knowledge. With the rise of pre-trained models (PTMs) such as CLIP, leveraging their strong generalization and semantic alignment capabilities has become a promising direction in CIL. However, existing CLIP-based CIL methods are often scattered across disparate codebases, rely on inconsistent configurations, hindering fair comparisons, reproducibility, and practical adoption. Therefore, we propose C3Box (CLIP-based Class-inCremental learning toolBOX), a modular and comprehensive Python toolbox. C3Box integrates representative traditional CIL methods, ViT-based CIL methods, and state-of-the-art CLIP-based CIL methods into a unified CLIP-based framework. By inheriting the streamlined design of PyCIL, C3Box provides a JSON-based configuration and standardized execution pipeline. This design enables reproducible experimentation with low engineering overhead and makes C3Box a reliable benchmark platform for continual learning research. Designed to be user-friendly, C3Box relies only on widely used open-source libraries and supports major operating systems. The code is available at https://github.com/LAMDA-CL/C3Box.
Abstract: Despite growing efforts to mitigate unfairness in recommender systems, existing fairness-aware methods typically fix the fairness requirement at training time and provide limited post-training flexibility. However, in real-world scenarios, diverse stakeholders may demand differing fairness requirements over time, so retraining for different fairness requirements becomes prohibitive. To address this limitation, we propose Cofair, a single-train framework that enables post-training fairness control in recommendation. Specifically, Cofair introduces a shared representation layer with fairness-conditioned adapter modules to produce user embeddings specialized for varied fairness levels, along with a user-level regularization term that guarantees user-wise monotonic fairness improvements across these levels. We theoretically establish that the adversarial objective of Cofair upper bounds demographic parity and the regularization term enforces progressive fairness at user level. Comprehensive experiments on multiple datasets and backbone models demonstrate that our framework provides dynamic fairness at different levels, delivering comparable or better fairness-accuracy curves than state-of-the-art baselines, without the need to retrain for each new fairness requirement. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/weixinchen98/Cofair.
Abstract: This paper introduces a novel Deep Researcher architecture designed to generate detailed research reports on complex PhD level topics by addressing the inherent limitations of the Parallel Scaling paradigm. Our system utilizes two key innovations: Sequential Research Plan Refinement via Reflection and a Candidates Crossover algorithm. The sequential refinement process is demonstrated as an efficient method that allows the agent to maintain a centralized Global Research Context, enabling it to look back at current progress, reason about the research plan, and intelligently make changes at runtime. This dynamic adaptation contrasts with parallel approaches, which often suffer from siloed knowledge. The Candidates Crossover algorithm further enhances search efficiency by deploying multiple LLM candidates with varied parameters to explore a larger search space, with their findings synthesized to curate a comprehensive final research response. The process concludes with One Shot Report Generation, ensuring the final document is informed by a unified narrative and high fact density. Powered by the Gemini 2.5 Pro model, our Deep Researcher was evaluated on the DeepResearch Bench, a globally recognized benchmark of 100 doctoral level research tasks. Our architecture achieved an overall score of 46.21, demonstrating superior performance by surpassing leading deep research agents such as Claude Researcher, Nvidia AIQ Research Assistant, Perplexity Research, Kimi Researcher and Grok Deeper Search present on the DeepResearch Bench actively running leaderboard. This performance marginally exceeds our previous work, Static DRA, and reinforces the finding that sequential scaling consistently outperforms the parallel self consistency paradigm.
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at code generation but struggle with complex problems. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates this issue by integrating external knowledge, yet retrieval models often miss relevant context, and generation models hallucinate with irrelevant data. We propose Programming Knowledge Graph (PKG) for semantic representation and fine-grained retrieval of code and text. Our approach enhances retrieval precision through tree pruning and mitigates hallucinations via a re-ranking mechanism that integrates non-RAG solutions. Structuring external data into finer-grained nodes improves retrieval granularity. Evaluations on HumanEval and MBPP show up to 20% pass@1 accuracy gains and a 34% improvement over baselines on MBPP. Our findings demonstrate that our proposed PKG approach along with re-ranker effectively address complex problems while maintaining minimal negative impact on solutions that are already correct without RAG. The replication package is published at https://github.com/iamshahd/ProgrammingKnowledgeGraph
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) continue to scale, deployment is increasingly bottlenecked by the memory wall, motivating a shift toward extremely low-bit quantization. However, most quantization-aware training (QAT) methods apply hard rounding and the straight-through estimator (STE) from the beginning of the training, which prematurely discretizes the optimization landscape and induces persistent gradient mismatch between latent weights and quantized weights, hindering effective optimization of quantized models. To address this, we propose Hestia, a Hessian-guided differentiable QAT framework for extremely low-bit LLMs, which replaces the rigid step function with a temperature-controlled softmax relaxation to maintain gradient flow early in training while progressively hardening quantization. Furthermore, Hestia leverages a tensor-wise Hessian trace metric as a lightweight curvature signal to drive fine-grained temperature annealing, enabling sensitivity-aware discretization across the model. Evaluations on Llama-3.2 show that Hestia consistently outperforms existing ternary QAT baselines, yielding average zero-shot improvements of 5.39% and 4.34% for the 1B and 3B models. These results indicate that Hessian-guided relaxation effectively recovers representational capacity, establishing a more robust training path for 1.58-bit LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/hestia2026/Hestia.
Abstract: Real-time robotic control demands fast action generation. However, existing generative policies based on diffusion and flow matching require multi-step sampling, fundamentally limiting deployment in time-critical scenarios. We propose Dispersive MeanFlow Policy Optimization (DMPO), a unified framework that enables true one-step generation through three key components: MeanFlow for mathematically-derived single-step inference without knowledge distillation, dispersive regularization to prevent representation collapse, and reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning to surpass expert demonstrations. Experiments across RoboMimic manipulation and OpenAI Gym locomotion benchmarks demonstrate competitive or superior performance compared to multi-step baselines. With our lightweight model architecture and the three key algorithmic components working in synergy, DMPO exceeds real-time control requirements (>120Hz) with 5-20x inference speedup, reaching hundreds of Hertz on high-performance GPUs. Physical deployment on a Franka-Emika-Panda robot validates real-world applicability.
Abstract: Prompt learning (PL) has emerged as an effective strategy to adapt vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, for downstream tasks under limited supervision. While PL has demonstrated strong generalization on natural image datasets, its transferability to remote sensing (RS) imagery remains underexplored. RS data present unique challenges, including multi-label scenes, high intra-class variability, and diverse spatial resolutions, that hinder the direct applicability of existing PL methods. In particular, current prompt-based approaches often struggle to identify dominant semantic cues and fail to generalize to novel classes in RS scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose BiMoRS, a lightweight bi-modal prompt learning framework tailored for RS tasks. BiMoRS employs a frozen image captioning model (e.g., BLIP-2) to extract textual semantic summaries from RS images. These captions are tokenized using a BERT tokenizer and fused with high-level visual features from the CLIP encoder. A lightweight cross-attention module then conditions a learnable query prompt on the fused textual-visual representation, yielding contextualized prompts without altering the CLIP backbone. We evaluate BiMoRS on four RS datasets across three domain generalization (DG) tasks and observe consistent performance gains, outperforming strong baselines by up to 2% on average. Codes are available at https://github.com/ipankhi/BiMoRS.
Abstract: Skill assessment in procedural videos is crucial for the objective evaluation of human performance in settings such as manufacturing and procedural daily tasks. Current research on skill assessment has predominantly focused on sports and lacks large-scale datasets for complex procedural activities. Existing studies typically involve only a limited number of actions, focus on either pairwise assessments (e.g., A is better than B) or on binary labels (e.g., good execution vs needs improvement). In response to these shortcomings, we introduce ProSkill, the first benchmark dataset for action-level skill assessment in procedural tasks. ProSkill provides absolute skill assessment annotations, along with pairwise ones. This is enabled by a novel and scalable annotation protocol that allows for the creation of an absolute skill assessment ranking starting from pairwise assessments. This protocol leverages a Swiss Tournament scheme for efficient pairwise comparisons, which are then aggregated into consistent, continuous global scores using an ELO-based rating system. We use our dataset to benchmark the main state-of-the-art skill assessment algorithms, including both ranking-based and pairwise paradigms. The suboptimal results achieved by the current state-of-the-art highlight the challenges and thus the value of ProSkill in the context of skill assessment for procedural videos. All data and code are available at https://fpv-iplab.github.io/ProSkill/
Abstract: Long-horizon, repetitive workflows are common in professional settings, such as processing expense reports from receipts and entering student grades from exam papers. These tasks are often tedious for humans since they can extend to extreme lengths proportional to the size of the data to process. However, they are ideal for Computer-Use Agents (CUAs) due to their structured, recurring sub-workflows with logic that can be systematically learned. Identifying the absence of an evaluation benchmark as a primary bottleneck, we establish OS-Marathon, comprising 242 long-horizon, repetitive tasks across 2 domains to evaluate state-of-the-art (SOTA) agents. We then introduce a cost-effective method to construct a condensed demonstration using only few-shot examples to teach agents the underlying workflow logic, enabling them to execute similar workflows effectively on larger, unseen data collections. Extensive experiments demonstrate both the inherent challenges of these tasks and the effectiveness of our proposed method. Project website: https://os-marathon.github.io/.
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in code generation by leveraging retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods. However, the computational costs associated with LLM inference, particularly in terms of latency and energy consumption, have received limited attention in the security context. This paper introduces DrainCode, the first adversarial attack targeting the computational efficiency of RAG-based code generation systems. By strategically poisoning retrieval contexts through a mutation-based approach, DrainCode forces LLMs to produce significantly longer outputs, thereby increasing GPU latency and energy consumption. We evaluate the effectiveness of DrainCode across multiple models. Our experiments show that DrainCode achieves up to an 85% increase in latency, a 49% increase in energy consumption, and more than a 3x increase in output length compared to the baseline. Furthermore, we demonstrate the generalizability of the attack across different prompting strategies and its effectiveness compared to different defenses. The results highlight DrainCode as a potential method for increasing the computational overhead of LLMs, making it useful for evaluating LLM security in resource-constrained environments. We provide code and data at https://github.com/DeepSoftwareAnalytics/DrainCode.
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) offers a robust mechanism for enhancing mathematical reasoning in large models. However, we identify a systematic lack of emphasis on more challenging questions in existing methods from both algorithmic and data perspectives, despite their importance for refining underdeveloped capabilities. Algorithmically, widely used Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) suffers from an implicit imbalance where the magnitude of policy updates is lower for harder questions. Data-wise, augmentation approaches primarily rephrase questions to enhance diversity without systematically increasing intrinsic difficulty. To address these issues, we propose a two-dual MathForge framework to improve mathematical reasoning by targeting harder questions from both perspectives, which comprises a Difficulty-Aware Group Policy Optimization (DGPO) algorithm and a Multi-Aspect Question Reformulation (MQR) strategy. Specifically, DGPO first rectifies the implicit imbalance in GRPO via difficulty-balanced group advantage estimation, and further prioritizes harder questions by difficulty-aware question-level weighting. Meanwhile, MQR reformulates questions across multiple aspects to increase difficulty while maintaining the original gold answer. Overall, MathForge forms a synergistic loop: MQR expands the data frontier, and DGPO effectively learns from the augmented data. Extensive experiments show that MathForge significantly outperforms existing methods on various mathematical reasoning tasks. The code and augmented data are all available at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/MathForge.
Abstract: This paper introduces a methodological framework for empirically testing AI alignment strategies through structured multi-model dialogue. Drawing on Peace Studies traditions - particularly interest-based negotiation, conflict transformation, and commons governance - we operationalize Viral Collaborative Wisdom (VCW), an approach that reframes alignment from a control problem to a relationship problem developed through dialogical reasoning. Our experimental design assigns four distinct roles (Proposer, Responder, Monitor, Translator) to different AI systems across six conditions, testing whether current large language models can engage substantively with complex alignment frameworks. Using Claude, Gemini, and GPT-4o, we conducted 72 dialogue turns totaling 576,822 characters of structured exchange. Results demonstrate that AI systems can engage meaningfully with Peace Studies concepts, surface complementary objections from different architectural perspectives, and generate emergent insights not present in initial framings - including the novel synthesis of "VCW as transitional framework." Cross-architecture patterns reveal that different models foreground different concerns: Claude emphasized verification challenges, Gemini focused on bias and scalability, and GPT-4o highlighted implementation barriers. The framework provides researchers with replicable methods for stress-testing alignment proposals before implementation, while the findings offer preliminary evidence about AI capacity for the kind of dialogical reasoning VCW proposes. We discuss limitations, including the observation that dialogues engaged more with process elements than with foundational claims about AI nature, and outline directions for future research including human-AI hybrid protocols and extended dialogue studies.
Abstract: Person Re-Identification (ReID) remains a challenging problem in computer vision. This work reviews various training paradigm and evaluates the robustness of state-of-the-art ReID models in cross-domain applications and examines the role of foundation models in improving generalization through richer, more transferable visual representations. We compare three training paradigms, supervised, self-supervised, and language-aligned models. Through the study the aim is to answer the following questions: Can supervised models generalize in cross-domain scenarios? How does foundation models like SigLIP2 perform for the ReID tasks? What are the weaknesses of current supervised and foundational models for ReID? We have conducted the analysis across 11 models and 9 datasets. Our results show a clear split: supervised models dominate their training domain but crumble on cross-domain data. Language-aligned models, however, show surprising robustness cross-domain for ReID tasks, even though they are not explicitly trained to do so. Code and data available at: https://github.com/moiiai-tech/object-reid-benchmark.
Abstract: Accurate delineation of Gross Tumor Volume (GTV), Lymph Node Clinical Target Volume (LN CTV), and Organ-at-Risk (OAR) from Computed Tomography (CT) scans is essential for precise radiotherapy planning in Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma (NPC). Building upon SegRap2023, which focused on OAR and GTV segmentation using single-center paired non-contrast CT (ncCT) and contrast-enhanced CT (ceCT) scans, the SegRap2025 challenge aims to enhance the generalizability and robustness of segmentation models across imaging centers and modalities. SegRap2025 comprises two tasks: Task01 addresses GTV segmentation using paired CT from the SegRap2023 dataset, with an additional external testing set to evaluate cross-center generalization, and Task02 focuses on LN CTV segmentation using multi-center training data and an unseen external testing set, where each case contains paired CT scans or a single modality, emphasizing both cross-center and cross-modality robustness. This paper presents the challenge setup and provides a comprehensive analysis of the solutions submitted by ten participating teams. For GTV segmentation task, the top-performing models achieved average Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 74.61% and 56.79% on the internal and external testing cohorts, respectively. For LN CTV segmentation task, the highest average DSC values reached 60.24%, 60.50%, and 57.23% on paired CT, ceCT-only, and ncCT-only subsets, respectively. SegRap2025 establishes a large-scale multi-center, multi-modality benchmark for evaluating the generalization and robustness in radiotherapy target segmentation, providing valuable insights toward clinically applicable automated radiotherapy planning systems. The benchmark is available at: https://hilab-git.github.io/SegRap2025_Challenge.
Abstract: Unsupervised ensemble learning emerged to address the challenge of combining multiple learners' predictions without access to ground truth labels or additional data. This paradigm is crucial in scenarios where evaluating individual classifier performance or understanding their strengths is challenging due to limited information. We propose a novel deep energy-based method for constructing an accurate meta-learner using only the predictions of individual learners, potentially capable of capturing complex dependence structures between them. Our approach requires no labeled data, learner features, or problem-specific information, and has theoretical guarantees for when learners are conditionally independent. We demonstrate superior performance across diverse ensemble scenarios, including challenging mixture of experts settings. Our experiments span standard ensemble datasets and curated datasets designed to test how the model fuses expertise from multiple sources. These results highlight the potential of unsupervised ensemble learning to harness collective intelligence, especially in data-scarce or privacy-sensitive environments.
Abstract: We present DeepSeek-OCR 2 to investigate the feasibility of a novel encoder-DeepEncoder V2-capable of dynamically reordering visual tokens upon image semantics. Conventional vision-language models (VLMs) invariably process visual tokens in a rigid raster-scan order (top-left to bottom-right) with fixed positional encoding when fed into LLMs. However, this contradicts human visual perception, which follows flexible yet semantically coherent scanning patterns driven by inherent logical structures. Particularly for images with complex layouts, human vision exhibits causally-informed sequential processing. Inspired by this cognitive mechanism, DeepEncoder V2 is designed to endow the encoder with causal reasoning capabilities, enabling it to intelligently reorder visual tokens prior to LLM-based content interpretation. This work explores a novel paradigm: whether 2D image understanding can be effectively achieved through two-cascaded 1D causal reasoning structures, thereby offering a new architectural approach with the potential to achieve genuine 2D reasoning. Codes and model weights are publicly accessible at http://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-OCR-2.
Abstract: We present LingBot-World, an open-sourced world simulator stemming from video generation. Positioned as a top-tier world model, LingBot-World offers the following features. (1) It maintains high fidelity and robust dynamics in a broad spectrum of environments, including realism, scientific contexts, cartoon styles, and beyond. (2) It enables a minute-level horizon while preserving contextual consistency over time, which is also known as "long-term memory". (3) It supports real-time interactivity, achieving a latency of under 1 second when producing 16 frames per second. We provide public access to the code and model in an effort to narrow the divide between open-source and closed-source technologies. We believe our release will empower the community with practical applications across areas like content creation, gaming, and robot learning.
Abstract: Zero-shot anomaly detection aims to detect and localise abnormal regions in the image without access to any in-domain training images. While recent approaches leverage vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, to transfer high-level concept knowledge, methods based on purely vision foundation models (VFMs), like DINOv2, have lagged behind in performance. We argue that this gap stems from two practical issues: (i) limited diversity in existing auxiliary anomaly detection datasets and (ii) overly shallow VFM adaptation strategies. To address both challenges, we propose AnomalyVFM, a general and effective framework that turns any pretrained VFM into a strong zero-shot anomaly detector. Our approach combines a robust three-stage synthetic dataset generation scheme with a parameter-efficient adaptation mechanism, utilising low-rank feature adapters and a confidence-weighted pixel loss. Together, these components enable modern VFMs to substantially outperform current state-of-the-art methods. More specifically, with RADIO as a backbone, AnomalyVFM achieves an average image-level AUROC of 94.1% across 9 diverse datasets, surpassing previous methods by significant 3.3 percentage points. Project Page: https://maticfuc.github.io/anomaly_vfm/
Abstract: Recent diffusion-based Multimodal Large Language Models (dMLLMs) suffer from high inference latency and therefore rely on caching techniques to accelerate decoding. However, the application of cache mechanisms often introduces undesirable repetitive text generation, a phenomenon we term the \textbf{Repeat Curse}. To better investigate underlying mechanism behind this issue, we analyze repetition generation through the lens of information flow. Our work reveals three key findings: (1) context tokens aggregate semantic information as anchors and guide the final predictions; (2) as information propagates across layers, the entropy of context tokens converges in deeper layers, reflecting the model's growing prediction certainty; (3) Repetition is typically linked to disruptions in the information flow of context tokens and to the inability of their entropy to converge in deeper layers. Based on these insights, we present \textbf{CoTA}, a plug-and-play method for mitigating repetition. CoTA enhances the attention of context tokens to preserve intrinsic information flow patterns, while introducing a penalty term to the confidence score during decoding to avoid outputs driven by uncertain context tokens. With extensive experiments, CoTA demonstrates significant effectiveness in alleviating repetition and achieves consistent performance improvements on general tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/ErikZ719/CoTA
Abstract: The autoregressive video diffusion model has recently gained considerable research interest due to its causal modeling and iterative denoising. In this work, we identify that the multi-head self-attention in these models under-utilizes historical frames: approximately 25% heads attend almost exclusively to the current frame, and discarding their KV caches incurs only minor performance degradation. Building upon this, we propose Dummy Forcing, a simple yet effective method to control context accessibility across different heads. Specifically, the proposed heterogeneous memory allocation reduces head-wise context redundancy, accompanied by dynamic head programming to adaptively classify head types. Moreover, we develop a context packing technique to achieve more aggressive cache compression. Without additional training, our Dummy Forcing delivers up to 2.0x speedup over the baseline, supporting video generation at 24.3 FPS with less than 0.5% quality drop. Project page is available at https://csguoh.github.io/project/DummyForcing/.
Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting improves LLM reasoning but incurs high latency and memory cost due to verbose traces, motivating CoT compression with preserved correctness. Existing methods either shorten CoTs at the semantic level, which is often conservative, or prune tokens aggressively, which can miss task-critical cues and degrade accuracy. Moreover, combining the two is non-trivial due to sequential dependency, task-agnostic pruning, and distribution mismatch. We propose \textbf{CtrlCoT}, a dual-granularity CoT compression framework that harmonizes semantic abstraction and token-level pruning through three components: Hierarchical Reasoning Abstraction produces CoTs at multiple semantic granularities; Logic-Preserving Distillation trains a logic-aware pruner to retain indispensable reasoning cues (e.g., numbers and operators) across pruning ratios; and Distribution-Alignment Generation aligns compressed traces with fluent inference-time reasoning styles to avoid fragmentation. On MATH-500 with Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, CtrlCoT uses 30.7\% fewer tokens while achieving 7.6 percentage points higher than the strongest baseline, demonstrating more efficient and reliable reasoning. Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/fanzhenxuan/Ctrl-CoT.
Abstract: Recent lightweight MLP-based models have achieved strong performance in time series forecasting by capturing stable trends and seasonal patterns. However, their effectiveness hinges on an implicit assumption of local stationarity assumption, making them prone to errors in long-term forecasting of highly non-stationary series, especially when abrupt fluctuations occur, a common challenge in domains like web traffic monitoring. To overcome this limitation, we propose TimeCatcher, a novel Volatility-Aware Variational Forecasting framework. TimeCatcher extends linear architectures with a variational encoder to capture latent dynamic patterns hidden in historical data and a volatility-aware enhancement mechanism to detect and amplify significant local variations. Experiments on nine real-world datasets from traffic, financial, energy, and weather domains show that TimeCatcher consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with particularly large improvements in long-term forecasting scenarios characterized by high volatility and sudden fluctuations. Our code is available at https://github.com/ColaPrinceCHEN/TimeCatcher.
Abstract: We introduce Mix2Morph, a text-to-audio diffusion model fine-tuned to perform sound morphing without a dedicated dataset of morphs. By finetuning on noisy surrogate mixes at higher diffusion timesteps, Mix2Morph yields stable, perceptually coherent morphs that convincingly integrate qualities of both sources. We specifically target sound infusions, a practically and perceptually motivated subclass of morphing in which one sound acts as the dominant primary source, providing overall temporal and structural behavior, while a secondary sound is infused throughout, enriching its timbral and textural qualities. Objective evaluations and listening tests show that Mix2Morph outperforms prior baselines and produces high-quality sound infusions across diverse categories, representing a step toward more controllable and concept-driven tools for sound design. Sound examples are available at https://anniejchu.github.io/mix2morph .
Abstract: Given the increasing adoption of AI solutions in professional environments, it is necessary for developers to be able to make informed decisions about the current tool landscape. This work empirically evaluates various MLOps (Machine Learning Operations) tools to facilitate the management of the ML model lifecycle: MLflow, Metaflow, Apache Airflow, and Kubeflow Pipelines. The tools are evaluated by assessing the criteria of Ease of installation, Configuration flexibility, Interoperability, Code instrumentation complexity, result interpretability, and Documentation when implementing two common ML scenarios: Digit classifier with MNIST and Sentiment classifier with IMDB and BERT. The evaluation is completed by providing weighted results that lead to practical conclusions on which tools are best suited for different scenarios.
Abstract: Can standard continuous-time generative models represent distributions whose support is an extremely sparse, globally constrained discrete set? We study this question using completed Sudoku grids as a controlled testbed, treating them as a subset of a continuous relaxation space. We train flow-matching and score-based models along a Gaussian probability path and compare deterministic (ODE) sampling, stochastic (SDE) sampling, and DDPM-style discretizations derived from the same continuous-time training. Unconditionally, stochastic sampling substantially outperforms deterministic flows; score-based samplers are the most reliable among continuous-time methods, and DDPM-style ancestral sampling achieves the highest validity overall. We further show that the same models can be repurposed for guided generation: by repeatedly sampling completions under clamped clues and stopping when constraints are satisfied, the model acts as a probabilistic Sudoku solver. Although far less sample-efficient than classical solvers and discrete-geometry-aware diffusion methods, these experiments demonstrate that classic diffusion/flow formulations can assign non-zero probability mass to globally constrained combinatorial structures and can be used for constraint satisfaction via stochastic search.
Abstract: Speculative decoding (SD) has proven effective for accelerating LLM inference by quickly generating draft tokens and verifying them in parallel. However, SD remains largely unexplored for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), which extend LLMs to process both image and text prompts. To address this gap, we benchmark existing inference methods with small draft models on 11 datasets across diverse input scenarios and observe scenario-specific performance fluctuations. Motivated by these findings, we propose Test-time Adaptive Batched Ensemble Drafting (TABED), which dynamically ensembles multiple drafts obtained via batch inference by leveraging deviations from past ground truths available in the SD setting. The dynamic ensemble method achieves an average robust walltime speedup of 1.74x over autoregressive decoding and a 5% improvement over single drafting methods, while remaining training-free and keeping ensembling costs negligible through parameter sharing. With its plug-and-play compatibility, we further enhance TABED by integrating advanced verification and alternative drafting methods. Code and custom-trained models are available at https://github.com/furiosa-ai/TABED.
Abstract: Text-to-image (T2I) models have achieved remarkable success in generating high-fidelity images, but they often fail in handling complex spatial relationships, e.g., spatial perception, reasoning, or interaction. These critical aspects are largely overlooked by current benchmarks due to their short or information-sparse prompt design. In this paper, we introduce SpatialGenEval, a new benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the spatial intelligence of T2I models, covering two key aspects: (1) SpatialGenEval involves 1,230 long, information-dense prompts across 25 real-world scenes. Each prompt integrates 10 spatial sub-domains and corresponding 10 multi-choice question-answer pairs, ranging from object position and layout to occlusion and causality. Our extensive evaluation of 21 state-of-the-art models reveals that higher-order spatial reasoning remains a primary bottleneck. (2) To demonstrate that the utility of our information-dense design goes beyond simple evaluation, we also construct the SpatialT2I dataset. It contains 15,400 text-image pairs with rewritten prompts to ensure image consistency while preserving information density. Fine-tuned results on current foundation models (i.e., Stable Diffusion-XL, Uniworld-V1, OmniGen2) yield consistent performance gains (+4.2%, +5.7%, +4.4%) and more realistic effects in spatial relations, highlighting a data-centric paradigm to achieve spatial intelligence in T2I models.
Abstract: Cryptocurrency projects articulate value propositions through whitepapers, making claims about functionality and technical capabilities. This study investigates whether these narratives align with observed market behavior. We construct a pipeline combining zero-shot NLP classification (BART-MNLI) with CP tensor decomposition to compare three spaces: (1) a claims matrix from 24 whitepapers across 10 semantic categories, (2) market statistics for 49 assets over two years of hourly data, and (3) latent factors from tensor decomposition (rank 2, 92.45% variance explained). Using Procrustes rotation and Tucker's congruence coefficient, we test alignment across 23 common entities. Results show weak alignment: claims-statistics (phi=0.341, p=0.332), claims-factors (phi=0.077, p=0.747), and statistics-factors (phi=0.197, p<0.001). The statistics-factors significance validates our methodology, confirming the pipeline detects relationships when present. Inter-model validation with DeBERTa-v3 yields 32% exact agreement but 67% top-3 agreement. Cross-sectional analysis reveals heterogeneous contributions: NEAR, MKR, ATOM show positive alignment while ENS, UNI, Bitcoin diverge most. Excluding Bitcoin confirms results are not driven by market dominance. We interpret findings as weak alignment between whitepaper narratives and market factor structure. Limited power (n=23) precludes distinguishing weak from no alignment, but strong alignment (phi>=0.70) can be confidently rejected. Implications for narrative economics and investment analysis are discussed.
Abstract: Robotic manipulation has increasingly adopted vision-language-action (VLA) models, which achieve strong performance but typically require task-specific demonstrations and fine-tuning, and often generalize poorly under domain shift. We investigate whether general-purpose large language model (LLM) agent frameworks, originally developed for software engineering, can serve as an alternative control paradigm for embodied manipulation. We introduce FAEA (Frontier Agent as Embodied Agent), which applies an LLM agent framework directly to embodied manipulation without modification. Using the same iterative reasoning that enables software agents to debug code, FAEA enables embodied agents to reason through manipulation strategies. We evaluate an unmodified frontier agent, Claude Agent SDK, across the LIBERO, ManiSkill3, and MetaWorld benchmarks. With privileged environment state access, FAEA achieves success rates of 84.9%, 85.7%, and 96%, respectively. This level of task success approaches that of VLA models trained with less than 100 demonstrations per task, without requiring demonstrations or fine-tuning. With one round of human feedback as an optional optimization, performance increases to 88.2% on LIBERO. This demonstration-free capability has immediate practical value: FAEA can autonomously explore novel scenarios in simulation and generate successful trajectories for training data augmentation in embodied learning. Our results indicate that general-purpose agents are sufficient for a class of manipulation tasks dominated by deliberative, task-level planning. This opens a path for robotics systems to leverage actively maintained agent infrastructure and benefit directly from ongoing advances in frontier models. Code is available at https://github.com/robiemusketeer/faea-sim
Abstract: Diffusion language models (DLMs) generate text through iterative denoising, but inference requires full-sequence attention at every iteration, resulting in substantial redundant computation on masked tokens. Block-wise diffusion can reduce this cost, yet it typically relies on retraining and constrained update orders, limiting its direct applicability to pretrained DLMs. Our token-level analysis reveals pronounced structural locality in DLM inference. Decoding is driven by a small set of prefix-localized active tokens; the influence of distant undecoded context diminishes rapidly, and decoded tokens exhibit stage-wise temporal stability, enabling reuse of intermediate representations except for a brief post-decode transient. Motivated by these observations, we propose \textbf{\placeholder}\footnote{The source code is available at https://github.com/vhicrgit/Window-Diffusion.}, a window-based token pruning and caching method for inference. We maintain a local computation window that slides rightward as denoising progresses, and partition undecoded tokens into: (i) \textit{active tokens} that are computed online, (ii) \textit{buffer tokens} whose KV states are cached and periodically refreshed, and (iii) \textit{far-field tokens} that are pruned outside the window. Computation is restricted to active and buffer tokens within the window, while far-field tokens are omitted at each stage. Experiments on LLaDA and Dream show that, under matched compute budgets, our method achieves up to $99\times$ inference speedup while largely preserving generation performance.
Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting enables efficient optimization and high-quality rendering, yet accurate surface reconstruction remains challenging. Prior methods improve surface reconstruction by refining Gaussian depth estimates, either via multi-view geometric consistency or through monocular depth priors. However, multi-view constraints become unreliable under large geometric discrepancies, while monocular priors suffer from scale ambiguity and local inconsistency, ultimately leading to inaccurate Gaussian depth supervision. To address these limitations, we introduce a Gaussian visibility-aware multi-view geometric consistency constraint that aggregates the visibility of shared Gaussian primitives across views, enabling more accurate and stable geometric supervision. In addition, we propose a progressive quadtree-calibrated Monocular depth constraint that performs block-wise affine calibration from coarse to fine spatial scales, mitigating the scale ambiguity of depth priors while preserving fine-grained surface details. Extensive experiments on DTU and TNT datasets demonstrate consistent improvements in geometric accuracy over prior Gaussian-based and implicit surface reconstruction methods. Codes are available at an anonymous repository: https://github.com/GVGScode/GVGS.
Abstract: KV caches, typically used only to speed up autoregressive decoding, encode contextual information that can be reused for downstream tasks at no extra cost. We propose treating the KV cache as a lightweight representation, eliminating the need to recompute or store full hidden states. Despite being weaker than dedicated embeddings, KV-derived representations are shown to be sufficient for two key applications: \textbf{(i) Chain-of-Embedding}, where they achieve competitive or superior performance on Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and Qwen2-7B-Instruct; and \textbf{(ii) Fast/Slow Thinking Switching}, where they enable adaptive reasoning on Qwen3-8B and DeepSeek-R1-Distil-Qwen-14B, reducing token generation by up to $5.7\times$ with minimal accuracy loss. Our findings establish KV caches as a free, effective substrate for sampling and reasoning, opening new directions for representation reuse in LLM inference. Code: https://github.com/cmd2001/ICLR2026_KV-Embedding.
Abstract: Current methods for multivariate time series forecasting can be classified into channel-dependent and channel-independent models. Channel-dependent models learn cross-channel features but often overfit the channel ordering, which hampers adaptation when channels are added or reordered. Channel-independent models treat each channel in isolation to increase flexibility, yet this neglects inter-channel dependencies and limits performance. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{CPiRi}, a \textbf{channel permutation invariant (CPI)} framework that infers cross-channel structure from data rather than memorizing a fixed ordering, enabling deployment in settings with structural and distributional co-drift without retraining. CPiRi couples \textbf{spatio-temporal decoupling architecture} with \textbf{permutation-invariant regularization training strategy}: a frozen pretrained temporal encoder extracts high-quality temporal features, a lightweight spatial module learns content-driven inter-channel relations, while a channel shuffling strategy enforces CPI during training. We further \textbf{ground CPiRi in theory} by analyzing permutation equivariance in multivariate time series forecasting. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show state-of-the-art results. CPiRi remains stable when channel orders are shuffled and exhibits strong \textbf{inductive generalization} to unseen channels even when trained on \textbf{only half} of the channels, while maintaining \textbf{practical efficiency} on large-scale datasets. The source code is released at https://github.com/JasonStraka/CPiRi.
Abstract: The prediction objectives of online advertisement ranking models are evolving from probabilistic metrics like conversion rate (CVR) to numerical business metrics like post-click gross merchandise volume (GMV). Unlike the well-studied delayed feedback problem in CVR prediction, delayed feedback modeling for GMV prediction remains unexplored and poses greater challenges, as GMV is a continuous target, and a single click can lead to multiple purchases that cumulatively form the label. To bridge the research gap, we establish TRACE, a GMV prediction benchmark containing complete transaction sequences rising from each user click, which supports delayed feedback modeling in an online streaming manner. Our analysis and exploratory experiments on TRACE reveal two key insights: (1) the rapid evolution of the GMV label distribution necessitates modeling delayed feedback under online streaming training; (2) the label distribution of repurchase samples substantially differs from that of single-purchase samples, highlighting the need for separate modeling. Motivated by these findings, we propose RepurchasE-Aware Dual-branch prEdictoR (READER), a novel GMV modeling paradigm that selectively activates expert parameters according to repurchase predictions produced by a router. Moreover, READER dynamically calibrates the regression target to mitigate under-estimation caused by incomplete labels. Experimental results show that READER yields superior performance on TRACE over baselines, achieving a 2.19% improvement in terms of accuracy. We believe that our study will open up a new avenue for studying online delayed feedback modeling for GMV prediction, and our TRACE benchmark with the gathered insights will facilitate future research and application in this promising direction. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/alimama-tech/OnlineGMV .
Abstract: All-in-one image restoration aims to address diverse degradation types using a single unified model. Existing methods typically rely on degradation priors to guide restoration, yet often struggle to reconstruct content in severely degraded regions. Although recent works leverage semantic information to facilitate content generation, integrating it into the shallow layers of diffusion models often disrupts spatial structures (\emph{e.g.}, blurring artifacts). To address this issue, we propose a Triple-Prior Guided Diffusion (TPGDiff) network for unified image restoration. TPGDiff incorporates degradation priors throughout the diffusion trajectory, while introducing structural priors into shallow layers and semantic priors into deep layers, enabling hierarchical and complementary prior guidance for image reconstruction. Specifically, we leverage multi-source structural cues as structural priors to capture fine-grained details and guide shallow layers representations. To complement this design, we further develop a distillation-driven semantic extractor that yields robust semantic priors, ensuring reliable high-level guidance at deep layers even under severe degradations. Furthermore, a degradation extractor is employed to learn degradation-aware priors, enabling stage-adaptive control of the diffusion process across all timesteps. Extensive experiments on both single- and multi-degradation benchmarks demonstrate that TPGDiff achieves superior performance and generalization across diverse restoration scenarios. Our project page is: https://leoyjtu.github.io/tpgdiff-project.
Abstract: Recent studies have examined attention dynamics in large vision-language models (LVLMs) to detect hallucinations. However, existing approaches remain limited in reliably distinguishing hallucinated from factually grounded outputs, as they rely solely on forward-pass attention patterns and neglect gradient-based signals that reveal how token influence propagates through the network. To bridge this gap, we introduce LVLMs-Saliency, a gradient-aware diagnostic framework that quantifies the visual grounding strength of each output token by fusing attention weights with their input gradients. Our analysis uncovers a decisive pattern: hallucinations frequently arise when preceding output tokens exhibit low saliency toward the prediction of the next token, signaling a breakdown in contextual memory retention. Leveraging this insight, we propose a dual-mechanism inference-time framework to mitigate hallucinations: (1) Saliency-Guided Rejection Sampling (SGRS), which dynamically filters candidate tokens during autoregressive decoding by rejecting those whose saliency falls below a context-adaptive threshold, thereby preventing coherence-breaking tokens from entering the output sequence; and (2) Local Coherence Reinforcement (LocoRE), a lightweight, plug-and-play module that strengthens attention from the current token to its most recent predecessors, actively counteracting the contextual forgetting behavior identified by LVLMs-Saliency. Extensive experiments across multiple LVLMs demonstrate that our method significantly reduces hallucination rates while preserving fluency and task performance, offering a robust and interpretable solution for enhancing model reliability. Code is available at: https://github.com/zhangbaijin/LVLMs-Saliency
Abstract: Machine learning models in high-stakes applications, such as recidivism prediction and automated personnel selection, often exhibit systematic performance disparities across sensitive subpopulations, raising critical concerns regarding algorithmic bias. Fairness auditing addresses these risks through two primary functions: certification, which verifies adherence to fairness constraints; and flagging, which isolates specific demographic groups experiencing disparate treatment. However, existing auditing techniques are frequently limited by restrictive distributional assumptions or prohibitive computational overhead. We propose a novel empirical likelihood-based (EL) framework that constructs robust statistical measures for model performance disparities. Unlike traditional methods, our approach is non-parametric; the proposed disparity statistics follow asymptotically chi-square or mixed chi-square distributions, ensuring valid inference without assuming underlying data distributions. This framework uses a constrained optimization profile that admits stable numerical solutions, facilitating both large-scale certification and efficient subpopulation discovery. Empirically, the EL methods outperform bootstrap-based approaches, yielding coverage rates closer to nominal levels while reducing computational latency by several orders of magnitude. We demonstrate the practical utility of this framework on the COMPAS dataset, where it successfully flags intersectional biases, specifically identifying a significantly higher positive prediction rate for African-American males under 25 and a systemic under-prediction for Caucasian females relative to the population mean.
Abstract: Decision Transformer (DT) shows promise for generative auto-bidding by capturing temporal dependencies, but suffers from two critical limitations: insufficient cross-correlation modeling among state, action, and return-to-go (RTG) sequences, and indiscriminate learning of optimal/suboptimal behaviors. To address these, we propose C2, a novel framework enhancing DT with two core innovations: (1) a Cross Learning Block (CLB) via cross-attention to strengthen inter-sequence correlation modeling; (2) a Constraint-aware Loss (CL) incorporating budget and Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) constraints for selective learning of optimal trajectories. Extensive offline evaluations on the AuctionNet dataset demonstrate consistent performance gains (up to 3.2% over state-of-the-art method) across diverse budget settings; ablation studies verify the complementary synergy of CLB and CL, confirming C2's superiority in auto-bidding. The code for reproducing our results is available at: https://github.com/Dingjinren/C2.
Abstract: Full-duplex voice interaction is crucial for natural human computer interaction. We present a framework that decomposes complex dialogue into minimal conversational units, enabling the system to process each unit independently and predict when to transit to the next. This framework is instantiated as a semi-cascaded full-duplex dialogue system built around a multimodal large language model, supported by auxiliary modules such as voice activity detection (VAD) and text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. The resulting system operates in a train-free, plug-and-play manner. Experiments on the HumDial dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, which ranks second among all teams on the test set of the Human-like Spoken Dialogue Systems Challenge (Track 2: Full-Duplex Interaction). Code is available at the GitHub repository https://github.com/yu-haoyuan/fd-badcat.
Abstract: The central challenge in robotic manipulation of deformable objects lies in aligning high-level semantic instructions with physical interaction points under complex appearance and texture variations. Due to near-infinite degrees of freedom, complex dynamics, and heterogeneous patterns, existing vision-based affordance prediction methods often suffer from boundary overflow and fragmented functional regions. To address these issues, we propose TRACER, a Texture-Robust Affordance Chain-of-thought with dEformable-object Refinement framework, which establishes a cross-hierarchical mapping from hierarchical semantic reasoning to appearance-robust and physically consistent functional region refinement. Specifically, a Tree-structured Affordance Chain-of-Thought (TA-CoT) is formulated to decompose high-level task intentions into hierarchical sub-task semantics, providing consistent guidance across various execution stages. To ensure spatial integrity, a Spatial-Constrained Boundary Refinement (SCBR) mechanism is introduced to suppress prediction spillover, guiding the perceptual response to converge toward authentic interaction manifolds. Furthermore, an Interactive Convergence Refinement Flow (ICRF) is developed to aggregate discrete pixels corrupted by appearance noise, significantly enhancing the spatial continuity and physical plausibility of the identified functional regions. Extensive experiments conducted on the Fine-AGDDO15 dataset and a real-world robotic platform demonstrate that TRACER significantly improves affordance grounding precision across diverse textures and patterns inherent to deformable objects. More importantly, it enhances the success rate of long-horizon tasks, effectively bridging the gap between high-level semantic reasoning and low-level physical execution. The source code and dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Dikay1/TRACER.
Abstract: X-Codec-2.0 has shown strong performance in neural audio compression and multilingual speech modeling, operating at a 50 Hz latent rate and a 16 kHz sampling rate using frozen HuBERT features. While effective, this configuration limits temporal efficiency and audio fidelity. In this work, we explore a simple and effective modification by introducing additional pooling and increasing the decoder hop size. This reduces the latent rate from 50 Hz to 25 Hz and simultaneously raises the output sampling rate from 16 kHz to 24 kHz, improving efficiency and perceptual quality without altering the core architecture. Evaluated on the multilingual Common Voice 17 test set, the proposed configuration achieves a 0.29 MOS improvement over the original X-Codec-2.0 baseline based on UTMOSv2, and attains the best reported performance among all codecs operating at 25 Hz. The source code, checkpoints, and generation comparisons are released at \href{https://huggingface.co/Scicom-intl/xcodec2-25TPS-24k}{https://huggingface.co/Scicom-intl/xcodec2-25TPS-24k}.
Abstract: Content-preserving style transfer, generating stylized outputs based on content and style references, remains a significant challenge for Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) due to the inherent entanglement of content and style features in their internal representations. In this technical report, we present TeleStyle, a lightweight yet effective model for both image and video stylization. Built upon Qwen-Image-Edit, TeleStyle leverages the base model's robust capabilities in content preservation and style customization. To facilitate effective training, we curated a high-quality dataset of distinct specific styles and further synthesized triplets using thousands of diverse, in-the-wild style categories. We introduce a Curriculum Continual Learning framework to train TeleStyle on this hybrid dataset of clean (curated) and noisy (synthetic) triplets. This approach enables the model to generalize to unseen styles without compromising precise content fidelity. Additionally, we introduce a video-to-video stylization module to enhance temporal consistency and visual quality. TeleStyle achieves state-of-the-art performance across three core evaluation metrics: style similarity, content consistency, and aesthetic quality. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/Tele-AI/TeleStyle
Abstract: As software engineering moves toward SE3.0, AI agents are increasingly used to carry out development tasks and contribute changes to software projects. It is therefore important to understand the extent of these contributions and how human developers review and intervene, since these factors shape the risks of delegating work to AI agents. While recent studies have examined how AI agents support software development tasks (e.g., code generation, issue resolution, and PR automation), their role in documentation tasks remains underexplored-even though documentation is widely consumed and shapes how developers understand and use software. Using the AIDev, we analyze 1,997 documentation-related pull requests (PRs) authored by AI agents and human developers, where documentation PRs are those that create or modify project documentation artifacts. We find that AI agents submit substantially more documentation-related PRs than humans in the studied repositories. We further observe that agent-authored documentation edits are typically integrated with little follow-up modification from humans, raising concerns about review practices and the reliability of agent-generated documentation. Overall, while AI agents already contribute substantially to documentation workflows, our results suggest concerns for emerging challenges for documentation quality assurance and human-AI collaboration in SE3.0.
Abstract: Prior work suggests that language models, while trained on next token prediction, show implicit planning behavior: they may select the next token in preparation to a predicted future token, such as a likely rhyming word, as supported by a prior qualitative study of Claude 3.5 Haiku using a cross-layer transcoder. We propose much simpler techniques for assessing implicit planning in language models. With case studies on rhyme poetry generation and question answering, we demonstrate that our methodology easily scales to many models. Across models, we find that the generated rhyme (e.g. "-ight") or answer to a question ("whale") can be manipulated by steering at the end of the preceding line with a vector, affecting the generation of intermediate tokens leading up to the rhyme or answer word. We show that implicit planning is a universal mechanism, present in smaller models than previously thought, starting from 1B parameters. Our methodology offers a widely applicable direct way to study implicit planning abilities of LLMs. More broadly, understanding planning abilities of language models can inform decisions in AI safety and control.
Abstract: We present a large autoregressive model for source-space MEG that scales next-token prediction to long context across datasets and scanners: handling a corpus of over 500 hours and thousands of sessions across the three largest MEG datasets. A modified SEANet-style vector-quantizer reduces multichannel MEG into a flattened token stream on which we train a Qwen2.5-VL backbone from scratch to predict the next brain token and to recursively generate minutes of MEG from up to a minute of context. To evaluate long-horizon generation, we introduce task-matched tests: (i) on-manifold stability via generated-only drift compared to the time-resolved distribution of real sliding windows, and (ii) conditional specificity via correct context versus prompt-swap controls using a neurophysiologically grounded metric set. We train on CamCAN and Omega and run all analyses on held-out MOUS, establishing cross-dataset generalization. Across metrics, generations remain relatively stable over long rollouts and are closer to the correct continuation than swapped controls. Code available at: https://github.com/ricsinaruto/brain-gen.
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce hallucinated or unverifiable content, undermining their reliability in factual domains. This work investigates Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) as a training paradigm that explicitly rewards abstention ("I don't know") alongside correctness to promote intellectual humility. We fine-tune and evaluate Granite-3.3-2B-Instruct and Qwen-3-4B-Instruct on the MedMCQA and Hendrycks Math benchmarks using a ternary reward structure ($-1$, r_abs, 1) under varying abstention reward structures. We further study the effect of combining RLVR with supervised fine-tuning strategies that teach abstention prior to reinforcement learning. Our results show that moderate abstention rewards (r_abs $\approx -0.25$ to 0.3) consistently reduce incorrect responses without severe accuracy degradation on multiple-choice tasks, with larger models exhibiting greater robustness to abstention incentives. On open-ended question answering, we observe limitations due to insufficient exploration, which can be partially mitigated through supervised abstention training. Overall, these findings demonstrate the feasibility and flexibility of verifiable reward design as a practical approach for hallucination mitigation in language models. Reproducible code for our abstention training framework is available here https://github.com/Mystic-Slice/rl-abstention.
Abstract: We address the challenge of training Vision Transformers (ViTs) when labeled data is scarce but unlabeled data is abundant. We propose Semi-Supervised Masked Autoencoder (SSMAE), a framework that jointly optimizes masked image reconstruction and classification using both unlabeled and labeled samples with dynamically selected pseudo-labels. SSMAE introduces a validation-driven gating mechanism that activates pseudo-labeling only after the model achieves reliable, high-confidence predictions that are consistent across both weakly and strongly augmented views of the same image, reducing confirmation bias. On CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, SSMAE consistently outperforms supervised ViT and fine-tuned MAE, with the largest gains in low-label regimes (+9.24% over ViT on CIFAR-10 with 10% labels). Our results demonstrate that when pseudo-labels are introduced is as important as how they are generated for data-efficient transformer training. Codes are available at https://github.com/atik666/ssmae.
Abstract: Despite the ubiquity of tabular data in high-stakes domains, traditional deep learning architectures often struggle to match the performance of gradient-boosted decision trees while maintaining scientific interpretability. Standard neural networks typically treat features as independent entities, failing to exploit the inherent manifold structural dependencies that define tabular distributions. We propose Structural Compositional Function Networks (StructuralCFN), a novel architecture that imposes a Relation-Aware Inductive Bias via a differentiable structural prior. StructuralCFN explicitly models each feature as a mathematical composition of its counterparts through Differentiable Adaptive Gating, which automatically discovers the optimal activation physics (e.g., attention-style filtering vs. inhibitory polarity) for each relationship. Our framework enables Structured Knowledge Integration, allowing domain-specific relational priors to be injected directly into the architecture to guide discovery. We evaluate StructuralCFN across a rigorous 10-fold cross-validation suite on 18 benchmarks, demonstrating statistically significant improvements (p < 0.05) on scientific and clinical datasets (e.g., Blood Transfusion, Ozone, WDBC). Furthermore, StructuralCFN provides Intrinsic Symbolic Interpretability: it recovers the governing "laws" of the data manifold as human-readable mathematical expressions while maintaining a compact parameter footprint (300--2,500 parameters) that is over an order of magnitude (10x--20x) smaller than standard deep baselines.
Abstract: Human-in-the-loop guidance has emerged as an effective approach for enabling faster convergence in online reinforcement learning (RL) of complex real-world manipulation tasks. However, existing human-in-the-loop RL (HiL-RL) frameworks often suffer from low sample efficiency, requiring substantial human interventions to achieve convergence and thereby leading to high labor costs. To address this, we propose a sample-efficient real-world human-in-the-loop RL framework named \method, which requires fewer human intervention by actively selecting informative samples. Specifically, stable reduction of policy entropy enables improved trade-off between exploration and exploitation with higher sample efficiency. We first build influence functions of different samples on the policy entropy, which is efficiently estimated by the covariance of action probabilities and soft advantages of policies. Then we select samples with moderate values of influence functions, where shortcut samples that induce sharp entropy drops and noisy samples with negligible effect are pruned. Extensive experiments on four real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that \method achieves a 42.1\% higher success rate while requiring 10.1\% fewer human interventions compared to the state-of-the-art HiL-RL method, validating its effectiveness. The project page providing code, videos, and mathematical formulations can be found at https://e2hil.github.io/.
Abstract: In industrial recommender systems, conversion rate (CVR) is widely used for traffic allocation, but it fails to fully reflect recommendation effectiveness because it ignores refund behavior. To better capture true user satisfaction and business value, net conversion rate (NetCVR), defined as the probability that a clicked item is purchased and not refunded, has been proposed.Unlike CVR, NetCVR prediction involves a more complex multi-stage cascaded delayed feedback process. The two cascaded delays from click to conversion and from conversion to refund have opposite effects, making traditional CVR modeling methods inapplicable. Moreover, the lack of open-source datasets and online continuous training schemes further hinders progress in this area.To address these challenges, we introduce CASCADE (Cascaded Sequences of Conversion and Delayed Refund), the first large-scale open dataset derived from the Taobao app for online continuous NetCVR prediction. Through an in-depth analysis of CASCADE, we identify three key insights: (1) NetCVR exhibits strong temporal dynamics, necessitating online continuous modeling; (2) cascaded modeling of CVR and refund rate outperforms direct NetCVR modeling; and (3) delay time, which correlates with both CVR and refund rate, is an important feature for NetCVR prediction.Based on these insights, we propose TESLA, a continuous NetCVR modeling framework featuring a CVR-refund-rate cascaded architecture, stage-wise debiasing, and a delay-time-aware ranking loss. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TESLA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on CASCADE, achieving absolute improvements of 12.41 percent in RI-AUC and 14.94 percent in RI-PRAUC on NetCVR prediction. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/alimama-tech/NetCVR.
Abstract: Speaker diarization aims to segment audio recordings into regions corresponding to individual speakers. Although unsupervised speaker diarization is inherently challenging, the prospect of identifying speaker regions without pretraining or weak supervision motivates research on clustering techniques. In this work, we share the notable observation that measuring multiple kernel similarities of speaker embeddings to thereafter craft a sparse graph for spectral clustering in a principled manner is sufficient to achieve state-of-the-art performances in a fully unsupervised setting. Specifically, we consider four polynomial kernels and a degree one arccosine kernel to measure similarities in speaker embeddings, using which sparse graphs are constructed in a principled manner to emphasize local similarities. Experiments show the proposed approach excels in unsupervised speaker diarization over a variety of challenging environments in the DIHARD-III, AMI, and VoxConverse corpora. To encourage further research, our implementations are available at https://github.com/nikhilraghav29/MK-SGC-SC.
Abstract: How can populations of learners develop coordinated, diverse behaviors without explicit communication or diversity incentives? We demonstrate that competition alone is sufficient to induce emergent specialization -- learners spontaneously partition into specialists for different environmental regimes through competitive dynamics, consistent with ecological niche theory. We introduce the NichePopulation algorithm, a simple mechanism combining competitive exclusion with niche affinity tracking. Validated across six real-world domains (cryptocurrency trading, commodity prices, weather forecasting, solar irradiance, urban traffic, and air quality), our approach achieves a mean Specialization Index of 0.75 with effect sizes of Cohen's d > 20. Key findings: (1) At lambda=0 (no niche bonus), learners still achieve SI > 0.30, proving specialization is genuinely emergent; (2) Diverse populations outperform homogeneous baselines by +26.5% through method-level division of labor; (3) Our approach outperforms MARL baselines (QMIX, MAPPO, IQL) by 4.3x while being 4x faster.
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive progress in optimization modeling, fostering a rapid expansion of new methodologies and evaluation benchmarks. However, the boundaries of their capabilities in automated formulation and problem solving remain poorly understood, particularly when extending to complex, real-world tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose OPT-ENGINE, an extensible benchmark framework designed to evaluate LLMs on optimization modeling with controllable and scalable difficulty levels. OPT-ENGINE spans 10 canonical tasks across operations research, with five Linear Programming and five Mixed-Integer Programming. Utilizing OPT-ENGINE, we conduct an extensive study of LLMs' reasoning capabilities, addressing two critical questions: 1.) Do LLMs' performance remain robust when generalizing to out-of-distribution optimization tasks that scale in complexity beyond current benchmark levels? and 2.) At what stage, from problem interpretation to solution generation, do current LLMs encounter the most significant bottlenecks? Our empirical results yield two key insights: first, tool-integrated reasoning with external solvers exhibits significantly higher robustness as task complexity escalates, while pure-text reasoning reaches a ceiling; second, the automated formulation of constraints constitutes the primary performance bottleneck. These findings provide actionable guidance for developing next-generation LLMs for advanced optimization. Our code is publicly available at \textcolor{blue}{https://github.com/Cardinal-Operations/OPTEngine}.
Abstract: Arabic calligraphy represents one of the richest visual traditions of the Arabic language, blending linguistic meaning with artistic form. Although multimodal models have advanced across languages, their ability to process Arabic script, especially in artistic and stylized calligraphic forms, remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we present DuwatBench, a benchmark of 1,272 curated samples containing about 1,475 unique words across six classical and modern calligraphic styles, each paired with sentence-level detection annotations. The dataset reflects real-world challenges in Arabic writing, such as complex stroke patterns, dense ligatures, and stylistic variations that often challenge standard text recognition systems. Using DuwatBench, we evaluated 13 leading Arabic and multilingual multimodal models and showed that while they perform well on clean text, they struggle with calligraphic variation, artistic distortions, and precise visual-text alignment. By publicly releasing DuwatBench and its annotations, we aim to advance culturally grounded multimodal research, foster fair inclusion of the Arabic language and visual heritage in AI systems, and support continued progress in this area. Our dataset (https://huggingface.co/datasets/MBZUAI/DuwatBench) and evaluation suit (https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/DuwatBench) are publicly available.
Abstract: Low-resource languages such as isiZulu and isiXhosa face persistent challenges in machine translation due to limited parallel data and linguistic resources. Recent advances in large language models suggest that self-reflection, prompting a model to critique and revise its own outputs, can improve reasoning quality and factual consistency. Building on this idea, this paper introduces Reflective Translation, a prompt-based framework in which a model generates an initial translation, produces a structured self-critique, and then uses this reflection to generate a refined translation. The approach is evaluated on English-isiZulu and English-isiXhosa translation using OPUS-100 and NTREX-African, across multiple prompting strategies and confidence thresholds. Results show consistent improvements in both BLEU and COMET scores between first- and second-pass translations, with average gains of up to +0.22 BLEU and +0.18 COMET. Statistical significance testing using paired nonparametric tests confirms that these improvements are robust. The proposed method is model-agnostic, requires no fine-tuning, and introduces a reflection-augmented dataset that can support future supervised or analysis-driven work. These findings demonstrate that structured self-reflection is a practical and effective mechanism for improving translation quality in low-resource settings.
Abstract: Robust 3D hand reconstruction in egocentric vision is challenging due to depth ambiguity, self-occlusion, and complex hand-object interactions. Prior methods mitigate these issues by scaling training data or adding auxiliary cues, but they often struggle in unseen contexts. We present EgoHandICL, the first in-context learning (ICL) framework for 3D hand reconstruction that improves semantic alignment, visual consistency, and robustness under challenging egocentric conditions. EgoHandICL introduces complementary exemplar retrieval guided by vision-language models (VLMs), an ICL-tailored tokenizer for multimodal context, and a masked autoencoder (MAE)-based architecture trained with hand-guided geometric and perceptual objectives. Experiments on ARCTIC and EgoExo4D show consistent gains over state-of-the-art methods. We also demonstrate real-world generalization and improve EgoVLM hand-object interaction reasoning by using reconstructed hands as visual prompts. Code and data: https://github.com/Nicous20/EgoHandICL
Abstract: Humans construct internal world models and reason by manipulating the concepts within these models. Recent advances in AI, particularly chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, approximate such human cognitive abilities, where world models are believed to be embedded within large language models. Expert-level performance in formal and abstract domains such as mathematics and programming has been achieved in current systems by relying predominantly on verbal reasoning. However, they still lag far behind humans in domains like physical and spatial intelligence, which require richer representations and prior knowledge. The emergence of unified multimodal models (UMMs) capable of both verbal and visual generation has therefore sparked interest in more human-like reasoning grounded in complementary multimodal pathways, though their benefits remain unclear. From a world-model perspective, this paper presents the first principled study of when and how visual generation benefits reasoning. Our key position is the visual superiority hypothesis: for certain tasks--particularly those grounded in the physical world--visual generation more naturally serves as world models, whereas purely verbal world models encounter bottlenecks arising from representational limitations or insufficient prior knowledge. Theoretically, we formalize internal world modeling as a core component of CoT reasoning and analyze distinctions among different forms of world models. Empirically, we identify tasks that necessitate interleaved visual-verbal CoT reasoning, constructing a new evaluation suite, VisWorld-Eval. Controlled experiments on a state-of-the-art UMM show that interleaved CoT significantly outperforms purely verbal CoT on tasks that favor visual world modeling, but offers no clear advantage otherwise. Together, this work clarifies the potential of multimodal world modeling for more powerful, human-like multimodal AI.
Abstract: Bandwidth constraints in live streaming require video codecs to balance compression strength and frame rate, yet the perceptual consequences of this trade-off remain underexplored. We present the high frame rate live streaming (HFR-LS) dataset, comprising 384 subject-rated 1080p videos encoded at multiple target bitrates by systematically varying compression strength and frame rate. A single-stimulus, hidden-reference subjective study shows that frame rate has a noticeable effect on perceived quality, and interacts with both bitrate and source content. The HFR-LS dataset is available at https://github.com/real-hjq/HFR-LS to facilitate research on bitrate-constrained live streaming.
Abstract: Interactive medical consultation requires an agent to proactively elicit missing clinical evidence under uncertainty. Yet existing evaluations largely remain static or outcome-centric, neglecting the evidence-gathering process. In this work, we propose an interactive evaluation framework that explicitly models the consultation process using a simulated patient and a \rev{simulated reporter} grounded in atomic evidences. Based on this representation, we introduce Information Coverage Rate (ICR) to quantify how completely an agent uncovers necessary evidence during interaction. To support systematic study, we build EviMed, an evidence-based benchmark spanning diverse conditions from common complaints to rare diseases, and evaluate 10 models with varying reasoning abilities. We find that strong diagnostic reasoning does not guarantee effective information collection, and this insufficiency acts as a primary bottleneck limiting performance in interactive settings. To address this, we propose REFINE, a strategy that leverages diagnostic verification to guide the agent in proactively resolving uncertainties. Extensive experiments demonstrate that REFINE consistently outperforms baselines across diverse datasets and facilitates effective model collaboration, enabling smaller agents to achieve superior performance under strong reasoning supervision. Our code can be found at https://github.com/NanshineLoong/EID-Benchmark .
Abstract: Underwater 3D reconstruction and appearance restoration are hindered by the complex optical properties of water, such as wavelength-dependent attenuation and scattering. Existing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)-based methods struggle with slow rendering speeds and suboptimal color restoration, while 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) inherently lacks the capability to model complex volumetric scattering effects. To address these issues, we introduce WaterClear-GS, the first pure 3DGS-based framework that explicitly integrates underwater optical properties of local attenuation and scattering into Gaussian primitives, eliminating the need for an auxiliary medium network. Our method employs a dual-branch optimization strategy to ensure underwater photometric consistency while naturally recovering water-free appearances. This strategy is enhanced by depth-guided geometry regularization and perception-driven image loss, together with exposure constraints, spatially-adaptive regularization, and physically guided spectral regularization, which collectively enforce local 3D coherence and maintain natural visual perception. Experiments on standard benchmarks and our newly collected dataset demonstrate that WaterClear-GS achieves outstanding performance on both novel view synthesis (NVS) and underwater image restoration (UIR) tasks, while maintaining real-time rendering. The code will be available at https://buaaxrzhang.github.io/WaterClear-GS/.
Abstract: Speaker embedding learning based on Euclidean space has achieved significant progress, but it is still insufficient in modeling hierarchical information within speaker features. Hyperbolic space, with its negative curvature geometric properties, can efficiently represent hierarchical information within a finite volume, making it more suitable for the feature distribution of speaker embeddings. In this paper, we propose Hyperbolic Softmax (H-Softmax) and Hyperbolic Additive Margin Softmax (HAM-Softmax) based on hyperbolic space. H-Softmax incorporates hierarchical information into speaker embeddings by projecting embeddings and speaker centers into hyperbolic space and computing hyperbolic distances. HAM-Softmax further enhances inter-class separability by introducing margin constraint on this basis. Experimental results show that H-Softmax and HAM-Softmax achieve average relative EER reductions of 27.84% and 14.23% compared with standard Softmax and AM-Softmax, respectively, demonstrating that the proposed methods effectively improve speaker verification performance and at the same time preserve the capability of hierarchical structure modeling. The code will be released at https://github.com/PunkMale/HAM-Softmax.
Abstract: The performance evaluation remains a complex challenge in audio separation, and existing evaluation metrics are often misaligned with human perception, course-grained, relying on ground truth signals. On the other hand, subjective listening tests remain the gold standard for real-world evaluation, but they are expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to scale. This paper addresses the growing need for automated systems capable of evaluating audio separation without human intervention. The proposed evaluation metric, SAM Audio Judge (SAJ), is a multimodal fine-grained reference-free objective metric, which shows highly alignment with human perceptions. SAJ supports three audio domains (speech, music and general sound events) and three prompt inputs (text, visual and span), covering four different dimensions of evaluation (recall, percision, faithfulness, and overall). SAM Audio Judge also shows potential applications in data filtering, pseudo-labeling large datasets and reranking in audio separation models. We release our code and pre-trained models at: https://github.com/facebookresearch/sam-audio.
Abstract: Vision Mamba models have been extensively researched in various fields, which address the limitations of previous models by effectively managing long-range dependencies with a linear-time overhead. Several prospective studies have further designed Vision Mamba based on UNet(VM-UNet) for medical image segmentation. These approaches primarily focus on optimizing architectural designs by creating more complex structures to enhance the model's ability to perceive semantic features. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach to improve the model by Dual Self-distillation for VM-UNet (DSVM-UNet) without any complex architectural designs. To achieve this goal, we develop double self-distillation methods to align the features at both the global and local levels. Extensive experiments conducted on the ISIC2017, ISIC2018, and Synapse benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining computational efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/RoryShao/DSVM-UNet.git.
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown strong potential for enhancing reasoning in multimodal large language models, yet existing video reasoning methods often rely on coarse sequence-level rewards or single-factor token selection, neglecting fine-grained links among visual inputs, temporal dynamics, and linguistic outputs, limiting both accuracy and interpretability. We propose Video-KTR, a modality-aware policy shaping framework that performs selective, token-level RL by combining three attribution signals: (1) visual-aware tokens identified via counterfactual masking to reveal perceptual dependence; (2) temporal-aware tokens detected through frame shuffling to expose temporal sensitivity; and (3) high-entropy tokens signaling predictive uncertainty. By reinforcing only these key tokens, Video-KTR focuses learning on semantically informative, modality-sensitive content while filtering out low-value tokens. Across five challenging benchmarks, Video-KTR achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive results, achieving 42.7\% on Video-Holmes (surpassing GPT-4o) with consistent gains on both reasoning and general video understanding tasks. Ablation studies verify the complementary roles of the attribution signals and the robustness of targeted token-level updates. Overall, Video-KTR improves accuracy and interpretability, offering a simple, drop-in extension to RL for complex video reasoning. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/zywang0104/Video-KTR.
Abstract: Continual learning for pre-trained vision-language models requires balancing three competing objectives: retaining pre-trained knowledge, preserving knowledge from a sequence of learned tasks, and maintaining the plasticity to acquire new knowledge. This paper presents a simple but effective approach called KeepLoRA to effectively balance these objectives. We first analyze the knowledge retention mechanism within the model parameter space and find that general knowledge is mainly encoded in the principal subspace, while task-specific knowledge is encoded in the residual subspace. Motivated by this finding, KeepLoRA learns new tasks by restricting LoRA parameter updates in the residual subspace to prevent interfering with previously learned capabilities. Specifically, we infuse knowledge for a new task by projecting its gradient onto a subspace orthogonal to both the principal subspace of pre-trained model and the dominant directions of previous task features. Our theoretical and empirical analyses confirm that KeepLoRA balances the three objectives and achieves state-of-the-art performance. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/MaolinLuo/KeepLoRA.
Abstract: Reviewer assignment is increasingly critical yet challenging in the LLM era, where rapid topic shifts render many pre-2023 benchmarks outdated and where proxy signals poorly reflect true reviewer familiarity. We address this evaluation bottleneck by introducing LR-bench, a high-fidelity, up-to-date benchmark curated from 2024-2025 AI/NLP manuscripts with five-level self-assessed familiarity ratings collected via a large-scale email survey, yielding 1055 expert-annotated paper-reviewer-score annotations. We further propose RATE, a reviewer-centric ranking framework that distills each reviewer's recent publications into compact keyword-based profiles and fine-tunes an embedding model with weak preference supervision constructed from heuristic retrieval signals, enabling matching each manuscript against a reviewer profile directly. Across LR-bench and the CMU gold-standard dataset, our approach consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong embedding baselines by a clear margin. We release LR-bench at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Gnociew/LR-bench, and a GitHub repository at https://github.com/Gnociew/RATE-Reviewer-Assign.
Abstract: Heuristic functions are essential to the performance of tree search algorithms such as A*, where their accuracy and efficiency directly impact search outcomes. Traditionally, such heuristics are handcrafted, requiring significant expertise. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and evolutionary frameworks have opened the door to automating heuristic design. In this paper, we extend the Evolution of Heuristics (EoH) framework to investigate the automated generation of guiding heuristics for A* search. We introduce a novel domain-agnostic prompt augmentation strategy that includes the A* code into the prompt to leverage in-context learning, named Algorithmic - Contextual EoH (A-CEoH). To evaluate the effectiveness of A-CeoH, we study two problem domains: the Unit-Load Pre-Marshalling Problem (UPMP), a niche problem from warehouse logistics, and the classical sliding puzzle problem (SPP). Our computational experiments show that A-CEoH can significantly improve the quality of the generated heuristics and even outperform expert-designed heuristics.
Abstract: We present a Monte Carlo study of energy extraction from rotating (Kerr) black holes via the Penrose process using rocket propulsion. Through over 250,000 trajectory simulations, we establish sharp constraints on when Penrose extraction with escape to infinity succeeds. The mechanism requires that exhaust ejected inside the ergosphere carries negative Killing energy, which is kinematically accessible only via ultra-relativistic ejection deep within the ergosphere. We find that successful extraction with escape is statistically rare ($\sim$1% in broad parameter scans) and is governed by strict thresholds: it requires high black hole spin (empirically $a/M \gtrsim 0.89$) and ultra-relativistic exhaust velocity (onset at $v_e \approx 0.91c$). When conditions are highly tuned to a specific "sweet spot," success rates can reach 88.5%, representing a narrow extraction window rather than generic behavior. Furthermore, single-impulse thrust at periapsis achieves significantly higher cumulative efficiency ($η_{\rm cum} \approx 19\%$) compared to continuous thrust ($\sim$2--4%) due to path-averaging penalties. These constraints quantify the extreme fine-tuning required for material-based Penrose extraction, consistent with the astrophysical dominance of electromagnetic mechanisms. Simulation code is available at https://github.com/anindex/penrose_process.
Abstract: Adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to specialized domains without human-annotated data is a crucial yet formidable challenge. Widely adopted knowledge distillation methods often devolve into coarse-grained mimicry, where the student model inefficiently targets its own weaknesses and risks inheriting the teacher's reasoning flaws. This exposes a critical pedagogical dilemma: how to devise a reliable curriculum when the teacher itself is not an infallible expert. Our work resolves this by capitalizing on a key insight: while LLMs may exhibit fallibility in complex, holistic reasoning, they often exhibit high fidelity on focused, atomic sub-problems. Based on this, we propose Divergence-Guided Reasoning Curriculum (DGRC), which constructs a learning path from atomic knowledge to reasoning chains by dynamically deriving two complementary curricula from disagreements in reasoning pathways. When a student and teacher produce conflicting results, DGRC directs the teacher to perform a diagnostic analysis: it analyzes both reasoning paths to formulate atomic queries that target the specific points of divergence, and then self-answers these queries to create high-confidence atomic question-answer pairs. These pairs then serve a dual purpose: (1) providing an atomic curriculum to rectify the student's knowledge gaps, and (2) serving as factual criteria to filter the teacher's original reasoning chains, yielding a verified CoT curriculum that teaches the student how to integrate atomic knowledge into complete reasoning paths. Experiments across the medical and legal domains on student models of various sizes demonstrate the effectiveness of our DGRC framework. Notably, our method achieves a 7.76% relative improvement for the 1.5B student model in the medical domain over strong unlabeled baseline.
Abstract: Vision-based 3D human motion capture from videos remains a challenge in computer vision. Traditional 3D pose estimation approaches often ignore the temporal consistency between frames, causing implausible and jittery motion. The emerging field of kinematics-based 3D motion capture addresses these issues by estimating the temporal transitioning between poses instead. A major drawback in current kinematics approaches is their reliance on Euler angles. Despite their simplicity, Euler angles suffer from discontinuity that leads to unstable motion reconstructions, especially in online settings where trajectory refinement is unavailable. Contrarily, quaternions have no discontinuity and can produce continuous transitions between poses. In this paper, we propose QuaMo, a novel Quaternion Motions method using quaternion differential equations (QDE) for human kinematics capture. We utilize the state-space model, an effective system for describing real-time kinematics estimations, with quaternion state and the QDE describing quaternion velocity. The corresponding angular acceleration is computed from a meta-PD controller with a novel acceleration enhancement that adaptively regulates the control signals as the human quickly changes to a new pose. Unlike previous work, our QDE is solved under the quaternion unit-sphere constraint that results in more accurate estimations. Experimental results show that our novel formulation of the QDE with acceleration enhancement accurately estimates 3D human kinematics with no discontinuity and minimal implausibilities. QuaMo outperforms comparable state-of-the-art methods on multiple datasets, namely Human3.6M, Fit3D, SportsPose and AIST. The code is available at https://github.com/cuongle1206/QuaMo
Abstract: Quality diversity (QD) is a branch of evolutionary computation that seeks high-quality and behaviorally diverse solutions to a problem. While adversarial problems are common, classical QD cannot be easily applied to them, as both the fitness and the behavior depend on the opposing solutions. Recently, Generational Adversarial MAP-Elites (GAME) has been proposed to coevolve both sides of an adversarial problem by alternating the execution of a multi-task QD algorithm against previous elites, called tasks. The original algorithm selects new tasks based on a behavioral criterion, which may lead to undesired dynamics due to inter-side dependencies. In addition, comparing sets of solutions cannot be done directly using classical QD measures due to side dependencies. In this paper, we (1) use an inter-variants tournament to compare the sets of solutions, ensuring a fair comparison, with 6 measures of quality and diversity, and (2) propose two tournament-informed task selection methods to promote higher quality and diversity at each generation. We evaluate the variants across three adversarial problems: Pong, a Cat-and-mouse game, and a Pursuers-and-evaders game. We show that the tournament-informed task selection method leads to higher adversarial quality and diversity. We hope that this work will help further advance adversarial quality diversity. Code, videos, and supplementary material are available at https://github.com/Timothee-ANNE/GAME_tournament_informed.
Abstract: Since their inception, artificial neural networks have relied on manually designed architectures and inductive biases to better adapt to data and tasks. With the rise of deep learning and the expansion of parameter spaces, they have begun to exhibit brain-like functional behaviors. Nevertheless, artificial neural networks remain fundamentally different from biological neural systems in structural organization, learning mechanisms, and evolutionary pathways. From the perspective of neuroscience, we rethink the formation and evolution of intelligence and proposes a new neural network paradigm, Brain-like Neural Network (BNN). We further present the first instantiation of a BNN termed LuminaNet that operates without convolutions or self-attention and is capable of autonomously modifying its architecture. We conduct extensive experiments demonstrating that LuminaNet can achieve self-evolution through dynamic architectural changes. On the CIFAR-10, LuminaNet achieves top-1 accuracy improvements of 11.19%, 5.46% over LeNet-5 and AlexNet, respectively, outperforming MLP-Mixer, ResMLP, and DeiT-Tiny among MLP/ViT architectures. On the TinyStories text generation task, LuminaNet attains a perplexity of 8.4, comparable to a single-layer GPT-2-style Transformer, while reducing computational cost by approximately 25% and peak memory usage by nearly 50%. Code and interactive structures are available at https://github.com/aaroncomo/LuminaNet.
Abstract: High-quality evaluation benchmarks are pivotal for deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) in Automated Code Review (ACR). However, existing benchmarks suffer from two critical limitations: first, the lack of multi-language support in repository-level contexts, which restricts the generalizability of evaluation results; second, the reliance on noisy, incomplete ground truth derived from raw Pull Request (PR) comments, which constrains the scope of issue detection. To address these challenges, we introduce AACR-Bench a comprehensive benchmark that provides full cross-file context across multiple programming languages. Unlike traditional datasets, AACR-Bench employs an "AI-assisted, Expert-verified" annotation pipeline to uncover latent defects often overlooked in original PRs, resulting in a 285% increase in defect coverage. Extensive evaluations of mainstream LLMs on AACR-Bench reveal that previous assessments may have either misjudged or only partially captured model capabilities due to data limitations. Our work establishes a more rigorous standard for ACR evaluation and offers new insights on LLM based ACR, i.e., the granularity/level of context and the choice of retrieval methods significantly impact ACR performance, and this influence varies depending on the LLM, programming language, and the LLM usage paradigm e.g., whether an Agent architecture is employed. The code, data, and other artifacts of our evaluation set are available at https://github.com/alibaba/aacr-bench .
Abstract: We present a fast 3DGS reconstruction pipeline designed to converge within one minute, developed for the SIGGRAPH Asia 3DGS Fast Reconstruction Challenge. The challenge consists of an initial round using SLAM-generated camera poses (with noisy trajectories) and a final round using COLMAP poses (highly accurate). To robustly handle these heterogeneous settings, we develop a two-stage solution. In the first round, we use reverse per-Gaussian parallel optimization and compact forward splatting based on Taming-GS and Speedy-splat, load-balanced tiling, an anchor-based Neural-Gaussian representation enabling rapid convergence with fewer learnable parameters, initialization from monocular depth and partially from feed-forward 3DGS models, and a global pose refinement module for noisy SLAM trajectories. In the final round, the accurate COLMAP poses change the optimization landscape; we disable pose refinement, revert from Neural-Gaussians back to standard 3DGS to eliminate MLP inference overhead, introduce multi-view consistency-guided Gaussian splitting inspired by Fast-GS, and introduce a depth estimator to supervise the rendered depth. Together, these techniques enable high-fidelity reconstruction under a strict one-minute budget. Our method achieved the top performance with a PSNR of 28.43 and ranked first in the competition.
Abstract: Safety-aligned LLMs suffer from two failure modes: jailbreak (answering harmful inputs) and over-refusal (declining benign queries). Existing vector steering methods adjust the magnitude of answer vectors, but this creates a fundamental trade-off -- reducing jailbreak increases over-refusal and vice versa. We identify the root cause: LLMs encode the decision to answer (answer vector $v_a$) and the judgment of input safety (benign vector $v_b$) as nearly orthogonal directions, treating them as independent processes. We propose LLM-VA, which aligns $v_a$ with $v_b$ through closed-form weight updates, making the model's willingness to answer causally dependent on its safety assessment -- without fine-tuning or architectural changes. Our method identifies vectors at each layer using SVMs, selects safety-relevant layers, and iteratively aligns vectors via minimum-norm weight modifications. Experiments on 12 LLMs demonstrate that LLM-VA achieves 11.45% higher F1 than the best baseline while preserving 95.92% utility, and automatically adapts to each model's safety bias without manual tuning. Code and models are available at https://hotbento.github.io/LLM-VA-Web/.
Abstract: Conformer and Mamba have achieved strong performance in speech modeling but face limitations in speaker diarization. Mamba is efficient but struggles with local details and nonlinear patterns. Conformer's self-attention incurs high memory overhead for long speech sequences and may cause instability in long-range dependency modeling. These limitations are critical for diarization, which requires both precise modeling of local variations and robust speaker consistency over extended spans. To address these challenges, we first apply ConBiMamba for speaker diarization. We follow the Pyannote pipeline and propose the Dual-Strategy-Enhanced ConBiMamba neural speaker diarization system. ConBiMamba integrates the strengths of Conformer and Mamba, where Conformer's convolutional and feed-forward structures are utilized to improve local feature extraction. By replacing Conformer's self-attention with ExtBiMamba, ConBiMamba efficiently handles long audio sequences while alleviating the high memory cost of self-attention. Furthermore, to address the problem of the higher DER around speaker change points, we introduce the Boundary-Enhanced Transition Loss to enhance the detection of speaker change points. We also propose Layer-wise Feature Aggregation to enhance the utilization of multi-layer representations. The system is evaluated on six diarization datasets and achieves state-of-the-art performance on four of them. The source code of our study is available at https://github.com/lz-hust/DSE-CBM.
Abstract: Generating immersive 3D scenes from texts is a core task in computer vision, crucial for applications in virtual reality and game development. Despite the promise of leveraging 2D diffusion priors, existing methods suffer from spatial blindness and rely on predefined trajectories that fail to exploit the inner relationships among salient objects. Consequently, these approaches are unable to comprehend the semantic layout, preventing them from exploring the scene adaptively to infer occluded content. Moreover, current inpainting models operate in 2D image space, struggling to plausibly fill holes caused by camera motion. To address these limitations, we propose RoamScene3D, a novel framework that bridges the gap between semantic guidance and spatial generation. Our method reasons about the semantic relations among objects and produces consistent and photorealistic scenes. Specifically, we employ a vision-language model (VLM) to construct a scene graph that encodes object relations, guiding the camera to perceive salient object boundaries and plan an adaptive roaming trajectory. Furthermore, to mitigate the limitations of static 2D priors, we introduce a Motion-Injected Inpainting model that is fine-tuned on a synthetic panoramic dataset integrating authentic camera trajectories, making it adaptive to camera motion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that with semantic reasoning and geometric constraints, our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in producing consistent and photorealistic scenes. Our code is available at https://github.com/JS-CHU/RoamScene3D.
Abstract: Current AI-Generated Image (AIGI) detection approaches predominantly rely on binary classification to distinguish real from synthetic images, often lacking interpretable or convincing evidence to substantiate their decisions. This limitation stems from existing AIGI detection benchmarks, which, despite featuring a broad collection of synthetic images, remain restricted in their coverage of artifact diversity and lack detailed, localized annotations. To bridge this gap, we introduce a fine-grained benchmark towards eXplainable AI-Generated image Detection, named X-AIGD, which provides pixel-level, categorized annotations of perceptual artifacts, spanning low-level distortions, high-level semantics, and cognitive-level counterfactuals. These comprehensive annotations facilitate fine-grained interpretability evaluation and deeper insight into model decision-making processes. Our extensive investigation using X-AIGD provides several key insights: (1) Existing AIGI detectors demonstrate negligible reliance on perceptual artifacts, even at the most basic distortion level. (2) While AIGI detectors can be trained to identify specific artifacts, they still substantially base their judgment on uninterpretable features. (3) Explicitly aligning model attention with artifact regions can increase the interpretability and generalization of detectors. The data and code are available at: https://github.com/Coxy7/X-AIGD.
Abstract: Synthetic simulation data and real-world human data provide scalable alternatives to circumvent the prohibitive costs of robot data collection. However, these sources suffer from the sim-to-real visual gap and the human-to-robot embodiment gap, respectively, which limits the policy's generalization to real-world scenarios. In this work, we identify a natural yet underexplored complementarity between these sources: simulation offers the robot action that human data lacks, while human data provides the real-world observation that simulation struggles to render. Motivated by this insight, we present SimHum, a co-training framework to simultaneously extract kinematic prior from simulated robot actions and visual prior from real-world human observations. Based on the two complementary priors, we achieve data-efficient and generalizable robotic manipulation in real-world tasks. Empirically, SimHum outperforms the baseline by up to $\mathbf{40\%}$ under the same data collection budget, and achieves a $\mathbf{62.5\%}$ OOD success with only 80 real data, outperforming the real only baseline by $7.1\times$. Videos and additional information can be found at \href{https://kaipengfang.github.io/sim-and-human}{project website}.
Abstract: Within the domain of large language models, reinforcement fine-tuning algorithms necessitate the generation of a complete reasoning trajectory beginning from the input query, which incurs significant computational overhead during the rollout phase of training. To address this issue, we analyze the impact of different segments of the reasoning path on the correctness of the final result and, based on these insights, propose Reinforcement Fine-Tuning with Partial Reasoning Optimization (RPO), a plug-and-play reinforcement fine-tuning algorithm. Unlike traditional reinforcement fine-tuning algorithms that generate full reasoning paths, RPO trains the model by generating suffixes of the reasoning path using experience cache. During the rollout phase of training, RPO reduces token generation in this phase by approximately 95%, greatly lowering the theoretical time overhead. Compared with full-path reinforcement fine-tuning algorithms, RPO reduces the training time of the 1.5B model by 90% and the 7B model by 72%. At the same time, it can be integrated with typical algorithms such as GRPO and DAPO, enabling them to achieve training acceleration while maintaining performance comparable to the original algorithms. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/yhz5613813/RPO.
Abstract: This paper presents the web-based platform Machine Learning with Bricks and an accompanying two-day course designed to teach machine learning concepts to students aged 12 to 17 through programming-free robotics activities. Machine Learning with Bricks is an open source platform and combines interactive visualizations with LEGO robotics to teach three core algorithms: KNN, linear regression, and Q-learning. Students learn by collecting data, training models, and interacting with robots via a web-based interface. Pre- and post-surveys with 14 students demonstrate significant improvements in conceptual understanding of machine learning algorithms, positive shifts in AI perception, high platform usability, and increased motivation for continued learning. This work demonstrates that tangible, visualization-based approaches can make machine learning concepts accessible and engaging for young learners while maintaining technical depth. The platform is freely available at https://learning-and-dynamics.github.io/ml-with-bricks/, with video tutorials guiding students through the experiments at https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx1grFu4zAcwfKKJZ1Ux4LwRqaePCOA2J.
Abstract: Despite significant progress in alignment, large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that elicit harmful behaviors. Activation steering techniques offer a promising inference-time intervention approach, but existing methods suffer from critical limitations: activation addition requires careful coefficient tuning and is sensitive to layer-specific norm variations, while directional ablation provides only binary control. Recent work on Angular Steering introduces continuous control via rotation in a 2D subspace, but its practical implementation violates norm preservation, causing distribution shift and generation collapse, particularly in models below 7B parameters. We propose Selective Steering, which addresses these limitations through two key innovations: (1) a mathematically rigorous norm-preserving rotation formulation that maintains activation distribution integrity, and (2) discriminative layer selection that applies steering only where feature representations exhibit opposite-signed class alignment. Experiments across nine models demonstrate that Selective Steering achieves 5.5x higher attack success rates than prior methods while maintaining zero perplexity violations and approximately 100\% capability retention on standard benchmarks. Our approach provides a principled, efficient framework for controllable and stable LLM behavior modification. Code: https://github.com/knoveleng/steering
Abstract: Modern data parallel (DP) training favors collective communication over parameter servers (PS) for its simplicity and efficiency under balanced workloads. However, the balanced workload assumption no longer holds in large language model (LLM) post-training due to the high variance in sequence lengths. Under imbalanced workloads, collective communication creates synchronization barriers, leading to under-utilization of devices with smaller workloads. This change in training dynamics calls for a revisit of the PS paradigm for its robustness to such imbalance. We propose \textbf{On-Demand Communication (ODC)}, which adapts PS into Fully Sharded Data Parallel (FSDP) by replacing collective all-gather and reduce-scatter with direct point-to-point communication. Compared to FSDP, ODC reduces the synchronization barrier from once per layer to once per minibatch and decouples the workload on each device so that faster workers are not stalled. It also enables simpler and more effective load balancing at the minibatch level. Across diverse LLM post-training tasks, ODC consistently improves device utilization and training throughput, achieving up to a 36\% speedup over standard FSDP. These results demonstrate that ODC is a superior fit for the prevalent imbalanced workloads in LLM post-training. Our implementation of ODC and integration with FSDP is open-sourced at https://github.com/sail-sg/odc.
Abstract: Deploying deep learning agents for autonomous navigation in unstructured environments faces critical challenges regarding safety, data scarcity, and limited computational resources. Traditional solvers often suffer from high latency, while emerging learning-based approaches struggle to ensure deterministic feasibility. To bridge the gap from embodied to embedded intelligence, we propose a self-supervised framework incorporating a differentiable hard constraint projection layer for runtime assurance. To mitigate data scarcity, we construct a Global-Guided Artificial Potential Field (G-APF), which provides dense supervision signals without manual labeling. To enforce actuator limitations and geometric constraints efficiently, we employ an adaptive neural projection layer, which iteratively rectifies the coarse network output onto the feasible manifold. Extensive benchmarks on a test set of 20,000 scenarios demonstrate an 88.75\% success rate, substantiating the enhanced operational safety. Closed-loop experiments in CARLA further validate the physical realizability of the planned paths under dynamic constraints. Furthermore, deployment verification on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX confirms an inference latency of 94 ms, showing real-time feasibility on resource-constrained embedded hardware. This framework offers a generalized paradigm for embedding physical laws into neural architectures, providing a viable direction for solving constrained optimization in mechatronics. Source code is available at: https://github.com/wzq-13/SSHC.git.
Abstract: Multimodal MRI is essential for brain tumor segmentation, yet missing modalities in clinical practice cause existing methods to exhibit >40% performance variance across modality combinations, rendering them clinically unreliable. We propose AMGFormer, achieving significantly improved stability through three synergistic modules: (1) QuadIntegrator Bridge (QIB) enabling spatially adaptive fusion maintaining consistent predictions regardless of available modalities, (2) Multi-Granular Attention Orchestrator (MGAO) focusing on pathological regions to reduce background sensitivity, and (3) Modality Quality-Aware Enhancement (MQAE) preventing error propagation from corrupted sequences. On BraTS 2018, our method achieves 89.33% WT, 82.70% TC, 67.23% ET Dice scores with <0.5% variance across 15 modality combinations, solving the stability crisis. Single-modality ET segmentation shows 40-81% relative improvements over state-of-the-art methods. The method generalizes to BraTS 2020/2021, achieving up to 92.44% WT, 89.91% TC, 84.57% ET. The model demonstrates potential for clinical deployment with 1.2s inference. Code: https://github.com/guochengxiangives/AMGFormer.
Abstract: While model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) improves sample efficiency by learning world models from raw observations, existing methods struggle to generalize across structurally similar scenes and remain vulnerable to spurious variations such as textures or color shifts. From a cognitive science perspective, humans segment continuous sensory streams into discrete events and rely on these key events for decision-making. Motivated by this principle, we propose the Event-Aware World Model (EAWM), a general framework that learns event-aware representations to streamline policy learning without requiring handcrafted labels. EAWM employs an automated event generator to derive events from raw observations and introduces a Generic Event Segmentor (GES) to identify event boundaries, which mark the start and end time of event segments. Through event prediction, the representation space is shaped to capture meaningful spatio-temporal transitions. Beyond this, we present a unified formulation of seemingly distinct world model architectures and show the broad applicability of our methods. Experiments on Atari 100K, Craftax 1M, and DeepMind Control 500K, DMC-GB2 500K demonstrate that EAWM consistently boosts the performance of strong MBRL baselines by 10%-45%, setting new state-of-the-art results across benchmarks. Our code is released at https://github.com/MarquisDarwin/EAWM.
Abstract: Quantization-aware training (QAT) is essential for deploying large models under strict memory and latency constraints, yet achieving stable and robust optimization at ultra-low bitwidths remains challenging. Common approaches based on the straight-through estimator (STE) or soft quantizers often suffer from gradient mismatch, instability, or high computational overhead. As such, we propose StableQAT, a unified and efficient QAT framework that stabilizes training in ultra low-bit settings via a novel, lightweight, and theoretically grounded surrogate for backpropagation derived from a discrete Fourier analysis of the rounding operator. StableQAT strictly generalizes STE as the latter arises as a special case of our more expressive surrogate family, yielding smooth, bounded, and inexpensive gradients that improve QAT training performance and stability across various hyperparameter choices. In experiments, StableQAT exhibits stable and efficient QAT at 2-4 bit regimes, demonstrating improved training stability, robustness, and superior performance with negligible training overhead against standard QAT techniques. Our code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/StableQAT.
Abstract: The Schrodinger Bridge and Bass (SBB) formulation, which jointly controls drift and volatility, is an established extension of the classical Schrodinger Bridge (SB). Building on this framework, we introduce LightSBB-M, an algorithm that computes the optimal SBB transport plan in only a few iterations. The method exploits a dual representation of the SBB objective to obtain analytic expressions for the optimal drift and volatility, and it incorporates a tunable parameter beta greater than zero that interpolates between pure drift (the Schrodinger Bridge) and pure volatility (Bass martingale transport). We show that LightSBB-M achieves the lowest 2-Wasserstein distance on synthetic datasets against state-of-the-art SB and diffusion baselines with up to 32 percent improvement. We also illustrate the generative capability of the framework on an unpaired image-to-image translation task (adult to child faces in FFHQ). These findings demonstrate that LightSBB-M provides a scalable, high-fidelity SBB solver that outperforms existing SB and diffusion baselines across both synthetic and real-world generative tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/alexouadi/LightSBB-M.
Abstract: Mobile agents have made progress toward reliable smartphone automation, yet performance in complex applications remains limited by incomplete knowledge and weak generalization to unseen environments. We introduce a curiosity driven knowledge retrieval framework that formalizes uncertainty during execution as a curiosity score. When this score exceeds a threshold, the system retrieves external information from documentation, code repositories, and historical trajectories. Retrieved content is organized into structured AppCards, which encode functional semantics, parameter conventions, interface mappings, and interaction patterns. During execution, an enhanced agent selectively integrates relevant AppCards into its reasoning process, thereby compensating for knowledge blind spots and improving planning reliability. Evaluation on the AndroidWorld benchmark shows consistent improvements across backbones, with an average gain of six percentage points and a new state of the art success rate of 88.8\% when combined with GPT-5. Analysis indicates that AppCards are particularly effective for multi step and cross application tasks, while improvements depend on the backbone model. Case studies further confirm that AppCards reduce ambiguity, shorten exploration, and support stable execution trajectories. Task trajectories are publicly available at https://lisalsj.github.io/Droidrun-appcard/.
Abstract: Speculative decoding is an effective and lossless approach for accelerating LLM inference. However, existing widely adopted model-based draft designs, such as EAGLE3, improve accuracy at the cost of multi-step autoregressive inference, resulting in high drafting latency and ultimately rendering the drafting stage itself a performance bottleneck. Inspired by diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs), we propose DART, which leverages parallel generation to reduce drafting latency. DART predicts logits for multiple future masked positions in parallel within a single forward pass based on hidden states of the target model, thereby eliminating autoregressive rollouts in the draft model while preserving a lightweight design. Based on these parallel logit predictions, we further introduce an efficient tree pruning algorithm that constructs high-quality draft token trees with N-gram-enforced semantic continuity. DART substantially reduces draft-stage overhead while preserving high draft accuracy, leading to significantly improved end-to-end decoding speed. Experimental results demonstrate that DART achieves a 2.03x--3.44x wall-clock time speedup across multiple datasets, surpassing EAGLE3 by 30% on average and offering a practical speculative decoding framework. Code is released at https://github.com/fvliang/DART.
Abstract: Recommender systems (RS) aim to retrieve a small set of items that best match individual user preferences. Naturally, RS place primary emphasis on the quality of the Top-$K$ results rather than performance across the entire item set. However, estimating Top-$K$ accuracy (e.g., Precision@$K$, Recall@$K$) requires determining the ranking positions of items, which imposes substantial computational overhead and poses significant challenges for optimization. In addition, RS often suffer from distribution shifts due to evolving user preferences or data biases, further complicating the task. To address these issues, we propose Talos, a loss function that is specifically designed to optimize the Talos recommendation accuracy. Talos leverages a quantile technique that replaces the complex ranking-dependent operations into simpler comparisons between predicted scores and learned score thresholds. We further develop a sampling-based regression algorithm for efficient and accurate threshold estimation, and introduce a constraint term to maintain optimization stability by preventing score inflation. Additionally, we incorporate a tailored surrogate function to address discontinuity and enhance robustness against distribution shifts. Comprehensive theoretical analyzes and empirical experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, convergence, and distributional robustness of Talos. The code is available at https://github.com/cynthia-shengjia/WWW-2026-Talos.
Abstract: RNA inverse folding, designing sequences to form specific 3D structures, is critical for therapeutics, gene regulation, and synthetic biology. Current methods, focused on sequence recovery, struggle to address structural objectives like secondary structure consistency (SS), minimum free energy (MFE), and local distance difference test (LDDT), leading to suboptimal structural accuracy. To tackle this, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework integrated with a latent diffusion model (LDM). Drawing inspiration from the success of diffusion models in RNA inverse folding, which adeptly model complex sequence-structure interactions, we develop an LDM incorporating pre-trained RNA-FM embeddings from a large-scale RNA model. These embeddings capture co-evolutionary patterns, markedly improving sequence recovery accuracy. However, existing approaches, including diffusion-based methods, cannot effectively handle non-differentiable structural objectives. By contrast, RL excels in this task by using policy-driven reward optimization to navigate complex, non-gradient-based objectives, offering a significant advantage over traditional methods. In summary, we propose the Step-wise Optimization of Latent Diffusion Model (SOLD), a novel RL framework that optimizes single-step noise without sampling the full diffusion trajectory, achieving efficient refinement of multiple structural objectives. Experimental results demonstrate SOLD surpasses its LDM baseline and state-of-the-art methods across all metrics, establishing a robust framework for RNA inverse folding with profound implications for biotechnological and therapeutic applications.
Abstract: This study reveals a previously unexplored vulnerability in the safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing aligned LLMs predominantly respond to unsafe queries with refusals, which often begin with a fixed set of prefixes (I'm sorry). We demonstrate that this rigid refusal pattern is a vulnerability and introduce a novel \textbf{refusal unlearning} technique that exploits it. Specifically, we fine-tune LLMs using merely 1,000 benign samples, where each response is prepended with a refusal prefix. The underlying intuition is to disrupt the refusal completion pathway, thereby driving the model to forget how to refuse while following harmful instructions. This intuition is further supported by theoretical proofs. We apply this approach to a total of 16 LLMs, including various open-source models from Llama, Qwen, and Gemma families, as well as closed-source models such as Gemini and GPT. Experimental results show that the safety scores of previously aligned LLMs degrade both consistently and substantially. Importantly, we verify that the observed gain cannot be attributed to plain fine-tuning or random prefix effects. Our findings suggest that current safety alignment may rely heavily on token sequence memorization rather than reasoning, motivating future work beyond simple refusal mechanisms. Code has been released: https://github.com/guoyang9/refusal-unlearning.
Abstract: The emerging applications of next-generation wireless networks (e.g., immersive 3D communication, low-altitude networks, and integrated sensing and communication) necessitate high-fidelity environmental intelligence. 3D radio maps have emerged as a critical tool for this purpose, enabling spectrum-aware planning and environment-aware sensing by bridging the gap between physical environments and electromagnetic signal propagation. However, constructing accurate 3D radio maps requires fine-grained 3D geometric information and a profound understanding of electromagnetic wave propagation. Existing approaches typically treat optical and wireless knowledge as distinct modalities, failing to exploit the fundamental physical principles governing both light and electromagnetic propagation. To bridge this gap, we propose URF-GS, a unified radio-optical radiation field representation framework for accurate and generalizable 3D radio map construction based on 3D Gaussian splatting (3D-GS) and inverse rendering. By fusing visual and wireless sensing observations, URF-GS recovers scene geometry and material properties while accurately predicting radio signal behavior at arbitrary transmitter-receiver (Tx-Rx) configurations. Experimental results demonstrate that URF-GS achieves up to a 24.7% improvement in spatial spectrum prediction accuracy and a 10x increase in sample efficiency for 3D radio map construction compared with neural radiance field (NeRF)-based methods. This work establishes a foundation for next-generation wireless networks by integrating perception, interaction, and communication through holistic radiation field reconstruction.
Abstract: Existing low-bit Microscaling (MX) formats, such as MXFP4, often suffer from substantial accuracy degradation due to the use of a shared scaling factor with the Power-of-Two format. In this work, we explore strategies that introduce minimal metadata to recover accuracy lost during quantization while maintaining high bit efficiency across a wide range of large language models. We propose a complete algorithm-hardware co-design based on flexible metadata, featuring an online quantization with simple encoding. To support the proposed method efficiently, we implement a lightweight hardware unit and integrate it into the accelerator. Evaluation results demonstrate that our method substantially narrows the accuracy gap, achieving on average a 70.63% reduction in accuracy loss compared to MXFP4 and a 37.30% reduction relative to the latest NVFP4 on LLM benchmarks. Furthermore, our design delivers up to 1.91$\times$ speedup and 1.75$\times$ energy savings over state-of-the-art accelerators. Our code is available at https://github.com/SJTU-ReArch-Group/M2XFP_ASPLOS26.
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization, yet remain highly vulnerable to adversarial examples (AEs). While test-time defenses are promising, existing methods fail to provide sufficient robustness against strong attacks and are often hampered by high inference latency and task-specific applicability. To address these limitations, we start by investigating the intrinsic properties of AEs, which reveals that AEs exhibit severe feature inconsistency under progressive frequency attenuation. We further attribute this to the model's inherent spectral bias. Leveraging this insight, we propose an efficient test-time defense named Contrastive Spectral Rectification (CSR). CSR optimizes a rectification perturbation to realign the input with the natural manifold under a spectral-guided contrastive objective, which is applied input-adaptively. Extensive experiments across 16 classification benchmarks demonstrate that CSR outperforms the SOTA by an average of 18.1% against strong AutoAttack with modest inference overhead. Furthermore, CSR exhibits broad applicability across diverse visual tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Summu77/CSR.
Abstract: Recent vision-language models have strong perceptual ability but their implicit reasoning is hard to explain and easily generates hallucinations on complex queries. Compositional methods improve interpretability, but most rely on a single agent or hand-crafted pipeline and cannot decide when to collaborate across complementary agents or compete among overlapping ones. We introduce MATA (Multi-Agent hierarchical Trainable Automaton), a multi-agent system presented as a hierarchical finite-state automaton for visual reasoning whose top-level transitions are chosen by a trainable hyper agent. Each agent corresponds to a state in the hyper automaton, and runs a small rule-based sub-automaton for reliable micro-control. All agents read and write a shared memory, yielding transparent execution history. To supervise the hyper agent's transition policy, we build transition-trajectory trees and transform to memory-to-next-state pairs, forming the MATA-SFT-90K dataset for supervised finetuning (SFT). The finetuned LLM as the transition policy understands the query and the capacity of agents, and it can efficiently choose the optimal agent to solve the task. Across multiple visual reasoning benchmarks, MATA achieves the state-of-the-art results compared with monolithic and compositional baselines. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ControlNet/MATA.
Abstract: Risk disclosures in SEC filings describe potential adverse events but rarely quantify their likelihood, limiting their usefulness for probabilistic analysis. A central obstacle is the absence of large-scale, risk-level supervision linking disclosed risks to realized outcomes. We introduce a fully automated data generation pipeline that converts qualitative SEC risk disclosures into temporally grounded supervision using only public data. For each filing, the pipeline generates firm-specific, time-bounded risk queries from the Risk Factors section and labels them by automatically resolving outcomes against subsequent disclosures. Using this dataset of risk queries and outcomes grounded in SEC filings, we train a compact large language model to estimate the probability that a disclosed risk will materialize within a specified horizon. Despite its modest size, the resulting model substantially improves over pretrained and heuristic baselines, and outperforms frontier general-purpose models, including GPT-5, on probabilistic accuracy and calibration. More broadly, this work demonstrates that Foresight Learning enables scalable and fully automated training of domain-specific expert models using only raw, chronological, in-domain text -- without proprietary data, external corpora, or manual annotation. The resulting models achieve frontier-level performance while remaining deployable on a single GPU. This result suggests a general pathway for learning calibrated, decision-relevant signals from naturally occurring enterprise documents. To support transparency and reproducibility, we open-source the evaluation dataset used in this study. Evaluation Data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/LightningRodLabs/sec_risk_questions_test_set Data Generation Platform: https://lightningrod.ai/ SDK: https://github.com/lightning-rod-labs/lightningrod-python-sdk
Abstract: Multi-access edge computing (MEC) promises to enable latency-critical applications by bringing computational power closer to mobile devices, but our measurements on commercial MEC deployments reveal frequent SLO violations due to high tail latencies. We identify resource contention at the RAN and the edge server as the root cause, compounded by SLO-unaware schedulers. Existing SLO-aware approaches require RAN--edge coordination, making them impractical for deployment and prone to poor performance due to coordination delays, limited heterogeneous application support, and ignoring edge resource contention. This paper introduces SMEC, a practical, SLO-aware resource management framework that facilitates deadline-aware scheduling through fully decoupled operations at the RAN and edge servers. Our key insight is that standard 5G protocols and application behaviors naturally provide information exploitable for SLO-aware management without extensive infrastructure or application changes. Evaluation on our 5G MEC testbed shows that SMEC achieves 90-96% SLO satisfaction versus under 6% for existing approaches, while reducing tail latency by up to 122$\times$. We have open-sourced SMEC at https://github.com/smec-project.
Abstract: Recent progress at the intersection of large language models (LLMs) and time series (TS) analysis has revealed both promise and fragility. While LLMs can reason over temporal structure given carefully engineered context, they often struggle with numeric fidelity, modality interference, and principled cross-modal integration. We present TS-Debate, a modality-specialized, collaborative multi-agent debate framework for zero-shot time series reasoning. TS-Debate assigns dedicated expert agents to textual context, visual patterns, and numerical signals, preceded by explicit domain knowledge elicitation, and coordinates their interaction via a structured debate protocol. Reviewer agents evaluate agent claims using a verification-conflict-calibration mechanism, supported by lightweight code execution and numerical lookup for programmatic verification. This architecture preserves modality fidelity, exposes conflicting evidence, and mitigates numeric hallucinations without task-specific fine-tuning. Across 20 tasks spanning three public benchmarks, TS-Debate achieves consistent and significant performance improvements over strong baselines, including standard multimodal debate in which all agents observe all inputs.
Abstract: Precise segmentation of retinal arteries and veins carries the diagnosis of systemic cardiovascular conditions. However, standard convolutional architectures often yield topologically disjointed segmentations, characterized by gaps and discontinuities that render reliable graph-based clinical analysis impossible despite high pixel-level accuracy. To address this, we introduce a topology-aware framework engineered to maintain vascular connectivity. Our architecture fuses a Topological Feature Fusion Module (TFFM) that maps local feature representations into a latent graph space, deploying Graph Attention Networks to capture global structural dependencies often missed by fixed receptive fields. Furthermore, we drive the learning process with a hybrid objective function, coupling Tversky loss for class imbalance with soft clDice loss to explicitly penalize topological disconnects. Evaluation on the Fundus-AVSeg dataset reveals state-of-the-art performance, achieving a combined Dice score of 90.97% and a 95% Hausdorff Distance of 3.50 pixels. Notably, our method decreases vessel fragmentation by approximately 38% relative to baselines, yielding topologically coherent vascular trees viable for automated biomarker quantification. We open-source our code at https://tffm-module.github.io/.
Abstract: Emotional Talking Face synthesis is pivotal in multimedia and signal processing, yet existing 3D methods suffer from two critical challenges: poor audio-vision emotion alignment, manifested as difficult audio emotion extraction and inadequate control over emotional micro-expressions; and a one-size-fits-all multi-view fusion strategy that overlooks uncertainty and feature quality differences, undermining rendering quality. We propose UA-3DTalk, Uncertainty-Aware 3D Emotional Talking Face Synthesis with emotion prior distillation, which has three core modules: the Prior Extraction module disentangles audio into content-synchronized features for alignment and person-specific complementary features for individualization; the Emotion Distillation module introduces a multi-modal attention-weighted fusion mechanism and 4D Gaussian encoding with multi-resolution code-books, enabling fine-grained audio emotion extraction and precise control of emotional micro-expressions; the Uncertainty-based Deformation deploys uncertainty blocks to estimate view-specific aleatoric (input noise) and epistemic (model parameters) uncertainty, realizing adaptive multi-view fusion and incorporating a multi-head decoder for Gaussian primitive optimization to mitigate the limitations of uniform-weight fusion. Extensive experiments on regular and emotional datasets show UA-3DTalk outperforms state-of-the-art methods like DEGSTalk and EDTalk by 5.2% in E-FID for emotion alignment, 3.1% in SyncC for lip synchronization, and 0.015 in LPIPS for rendering quality. Project page: https://mrask999.github.io/UA-3DTalk
Abstract: Pan-cancer screening in large-scale CT scans remains challenging for existing AI methods, primarily due to the difficulty of localizing diverse types of tiny lesions in large CT volumes. The extreme foreground-background imbalance significantly hinders models from focusing on diseased regions, while redundant focus on healthy regions not only decreases the efficiency but also increases false positives. Inspired by radiologists' glance and focus diagnostic strategy, we introduce GF-Screen, a Glance and Focus reinforcement learning framework for pan-cancer screening. GF-Screen employs a Glance model to localize the diseased regions and a Focus model to precisely segment the lesions, where segmentation results of the Focus model are leveraged to reward the Glance model via Reinforcement Learning (RL). Specifically, the Glance model crops a group of sub-volumes from the entire CT volume and learns to select the sub-volumes with lesions for the Focus model to segment. Given that the selecting operation is non-differentiable for segmentation training, we propose to employ the segmentation results to reward the Glance model. To optimize the Glance model, we introduce a novel group relative learning paradigm, which employs group relative comparison to prioritize high-advantage predictions and discard low-advantage predictions within sub-volume groups, not only improving efficiency but also reducing false positives. In this way, for the first time, we effectively extend cutting-edge RL techniques to tackle the specific challenges in pan-cancer screening. Extensive experiments on 16 internal and 7 external datasets across 9 lesion types demonstrated the effectiveness of GF-Screen. Notably, GF-Screen leads the public validation leaderboard of MICCAI FLARE25 pan-cancer challenge, surpassing the FLARE24 champion solution by a large margin (+25.6% DSC and +28.2% NSD).
Abstract: Generative models for materials have achieved strong performance on periodic bulk crystals, yet their ability to generalize across scale transitions to finite nanostructures remains largely untested. We introduce Crystal-to-Nanoparticle (C2NP), a systematic benchmark for evaluating generative models when moving between infinite crystalline unit cells and finite nanoparticles, where surface effects and size-dependent distortions dominate. C2NP defines two complementary tasks: (i) generating nanoparticles of specified radii from periodic unit cells, testing whether models capture surface truncation and geometric constraints; and (ii) recovering bulk lattice parameters and space-group symmetry from finite particle configurations, assessing whether models can infer underlying crystallographic order despite surface perturbations. Using diverse materials as a structurally consistent testbed, we construct over 170,000 nanoparticle configurations by carving particles from supercells derived from DFT-relaxed crystal unit cells, and introduce size-based splits that separate interpolation from extrapolation regimes. Experiments with state-of-the-art approaches, including diffusion, flow-matching, and variational models, show that even when losses are low, models often fail geometrically under distribution shift, yielding large lattice-recovery errors and near-zero joint accuracy on structure and symmetry. Overall, our results suggest that current methods rely on template memorization rather than scalable physical generalization. C2NP offers a controlled, reproducible framework for diagnosing these failures, with immediate applications to nanoparticle catalyst design, nanostructured hydrides for hydrogen storage, and materials discovery. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/KurbanIntelligenceLab/C2NP.
Abstract: Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) are a powerful paradigm for time series analysis and are often enhanced by synthetic data augmentation to improve the training data quality. Existing augmentation methods, however, typically rely on heuristics and static paradigms. Motivated by dynamic data optimization, which shows that the contribution of samples varies across training stages, we propose OATS (Online Data Augmentation for Time Series Foundation Models), a principled strategy that generates synthetic data tailored to different training steps. OATS leverages valuable training samples as principled guiding signals and dynamically generates high-quality synthetic data conditioned on them. We further design a diffusion-based framework to produce realistic time series and introduce an explore-exploit mechanism to balance efficiency and effectiveness. Experiments on TSFMs demonstrate that OATS consistently outperforms regular training and yields substantial performance gains over static data augmentation baselines across six validation datasets and two TSFM architectures. The code is available at the link https://github.com/microsoft/TimeCraft.
Abstract: Automated piano performance evaluation traditionally relies on symbolic (MIDI) representations, which capture note-level information but miss the acoustic nuances that characterize expressive playing. I propose using pre-trained audio foundation models, specifically MuQ and MERT, to predict 19 perceptual dimensions of piano performance quality. Using synthesized audio from PercePiano MIDI files (rendered via Pianoteq), I compare audio and symbolic approaches under controlled conditions where both derive from identical source data. The best model, MuQ layers 9-12 with Pianoteq soundfont augmentation, achieves R^2 = 0.537 (95% CI: [0.465, 0.575]), representing a 55% improvement over the symbolic baseline (R^2 = 0.347). Statistical analysis confirms significance (p < 10^-25) with audio outperforming symbolic on all 19 dimensions. I validate the approach through cross-soundfont generalization (R^2 = 0.534 +/- 0.075), difficulty correlation with an external dataset (rho = 0.623), and multi-performer consistency analysis. Analysis of audio-symbolic fusion reveals high error correlation (r = 0.738), explaining why fusion provides minimal benefit: audio representations alone are sufficient. I release the complete training pipeline, pretrained models, and inference code.
Abstract: We propose FROST, an attention-aware method for efficient reasoning. Unlike traditional approaches, FROST leverages attention weights to prune uncritical reasoning paths, yielding shorter and more reliable reasoning trajectories. Methodologically, we introduce the concept of reasoning outliers and design an attention-based mechanism to remove them. Theoretically, FROST preserves and enhances the model's reasoning capacity while eliminating outliers at the sentence level. Empirically, we validate FROST on four benchmarks using two strong reasoning models (Phi-4-Reasoning and GPT-OSS-20B), outperforming state-of-the-art methods such as TALE and ThinkLess. Notably, FROST achieves an average 69.68% reduction in token usage and a 26.70% improvement in accuracy over the base model. Furthermore, in evaluations of attention outlier metrics, FROST reduces the maximum infinity norm by 15.97% and the average kurtosis by 91.09% compared to the base model. Code is available at https://github.com/robinzixuan/FROST
Abstract: KV caching is a fundamental technique for accelerating Large Language Model (LLM) inference by reusing key-value (KV) pairs from previous queries, but its effectiveness under limited memory is highly sensitive to the eviction policy. The default Least Recently Used (LRU) eviction algorithm struggles with dynamic online query arrivals, especially in multi-LLM serving scenarios, where balancing query load across workers and maximizing cache hit rate of each worker are inherently conflicting objectives. We give the first unified mathematical model that captures the core trade-offs between KV cache eviction and query routing. Our analysis reveals the theoretical limitations of existing methods and leads to principled algorithms that integrate provably competitive randomized KV cache eviction with learning-based methods to adaptively route queries with evolving patterns, thus balancing query load and cache hit rate. Our theoretical results are validated by extensive experiments across 4 benchmarks and 3 prefix-sharing settings, demonstrating improvements of up to 6.92$\times$ in cache hit rate, 11.96$\times$ reduction in latency, 14.06$\times$ reduction in time-to-first-token (TTFT), and 77.4% increase in throughput over the state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/fzwark/KVRouting.
Abstract: We present the novel Tensorized Discontinuous Isogeometric Analysis (TDIGA) method applied to the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) time-independent 2-D linearized Boltzmann transport equation (LBTE) with higher-order scattering, discretized with discrete ordinates in angle, multigroup in energy, and isogeometric analysis (IGA) in space. We formulate operator assembly in the tensor train (TT) format, producing seven-dimensional operators for both fixed-source and $k$-eigenvalue neutron transport problems solved using the restarted Generalized Minimum Residual Method (GMRES) and power iteration with an uncompressed solution vector. Our results on single-patch homogeneous and multi-patch heterogeneous problems, including a cruciform-shaped fuel array inspired by advanced reactor fuel designs, demonstrate the TT format's ability to compress interior operators from petabytes to megabytes, whereas the Compressed Sparse Row (CSR) matrix format requires gigabytes of storage. However, highly coupled boundary operators present a significant challenge for TT. Despite the storage savings, TT formatted operators increase time-to-solution relative to CSR as an uncompressed solution vector forces operator-vector product scaling of $O(dr^2N^d\log(N))$ for TT while CSR scales at $O(\text{nnz})$. We mitigate this discrepancy by using mixed formats with interior operators in TT, while high-rank boundary operators remain in CSR format. We compare all results to Monte Carlo (MC) and analytic reference solutions. While CSR remains $<10\times$ faster than this mixed format, the TDIGA method enables high-fidelity transport for expensive high-order IGA meshes.
Abstract: GUI agents enable end-to-end automation through direct perception of and interaction with on-screen interfaces. However, these agents frequently access interfaces containing sensitive personal information, and screenshots are often transmitted to remote models, creating substantial privacy risks. These risks are particularly severe in GUI workflows: GUIs expose richer, more accessible private information, and privacy risks depend on interaction trajectories across sequential scenes. We propose GUIGuard, a three-stage framework for privacy-preserving GUI agents: (1) privacy recognition, (2) privacy protection, and (3) task execution under protection. We further construct GUIGuard-Bench, a cross-platform benchmark with 630 trajectories and 13,830 screenshots, annotated with region-level privacy grounding and fine-grained labels of risk level, privacy category, and task necessity. Evaluations reveal that existing agents exhibit limited privacy recognition, with state-of-the-art models achieving only 13.3% accuracy on Android and 1.4% on PC. Under privacy protection, task-planning semantics can still be maintained, with closed-source models showing stronger semantic consistency than open-source ones. Case studies on MobileWorld show that carefully designed protection strategies achieve higher task accuracy while preserving privacy. Our results highlight privacy recognition as a critical bottleneck for practical GUI agents. Project: https://futuresis.github.io/GUIGuard-page/
Abstract: Aggregate analytics over conversational data are increasingly used for safety monitoring, governance, and product analysis in large language model systems. A common practice is to embed conversations, cluster them, and publish short textual summaries describing each cluster. While raw conversations may never be exposed, these derived summaries can still pose privacy risks if they contain personally identifying information (PII) or uniquely traceable strings copied from individual conversations. We introduce CanaryBench, a simple and reproducible stress test for privacy leakage in cluster-level conversation summaries. CanaryBench generates synthetic conversations with planted secret strings ("canaries") that simulate sensitive identifiers. Because canaries are known a priori, any appearance of these strings in published summaries constitutes a measurable leak. Using TF-IDF embeddings and k-means clustering on 3,000 synthetic conversations (24 topics) with a canary injection rate of 0.60, we evaluate an intentionally extractive example snippet summarizer that models quote-like reporting. In this configuration, we observe canary leakage in 50 of 52 canary-containing clusters (cluster-level leakage rate 0.961538), along with nonzero regex-based PII indicator counts. A minimal defense combining a minimum cluster-size publication threshold (k-min = 25) and regex-based redaction eliminates measured canary leakage and PII indicator hits in the reported run while maintaining a similar cluster-coherence proxy. We position this work as a societal impacts contribution centered on privacy risk measurement for published analytics artifacts rather than raw user data.
Abstract: Multi-channel time-series data, prevalent across diverse applications, is characterized by significant heterogeneity in its different channels. However, existing forecasting models are typically guided by channel-agnostic loss functions like MSE, which apply a uniform metric across all channels. This often leads to fail to capture channel-specific dynamics such as sharp fluctuations or trend shifts. To address this, we propose a Channel-wise Perceptual Loss (CP Loss). Its core idea is to learn a unique perceptual space for each channel that is adapted to its characteristics, and to compute the loss within this space. Specifically, we first design a learnable channel-wise filter that decomposes the raw signal into disentangled multi-scale representations, which form the basis of our perceptual space. Crucially, the filter is optimized jointly with the main forecasting model, ensuring that the learned perceptual space is explicitly oriented towards the prediction task. Finally, losses are calculated within these perception spaces to optimize the model. Code is available at https://github.com/zyh16143998882/CP_Loss.
Authors:Jens Kohl, Otto Kruse, Youssef Mostafa, Andre Luckow, Karsten Schroer, Thomas Riedl, Ryan French, David Katz, Manuel P. Luitz, Tanrajbir Takher, Ken E. Friedl, Céline Laurent-Winter
Abstract: LLM-based agents are rapidly being adopted across diverse domains. Since they interact with users without supervision, they must be tested extensively. Current testing approaches focus on acceptance-level evaluation from the user's perspective. While intuitive, these tests require manual evaluation, are difficult to automate, do not facilitate root cause analysis, and incur expensive test environments. In this paper, we present methods to enable structural testing of LLM-based agents. Our approach utilizes traces (based on OpenTelemetry) to capture agent trajectories, employs mocking to enforce reproducible LLM behavior, and adds assertions to automate test verification. This enables testing agent components and interactions at a deeper technical level within automated workflows. We demonstrate how structural testing enables the adaptation of software engineering best practices to agents, including the test automation pyramid, regression testing, test-driven development, and multi-language testing. In representative case studies, we demonstrate automated execution and faster root-cause analysis. Collectively, these methods reduce testing costs and improve agent quality through higher coverage, reusability, and earlier defect detection. We provide an open source reference implementation on GitHub.
Abstract: This paper presents a Quantum Reinforcement Learning (QRL) solution to the dynamic portfolio optimization problem based on Variational Quantum Circuits. The implemented QRL approaches are quantum analogues of the classical neural-network-based Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient and Deep Q-Network algorithms. Through an empirical evaluation on real-world financial data, we show that our quantum agents achieve risk-adjusted performance comparable to, and in some cases exceeding, that of classical Deep RL models with several orders of magnitude more parameters. However, while quantum circuit execution is inherently fast at the hardware level, practical deployment on cloud-based quantum systems introduces substantial latency, making end-to-end runtime currently dominated by infrastructural overhead and limiting practical applicability. Taken together, our results suggest that QRL is theoretically competitive with state-of-the-art classical reinforcement learning and may become practically advantageous as deployment overheads diminish. This positions QRL as a promising paradigm for dynamic decision-making in complex, high-dimensional, and non-stationary environments such as financial markets. The complete codebase is released as open source at: https://github.com/VincentGurgul/qrl-dpo-public
Abstract: ECG-Language Models (ELMs) extend recent progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to automated ECG interpretation. However, most ELMs follow Vision-Language Model (VLM) designs and depend on pretrained ECG encoders, adding architectural and training complexity. Inspired by encoder-free VLMs, we introduce ELF, an encoder-free ELM that replaces the ECG encoder with a single projection layer trained jointly with the LLM. Across five datasets, ELF matches or exceeds state-of-the-art ELMs that use far more complex encoders and training pipelines. We also test whether adding architectural biases to ELF improves performance and find that the single linear projection remains competitive. Finally, we show that ELF, and potentially other ELMs, often rely more on benchmark artifacts and language priors than ECG-derived information, highlighting limitations in current evaluation practices and ELM design. All data and code is available at https://github.com/willxxy/ECG-Bench.
Abstract: Can a model learn to escape its own learning plateau? Reinforcement learning methods for finetuning large reasoning models stall on datasets with low initial success rates, and thus little training signal. We investigate a fundamental question: Can a pretrained LLM leverage latent knowledge to generate an automated curriculum for problems it cannot solve? To explore this, we design SOAR: A self-improvement framework designed to surface these pedagogical signals through meta-RL. A teacher copy of the model proposes synthetic problems for a student copy, and is rewarded with its improvement on a small subset of hard problems. Critically, SOAR grounds the curriculum in measured student progress rather than intrinsic proxy rewards. Our study on the hardest subsets of mathematical benchmarks (0/128 success) reveals three core findings. First, we show that it is possible to realize bi-level meta-RL that unlocks learning under sparse, binary rewards by sharpening a latent capacity of pretrained models to generate useful stepping stones. Second, grounded rewards outperform intrinsic reward schemes used in prior LLM self-play, reliably avoiding the instability and diversity collapse modes they typically exhibit. Third, analyzing the generated questions reveals that structural quality and well-posedness are more critical for learning progress than solution correctness. Our results suggest that the ability to generate useful stepping stones does not require the preexisting ability to actually solve the hard problems, paving a principled path to escape reasoning plateaus without additional curated data.
Abstract: Knowledge distillation improves large language model (LLM) reasoning by compressing the knowledge of a teacher LLM to train smaller LLMs. On-policy distillation advances this approach by having the student sample its own trajectories while a teacher LLM provides dense token-level supervision, addressing the distribution mismatch between training and inference in off-policy distillation methods. However, on-policy distillation typically requires a separate, often larger, teacher LLM and does not explicitly leverage ground-truth solutions available in reasoning datasets. Inspired by the intuition that a sufficiently capable LLM can rationalize external privileged reasoning traces and teach its weaker self (i.e., the version without access to privileged information), we introduce On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD), a framework where a single model acts as both teacher and student by conditioning on different contexts. The teacher policy conditions on privileged information (e.g., verified reasoning traces) while the student policy sees only the question; training minimizes the per-token divergence between these distributions over the student's own rollouts. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks, achieving 8-12x token efficiency compared to reinforcement learning methods such as GRPO and superior performance over off-policy distillation methods.
Abstract: Offering great potential in robotic manipulation, a capable Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation model is expected to faithfully generalize across tasks and platforms while ensuring cost efficiency (e.g., data and GPU hours required for adaptation). To this end, we develop LingBot-VLA with around 20,000 hours of real-world data from 9 popular dual-arm robot configurations. Through a systematic assessment on 3 robotic platforms, each completing 100 tasks with 130 post-training episodes per task, our model achieves clear superiority over competitors, showcasing its strong performance and broad generalizability. We have also built an efficient codebase, which delivers a throughput of 261 samples per second with an 8-GPU training setup, representing a 1.5~2.8$\times$ (depending on the relied VLM base model) speedup over existing VLA-oriented codebases. The above features ensure that our model is well-suited for real-world deployment. To advance the field of robot learning, we provide open access to the code, base model, and benchmark data, with a focus on enabling more challenging tasks and promoting sound evaluation standards.
Abstract: Motivation: Pathway enrichment analysis is widely used to interpret gene expression data. Standard approaches, such as GSEA, rely on predefined phenotypic labels and pairwise comparisons, which limits their applicability in unsupervised settings. Existing unsupervised extensions, including single-sample methods, provide pathway-level summaries but primarily capture linear relationships and do not explicitly model gene-pathway associations. More recently, deep learning models have been explored to capture non-linear transcriptomic structure. However, their interpretation has typically relied on generic explainable AI (XAI) techniques designed for feature-level attribution. As these methods are not designed for pathway-level interpretation in unsupervised transcriptomic analyses, their effectiveness in this setting remains limited. Results: To bridge this gap, we introduce LaCoGSEA (Latent Correlation GSEA), an unsupervised framework that integrates deep representation learning with robust pathway statistics. LaCoGSEA employs an autoencoder to capture non-linear manifolds and proposes a global gene-latent correlation metric as a proxy for differential expression, generating dense gene rankings without prior labels. We demonstrate that LaCoGSEA offers three key advantages: (i) it achieves improved clustering performance in distinguishing cancer subtypes compared to existing unsupervised baselines; (ii) it recovers a broader range of biologically meaningful pathways at higher ranks compared with linear dimensionality reduction and gradient-based XAI methods; and (iii) it maintains high robustness and consistency across varying experimental protocols and dataset sizes. Overall, LaCoGSEA provides state-of-the-art performance in unsupervised pathway enrichment analysis. Availability and implementation: https://github.com/willyzzz/LaCoGSEA
Abstract: We introduce GenAgent, unifying visual understanding and generation through an agentic multimodal model. Unlike unified models that face expensive training costs and understanding-generation trade-offs, GenAgent decouples these capabilities through an agentic framework: understanding is handled by the multimodal model itself, while generation is achieved by treating image generation models as invokable tools. Crucially, unlike existing modular systems constrained by static pipelines, this design enables autonomous multi-turn interactions where the agent generates multimodal chains-of-thought encompassing reasoning, tool invocation, judgment, and reflection to iteratively refine outputs. We employ a two-stage training strategy: first, cold-start with supervised fine-tuning on high-quality tool invocation and reflection data to bootstrap agent behaviors; second, end-to-end agentic reinforcement learning combining pointwise rewards (final image quality) and pairwise rewards (reflection accuracy), with trajectory resampling for enhanced multi-turn exploration. GenAgent significantly boosts base generator(FLUX.1-dev) performance on GenEval++ (+23.6\%) and WISE (+14\%). Beyond performance gains, our framework demonstrates three key properties: 1) cross-tool generalization to generators with varying capabilities, 2) test-time scaling with consistent improvements across interaction rounds, and 3) task-adaptive reasoning that automatically adjusts to different tasks. Our code will be available at \href{https://github.com/deep-kaixun/GenAgent}{this url}.
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) succeeds in reasoning tasks (e.g., math and code) by checking the final verifiable answer (i.e., a verifiable dot signal). However, extending this paradigm to open-ended generation is challenging because there is no unambiguous ground truth. Relying on single-dot supervision often leads to inefficiency and reward hacking. To address these issues, we propose reinforcement learning with verifiable reference-based rewards (RLVRR). Instead of checking the final answer, RLVRR extracts an ordered linguistic signal from high-quality references (i.e, reward chain). Specifically, RLVRR decomposes rewards into two dimensions: content, which preserves deterministic core concepts (e.g., keywords), and style, which evaluates adherence to stylistic properties through LLM-based verification. In this way, RLVRR combines the exploratory strength of RL with the efficiency and reliability of supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Extensive experiments on more than 10 benchmarks with Qwen and Llama models confirm the advantages of our approach. RLVRR (1) substantially outperforms SFT trained with ten times more data and advanced reward models, (2) unifies the training of structured reasoning and open-ended generation, and (3) generalizes more effectively while preserving output diversity. These results establish RLVRR as a principled and efficient path toward verifiable reinforcement learning for general-purpose LLM alignment. We release our code and data at https://github.com/YJiangcm/RLVRR.
Abstract: While Large Language Model (LLM) agents excel at general tasks, they inherently struggle with continual adaptation due to the frozen weights after deployment. Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) offers a solution but incurs prohibitive computational costs and the risk of catastrophic forgetting. We introduce Just-In-Time Reinforcement Learning (JitRL), a training-free framework that enables test-time policy optimization without any gradient updates. JitRL maintains a dynamic, non-parametric memory of experiences and retrieves relevant trajectories to estimate action advantages on-the-fly. These estimates are then used to directly modulate the LLM's output logits. We theoretically prove that this additive update rule is the exact closed-form solution to the KL-constrained policy optimization objective. Extensive experiments on WebArena and Jericho demonstrate that JitRL establishes a new state-of-the-art among training-free methods. Crucially, JitRL outperforms the performance of computationally expensive fine-tuning methods (e.g., WebRL) while reducing monetary costs by over 30 times, offering a scalable path for continual learning agents. The code is available at https://github.com/liushiliushi/JitRL.
Abstract: Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an embodied agent to navigate in a complex 3D environment according to natural language instructions. Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has enabled language-driven navigation with improved interpretability. However, most LLM-based agents still rely on single-shot action decisions, where the model must choose one option from noisy, textualized multi-perspective observations. Due to local mismatches and imperfect intermediate reasoning, such decisions can easily deviate from the correct path, leading to error accumulation and reduced reliability in unseen environments. In this paper, we propose DV-VLN, a new VLN framework that follows a generate-then-verify paradigm. DV-VLN first performs parameter-efficient in-domain adaptation of an open-source LLaMA-2 backbone to produce a structured navigational chain-of-thought, and then verifies candidate actions with two complementary channels: True-False Verification (TFV) and Masked-Entity Verification (MEV). DV-VLN selects actions by aggregating verification successes across multiple samples, yielding interpretable scores for reranking. Experiments on R2R, RxR (English subset), and REVERIE show that DV-VLN consistently improves over direct prediction and sampling-only baselines, achieving competitive performance among language-only VLN agents and promising results compared with several cross-modal systems.Code is available at https://github.com/PlumJun/DV-VLN.
Abstract: Recommendation systems (RS) aim to retrieve the top-K items most relevant to users, with metrics such as Precision@K and Recall@K commonly used to assess effectiveness. The architecture of an RS model acts as an inductive bias, shaping the patterns the model is inclined to learn. In recent years, numerous recommendation architectures have emerged, spanning traditional matrix factorization, deep neural networks, and graph neural networks. However, their designs are often not explicitly aligned with the top-K objective, thereby limiting their effectiveness. To address this limitation, we propose TopKGAT, a novel recommendation architecture directly derived from a differentiable approximation of top-K metrics. The forward computation of a single TopKGAT layer is intrinsically aligned with the gradient ascent dynamics of the Precision@K metric, enabling the model to naturally improve top-K recommendation accuracy. Structurally, TopKGAT resembles a graph attention network and can be implemented efficiently. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that TopKGAT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/StupidThree/TopKGAT.
Abstract: Digital collage is an artistic practice that combines image cutouts to tell stories. However, preparing cutouts from a set of photos remains a tedious and time-consuming task. A formative study identified three main challenges: 1) inefficient search for relevant photos, 2) manual image cutout, and 3) difficulty in organizing large sets of cutouts. To meet these challenges and facilitate asset preparation for collage, we propose Collaposer, a tool that transforms a collection of photos into organized, ready-to-use visual cutouts based on user-provided story descriptions. Collaposer tags, detects, and segments photos, and then uses an LLM to select central and related labels based on the user-provided story description. Collaposer presents the resulting visuals in varying sizes, clustered according to semantic hierarchy. Our evaluation shows that Collaposer effectively automates the preparation process to produce diverse sets of visual cutouts adhering to the storyline, allowing users to focus on collaging these assets for storytelling. Project website: https://jiayzhou.github.io/collaposer-website/
Abstract: Dry-electrode Motor Imagery Electroencephalography (MI-EEG) enables fast, comfortable, real-world Brain Computer Interface by eliminating gels and shortening setup for at-home and wearable use.However, dry recordings pose three main issues: lower Signal-to-Noise Ratio with more baseline drift and sudden transients; weaker and noisier data with poor phase alignment across trials; and bigger variances between sessions. These drawbacks lead to larger data distribution shift, making features less stable for MI-EEG tasks.To address these problems, we introduce STGMFM, a tri-branch framework tailored for dry-electrode MI-EEG, which models complementary spatio-temporal dependencies via dual graph orders, and captures robust envelope dynamics with a multi-scale frequency mixing branch, motivated by the observation that amplitude envelopes are less sensitive to contact variability than instantaneous waveforms. Physiologically meaningful connectivity priors guide learning, and decision-level fusion consolidates a noise-tolerant consensus. On our collected dry-electrode MI-EEG, STGMFM consistently surpasses competitive CNN/Transformer/graph baselines. Codes are available at https://github.com/Tianyi-325/STGMFM.
Abstract: This work presents a speech-to-text system "Pisets" for scientists and journalists which is based on a three-component architecture aimed at improving speech recognition accuracy while minimizing errors and hallucinations associated with the Whisper model. The architecture comprises primary recognition using Wav2Vec2, false positive filtering via the Audio Spectrogram Transformer (AST), and final speech recognition through Whisper. The implementation of curriculum learning methods and the utilization of diverse Russian-language speech corpora significantly enhanced the system's effectiveness. Additionally, advanced uncertainty modeling techniques were introduced, contributing to further improvements in transcription quality. The proposed approaches ensure robust transcribing of long audio data across various acoustic conditions compared to WhisperX and the usual Whisper model. The source code of "Pisets" system is publicly available at GitHub: https://github.com/bond005/pisets.
Abstract: In audiovisual automatic speech recognition (AV-ASR) systems, information fusion of visual features in a pre-trained ASR has been proven as a promising method to improve noise robustness. In this work, based on the prominent Whisper ASR, first, we propose a simple and effective visual fusion method -- use of visual features both in encoder and decoder (dual-use) -- to learn the audiovisual interactions in the encoder and to weigh modalities in the decoder. Second, we compare visual fusion methods in Whisper models of various sizes. Our proposed dual-use method shows consistent noise robustness improvement, e.g., a 35% relative improvement (WER: 4.41% vs. 6.83%) based on Whisper small, and a 57% relative improvement (WER: 4.07% vs. 9.53%) based on Whisper medium, compared to typical reference middle fusion in babble noise with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 0dB. Third, we conduct ablation studies examining the impact of various module designs and fusion options. Fine-tuned on 1929 hours of audiovisual data, our dual-use method using Whisper medium achieves 4.08% (MUSAN babble noise) and 4.43% (NoiseX babble noise) average WER across various SNRs, thereby establishing a new state-of-the-art in noisy conditions on the LRS3 AV-ASR benchmark. Our code is at https://github.com/ifnspaml/Dual-Use-AVASR
Abstract: Multi-view 3D reconstruction methods remain highly sensitive to photometric inconsistencies arising from camera optical characteristics and variations in image signal processing (ISP). Existing mitigation strategies such as per-frame latent variables or affine color corrections lack physical grounding and generalize poorly to novel views. We propose the Physically-Plausible ISP (PPISP) correction module, which disentangles camera-intrinsic and capture-dependent effects through physically based and interpretable transformations. A dedicated PPISP controller, trained on the input views, predicts ISP parameters for novel viewpoints, analogous to auto exposure and auto white balance in real cameras. This design enables realistic and fair evaluation on novel views without access to ground-truth images. PPISP achieves SoTA performance on standard benchmarks, while providing intuitive control and supporting the integration of metadata when available. The source code is available at: https://github.com/nv-tlabs/ppisp
Abstract: Multimodal emotion analysis is shifting from static classification to generative reasoning. Beyond simple label prediction, robust affective reasoning must synthesize fine-grained signals such as facial micro-expressions and prosodic which shifts to decode the latent causality within complex social contexts. However, current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) face significant limitations in fine-grained perception, primarily due to data scarcity and insufficient cross-modal fusion. As a result, these models often exhibit unimodal dominance which leads to hallucinations in complex multimodal interactions, particularly when visual and acoustic cues are subtle, ambiguous, or even contradictory (e.g., in sarcastic scenery). To address this, we introduce SABER-LLM, a framework designed for robust multimodal reasoning. First, we construct SABER, a large-scale emotion reasoning dataset comprising 600K video clips, annotated with a novel six-dimensional schema that jointly captures audiovisual cues and causal logic. Second, we propose the structured evidence decomposition paradigm, which enforces a "perceive-then-reason" separation between evidence extraction and reasoning to alleviate unimodal dominance. The ability to perceive complex scenes is further reinforced by consistency-aware direct preference optimization, which explicitly encourages alignment among modalities under ambiguous or conflicting perceptual conditions. Experiments on EMER, EmoBench-M, and SABER-Test demonstrate that SABER-LLM significantly outperforms open-source baselines and achieves robustness competitive with closed-source models in decoding complex emotional dynamics. The dataset and model are available at https://github.com/zxzhao0/SABER-LLM.
Abstract: Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (TKGQA) is inherently challenging, as it requires sophisticated reasoning over dynamic facts with multi-hop dependencies and complex temporal constraints. Existing methods rely on fixed workflows and expensive closed-source APIs, limiting flexibility and scalability. We propose Temp-R1, the first autonomous end-to-end agent for TKGQA trained through reinforcement learning. To address cognitive overload in single-action reasoning, we expand the action space with specialized internal actions alongside external action. To prevent shortcut learning on simple questions, we introduce reverse curriculum learning that trains on difficult questions first, forcing the development of sophisticated reasoning before transferring to easier cases. Our 8B-parameter Temp-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on MultiTQ and TimelineKGQA, improving 19.8% over strong baselines on complex questions. Our work establishes a new paradigm for autonomous temporal reasoning agents. Our code will be publicly available soon at https://github.com/zjukg/Temp-R1.
Abstract: Quest2ROS2 is an open-source ROS2 framework for bi-manual teleoperation designed to scale robot data collection. Extending Quest2ROS, it overcomes workspace limitations via relative motion-based control, calculating robot movement from VR controller pose changes to enable intuitive, pose-independent operation. The framework integrates essential usability and safety features, including real-time RViz visualization, streamlined gripper control, and a pause-and-reset function for smooth transitions. We detail a modular architecture that supports "Side-by-Side" and "Mirror" control modes to optimize operator experience across diverse platforms. Code is available at: https://github.com/Taokt/Quest2ROS2.
Authors:Elena Bruches, Vadim Alperovich, Dari Baturova, Roman Derunets, Daniil Grebenkin, Georgy Mkrtchyan, Oleg Sedukhin, Mikhail Klementev, Ivan Bondarenko, Nikolay Bushkov, Stanislav Moiseev
Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in software engineering, their application to unit testing remains largely confined to isolated test generation or oracle prediction, neglecting the broader challenge of test suite maintenance. We introduce TAM-Eval (Test Automated Maintenance Evaluation), a framework and benchmark designed to evaluate model performance across three core test maintenance scenarios: creation, repair, and updating of test suites. Unlike prior work limited to function-level tasks, TAM-Eval operates at the test file level, while maintaining access to full repository context during isolated evaluation, better reflecting real-world maintenance workflows. Our benchmark comprises 1,539 automatically extracted and validated scenarios from Python, Java, and Go projects. TAM-Eval supports system-agnostic evaluation of both raw LLMs and agentic workflows, using a reference-free protocol based on test suite pass rate, code coverage, and mutation testing. Empirical results indicate that state-of-the-art LLMs have limited capabilities in realistic test maintenance processes and yield only marginal improvements in test effectiveness. We release TAM-Eval as an open-source framework to support future research in automated software testing. Our data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/trndcenter/TAM-Eval.
Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly deployed in e-commerce shopping. To perform thorough, user-tailored product searches, agents should interpret personal preferences, engage in multi-turn dialogues, and ultimately retrieve and discriminate among highly similar products. However, existing research has yet to provide a unified simulation environment that consistently captures all of these aspects, and always focuses solely on evaluation benchmarks without training support. In this paper, we introduce ShopSimulator, a large-scale and challenging Chinese shopping environment. Leveraging ShopSimulator, we evaluate LLMs across diverse scenarios, finding that even the best-performing models achieve less than 40% full-success rate. Error analysis reveals that agents struggle with deep search and product selection in long trajectories, fail to balance the use of personalization cues, and to effectively engage with users. Further training exploration provides practical guidance for overcoming these weaknesses, with the combination of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) yielding significant performance improvements. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/ShopAgent-Team/ShopSimulator.
Abstract: Deep homography estimation has broad applications in computer vision and robotics. Remarkable progresses have been achieved while the existing methods typically treat it as a direct regression or iterative refinement problem and often struggling to capture complex geometric transformations or generalize across different domains. In this work, we propose HomoFM, a new framework that introduces the flow matching technique from generative modeling into the homography estimation task for the first time. Unlike the existing methods, we formulate homography estimation problem as a velocity field learning problem. By modeling a continuous and point-wise velocity field that transforms noisy distributions into registered coordinates, the proposed network recovers high-precision transformations through a conditional flow trajectory. Furthermore, to address the challenge of domain shifts issue, e.g., the cases of multimodal matching or varying illumination scenarios, we integrate a gradient reversal layer (GRL) into the feature extraction backbone. This domain adaptation strategy explicitly constrains the encoder to learn domain-invariant representations, significantly enhancing the network's robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, showing that HomoFM outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both estimation accuracy and robustness on standard benchmarks. Code and data resource are available at https://github.com/hmf21/HomoFM.
Abstract: Existing multimodal document question-answering (QA) systems predominantly rely on flat semantic retrieval, representing documents as a set of disconnected text chunks and largely neglecting their intrinsic hierarchical and relational structures. Such flattening disrupts logical and spatial dependencies - such as section organization, figure-text correspondence, and cross-reference relations, that humans naturally exploit for comprehension. To address this limitation, we introduce a document-level structural Document MAP (DMAP), which explicitly encodes both hierarchical organization and inter-element relationships within multimodal documents. Specifically, we design a Structured-Semantic Understanding Agent to construct DMAP by organizing textual content together with figures, tables, charts, etc. into a human-aligned hierarchical schema that captures both semantic and layout dependencies. Building upon this representation, a Reflective Reasoning Agent performs structure-aware and evidence-driven reasoning, dynamically assessing the sufficiency of retrieved context and iteratively refining answers through targeted interactions with DMAP. Extensive experiments on MMDocQA benchmarks demonstrate that DMAP yields document-specific structural representations aligned with human interpretive patterns, substantially enhancing retrieval precision, reasoning consistency, and multimodal comprehension over conventional RAG-based approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/Forlorin/DMAP
Abstract: Visual quality assessment (VQA) is increasingly shifting from scalar score prediction toward interpretable quality understanding -- a paradigm that demands \textit{fine-grained spatiotemporal perception} and \textit{auxiliary contextual information}. Current approaches rely on supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning on curated instruction datasets, which involve labor-intensive annotation and are prone to dataset-specific biases. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{QualiRAG}, a \textit{training-free} \textbf{R}etrieval-\textbf{A}ugmented \textbf{G}eneration \textbf{(RAG)} framework that systematically leverages the latent perceptual knowledge of large multimodal models (LMMs) for visual quality perception. Unlike conventional RAG that retrieves from static corpora, QualiRAG dynamically generates auxiliary knowledge by decomposing questions into structured requests and constructing four complementary knowledge sources: \textit{visual metadata}, \textit{subject localization}, \textit{global quality summaries}, and \textit{local quality descriptions}, followed by relevance-aware retrieval for evidence-grounded reasoning. Extensive experiments show that QualiRAG achieves substantial improvements over open-source general-purpose LMMs and VQA-finetuned LMMs on visual quality understanding tasks, and delivers competitive performance on visual quality comparison tasks, demonstrating robust quality assessment capabilities without any task-specific training. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/clh124/QualiRAG.
Abstract: Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models like CLIP have significantly advanced Remote Sensing Image-Text Retrieval (RSITR). However, existing methods predominantly rely on coarse-grained global alignment, which often overlooks the dense, multi-scale semantics inherent in overhead imagery. Moreover, adapting these heavy models via full fine-tuning incurs prohibitive computational costs and risks catastrophic forgetting. To address these challenges, we propose MPS-CLIP, a parameter-efficient framework designed to shift the retrieval paradigm from global matching to keyword-guided fine-grained alignment. Specifically, we leverage a Large Language Model (LLM) to extract core semantic keywords, guiding the Segment Anything Model (SamGeo) to generate semantically relevant sub-perspectives. To efficiently adapt the frozen backbone, we introduce a Gated Global Attention (G^2A) adapter, which captures global context and long-range dependencies with minimal overhead. Furthermore, a Multi-Perspective Representation (MPR) module aggregates these local cues into robust multi-perspective embeddings. The framework is optimized via a hybrid objective combining multi-perspective contrastive and weighted triplet losses, which dynamically selects maximum-response perspectives to suppress noise and enforce precise semantic matching. Extensive experiments on the RSICD and RSITMD benchmarks demonstrate that MPS-CLIP achieves state-of-the-art performance with 35.18% and 48.40% mean Recall (mR), respectively, significantly outperforming full fine-tuning baselines and recent competitive methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Lcrucial1f/MPS-CLIP.
Abstract: Transarterial chemoembolization (TACE) is a preferred treatment option for hepatocellular carcinoma and other liver malignancies, yet it remains a highly challenging procedure due to complex intra-operative vascular navigation and anatomical variability. Accurate and robust 2D-3D vessel registration is essential to guide microcatheter and instruments during TACE, enabling precise localization of vascular structures and optimal therapeutic targeting. To tackle this issue, we develop a coarse-to-fine registration strategy. First, we introduce a global alignment module, structure-aware perspective n-point (SA-PnP), to establish correspondence between 2D and 3D vessel structures. Second, we propose TempDiffReg, a temporal diffusion model that performs vessel deformation iteratively by leveraging temporal context to capture complex anatomical variations and local structural changes. We collected data from 23 patients and constructed 626 paired multi-frame samples for comprehensive evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in both accuracy and anatomical plausibility. Specifically, our method achieves a mean squared error (MSE) of 0.63 mm and a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.51 mm in registration accuracy, representing 66.7\% lower MSE and 17.7\% lower MAE compared to the most competitive existing approaches. It has the potential to assist less-experienced clinicians in safely and efficiently performing complex TACE procedures, ultimately enhancing both surgical outcomes and patient care. Code and data are available at: \textcolor{blue}{https://github.com/LZH970328/TempDiffReg.git}
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have progressed rapidly; however, most state-of-the-art models are trained and evaluated primarily in high-resource languages such as English and Chinese, and are often developed by a small number of organizations with access to large-scale compute and data. This gatekeeping creates a practical barrier for sovereign settings in which a regional- or national-scale institution or domain owner must retain control and understanding of model weights, training data, and deployment while operating under limited resources and strict transparency constraints. To this end, we identify two core requirements: (1) adoptability, the ability to transform a base model into a general-purpose assistant, and (2) sovereign capability, the ability to perform high-stakes, region-specific tasks (e.g., legal reasoning in local languages and cultural knowledge). We investigate whether these requirements can be achieved without scaling massive instruction corpora or relying on complex preference tuning pipelines and large-scale reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). We present Typhoon S, a minimal and open post-training recipe that combines supervised fine-tuning, on-policy distillation, and small-scale RFT. Using Thai as a representative case study, we demonstrate that our approach transforms both sovereign-adapted and general-purpose base models into instruction-tuned models with strong general performance. We further show that small-scale RFT with InK-GRPO -- an extension of GRPO that augments the GRPO loss with a next-word prediction loss -- improves Thai legal reasoning and Thai-specific knowledge while preserving general capabilities. Our results suggest that a carefully designed post-training strategy can reduce the required scale of instruction data and computation, providing a practical path toward high-quality sovereign LLMs under academic-scale resources.
Abstract: LLM-based web agents have become increasingly popular for their utility in daily life and work. However, they exhibit critical vulnerabilities when processing malicious URLs: accepting a disguised malicious URL enables subsequent access to unsafe webpages, which can cause severe damage to service providers and users. Despite this risk, no benchmark currently targets this emerging threat. To address this gap, we propose MalURLBench, the first benchmark for evaluating LLMs' vulnerabilities to malicious URLs. MalURLBench contains 61,845 attack instances spanning 10 real-world scenarios and 7 categories of real malicious websites. Experiments with 12 popular LLMs reveal that existing models struggle to detect elaborately disguised malicious URLs. We further identify and analyze key factors that impact attack success rates and propose URLGuard, a lightweight defense module. We believe this work will provide a foundational resource for advancing the security of web agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/JiangYingEr/MalURLBench.
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly costly to deploy, motivating extensive research on model pruning. However, most existing studies focus on instruction-following LLMs, leaving it unclear whether established pruning strategies transfer to reasoning-augmented models that explicitly generate long intermediate reasoning traces. In this work, we conduct a controlled study of pruning for both instruction-following ($\textbf{LLM-instruct}$) and reasoning-augmented ($\textbf{LLM-think}$) models. To isolate the effects of pruning, we align pruning calibration and post-pruning recovery data with each model's original training distribution, which we show yields more stable and reliable pruning behavior. We evaluate static depth pruning, static width pruning, and dynamic pruning across 17 tasks spanning classification, generation, and reasoning. Our results reveal clear paradigm-dependent differences: depth pruning outperforms width pruning on classification tasks, while width pruning is more robust for generation and reasoning. Moreover, static pruning better preserves reasoning performance, whereas dynamic pruning excels on classification and generation but remains challenging for long-chain reasoning. These findings underscore the need for pruning strategies that explicitly account for the distinct characteristics of reasoning-augmented LLMs. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/LRM-Pruning.
Abstract: Despite the growing adoption of large language models (LLMs) in scientific research workflows, automated support for academic rebuttal, a crucial step in academic communication and peer review, remains largely underexplored. Existing approaches typically rely on off-the-shelf LLMs or simple pipelines, which struggle with long-context understanding and often fail to produce targeted and persuasive responses. In this paper, we propose DRPG, an agentic framework for automatic academic rebuttal generation that operates through four steps: Decompose reviews into atomic concerns, Retrieve relevant evidence from the paper, Plan rebuttal strategies, and Generate responses accordingly. Notably, the Planner in DRPG reaches over 98% accuracy in identifying the most feasible rebuttal direction. Experiments on data from top-tier conferences demonstrate that DRPG significantly outperforms existing rebuttal pipelines and achieves performance beyond the average human level using only an 8B model. Our analysis further demonstrates the effectiveness of the planner design and its value in providing multi-perspective and explainable suggestions. We also showed that DRPG works well in a more complex multi-round setting. These results highlight the effectiveness of DRPG and its potential to provide high-quality rebuttal content and support the scaling of academic discussions. Codes for this work are available at https://github.com/ulab-uiuc/DRPG-RebuttalAgent.
Abstract: As an emerging type of AI computing accelerator, SRAM Computing-In-Memory (CIM) accelerators feature high energy efficiency and throughput. However, various CIM designs and under-explored mapping strategies impede the full exploration of compute and storage balancing in SRAM-CIM accelerator, potentially leading to significant performance degradation. To address this issue, we propose CIM-Tuner, an automatic tool for hardware balancing and optimal mapping strategy under area constraint via hardware-mapping co-exploration. It ensures universality across various CIM designs through a matrix abstraction of CIM macros and a generalized accelerator template. For efficient mapping with different hardware configurations, it employs fine-grained two-level strategies comprising accelerator-level scheduling and macro-level tiling. Compared to prior CIM mapping, CIM-Tuner's extended strategy space achieves 1.58$\times$ higher energy efficiency and 2.11$\times$ higher throughput. Applied to SOTA CIM accelerators with identical area budget, CIM-Tuner also delivers comparable improvements. The simulation accuracy is silicon-verified and CIM-Tuner tool is open-sourced at https://github.com/champloo2878/CIM-Tuner.git.
Abstract: Verilog's design cycle is inherently labor-intensive and necessitates extensive domain expertise. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising pathway toward automation, their limited training data and intrinsic sequential reasoning fail to capture the strict formal logic and concurrency inherent in hardware systems. To overcome these barriers, we present EvolVE, the first framework to analyze multiple evolution strategies on chip design tasks, revealing that Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) excels at maximizing functional correctness, while Idea-Guided Refinement (IGR) proves superior for optimization. We further leverage Structured Testbench Generation (STG) to accelerate the evolutionary process. To address the lack of complex optimization benchmarks, we introduce IC-RTL, targeting industry-scale problems derived from the National Integrated Circuit Contest. Evaluations establish EvolVE as the new state-of-the-art, achieving 98.1% on VerilogEval v2 and 92% on RTLLM v2. Furthermore, on the industry-scale IC-RTL suite, our framework surpasses reference implementations authored by contest participants, reducing the Power, Performance, Area (PPA) product by up to 66% in Huffman Coding and 17% in the geometric mean across all problems. The source code of the IC-RTL benchmark is available at https://github.com/weiber2002/ICRTL.
Abstract: Dielectric materials are critical building blocks for modern electronics such as sensors, actuators, and transistors. With the rapid recent advance in soft and stretchable electronics for emerging human- and robot-interfacing applications, there is a surging need for high-performance dielectric elastomers. However, it remains a grand challenge to develop soft elastomers that simultaneously possess high dielectric constants (k, related to energy storage capacity) and low Young's moduli (E, related to mechanical flexibility). While some new elastomer designs have been reported in individual (mostly one-off) studies, almost no structured dataset is currently available for dielectric elastomers that systematically encompasses their molecular sequence, dielectric, and mechanical properties. Within this context, we curate a compact, high-quality dataset of acrylate-based dielectric elastomers, one of the most widely explored elastomer backbones due to its versatile chemistry and molecular design flexibility, by screening and aggregating experimental results from the literature over the past 10 years. Building on this dataset, we propose a multimodal learning framework that leverages large-scale pretrained polymer representations from graph- and sequence-based encoders. These pretrained embeddings transfer rich chemical and structural knowledge from vast polymer corpora, enabling accurate few-shot prediction of both dielectric and mechanical properties from molecular sequences. Our results represent a new paradigm for transferring knowledge from pretrained multimodal models to overcome severe data scarcity, which can be readily translated to other polymer backbones (e.g., silicones, urethanes) and thus accelerate data-efficient discovery of soft high-k dielectric elastomers. Our source code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/HySonLab/Polymers
Abstract: Implicit feedback -- the main data source for training Recommender Systems (RSs) -- is inherently noisy and has been shown to negatively affect recommendation effectiveness. Denoising has been proposed as a method for removing noisy implicit feedback and improving recommendations. Prior work has focused on in-training denoising, however this requires additional data, changes to the model architecture and training procedure or fine-tuning, all of which can be costly and data hungry. In this work, we focus on post-training denoising. Different from in-training denoising, post-training denoising does not involve changing the architecture of the model nor its training procedure, and does not require additional data. Specifically, we present a method for post-training denoising user profiles using Large Language Models (LLMs) for Collaborative Filtering (CF) recommendations. Our approach prompts LLMs with (i) a user profile (user interactions), (ii) a candidate item, and (iii) its rank as given by the CF recommender, and asks the LLM to remove items from the user profile to improve the rank of the candidate item. Experiments with a state-of-the-art CF recommender and 4 open and closed source LLMs in 3 datasets show that our denoising yields improvements up to 13% in effectiveness over the original user profiles. Our code is available at https://github.com/edervishaj/denoising-user-profiles-LLM.
Abstract: Pedestrian detection is a critical task in robot perception. Multispectral modalities (visible light and thermal) can boost pedestrian detection performance by providing complementary visual information. Several gaps remain with multispectral pedestrian detection methods. First, existing approaches primarily focus on spatial fusion and often neglect temporal information. Second, RGB and thermal image pairs in multispectral benchmarks may not always be perfectly aligned. Pedestrians are also challenging to detect due to varying lighting conditions, occlusion, etc. This work proposes Strip-Fusion, a spatial-temporal fusion network that is robust to misalignment in input images, as well as varying lighting conditions and heavy occlusions. The Strip-Fusion pipeline integrates temporally adaptive convolutions to dynamically weigh spatial-temporal features, enabling our model to better capture pedestrian motion and context over time. A novel Kullback-Leibler divergence loss was designed to mitigate modality imbalance between visible and thermal inputs, guiding feature alignment toward the more informative modality during training. Furthermore, a novel post-processing algorithm was developed to reduce false positives. Extensive experimental results show that our method performs competitively for both the KAIST and the CVC-14 benchmarks. We also observed significant improvements compared to previous state-of-the-art on challenging conditions such as heavy occlusion and misalignment.
Abstract: Foundation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) show strong generalization, yet adapting them to medical images remains difficult due to domain shift, scarce labels, and the inability of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) to exploit unlabeled data. While conventional models like U-Net excel in semi-supervised medical learning, their potential to assist a PEFT SAM has been largely overlooked. We introduce SC-SAM, a specialist-generalist framework where U-Net provides point-based prompts and pseudo-labels to guide SAM's adaptation, while SAM serves as a powerful generalist supervisor to regularize U-Net. This reciprocal guidance forms a bidirectional co-training loop that allows both models to effectively exploit the unlabeled data. Across prostate MRI and polyp segmentation benchmarks, our method achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming other existing semi-supervised SAM variants and even medical foundation models like MedSAM, highlighting the value of specialist-generalist cooperation for label-efficient medical image segmentation. Our code is available at https://github.com/vnlvi2k3/SC-SAM.
Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) hold significant promise for medical applications, yet their deployment is often constrained by insufficient alignment and reliability. While Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a potent framework for refining model responses, its efficacy in high-stakes medical contexts remains underexplored, lacking the rigorous empirical groundwork necessary to guide future methodological advances. To bridge this gap, we present the first comprehensive examination of diverse DPO variants within the medical domain, evaluating nine distinct formulations across two medical LVLMs: LLaVA-Med and HuatuoGPT-Vision. Our results reveal several critical limitations: current DPO approaches often yield inconsistent gains over supervised fine-tuning, with their efficacy varying significantly across different tasks and backbones. Furthermore, they frequently fail to resolve fundamental visual misinterpretation errors. Building on these insights, we present a targeted preference construction strategy as a proof-of-concept that explicitly addresses visual misinterpretation errors frequently observed in existing DPO models. This design yields a 3.6% improvement over the strongest existing DPO baseline on visual question-answering tasks. To support future research, we release our complete framework, including all training data, model checkpoints, and our codebase at https://github.com/dmis-lab/med-vlm-dpo.
Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer a compelling paradigm for natural language generation, leveraging parallel decoding and bidirectional attention to achieve superior global coherence compared to autoregressive models. While recent works have accelerated inference via KV cache reuse or heuristic decoding, they overlook the intrinsic inefficiencies within the block-wise diffusion process. Specifically, they suffer from spatial redundancy by modeling informative-sparse suffix regions uniformly and temporal inefficiency by applying fixed denoising schedules across all the decoding process. To address this, we propose Streaming-dLLM, a training-free framework that streamlines inference across both spatial and temporal dimensions. Spatially, we introduce attenuation guided suffix modeling to approximate the full context by pruning redundant mask tokens. Temporally, we employ a dynamic confidence aware strategy with an early exit mechanism, allowing the model to skip unnecessary iterations for converged tokens. Extensive experiments show that Streaming-dLLM achieves up to 68.2X speedup while maintaining generation quality, highlighting its effectiveness in diffusion decoding. The code is available at https://github.com/xiaoshideta/Streaming-dLLM.
Abstract: Named entity recognition (NER) is evolving from a sequence labeling task into a generative paradigm with the rise of large language models (LLMs). We conduct a systematic evaluation of open-source LLMs on both flat and nested NER tasks. We investigate several research questions including the performance gap between generative NER and traditional NER models, the impact of output formats, whether LLMs rely on memorization, and the preservation of general capabilities after fine-tuning. Through experiments across eight LLMs of varying scales and four standard NER datasets, we find that: (1) With parameter-efficient fine-tuning and structured formats like inline bracketed or XML, open-source LLMs achieve performance competitive with traditional encoder-based models and surpass closed-source LLMs like GPT-3; (2) The NER capability of LLMs stems from instruction-following and generative power, not mere memorization of entity-label pairs; and (3) Applying NER instruction tuning has minimal impact on general capabilities of LLMs, even improving performance on datasets like DROP due to enhanced entity understanding. These findings demonstrate that generative NER with LLMs is a promising, user-friendly alternative to traditional methods. We release the data and code at https://github.com/szu-tera/LLMs4NER.
Abstract: A growing body of research suggests that the cognitive processes of large language models (LLMs) differ fundamentally from those of humans. However, existing interpretability methods remain limited in explaining how cognitive abilities are engaged during LLM reasoning. In this paper, we propose UniCog, a unified framework that analyzes LLM cognition via a latent mind space. Formulated as a latent variable model, UniCog encodes diverse abilities from dense model activations into sparse, disentangled latent dimensions. Through extensive analysis on six advanced LLMs, including DeepSeek-V3.2 and GPT-4o, we reveal a Pareto principle of LLM cognition, where a shared reasoning core is complemented by ability-specific signatures. Furthermore, we discover that reasoning failures often manifest as anomalous intensity in latent activations. These findings opens a new paradigm in LLM analysis, providing a cognition grounded view of reasoning dynamics. Finally, leveraging these insights, we introduce a latent-informed candidate prioritization strategy, which improves reasoning performance by up to 7.5% across challenging benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/milksalute/unicog.
Abstract: Bimanual manipulation in cluttered scenes requires policies that remain stable under occlusions, viewpoint and scene variations. Existing vision-language-action models often fail to generalize because (i) multi-view features are fused via view-agnostic token concatenation, yielding weak 3D-consistent spatial understanding, and (ii) language is injected as global conditioning, resulting in coarse instruction grounding. In this paper, we introduce PEAfowl, a perception-enhanced multi-view VLA policy for bimanual manipulation. For spatial reasoning, PEAfowl predicts per-token depth distributions, performs differentiable 3D lifting, and aggregates local cross-view neighbors to form geometrically grounded, cross-view consistent representations. For instruction grounding, we propose to replace global conditioning with a Perceiver-style text-aware readout over frozen CLIP visual features, enabling iterative evidence accumulation. To overcome noisy and incomplete commodity depth without adding inference overhead, we apply training-only depth distillation from a pretrained depth teacher to supervise the depth-distribution head, providing perception front-end with geometry-aware priors. On RoboTwin 2.0 under domain-randomized setting, PEAfowl improves the strongest baseline by 23.0 pp in success rate, and real-robot experiments further demonstrate reliable sim-to-real transfer and consistent improvements from depth distillation. Project website: https://peafowlvla.github.io/.
Abstract: For the past three decades, the architecture of the internet has rested on two primary pillars - communication on the World Wide Web and Value such as Bitcoin/Distributed ledgers. However, a third critical pillar, Private Coordination has remained dependent on centralised intermediaries, effectively creating a surveillance architecture by default. This paper introduces the 'Stateless Pattern', a novel network topology that replaces the traditional 'Fortress' security model (database-centric) with a 'Mist' model (ephemeral relays). By utilising client-side cryptography and self-destructing server instances, we demonstrate a protocol where the server acts as a blind medium rather than a custodian of state. We present empirical data from a live deployment (https://signingroom.io), analysing over 1,900 requests and cache-hit ratios to validate the system's 'Zero-Knowledge' properties and institutional utility. The findings suggest that digital privacy can be commoditised as a utility, technically enforcing specific articles of the universal declaration of human rights not through policy, but through physics.
Abstract: Current Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) typically encode frames via a vision encoder and employ an autoregressive (AR) LLM for understanding and generation. However, this AR paradigm inevitably faces a dual efficiency bottleneck: strictly unidirectional attention compromises understanding efficiency by hindering global spatiotemporal aggregation, while serial decoding restricts generation efficiency. To address this, we propose VidLaDA, a Video LLM based on Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) that leverages bidirectional attention to unlock comprehensive spatiotemporal modeling and decode tokens in parallel. To further mitigate the computational overhead of diffusion decoding, we introduce MARS-Cache, an acceleration strategy that prunes redundancy by combining asynchronous visual cache refreshing with frame-wise chunk attention. Experiments show VidLaDA rivals state-of-the-art AR baselines (e.g., Qwen2.5-VL and LLaVA-Video) and outperforms DLM baselines, with MARS-Cache delivering over 12x speedup without compromising accuracy. Code and checkpoints are open-sourced at https://github.com/ziHoHe/VidLaDA.
Abstract: Promptable segmentation has emerged as a powerful paradigm in computer vision, enabling users to guide models in parsing complex scenes with prompts such as clicks, boxes, or textual cues. Recent advances, exemplified by the Segment Anything Model (SAM), have extended this paradigm to videos and multi-view images. However, the lack of 3D awareness often leads to inconsistent results, necessitating costly per-scene optimization to enforce 3D consistency. In this work, we introduce MV-SAM, a framework for multi-view segmentation that achieves 3D consistency using pointmaps -- 3D points reconstructed from unposed images by recent visual geometry models. Leveraging the pixel-point one-to-one correspondence of pointmaps, MV-SAM lifts images and prompts into 3D space, eliminating the need for explicit 3D networks or annotated 3D data. Specifically, MV-SAM extends SAM by lifting image embeddings from its pretrained encoder into 3D point embeddings, which are decoded by a transformer using cross-attention with 3D prompt embeddings. This design aligns 2D interactions with 3D geometry, enabling the model to implicitly learn consistent masks across views through 3D positional embeddings. Trained on the SA-1B dataset, our method generalizes well across domains, outperforming SAM2-Video and achieving comparable performance with per-scene optimization baselines on NVOS, SPIn-NeRF, ScanNet++, uCo3D, and DL3DV benchmarks. Code will be released.
Abstract: In recent years, the success of large language models (LLMs) has driven the exploration of scaling laws in recommender systems. However, models that demonstrate scaling laws are actually challenging to deploy in industrial settings for modeling long sequences of user behaviors, due to the high computational complexity of the standard self-attention mechanism. Despite various sparse self-attention mechanisms proposed in other fields, they are not fully suited for recommendation scenarios. This is because user behaviors exhibit personalization and temporal characteristics: different users have distinct behavior patterns, and these patterns change over time, with data from these users differing significantly from data in other fields in terms of distribution. To address these challenges, we propose SparseCTR, an efficient and effective model specifically designed for long-term behaviors of users. To be precise, we first segment behavior sequences into chunks in a personalized manner to avoid separating continuous behaviors and enable parallel processing of sequences. Based on these chunks, we propose a three-branch sparse self-attention mechanism to jointly identify users' global interests, interest transitions, and short-term interests. Furthermore, we design a composite relative temporal encoding via learnable, head-specific bias coefficients, better capturing sequential and periodic relationships among user behaviors. Extensive experimental results show that SparseCTR not only improves efficiency but also outperforms state-of-the-art methods. More importantly, it exhibits an obvious scaling law phenomenon, maintaining performance improvements across three orders of magnitude in FLOPs. In online A/B testing, SparseCTR increased CTR by 1.72\% and CPM by 1.41\%. Our source code is available at https://github.com/laiweijiang/SparseCTR.
Abstract: In this paper, we present DIETA, a small, decoder-only Transformer model with 0.5 billion parameters, specifically designed and trained for Italian-English machine translation. We collect and curate a large parallel corpus consisting of approximately 207 million Italian-English sentence pairs across diverse domains, including parliamentary proceedings, legal texts, web-crawled content, subtitles, news, literature and 352 million back-translated data using pretrained models. Additionally, we create and release a new small-scale evaluation set, consisting of 450 sentences, based on 2025 WikiNews articles, enabling assessment of translation quality on contemporary text. Comprehensive evaluations show that DIETA achieves competitive performance on multiple Italian-English benchmarks, consistently ranking in the second quartile of a 32-system leaderboard and outperforming most other sub-3B models on four out of five test suites. The training script, trained models, curated corpus, and newly introduced evaluation set are made publicly available, facilitating further research and development in specialized Italian-English machine translation. https://github.com/pkasela/DIETA-Machine-Translation
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced rapidly, yet heterogeneity in architecture, alignment strategies, and efficiency means that no single model is uniformly superior across tasks. In practical deployments, workloads span lightweight OCR to complex multimodal reasoning; using one MLLM for all queries either over-provisions compute on easy instances or sacrifices accuracy on hard ones. Query-level model selection (routing) addresses this tension, but extending routing from text-only LLMs to MLLMs is nontrivial due to modality fusion, wide variation in computational cost across models, and the absence of a standardized, budget-aware evaluation. We present MMR-Bench, a unified benchmark that isolates the multimodal routing problem and enables comparison under fixed candidate sets and cost models. MMR-Bench provides (i) a controlled environment with modality-aware inputs and variable compute budgets, (ii) a broad suite of vision-language tasks covering OCR, general VQA, and multimodal math reasoning, and (iii) strong single-model reference, oracle upper bounds, and representative routing policies. Using MMR-Bench, we show that incorporating multimodal signals improves routing quality. Empirically, these cues improve the cost-accuracy frontier and enable the routed system to exceed the strongest single model's accuracy at roughly 33% of its cost. Furthermore, policies trained on a subset of models and tasks generalize zero-shot to new datasets and text-only benchmarks without retuning, establishing MMR-Bench as a foundation for studying adaptive multimodal model selection and efficient MLLM deployment. The code will be available at: https://github.com/Hunter-Wrynn/MMR-Bench.
Abstract: Generative recommender systems have recently attracted attention by formulating next-item prediction as an autoregressive sequence generation task. However, most existing methods optimize standard next-token likelihood and implicitly treat all tokens as equally informative, which is misaligned with semantic-ID-based generation. Accordingly, we propose two complementary information-gain-based token-weighting strategies tailored to generative recommendation with semantic IDs. Front-Greater Weighting captures conditional semantic information gain by prioritizing early tokens that most effectively reduce candidate-item uncertainty given their prefixes and encode coarse semantics. Frequency Weighting models marginal information gain under long-tailed item and token distributions, upweighting rare tokens to counteract popularity bias. Beyond individual strategies, we introduce a multi-target learning framework with curriculum learning that jointly optimizes the two token-weighted objectives alongside standard likelihood, enabling stable optimization and adaptive emphasis across training stages. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines and existing token-weighting approaches, with improved robustness, strong generalization across different semantic-ID constructions, and substantial gains on both head and tail items. Code is available at https://github.com/CHIUWEINING/Token-Weighted-Multi-Target-Learning-for-Generative-Recommenders-with-Curriculum-Learning.
Abstract: Text anomaly detection (TAD) plays a critical role in various language-driven real-world applications, including harmful content moderation, phishing detection, and spam review filtering. While two-step "embedding-detector" TAD methods have shown state-of-the-art performance, their effectiveness is often limited by the use of a single embedding model and the lack of adaptability across diverse datasets and anomaly types. To address these limitations, we propose to exploit the embeddings from multiple pretrained language models and integrate them into $MCA^2$, a multi-view TAD framework. $MCA^2$ adopts a multi-view reconstruction model to effectively extract normal textual patterns from multiple embedding perspectives. To exploit inter-view complementarity, a contrastive collaboration module is designed to leverage and strengthen the interactions across different views. Moreover, an adaptive allocation module is developed to automatically assign the contribution weight of each view, thereby improving the adaptability to diverse datasets. Extensive experiments on 10 benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of $MCA^2$ against strong baselines. The source code of $MCA^2$ is available at https://github.com/yankehan/MCA2.
Abstract: In LLM inference, the same prompt may yield different outputs across different runs. At the system level, this non-determinism arises from floating-point non-associativity combined with dynamic batching and GPU kernels whose reduction orders vary with batch size. A straightforward way to eliminate non-determinism is to disable dynamic batching during inference, but doing so severely degrades throughput. Another approach is to make kernels batch-invariant; however, this tightly couples determinism to kernel design, requiring new implementations. This coupling also imposes fixed runtime overheads, regardless of how much of the workload actually requires determinism. Inspired by ideas from speculative decoding, we present LLM-42, a scheduling-based approach to enable determinism in LLM inference. Our key observation is that if a sequence is in a consistent state, the next emitted token is likely to be consistent even with dynamic batching. Moreover, most GPU kernels use shape-consistent reductions. Leveraging these insights, LLM-42 decodes tokens using a non-deterministic fast path and enforces determinism via a lightweight verify-rollback loop. The verifier replays candidate tokens under a fixed-shape reduction schedule, commits those that are guaranteed to be consistent across runs, and rolls back those violating determinism. LLM-42 mostly re-uses existing kernels unchanged and incurs overhead only in proportion to the traffic that requires determinism.
Abstract: Existing Subject-to-Video Generation (S2V) methods have achieved high-fidelity and subject-consistent video generation, yet remain constrained to single-view subject references. This limitation renders the S2V task reducible to an S2I + I2V pipeline, failing to exploit the full potential of video subject control. In this work, we propose and address the challenging Multi-View S2V (MV-S2V) task, which synthesizes videos from multiple reference views to enforce 3D-level subject consistency. Regarding the scarcity of training data, we first develop a synthetic data curation pipeline to generate highly customized synthetic data, complemented by a small-scale real-world captured dataset to boost the training of MV-S2V. Another key issue lies in the potential confusion between cross-subject and cross-view references in conditional generation. To overcome this, we further introduce Temporally Shifted RoPE (TS-RoPE) to distinguish between different subjects and distinct views of the same subject in reference conditioning. Our framework achieves superior 3D subject consistency w.r.t. multi-view reference images and high-quality visual outputs, establishing a new meaningful direction for subject-driven video generation. Our project page is available at: https://szy-young.github.io/mv-s2v
Abstract: Autonomous agent systems increasingly trigger real-world side effects: deploying infrastructure, modifying databases, moving money, and executing workflows. Yet most agent stacks provide no mandatory execution checkpoint where organizations can deterministically permit, deny, or defer an action before it changes reality. This paper introduces Faramesh, a protocol-agnostic execution control plane that enforces execution-time authorization for agent-driven actions via a non-bypassable Action Authorization Boundary (AAB). Faramesh canonicalizes agent intent into a Canonical Action Representation (CAR), evaluates actions deterministically against policy and state, and issues a decision artifact (PERMIT/DEFER/DENY) that executors must validate prior to execution. The system is designed to be framework- and model-agnostic, supports multi-agent and multi-tenant deployments, and remains independent of transport protocols (e.g., MCP). Faramesh further provides decision-centric, append-only provenance logging keyed by canonical action hashes, enabling auditability, verification, and deterministic replay without re-running agent reasoning. We show how these primitives yield enforceable, predictable governance for autonomous execution while avoiding hidden coupling to orchestration layers or observability-only approaches.
Abstract: Relational databases (RDBs) play a crucial role in many real-world web applications, supporting data management across multiple interconnected tables. Beyond typical retrieval-oriented tasks, prediction tasks on RDBs have recently gained attention. In this work, we address this problem by generating informative relational features that enhance predictive performance. However, generating such features is challenging: it requires reasoning over complex schemas and exploring a combinatorially large feature space, all without explicit supervision. To address these challenges, we propose ReFuGe, an agentic framework that leverages specialized large language model agents: (1) a schema selection agent identifies the tables and columns relevant to the task, (2) a feature generation agent produces diverse candidate features from the selected schema, and (3) a feature filtering agent evaluates and retains promising features through reasoning-based and validation-based filtering. It operates within an iterative feedback loop until performance converges. Experiments on RDB benchmarks demonstrate that ReFuGe substantially improves performance on various RDB prediction tasks. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/K-Kyungho/REFUGE.
Abstract: Distributed microphone array (DMA) is a promising next-generation platform for speech interaction, where speech enhancement (SE) is still required to improve the speech quality in noisy cases. Existing SE methods usually first gather raw waveforms at a fusion center (FC) from all devices and then design a multi-microphone model, causing high bandwidth and energy costs. In this work, we propose a \emph{Compress-and-Send Network (CaSNet)} for resource-constrained DMAs, where one microphone serves as the FC and reference. Each of other devices encodes the measured raw data into a feature matrix, which is then compressed by singular value decomposition (SVD) to produce a more compact representation. The received features at the FC are aligned via cross window query with respect to the reference, followed by neural decoding to yield spatially coherent enhanced speech. Experiments on multiple datasets show that the proposed CaSNet can save the data amount with a negligible impact on the performance compared to the uncompressed case. The reproducible code is available at https://github.com/Jokejiangv/CaSNet.
Abstract: Images often communicate more than they literally depict: a set of tools can suggest an occupation and a cultural artifact can suggest a tradition. This kind of indirect visual reference, known as visual metonymy, invites viewers to recover a target concept via associated cues rather than explicit depiction. In this work, we present the first computational investigation of visual metonymy. We introduce a novel pipeline grounded in semiotic theory that leverages large language models and text-to-image models to generate metonymic visual representations. Using this framework, we construct ViMET, the first visual metonymy dataset comprising 2,000 multiple-choice questions to evaluate the cognitive reasoning abilities in multimodal language models. Experimental results on our dataset reveal a significant gap between human performance (86.9%) and state-of-the-art vision-language models (65.9%), highlighting limitations in machines' ability to interpret indirect visual references. Our dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/cincynlp/ViMET.
Abstract: Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has accomplished extraordinary success for semantic understanding but inherently struggles to perceive geometric structure. Existing methods attempt to bridge this gap by querying CLIP with textual prompts, a process that is often indirect and inefficient. This paper introduces a fundamentally different approach using a dual-pathway decoder. We present SPACE-CLIP, an architecture that unlocks and interprets latent geometric knowledge directly from a frozen CLIP vision encoder, completely bypassing the text encoder and its associated textual prompts. A semantic pathway interprets high-level features, dynamically conditioned on global context using feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM). In addition, a structural pathway extracts fine-grained spatial details from early layers. These complementary streams are hierarchically fused, enabling a robust synthesis of semantic context and precise geometry. Extensive experiments on the KITTI benchmark show that SPACE-CLIP dramatically outperforms previous CLIP-based methods. Our ablation studies validate that the synergistic fusion of our dual pathways is critical to this success. SPACE-CLIP offers a new, efficient, and architecturally elegant blueprint for repurposing large-scale vision models. The proposed method is not just a standalone depth estimator, but a readily integrable spatial perception module for the next generation of embodied AI systems, such as vision-language-action (VLA) models. Our model is available at https://github.com/taewan2002/space-clip
Abstract: Prefetching and off-chip prediction are two techniques proposed to hide long memory access latencies in high-performance processors. In this work, we demonstrate that: (1) prefetching and off-chip prediction often provide complementary performance benefits, yet (2) naively combining them often fails to realize their full performance potential, and (3) existing prefetcher control policies leave significant room for performance improvement behind. Our goal is to design a holistic framework that can autonomously learn to coordinate an off-chip predictor with multiple prefetchers employed at various cache levels. To this end, we propose a new technique called Athena, which models the coordination between prefetchers and off-chip predictor (OCP) as a reinforcement learning (RL) problem. Athena acts as the RL agent that observes multiple system-level features (e.g., prefetcher/OCP accuracy, bandwidth usage) over an epoch of program execution, and uses them as state information to select a coordination action (i.e., enabling the prefetcher and/or OCP, and adjusting prefetcher aggressiveness). At the end of every epoch, Athena receives a numerical reward that measures the change in multiple system-level metrics (e.g., number of cycles taken to execute an epoch). Athena uses this reward to autonomously and continuously learn a policy to coordinate prefetchers with OCP. Our extensive evaluation using a diverse set of memory-intensive workloads shows that Athena consistently outperforms prior state-of-the-art coordination policies across a wide range of system configurations with various combinations of underlying prefetchers, OCPs, and main memory bandwidths, while incurring only modest storage overhead. Athena is freely available at https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/Athena.
Abstract: Deep learning models in medical image analysis often struggle with generalizability across domains and demographic groups due to data heterogeneity and scarcity. Traditional augmentation improves robustness, but fails under substantial domain shifts. Recent advances in stylistic augmentation enhance domain generalization by varying image styles but fall short in terms of style diversity or by introducing artifacts into the generated images. To address these limitations, we propose Stylizing ViT, a novel Vision Transformer encoder that utilizes weight-shared attention blocks for both self- and cross-attention. This design allows the same attention block to maintain anatomical consistency through self-attention while performing style transfer via cross-attention. We assess the effectiveness of our method for domain generalization by employing it for data augmentation on three distinct image classification tasks in the context of histopathology and dermatology. Results demonstrate an improved robustness (up to +13% accuracy) over the state of the art while generating perceptually convincing images without artifacts. Additionally, we show that Stylizing ViT is effective beyond training, achieving a 17% performance improvement during inference when used for test-time augmentation. The source code is available at https://github.com/sdoerrich97/stylizing-vit .
Abstract: The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) tests AI systems' ability to perform human-like inductive reasoning from a few demonstration pairs. Existing Gymnasium-based RL environments severely limit experimental scale due to computational bottlenecks. We present JaxARC, an open-source, high-performance RL environment for ARC implemented in JAX. Its functional, stateless architecture enables massive parallelism, achieving 38-5,439x speedup over Gymnasium at matched batch sizes, with peak throughput of 790M steps/second. JaxARC supports multiple ARC datasets, flexible action spaces, composable wrappers, and configuration-driven reproducibility, enabling large-scale RL research previously computationally infeasible. JaxARC is available at https://github.com/aadimator/JaxARC.
Abstract: Adapter-based Federated Large Language Models (FedLLMs) are widely adopted to reduce the computational, storage, and communication overhead of full-parameter fine-tuning for web-scale applications while preserving user privacy. By freezing the backbone and training only compact low-rank adapters, these methods appear to limit gradient leakage and thwart existing Gradient Inversion Attacks (GIAs). Contrary to this assumption, we show that low-rank adapters create new, exploitable leakage channels. We propose the Unordered-word-bag-based Text Reconstruction (UTR) attack, a novel GIA tailored to the unique structure of adapter-based FedLLMs. UTR overcomes three core challenges: low-dimensional gradients, frozen backbones, and combinatorially large reconstruction spaces by: (i) inferring token presence from attention patterns in frozen layers, (ii) performing sentence-level inversion within the low-rank subspace of adapter gradients, and (iii) enforcing semantic coherence through constrained greedy decoding guided by language priors. Extensive experiments across diverse models (GPT2-Large, BERT, Qwen2.5-7B) and datasets (CoLA, SST-2, Rotten Tomatoes) demonstrate that UTR achieves near-perfect reconstruction accuracy (ROUGE-1/2 > 99), even with large batch size settings where prior GIAs fail completely. Our results reveal a fundamental tension between parameter efficiency and privacy in FedLLMs, challenging the prevailing belief that lightweight adaptation inherently enhances security. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/shwksnshwowk-wq/GIA.
Abstract: Deep learning has revolutionized medical image registration by achieving unprecedented speeds, yet its clinical application is hindered by a limited ability to generalize beyond the training domain, a critical weakness given the typically small scale of medical datasets. In this paper, we introduce FMIR, a foundation model-based registration framework that overcomes this limitation.Combining a foundation model-based feature encoder for extracting anatomical structures with a general registration head, and trained with a channel regularization strategy on just a single dataset, FMIR achieves state-of-the-art(SOTA) in-domain performance while maintaining robust registration on out-of-domain images.Our approach demonstrates a viable path toward building generalizable medical imaging foundation models with limited resources. The code is available at https://github.com/Monday0328/FMIR.git.
Abstract: Accurate brain tumor segmentation from multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a prerequisite for precise radiotherapy planning and surgical navigation. While recent Transformer-based models such as Swin UNETR have achieved impressive benchmark performance, their clinical utility is often compromised by two critical issues: sensitivity to missing modalities (common in clinical practice) and a lack of confidence calibration. Merely chasing higher Dice scores on idealized data fails to meet the safety requirements of real-world medical deployment. In this work, we propose BMDS-Net, a unified framework that prioritizes clinical robustness and trustworthiness over simple metric maximization. Our contribution is three-fold. First, we construct a robust deterministic backbone by integrating a Zero-Init Multimodal Contextual Fusion (MMCF) module and a Residual-Gated Deep Decoder Supervision (DDS) mechanism, enabling stable feature learning and precise boundary delineation with significantly reduced Hausdorff Distance, even under modality corruption. Second, and most importantly, we introduce a memory-efficient Bayesian fine-tuning strategy that transforms the network into a probabilistic predictor, providing voxel-wise uncertainty maps to highlight potential errors for clinicians. Third, comprehensive experiments on the BraTS 2021 dataset demonstrate that BMDS-Net not only maintains competitive accuracy but, more importantly, exhibits superior stability in missing-modality scenarios where baseline models fail. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/RyanZhou168/BMDS-Net.
Abstract: Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) methods construct sparse lexical representations of queries and documents that can be efficiently searched using inverted indexes. Existing LSR approaches have relied almost exclusively on uncased backbone models, whose vocabularies exclude case-sensitive distinctions, thereby reducing vocabulary mismatch. However, the most recent state-of-the-art language models are only available in cased versions. Despite this shift, the impact of backbone model casing on LSR has not been studied, potentially posing a risk to the viability of the method going forward. To fill this gap, we systematically evaluate paired cased and uncased versions of the same backbone models across multiple datasets to assess their suitability for LSR. Our findings show that LSR models with cased backbone models by default perform substantially worse than their uncased counterparts; however, this gap can be eliminated by pre-processing the text to lowercase. Moreover, our token-level analysis reveals that, under lowercasing, cased models almost entirely suppress cased vocabulary items and behave effectively as uncased models, explaining their restored performance. This result broadens the applicability of recent cased models to the LSR setting and facilitates the integration of stronger backbone architectures into sparse retrieval. The complete code and implementation for this project are available at: https://github.com/lionisakis/Uncased-vs-cased-models-in-LSR
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized Recommender Systems (RS) through advanced generative user modeling. However, LLM-based RS (LLM-RS) often inadvertently perpetuates bias present in the training data, leading to severe fairness issues. Addressing these fairness problems in LLM-RS faces two significant challenges. 1) Existing debiasing methods, designed for specific bias types, lack the generality to handle diverse or emerging biases in real-world applications. 2) Debiasing methods relying on retraining are computationally infeasible given the massive parameter scale of LLMs. To overcome these challenges, we propose FUDLR (Fast Unified Debiasing for LLM-RS). The core idea is to reformulate the debiasing problem as an efficient machine unlearning task with two stages. First, FUDLR identifies bias-inducing samples to unlearn through a novel bias-agnostic mask, optimized to balance fairness improvement with accuracy preservation. Its bias-agnostic design allows adaptability to various or co-existing biases simply by incorporating different fairness metrics. Second, FUDLR performs efficient debiasing by estimating and removing the influence of identified samples on model parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FUDLR effectively and efficiently improves fairness while preserving recommendation accuracy, offering a practical path toward socially responsible LLM-RS. The code and data are available at https://github.com/JinLi-i/FUDLR.
Abstract: Visual imitation learning with 3D point clouds has advanced robotic manipulation by providing geometry-aware, appearance-invariant observations. However, point cloud-based policies remain highly sensitive to sensor noise, pose perturbations, and occlusion-induced artifacts, which distort geometric structure and break the equivariance assumptions required for robust generalization. Existing equivariant approaches primarily encode symmetry constraints into neural architectures, but do not explicitly correct noise-induced geometric deviations or enforce equivariant consistency in learned representations. We introduce EquiForm, a noise-robust SE(3)-equivariant policy learning framework for point cloud-based manipulation. EquiForm formalizes how noise-induced geometric distortions lead to equivariance deviations in observation-to-action mappings, and introduces a geometric denoising module to restore consistent 3D structure under noisy or incomplete observations. In addition, we propose a contrastive equivariant alignment objective that enforces representation consistency under both rigid transformations and noise perturbations. Built upon these components, EquiForm forms a flexible policy learning pipeline that integrates noise-robust geometric reasoning with modern generative models. We evaluate EquiForm on 16 simulated tasks and 4 real-world manipulation tasks across diverse objects and scene layouts. Compared to state-of-the-art point cloud imitation learning methods, EquiForm achieves an average improvement of 17.2% in simulation and 28.1% in real-world experiments, demonstrating strong noise robustness and spatial generalization.
Abstract: Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) has been increasingly explored to address data sparsity and cold-start issues. However, recent approaches typically disentangle domain-invariant features shared between source and target domains, as well as domain-specific features for each domain. However, they often rely solely on domain-invariant features combined with target domain-specific features, which can lead to suboptimal performance. To overcome the limitations, this paper presents the Adversarial Alignment and Disentanglement Cross-Domain Recommendation ($A^2DCDR$ ) model, an innovative approach designed to capture a comprehensive range of cross-domain information, including both domain-invariant and valuable non-aligned features. The $A^2DCDR$ model enhances cross-domain recommendation through three key components: refining MMD with adversarial training for better generalization, employing a feature disentangler and reconstruction mechanism for intra-domain disentanglement, and introducing a novel fused representation combining domain-invariant, non-aligned features with original contextual data. Experiments on real-world datasets and online A/B testing show that $A^2DCDR$ outperforms existing methods, confirming its effectiveness and practical applicability. The code is provided at https://github.com/youzi0925/A-2DCDR/tree/main.
Abstract: Shadow removal under diverse lighting conditions requires disentangling illumination from intrinsic reflectance, a challenge compounded when physical priors are not properly aligned. We propose PhaSR (Physically Aligned Shadow Removal), addressing this through dual-level prior alignment to enable robust performance from single-light shadows to multi-source ambient lighting. First, Physically Aligned Normalization (PAN) performs closed-form illumination correction via Gray-world normalization, log-domain Retinex decomposition, and dynamic range recombination, suppressing chromatic bias. Second, Geometric-Semantic Rectification Attention (GSRA) extends differential attention to cross-modal alignment, harmonizing depth-derived geometry with DINO-v2 semantic embeddings to resolve modal conflicts under varying illumination. Experiments show competitive performance in shadow removal with lower complexity and generalization to ambient lighting where traditional methods fail under multi-source illumination. Our source code is available at https://github.com/ming053l/PhaSR.
Abstract: Single Image Reflection Separation (SIRS) disentangles mixed images into transmission and reflection layers. Existing methods suffer from transmission-reflection confusion under nonlinear mixing, particularly in deep decoder layers, due to implicit fusion mechanisms and inadequate multi-scale coordination. We propose ReflexSplit, a dual-stream framework with three key innovations. (1) Cross-scale Gated Fusion (CrGF) adaptively aggregates semantic priors, texture details, and decoder context across hierarchical depths, stabilizing gradient flow and maintaining feature consistency. (2) Layer Fusion-Separation Blocks (LFSB) alternate between fusion for shared structure extraction and differential separation for layer-specific disentanglement. Inspired by Differential Transformer, we extend attention cancellation to dual-stream separation via cross-stream subtraction. (3) Curriculum training progressively strengthens differential separation through depth-dependent initialization and epoch-wise warmup. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with superior perceptual quality and robust generalization. Our code is available at https://github.com/wuw2135/ReflexSplit.
Abstract: Fetal ultrasound (US) data is often limited due to privacy and regulatory restrictions, posing challenges for training deep learning (DL) models. While semi-supervised learning (SSL) is commonly used for fetal US image analysis, existing SSL methods typically rely on random limited selection, which can lead to suboptimal model performance by overfitting to homogeneous labeled data. To address this, we propose a two-stage Active Learning (AL) sampler, Entropy-Guided Agreement-Diversity (EGAD), for fetal head segmentation. Our method first selects the most uncertain samples using predictive entropy, and then refines the final selection using the agreement-diversity score combining cosine similarity and mutual information. Additionally, our SSL framework employs a consistency learning strategy with feature downsampling to further enhance segmentation performance. In experiments, SSL-EGAD achieves an average Dice score of 94.57\% and 96.32\% on two public datasets for fetal head segmentation, using 5\% and 10\% labeled data for training, respectively. Our method outperforms current SSL models and showcases consistent robustness across diverse pregnancy stage data. The code is available on \href{https://github.com/13204942/Semi-supervised-EGAD}{GitHub}.
Abstract: Generative recommendation has recently emerged as a transformative paradigm that directly generates target items, surpassing traditional cascaded approaches. It typically involves two components: a tokenizer that learns item identifiers and a recommender trained on them. Existing methods often decouple tokenization from recommendation or rely on asynchronous alternating optimization, limiting full end-to-end alignment. To address this, we unify the tokenizer and recommender under the ultimate recommendation objective via differentiable soft item identifiers, enabling joint end-to-end training. However, this introduces three challenges: training-inference discrepancy due to soft-to-hard mismatch, item identifier collapse from codeword usage imbalance, and collaborative signal deficiency due to an overemphasis on fine-grained token-level semantics. To tackle these challenges, we propose UniGRec, a unified generative recommendation framework that addresses them from three perspectives. UniGRec employs Annealed Inference Alignment during tokenization to smoothly bridge soft training and hard inference, a Codeword Uniformity Regularization to prevent identifier collapse and encourage codebook diversity, and a Dual Collaborative Distillation mechanism that distills collaborative priors from a lightweight teacher model to jointly guide both the tokenizer and the recommender. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that UniGRec consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Jialei-03/UniGRec.
Abstract: We study the problem of identifying an anomalous subset of streams under correlated noise, motivated by monitoring and security in cyber-physical systems. This problem can be viewed as a form of combinatorial pure exploration, where each stream plays the role of an arm and measurements must be allocated sequentially under uncertainty. Existing combinatorial bandit and hypothesis testing methods typically assume independent observations and fail to exploit correlation for efficient measurement design. We propose ECC-AHT, an adaptive algorithm that selects continuous, constrained measurements to maximize Chernoff information between competing hypotheses, enabling active noise cancellation through differential sensing. ECC-AHT achieves optimal sample complexity guarantees and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both synthetic and real-world correlated environments. The code is available on https://github.com/VincentdeCristo/ECC-AHT
Abstract: Existing works of reasoning segmentation often fall short in complex cases, particularly when addressing complicated queries and out-of-domain images. Inspired by the chain-of-thought reasoning, where harder problems require longer thinking steps/time, this paper aims to explore a system that can think step-by-step, look up information if needed, generate results, self-evaluate its own results, and refine the results, in the same way humans approach harder questions. We introduce CoT-Seg, a training-free framework that rethinks reasoning segmentation by combining chain-of-thought reasoning with self-correction. Instead of fine-tuning, CoT-Seg leverages the inherent reasoning ability of pre-trained MLLMs (GPT-4o) to decompose queries into meta-instructions, extract fine-grained semantics from images, and identify target objects even under implicit or complex prompts. Moreover, CoT-Seg incorporates a self-correction stage: the model evaluates its own segmentation against the original query and reasoning trace, identifies mismatches, and iteratively refines the mask. This tight integration of reasoning and correction significantly improves reliability and robustness, especially in ambiguous or error-prone cases. Furthermore, our CoT-Seg framework allows easy incorporation of retrieval-augmented reasoning, enabling the system to access external knowledge when the input lacks sufficient information. To showcase CoT-Seg's ability to handle very challenging cases ,we introduce a new dataset ReasonSeg-Hard. Our results highlight that combining chain-of-thought reasoning, self-correction, offers a powerful paradigm for vision-language integration driven segmentation.
Abstract: Watermarking methods have always been effective means of protecting intellectual property, yet they face significant challenges. Although existing deep learning-based watermarking systems can hide watermarks in images with minimal impact on image quality, they often lack robustness when encountering image corruptions during transmission, which undermines their practical application value. To this end, we propose a high-quality and robust watermark framework based on the diffusion model. Our method first converts the clean image into inversion noise through a null-text optimization process, and after optimizing the inversion noise in the latent space, it produces a high-quality watermarked image through an iterative denoising process of the diffusion model. The iterative denoising process serves as a powerful purification mechanism, ensuring both the visual quality of the watermarked image and enhancing the robustness of the watermark against various corruptions. To prevent the optimizing of inversion noise from distorting the original semantics of the image, we specifically introduced self-attention constraints and pseudo-mask strategies. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method against various image corruptions. In particular, our method outperforms the stable signature method by an average of 10\% across 12 different image transformations on COCO datasets. Our codes are available at https://github.com/920927/ONRW.
Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world intelligent systems for perception and reasoning in open physical environments. While LVLMs are known to be vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, existing methods either require access to input channels or depend on knowledge of user queries, assumptions that rarely hold in practical deployments. We propose the first Physical Prompt Injection Attack (PPIA), a black-box, query-agnostic attack that embeds malicious typographic instructions into physical objects perceivable by the LVLM. PPIA requires no access to the model, its inputs, or internal pipeline, and operates solely through visual observation. It combines offline selection of highly recognizable and semantically effective visual prompts with strategic environment-aware placement guided by spatiotemporal attention, ensuring that the injected prompts are both perceivable and influential on model behavior. We evaluate PPIA across 10 state-of-the-art LVLMs in both simulated and real-world settings on tasks including visual question answering, planning, and navigation, PPIA achieves attack success rates up to 98%, with strong robustness under varying physical conditions such as distance, viewpoint, and illumination. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/2023cghacker/Physical-Prompt-Injection-Attack.
Abstract: Existing displacement strategies in semi-supervised segmentation only operate on rectangular regions, ignoring anatomical structures and resulting in boundary distortions and semantic inconsistency. To address these issues, we propose UCAD, an Uncertainty-Guided Contour-Aware Displacement framework for semi-supervised medical image segmentation that preserves contour-aware semantics while enhancing consistency learning. Our UCAD leverages superpixels to generate anatomically coherent regions aligned with anatomy boundaries, and an uncertainty-guided selection mechanism to selectively displace challenging regions for better consistency learning. We further propose a dynamic uncertainty-weighted consistency loss, which adaptively stabilizes training and effectively regularizes the model on unlabeled regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UCAD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised segmentation methods, achieving superior segmentation accuracy under limited annotation. The code is available at:https://github.com/dcb937/UCAD.
Abstract: This study uses Jordanian law as a case study to explore the fine-tuning of the Llama-3.1 large language model for Arabic question-answering. Two versions of the model - Llama-3.1-8B-bnb-4bit and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct-bnb-4bit - were fine-tuned using parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) with LoRA adapters and 4-bit quantized models, leveraging the Unsloth framework for accelerated and resource-efficient training. A custom dataset of 6000 legal question-answer pairs was curated from Jordanian laws and formatted into structured prompts. Performance was evaluated using the BLEU and the ROUGE metrics to compare the fine-tuned models to their respective base versions. Results demonstrated improved legal reasoning and accuracy while achieving resource efficiency through quantization and optimized fine-tuning strategies. This work underscores the potential of adapting large language models for Arabic legal domains and highlights effective techniques for fine-tuning domain-specific tasks.
Abstract: The high cost of agentic workflows in formal mathematics hinders large-scale data synthesis, exacerbating the scarcity of open-source corpora. To address this, we introduce \textbf{TheoremForge}, a cost-effective formal data synthesis pipeline that decomposes the formalization process into five sub-tasks, which are \textit{statement formalization}, \textit{proof generation}, \textit{premise selection}, \textit{proof correction} and \textit{proof sketching}. By implementing a \textit{Decoupled Extraction Strategy}, the workflow recovers valid training signals from globally failed trajectories, effectively utilizing wasted computation. Experiments on a 2,000-problem benchmark demonstrate that TheoremForge achieves a Verified Rate of 12.6\%, surpassing the 8.6\% baseline, at an average cost of only \textbf{\$0.481} per successful trajectory using Gemini-3-Flash. Crucially, our strategy increases data yield by \textbf{1.6$\times$} for proof generation compared to standard filtering. These results establish TheoremForge as a scalable framework for constructing a data flywheel to train future expert models. Our code is available \href{https://github.com/timechess/TheoremForge}{here}.
Abstract: Accurate and robust polyp segmentation is essential for early colorectal cancer detection and for computer-aided diagnosis. While convolutional neural network-, Transformer-, and Mamba-based U-Net variants have achieved strong performance, they still struggle to capture geometric and structural cues, especially in low-contrast or cluttered colonoscopy scenes. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Geometric Prior-guided Module (GPM) that injects explicit geometric priors into U-Net-based architectures for polyp segmentation. Specifically, we fine-tune the Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) on a simulated ColonDepth dataset to estimate depth maps of polyp images tailored to the endoscopic domain. These depth maps are then processed by GPM to encode geometric priors into the encoder's feature maps, where they are further refined using spatial and channel attention mechanisms that emphasize both local spatial and global channel information. GPM is plug-and-play and can be seamlessly integrated into diverse U-Net variants. Extensive experiments on five public polyp segmentation datasets demonstrate consistent gains over three strong baselines. Code and the generated depth maps are available at: https://github.com/fvazqu/GPM-PolypSeg
Abstract: Video generation serves as a cornerstone for building world models, where multimodal contextual inference stands as the defining test of capability. In this end, we present SkyReels-V3, a conditional video generation model, built upon a unified multimodal in-context learning framework with diffusion Transformers. SkyReels-V3 model supports three core generative paradigms within a single architecture: reference images-to-video synthesis, video-to-video extension and audio-guided video generation. (i) reference images-to-video model is designed to produce high-fidelity videos with strong subject identity preservation, temporal coherence, and narrative consistency. To enhance reference adherence and compositional stability, we design a comprehensive data processing pipeline that leverages cross frame pairing, image editing, and semantic rewriting, effectively mitigating copy paste artifacts. During training, an image video hybrid strategy combined with multi-resolution joint optimization is employed to improve generalization and robustness across diverse scenarios. (ii) video extension model integrates spatio-temporal consistency modeling with large-scale video understanding, enabling both seamless single-shot continuation and intelligent multi-shot switching with professional cinematographic patterns. (iii) Talking avatar model supports minute-level audio-conditioned video generation by training first-and-last frame insertion patterns and reconstructing key-frame inference paradigms. On the basis of ensuring visual quality, synchronization of audio and videos has been optimized. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that SkyReels-V3 achieves state-of-the-art or near state-of-the-art performance on key metrics including visual quality, instruction following, and specific aspect metrics, approaching leading closed-source systems. Github: https://github.com/SkyworkAI/SkyReels-V3.
Abstract: The deployment of Large Language Models in Medical Question Answering is severely hampered by ambiguous user queries, a significant safety risk that demonstrably reduces answer accuracy in high-stakes healthcare settings. In this paper, we formalize this challenge by linking input ambiguity to aleatoric uncertainty (AU), which is the irreducible uncertainty arising from underspecified input. To facilitate research in this direction, we construct CV-MedBench, the first benchmark designed for studying input ambiguity in Medical QA. Using this benchmark, we analyze AU from a representation engineering perspective, revealing that AU is linearly encoded in LLM's internal activation patterns. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a novel AU-guided "Clarify-Before-Answer" framework, which incorporates AU-Probe - a lightweight module that detects input ambiguity directly from hidden states. Unlike existing uncertainty estimation methods, AU-Probe requires neither LLM fine-tuning nor multiple forward passes, enabling an efficient mechanism to proactively request user clarification and significantly enhance safety. Extensive experiments across four open LLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of our QA framework, with an average accuracy improvement of 9.48% over baselines. Our framework provides an efficient and robust solution for safe Medical QA, strengthening the reliability of health-related applications. The code is available at https://github.com/yaokunliu/AU-Med.git, and the CV-MedBench dataset is released on Hugging Face at https://huggingface.co/datasets/yaokunl/CV-MedBench.
Abstract: 360° depth estimation is a challenging research problem due to the difficulty of finding a representation that both preserves global continuity and avoids distortion in spherical images. Existing methods attempt to leverage complementary information from multiple projections, but struggle with balancing global and local consistency. Their local patch features have limited global perception, and the combined global representation does not address discrepancies in feature extraction at the boundaries between patches. To address these issues, we propose Cross360, a novel cross-attention-based architecture integrating local and global information using less-distorted tangent patches along with equirectangular features. Our Cross Projection Feature Alignment module employs cross-attention to align local tangent projection features with the equirectangular projection's 360° field of view, ensuring each tangent projection patch is aware of the global context. Additionally, our Progressive Feature Aggregation with Attention module refines multi-scaled features progressively, enhancing depth estimation accuracy. Cross360 significantly outperforms existing methods across most benchmark datasets, especially those in which the entire 360° image is available, demonstrating its effectiveness in accurate and globally consistent depth estimation. The code and model are available at https://github.com/huangkun101230/Cross360.
Abstract: We present JetFormer, a versatile and scalable encoder-only Transformer architecture for particle jet tagging at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Unlike prior approaches that are often tailored to specific deployment regimes, JetFormer is designed to operate effectively across the full spectrum of jet tagging scenarios, from high-accuracy offline analysis to ultra-low-latency online triggering. The model processes variable-length sets of particle features without relying on input of explicit pairwise interactions, yet achieves competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. On the large-scale JetClass dataset, a large-scale JetFormer matches the accuracy of the interaction-rich ParT model (within 0.7%) while using 37.4% fewer FLOPs, demonstrating its computational efficiency and strong generalization. On benchmark HLS4ML 150P datasets, JetFormer consistently outperforms existing models such as MLPs, Deep Sets, and Interaction Networks by 3-4% in accuracy. To bridge the gap to hardware deployment, we further introduce a hardware-aware optimization pipeline based on multi-objective hyperparameter search, yielding compact variants like JetFormer-tiny suitable for FPGA-based trigger systems with sub-microsecond latency requirements. Through structured pruning and quantization, we show that JetFormer can be aggressively compressed with minimal accuracy loss. By unifying high-performance modeling and deployability within a single architectural framework, JetFormer provides a practical pathway for deploying Transformer-based jet taggers in both offline and online environments at the LHC. Code is available at https://github.com/walkieq/JetFormer.
Abstract: Small-molecule identification from tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) remains a bottleneck in untargeted settings where spectral libraries are incomplete. While deep learning offers a solution, current approaches typically fall into two extremes: explicit generative models that construct molecular graphs atom-by-atom, or joint contrastive models that learn cross-modal subspaces from scratch. We introduce SpecBridge, a novel implicit alignment framework that treats structure identification as a geometric alignment problem. SpecBridge fine-tunes a self-supervised spectral encoder (DreaMS) to project directly into the latent space of a frozen molecular foundation model (ChemBERTa), and then performs retrieval by cosine similarity to a fixed bank of precomputed molecular embeddings. Across MassSpecGym, Spectraverse, and MSnLib benchmarks, SpecBridge improves top-1 retrieval accuracy by roughly 20-25% relative to strong neural baselines, while keeping the number of trainable parameters small. These results suggest that aligning to frozen foundation models is a practical, stable alternative to designing new architectures from scratch. The code for SpecBridge is released at https://github.com/HassounLab/SpecBridge.
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning abilities in literal multimodal tasks such as visual mathematics and science question answering. However, figurative language, such as sarcasm, humor, and metaphor, remains a significant challenge, as it conveys intent and emotion through subtle incongruities between expressed and intended meanings. In multimodal settings, accompanying images can amplify or invert textual meaning, demanding models that reason across modalities and account for subjectivity. We propose a three-step framework for developing efficient multimodal reasoning models that can (i) interpret multimodal figurative language, (ii) provide transparent reasoning traces, and (iii) generalize across multiple figurative styles. Experiments across four styles show that (1) incorporating reasoning traces substantially improves multimodal figurative understanding, (2) reasoning learned in one style can transfer to others, especially between related styles like sarcasm and humor, and (3) training jointly across styles yields a generalized reasoning VLM that outperforms much larger open- and closed-source models. Our findings show that lightweight VLMs with verifiable reasoning achieve robust cross-style generalization while providing inspectable reasoning traces for multimodal tasks. The code and implementation are available at https://github.com/scheshmi/CrossStyle-MMR.
Abstract: Motivation: High-throughput sequencing (HTS) enables population-scale genomics but generates massive datasets, creating bottlenecks in storage, transfer, and analysis. FASTQ, the standard format for over two decades, stores one byte per base and one byte per quality score, leading to inefficient I/O, high storage costs, and redundancy. Existing compression tools can mitigate some issues, but often introduce costly decompression or complex dependency issues. Results: We introduce FASTR, a lossless, computation-native successor to FASTQ that encodes each nucleotide together with its base quality score into a single 8-bit value. FASTR reduces file size by at least 2x while remaining fully reversible and directly usable for downstream analyses. Applying general-purpose compression tools on FASTR consistently yields higher compression ratios, 2.47, 3.64, and 4.8x faster compression, and 2.34, 1.96, 1.75x faster decompression than on FASTQ across Illumina, HiFi, and ONT reads. FASTR is machine-learning-ready, allowing reads to be consumed directly as numerical vectors or image-like representations. We provide a highly parallel software ecosystem for FASTQ-FASTR conversion and show that FASTR integrates with existing tools, such as minimap2, with minimal interface changes and no performance overhead. By eliminating decompression costs and reducing data movement, FASTR lays the foundation for scalable genomics analyses and real-time sequencing workflows. Availability and Implementation: https://github.com/ALSER-Lab/FASTR
Abstract: Question answering systems are typically evaluated on factual correctness, yet many real-world applications-such as education and career guidance-require mentorship: responses that provide reflection and guidance. Existing QA benchmarks rarely capture this distinction, particularly in multilingual and long-form settings. We introduce MentorQA, the first multilingual dataset and evaluation framework for mentorship-focused question answering from long-form videos, comprising nearly 9,000 QA pairs from 180 hours of content across four languages. We define mentorship-focused evaluation dimensions that go beyond factual accuracy, capturing clarity, alignment, and learning value. Using MentorQA, we compare Single-Agent, Dual-Agent, RAG, and Multi-Agent QA architectures under controlled conditions. Multi-Agent pipelines consistently produce higher-quality mentorship responses, with especially strong gains for complex topics and lower-resource languages. We further analyze the reliability of automated LLM-based evaluation, observing substantial variation in alignment with human judgments. Overall, this work establishes mentorship-focused QA as a distinct research problem and provides a multilingual benchmark for studying agentic architectures and evaluation design in educational AI. The dataset and evaluation framework are released at https://github.com/AIM-SCU/MentorQA.
Abstract: We develop a data-driven information-theoretic framework for sharp partial identification of causal effects under unmeasured confounding. Existing approaches often rely on restrictive assumptions, such as bounded or discrete outcomes; require external inputs (for example, instrumental variables, proxies, or user-specified sensitivity parameters); necessitate full structural causal model specifications; or focus solely on population-level averages while neglecting covariate-conditional treatment effects. We overcome all four limitations simultaneously by establishing novel information-theoretic, data-driven divergence bounds. Our key theoretical contribution shows that the f-divergence between the observational distribution P(Y | A = a, X = x) and the interventional distribution P(Y | do(A = a), X = x) is upper bounded by a function of the propensity score alone. This result enables sharp partial identification of conditional causal effects directly from observational data, without requiring external sensitivity parameters, auxiliary variables, full structural specifications, or outcome boundedness assumptions. For practical implementation, we develop a semiparametric estimator satisfying Neyman orthogonality (Chernozhukov et al., 2018), which ensures square-root-n consistent inference even when nuisance functions are estimated using flexible machine learning methods. Simulation studies and real-world data applications, implemented in the GitHub repository (https://github.com/yonghanjung/Information-Theretic-Bounds), demonstrate that our framework provides tight and valid causal bounds across a wide range of data-generating processes.
Abstract: Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) for specialized domains is constrained by a fundamental challenge: the need for diverse, cross-organizational data conflicts with the principles of data privacy and sovereignty. While Federated Learning (FL) provides a framework for collaboration without raw data exchange, its classic centralized form introduces a single point of failure and remains vulnerable to model inversion attacks. Decentralized FL (DFL) mitigates this risk by removing the central aggregator but typically relies on inefficient, random peer-to-peer (P2P) pairings, forming a collaboration graph that is blind to agent heterogeneity and risks negative transfer. This paper introduces KNEXA-FL, a novel framework for orchestrated decentralization that resolves this trade-off. KNEXA-FL employs a non-aggregating Central Profiler/Matchmaker (CPM) that formulates P2P collaboration as a contextual bandit problem, using a LinUCB algorithm on abstract agent profiles to learn an optimal matchmaking policy. It orchestrates direct knowledge exchange between heterogeneous, PEFT-based LLM agents via secure distillation, without ever accessing the models themselves. Our comprehensive experiments on a challenging code generation task show that KNEXA-FL yields substantial gains, improving Pass@1 by approx. 50% relative to random P2P collaboration. Critically, our orchestrated approach demonstrates stable convergence, in stark contrast to a powerful centralized distillation baseline which suffers from catastrophic performance collapse. Our work establishes adaptive, learning-based orchestration as a foundational principle for building robust and effective decentralized AI ecosystems.
Abstract: The field of image generation is currently bifurcated into autoregressive (AR) models operating on discrete tokens and diffusion models utilizing continuous latents. This divide, rooted in the distinction between VQ-VAEs and VAEs, hinders unified modeling and fair benchmarking. Finite Scalar Quantization (FSQ) offers a theoretical bridge, yet vanilla FSQ suffers from a critical flaw: its equal-interval quantization can cause activation collapse. This mismatch forces a trade-off between reconstruction fidelity and information efficiency. In this work, we resolve this dilemma by simply replacing the activation function in original FSQ with a distribution-matching mapping to enforce a uniform prior. Termed iFSQ, this simple strategy requires just one line of code yet mathematically guarantees both optimal bin utilization and reconstruction precision. Leveraging iFSQ as a controlled benchmark, we uncover two key insights: (1) The optimal equilibrium between discrete and continuous representations lies at approximately 4 bits per dimension. (2) Under identical reconstruction constraints, AR models exhibit rapid initial convergence, whereas diffusion models achieve a superior performance ceiling, suggesting that strict sequential ordering may limit the upper bounds of generation quality. Finally, we extend our analysis by adapting Representation Alignment (REPA) to AR models, yielding LlamaGen-REPA. Codes is available at https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/iFSQ
Abstract: Annotating medical data for training AI models is often costly and limited due to the shortage of specialists with relevant clinical expertise. This challenge is further compounded by privacy and ethical concerns associated with sensitive patient information. As a result, well-trained medical segmentation models on private datasets constitute valuable intellectual property requiring robust protection mechanisms. Existing model protection techniques primarily focus on classification and generative tasks, while segmentation models-crucial to medical image analysis-remain largely underexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel, stealthy, and harmless method, StealthMark, for verifying the ownership of medical segmentation models under black-box conditions. Our approach subtly modulates model uncertainty without altering the final segmentation outputs, thereby preserving the model's performance. To enable ownership verification, we incorporate model-agnostic explanation methods, e.g. LIME, to extract feature attributions from the model outputs. Under specific triggering conditions, these explanations reveal a distinct and verifiable watermark. We further design the watermark as a QR code to facilitate robust and recognizable ownership claims. We conducted extensive experiments across four medical imaging datasets and five mainstream segmentation models. The results demonstrate the effectiveness, stealthiness, and harmlessness of our method on the original model's segmentation performance. For example, when applied to the SAM model, StealthMark consistently achieved ASR above 95% across various datasets while maintaining less than a 1% drop in Dice and AUC scores, significantly outperforming backdoor-based watermarking methods and highlighting its strong potential for practical deployment. Our implementation code is made available at: https://github.com/Qinkaiyu/StealthMark.
Abstract: ROCKET (RandOm Convolutional KErnel Transform) is a feature extraction algorithm created for Time Series Classification (TSC), published in 2019. It applies convolution with randomly generated kernels on a time series, producing features that can be used to train a linear classifier or regressor like Ridge. At the time of publication, ROCKET was on par with the best state-of-the-art algorithms for TSC in terms of accuracy while being significantly less computationally expensive, making ROCKET a compelling algorithm for TSC. This also led to several subsequent versions, further improving accuracy and computational efficiency. The currently available ROCKET implementations are mostly bound to execution on CPU. However, convolution is a task that can be highly parallelized and is therefore suited to be executed on GPU, which speeds up the computation significantly. A key difficulty arises from the inhomogeneous kernels ROCKET uses, making standard methods for applying convolution on GPU inefficient. In this work, we propose an algorithm that is able to efficiently perform ROCKET on GPU and achieves up to 11 times higher computational efficiency per watt than ROCKET on CPU. The code for CUROCKET is available in this repository https://github.com/oleeven/CUROCKET on github.
Abstract: Virtual try-on systems allow users to interactively try different products within VR scenarios. However, most existing VTON methods operate only on predefined eyewear templates and lack support for fine-grained, user-driven customization. While GlassesGAN enables personalized 2D eyewear design, its capability remains limited to 2D image generation. Motivated by the success of 3D Gaussian Blendshapes in head reconstruction, we integrate these two techniques and propose GlassesGB, a framework that supports customizable eyewear generation for 3D head avatars. GlassesGB effectively bridges 2D generative customization with 3D head avatar rendering, addressing the challenge in achieving personalized eyewear design for VR applications. The implementation code is available at https://ruiyangju.github.io/GlassesGB.
Abstract: Event forecasting is inherently influenced by multifaceted considerations, including international relations, regional historical dynamics, and cultural contexts. However, existing LLM-based approaches employ single-model architectures that generate predictions along a singular explicit trajectory, constraining their ability to capture diverse geopolitical nuances across complex regional contexts. To address this limitation, we introduce ThinkTank-ME, a novel Think Tank framework for Middle East event forecasting that emulates collaborative expert analysis in real-world strategic decision-making. To facilitate expert specialization and rigorous evaluation, we construct POLECAT-FOR-ME, a Middle East-focused event forecasting benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of multi-expert collaboration in handling complex temporal geopolitical forecasting tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/LuminosityX/ThinkTank-ME.
Abstract: Data preparation aims to denoise raw datasets, uncover cross-dataset relationships, and extract valuable insights from them, which is essential for a wide range of data-centric applications. Driven by (i) rising demands for application-ready data (e.g., for analytics, visualization, decision-making), (ii) increasingly powerful LLM techniques, and (iii) the emergence of infrastructures that facilitate flexible agent construction (e.g., using Databricks Unity Catalog), LLM-enhanced methods are rapidly becoming a transformative and potentially dominant paradigm for data preparation. By investigating hundreds of recent literature works, this paper presents a systematic review of this evolving landscape, focusing on the use of LLM techniques to prepare data for diverse downstream tasks. First, we characterize the fundamental paradigm shift, from rule-based, model-specific pipelines to prompt-driven, context-aware, and agentic preparation workflows. Next, we introduce a task-centric taxonomy that organizes the field into three major tasks: data cleaning (e.g., standardization, error processing, imputation), data integration (e.g., entity matching, schema matching), and data enrichment (e.g., data annotation, profiling). For each task, we survey representative techniques, and highlight their respective strengths (e.g., improved generalization, semantic understanding) and limitations (e.g., the prohibitive cost of scaling LLMs, persistent hallucinations even in advanced agents, the mismatch between advanced methods and weak evaluation). Moreover, we analyze commonly used datasets and evaluation metrics (the empirical part). Finally, we discuss open research challenges and outline a forward-looking roadmap that emphasizes scalable LLM-data systems, principled designs for reliable agentic workflows, and robust evaluation protocols.
Abstract: We investigated visual reasoning limitations of both multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and image generation models (IGMs) by creating a novel benchmark to systematically compare failure modes across image-to-text and text-to-image tasks, enabling cross-modal evaluation of visual understanding. Despite rapid growth in machine learning, vision language models (VLMs) still fail to understand or generate basic visual concepts such as object orientation, quantity, or spatial relationships, which highlighted gaps in elementary visual reasoning. By adapting MMVP benchmark questions into explicit and implicit prompts, we create \textit{AMVICC}, a novel benchmark for profiling failure modes across various modalities. After testing 11 MLLMs and 3 IGMs in nine categories of visual reasoning, our results show that failure modes are often shared between models and modalities, but certain failures are model-specific and modality-specific, and this can potentially be attributed to various factors. IGMs consistently struggled to manipulate specific visual components in response to prompts, especially in explicit prompts, suggesting poor control over fine-grained visual attributes. Our findings apply most directly to the evaluation of existing state-of-the-art models on structured visual reasoning tasks. This work lays the foundation for future cross-modal alignment studies, offering a framework to probe whether generation and interpretation failures stem from shared limitations to guide future improvements in unified vision-language modeling.
Abstract: ArXiv recently prohibited the upload of unpublished review papers to its servers in the Computer Science domain, citing a high prevalence of LLM-generated content in these categories. However, this decision was not accompanied by quantitative evidence. In this work, we investigate this claim by measuring the proportion of LLM-generated content in review vs. non-review research papers in recent years. Using two high-quality detection methods, we find a substantial increase in LLM-generated content across both review and non-review papers, with a higher prevalence in review papers. However, when considering the number of LLM-generated papers published in each category, the estimates of non-review LLM-generated papers are almost six times higher. Furthermore, we find that this policy will affect papers in certain domains far more than others, with the CS subdiscipline Computers & Society potentially facing cuts of 50%. Our analysis provides an evidence-based framework for evaluating such policy decisions, and we release our code to facilitate future investigations at: https://github.com/yanaiela/llm-review-arxiv.
Abstract: Tropical algebra, including max-plus, min-plus, and related idempotent semirings, provides a unifying framework in which many optimization problems that are nonlinear in classical algebra become linear. This property makes tropical methods particularly well suited for shortest paths, scheduling, throughput analysis, and discrete event systems. Despite their theoretical maturity and practical relevance, existing tropical algebra implementations primarily target desktop or server environments and remain largely inaccessible on resource-constrained embedded platforms, where such optimization problems are most acute. We present PALMA (Parallel Algebra Library for Max-plus Applications), a lightweight, dependency-free C library that brings tropical linear algebra to ARM-based embedded systems. PALMA implements a generic semiring abstraction with SIMD-accelerated kernels, enabling a single computational framework to support shortest paths, bottleneck paths, reachability, scheduling, and throughput analysis. The library supports five tropical semirings, dense and sparse (CSR) representations, tropical closure, and spectral analysis via maximum cycle mean computation. We evaluate PALMA on a Raspberry Pi 4 and demonstrate peak performance of 2,274 MOPS, speedups of up to 11.9 times over classical Bellman-Ford for single-source shortest paths, and sub-10 microsecond scheduling solves for real-time control workloads. Case studies in UAV control, IoT routing, and manufacturing systems show that tropical algebra enables efficient, predictable, and unified optimization directly on embedded hardware. PALMA is released as open-source software under the MIT license.
Abstract: BickGraphing is a browser based research tool that enables visual inspection of acoustic recordings. The tool was built in support of visualizing crop feeding pest sounds in support of the Insect Eavesdropper project; however, it is widely applicable to all audiovisualizations in research. It allows multiple uploads of large .wav files, computes waveforms and spectrograms locally, and supports interactive exploration of audio events in time and frequency. The application is implemented as a SvelteKit and TypeScript web app with a client side signal processing pipeline using WebAssembly compiled FFmpeg and custom FFT utilities. The software is released on an open Git repository (https://github.com/bicklabuw/BickGraphing) and archived under a standard MIT license and can be reused for rapid visual quality checks of .wav recordings in insect bioacoustics and related fields. BickGraphing has the potential to be a local, easy to use coding free visualization platform for audio data in research.
Abstract: Modern generative video models excel at producing convincing, high-quality outputs, but struggle to maintain multi-view and spatiotemporal consistency in highly dynamic real-world environments. In this work, we introduce \textbf{AnyView}, a diffusion-based video generation framework for \emph{dynamic view synthesis} with minimal inductive biases or geometric assumptions. We leverage multiple data sources with various levels of supervision, including monocular (2D), multi-view static (3D) and multi-view dynamic (4D) datasets, to train a generalist spatiotemporal implicit representation capable of producing zero-shot novel videos from arbitrary camera locations and trajectories. We evaluate AnyView on standard benchmarks, showing competitive results with the current state of the art, and propose \textbf{AnyViewBench}, a challenging new benchmark tailored towards \emph{extreme} dynamic view synthesis in diverse real-world scenarios. In this more dramatic setting, we find that most baselines drastically degrade in performance, as they require significant overlap between viewpoints, while AnyView maintains the ability to produce realistic, plausible, and spatiotemporally consistent videos when prompted from \emph{any} viewpoint. Results, data, code, and models can be viewed at: https://tri-ml.github.io/AnyView/
Authors:Zirui Wang, Junyi Zhang, Jiaxin Ge, Long Lian, Letian Fu, Lisa Dunlap, Ken Goldberg, XuDong Wang, Ion Stoica, David M. Chan, Sewon Min, Joseph E. Gonzalez
Abstract: Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) remain poorly characterized in multi-step visual interactions, particularly in how they integrate perception, memory, and action over long horizons. We introduce VisGym, a gymnasium of 17 environments for evaluating and training VLMs. The suite spans symbolic puzzles, real-image understanding, navigation, and manipulation, and provides flexible controls over difficulty, input representation, planning horizon, and feedback. We also provide multi-step solvers that generate structured demonstrations, enabling supervised finetuning. Our evaluations show that all frontier models struggle in interactive settings, achieving low success rates in both the easy (46.6%) and hard (26.0%) configurations. Our experiments reveal notable limitations: models struggle to effectively leverage long context, performing worse with an unbounded history than with truncated windows. Furthermore, we find that several text-based symbolic tasks become substantially harder once rendered visually. However, explicit goal observations, textual feedback, and exploratory demonstrations in partially observable or unknown-dynamics settings for supervised finetuning yield consistent gains, highlighting concrete failure modes and pathways for improving multi-step visual decision-making. Code, data, and models can be found at: https://visgym.github.io/.
Abstract: The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has sparked growing interest in their integration into autonomous systems for reasoning-driven perception, planning, and decision-making. However, evaluating and training such agentic AI models remains challenging due to the lack of large-scale, structured, and safety-critical benchmarks. This paper introduces AgentDrive, an open benchmark dataset containing 300,000 LLM-generated driving scenarios designed for training, fine-tuning, and evaluating autonomous agents under diverse conditions. AgentDrive formalizes a factorized scenario space across seven orthogonal axes: scenario type, driver behavior, environment, road layout, objective, difficulty, and traffic density. An LLM-driven prompt-to-JSON pipeline generates semantically rich, simulation-ready specifications that are validated against physical and schema constraints. Each scenario undergoes simulation rollouts, surrogate safety metric computation, and rule-based outcome labeling. To complement simulation-based evaluation, we introduce AgentDrive-MCQ, a 100,000-question multiple-choice benchmark spanning five reasoning dimensions: physics, policy, hybrid, scenario, and comparative reasoning. We conduct a large-scale evaluation of fifty leading LLMs on AgentDrive-MCQ. Results show that while proprietary frontier models perform best in contextual and policy reasoning, advanced open models are rapidly closing the gap in structured and physics-grounded reasoning. We release the AgentDrive dataset, AgentDrive-MCQ benchmark, evaluation code, and related materials at https://github.com/maferrag/AgentDrive
Abstract: To be discoverable in an embedding-based search process, each part of a document should be reflected in its embedding representation. To quantify any potential reflection biases, we introduce a permutation-based evaluation framework. With this, we observe that state-of-the-art embedding models exhibit systematic positional and language biases when documents are longer and consist of multiple segments. Specifically, early segments and segments in higher-resource languages like English are over-represented, while later segments and segments in lower-resource languages are marginalized. In our further analysis, we find that the positional bias stems from front-loaded attention distributions in pooling-token embeddings, where early tokens receive more attention. To mitigate this issue, we introduce an inference-time attention calibration method that redistributes attention more evenly across document positions, increasing discoverabiltiy of later segments. Our evaluation framework and attention calibration is available at https://github.com/impresso/fair-sentence-transformers
Abstract: Transformer-based general visual geometry frameworks have shown promising performance in camera pose estimation and 3D scene understanding. Recent advancements in Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) models have shown great promise in camera pose estimation and 3D reconstruction. However, these models typically rely on ground truth labels for training, posing challenges when adapting to unlabeled and unseen scenes. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised framework to train VGGT with unlabeled data, thereby enhancing its localization capability in large-scale environments. To achieve this, we extend conventional pair-wise relations to sequence-wise geometric constraints for self-supervised learning. Specifically, in each sequence, we sample multiple source frames and geometrically project them onto different target frames, which improves temporal feature consistency. We formulate physical photometric consistency and geometric constraints as a joint optimization loss to circumvent the requirement for hard labels. By training the model with this proposed method, not only the local and global cross-view attention layers but also the camera and depth heads can effectively capture the underlying multi-view geometry. Experiments demonstrate that the model converges within hundreds of iterations and achieves significant improvements in large-scale localization. Our code will be released at https://github.com/X-yangfan/GPA-VGGT.
Abstract: LLM agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in software development, but their performance is hampered by long interaction contexts, which incur high API costs and latency. While various context compression approaches such as LongLLMLingua have emerged to tackle this challenge, they typically rely on fixed metrics such as PPL, ignoring the task-specific nature of code understanding. As a result, they frequently disrupt syntactic and logical structure and fail to retain critical implementation details. In this paper, we propose SWE-Pruner, a self-adaptive context pruning framework tailored for coding agents. Drawing inspiration from how human programmers "selectively skim" source code during development and debugging, SWE-Pruner performs task-aware adaptive pruning for long contexts. Given the current task, the agent formulates an explicit goal (e.g., "focus on error handling") as a hint to guide the pruning targets. A lightweight neural skimmer (0.6B parameters) is trained to dynamically select relevant lines from the surrounding context given the goal. Evaluations across four benchmarks and multiple models validate SWE-Pruner's effectiveness in various scenarios, achieving 23-54% token reduction on agent tasks like SWE-Bench Verified and up to 14.84x compression on single-turn tasks like LongCodeQA with minimal performance impact.
Abstract: Generalization to unseen concepts is a central challenge due to the scarcity of human annotations in Mention-agnostic Biomedical Concept Recognition (MA-BCR). This work makes two key contributions to systematically address this issue. First, we propose an evaluation framework built on hierarchical concept indices and novel metrics to measure generalization. Second, we explore LLM-based Auto-Labeled Data (ALD) as a scalable resource, creating a task-specific pipeline for its generation. Our research unequivocally shows that while LLM-generated ALD cannot fully substitute for manual annotations, it is a valuable resource for improving generalization, successfully providing models with the broader coverage and structural knowledge needed to approach recognizing unseen concepts. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/bio-ie-tool/hi-ald.
Abstract: In skeleton-based human activity understanding, existing methods often adopt the contrastive learning paradigm to construct a discriminative feature space. However, many of these approaches fail to exploit the structural inter-class similarities and overlook the impact of anomalous positive samples. In this study, we introduce ACLNet, an Affinity Contrastive Learning Network that explores the intricate clustering relationships among human activity classes to improve feature discrimination. Specifically, we propose an affinity metric to refine similarity measurements, thereby forming activity superclasses that provide more informative contrastive signals. A dynamic temperature schedule is also introduced to adaptively adjust the penalty strength for various superclasses. In addition, we employ a margin-based contrastive strategy to improve the separation of hard positive and negative samples within classes. Extensive experiments on NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, Kinetics-Skeleton, PKU-MMD, FineGYM, and CASIA-B demonstrate the superiority of our method in skeleton-based action recognition, gait recognition, and person re-identification. The source code is available at https://github.com/firework8/ACLNet.
Abstract: This paper addresses the challenge of human-guided navigation for mobile collaborative robots under simultaneous proximity regulation and safety constraints. We introduce Adaptive Reinforcement and Model Predictive Control Switching (ARMS), a hybrid learning-control framework that integrates a reinforcement learning follower trained with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and an analytical one-step Model Predictive Control (MPC) formulated as a quadratic program safety filter. To enable robust perception under partial observability and non-stationary human motion, ARMS employs a decoupled sensing architecture with a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) temporal encoder for the human-robot relative state and a spatial encoder for 360-degree LiDAR scans. The core contribution is a learned adaptive neural switcher that performs context-aware soft action fusion between the two controllers, favoring conservative, constraint-aware QP-based control in low-risk regions while progressively shifting control authority to the learned follower in highly cluttered or constrained scenarios where maneuverability is critical, and reverting to the follower action when the QP becomes infeasible. Extensive evaluations against Pure Pursuit, Dynamic Window Approach (DWA), and an RL-only baseline demonstrate that ARMS achieves an 82.5 percent success rate in highly cluttered environments, outperforming DWA and RL-only approaches by 7.1 percent and 3.1 percent, respectively, while reducing average computational latency by 33 percent to 5.2 milliseconds compared to a multi-step MPC baseline. Additional simulation transfer in Gazebo and initial real-world deployment results further indicate the practicality and robustness of ARMS for safe and efficient human-robot collaboration. Source code and a demonstration video are available at https://github.com/21ning/ARMS.git.
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to legal domain-specific tasks, evaluating their ability to perform legal work in real-world settings has become essential. However, existing legal benchmarks rely on simplified and highly standardized tasks, failing to capture the ambiguity, complexity, and reasoning demands of real legal practice. Moreover, prior evaluations often adopt coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. To address these limitations, we introduce PLawBench, a Practical Law Benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs in realistic legal practice scenarios. Grounded in real-world legal workflows, PLawBench models the core processes of legal practitioners through three task categories: public legal consultation, practical case analysis, and legal document generation. These tasks assess a model's ability to identify legal issues and key facts, perform structured legal reasoning, and generate legally coherent documents. PLawBench comprises 850 questions across 13 practical legal scenarios, with each question accompanied by expert-designed evaluation rubrics, resulting in approximately 12,500 rubric items for fine-grained assessment. Using an LLM-based evaluator aligned with human expert judgments, we evaluate 10 state-of-the-art LLMs. Experimental results show that none achieves strong performance on PLawBench, revealing substantial limitations in the fine-grained legal reasoning capabilities of current LLMs and highlighting important directions for future evaluation and development of legal LLMs. Data is available at: https://github.com/skylenage/PLawbench.
Abstract: Recent advances in image editing leverage latent diffusion models (LDMs) for versatile, text-prompt-driven edits across diverse tasks. Yet, maintaining pixel-level edge structures-crucial for tasks such as photorealistic style transfer or image tone adjustment-remains as a challenge for latent-diffusion-based editing. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel Structure Preservation Loss (SPL) that leverages local linear models to quantify structural differences between input and edited images. Our training-free approach integrates SPL directly into the diffusion model's generative process to ensure structural fidelity. This core mechanism is complemented by a post-processing step to mitigate LDM decoding distortions, a masking strategy for precise edit localization, and a color preservation loss to preserve hues in unedited areas. Experiments confirm SPL enhances structural fidelity, delivering state-of-the-art performance in latent-diffusion-based image editing. Our code will be publicly released at https://github.com/gongms00/SPL.
Abstract: Nuclei panoptic segmentation supports cancer diagnostics by integrating both semantic and instance segmentation of different cell types to analyze overall tissue structure and individual nuclei in histopathology images. Major challenges include detecting small objects, handling ambiguous boundaries, and addressing class imbalance. To address these issues, we propose PanopMamba, a novel hybrid encoder-decoder architecture that integrates Mamba and Transformer with additional feature-enhanced fusion via state space modeling. We design a multiscale Mamba backbone and a State Space Model (SSM)-based fusion network to enable efficient long-range perception in pyramid features, thereby extending the pure encoder-decoder framework while facilitating information sharing across multiscale features of nuclei. The proposed SSM-based feature-enhanced fusion integrates pyramid feature networks and dynamic feature enhancement across different spatial scales, enhancing the feature representation of densely overlapping nuclei in both semantic and spatial dimensions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first Mamba-based approach for panoptic segmentation. Additionally, we introduce alternative evaluation metrics, including image-level Panoptic Quality ($i$PQ), boundary-weighted PQ ($w$PQ), and frequency-weighted PQ ($fw$PQ), which are specifically designed to address the unique challenges of nuclei segmentation and thereby mitigate the potential bias inherent in vanilla PQ. Experimental evaluations on two multiclass nuclei segmentation benchmark datasets, MoNuSAC2020 and NuInsSeg, demonstrate the superiority of PanopMamba for nuclei panoptic segmentation over state-of-the-art methods. Consequently, the robustness of PanopMamba is validated across various metrics, while the distinctiveness of PQ variants is also demonstrated. Code is available at https://github.com/mkang315/PanopMamba.
Abstract: Equivariant Graph Neural Networks (EGNNs) have become a widely used approach for modeling 3D atomistic systems. However, mainstream architectures face critical scalability bottlenecks due to the explicit construction of geometric features or dense tensor products on \textit{every} edge. To overcome this, we introduce \textbf{E2Former-V2}, a scalable architecture that integrates algebraic sparsity with hardware-aware execution. We first propose \textbf{E}quivariant \textbf{A}xis-\textbf{A}ligned \textbf{S}parsification (EAAS). EAAS builds on Wigner-$6j$ convolution by exploiting an $\mathrm{SO}(3) \rightarrow \mathrm{SO}(2)$ change of basis to transform computationally expensive dense tensor contractions into efficient, sparse parity re-indexing operations. Building on this representation, we introduce \textbf{On-the-Fly Equivariant Attention}, a fully node-centric mechanism implemented via a custom fused Triton kernel. By eliminating materialized edge tensors and maximizing SRAM utilization, our kernel achieves a \textbf{20$\times$ improvement in TFLOPS} compared to standard implementations. Extensive experiments on the SPICE and OMol25 datasets demonstrate that E2Former-V2 maintains comparable predictive performance while notably accelerating inference. This work demonstrates that large equivariant transformers can be trained efficiently using widely accessible GPU platforms. The code is avalible at https://github.com/IQuestLab/UBio-MolFM/tree/e2formerv2.
Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-powered assistants have recently integrated memory mechanisms that record user preferences, leading to more personalized and user-aligned responses. However, irrelevant personalized memories are often introduced into the context, interfering with the LLM's intent understanding. To comprehensively investigate the dual effects of personalization, we develop RPEval, a benchmark comprising a personalized intent reasoning dataset and a multi-granularity evaluation protocol. RPEval reveals the widespread phenomenon of irrational personalization in existing LLMs and, through error pattern analysis, illustrates its negative impact on user experience. Finally, we introduce RP-Reasoner, which treats memory utilization as a pragmatic reasoning process, enabling the selective integration of personalized information. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms carefully designed baselines on RPEval, and resolves 80% of the bad cases observed in a large-scale commercial personalized assistant, highlighting the potential of pragmatic reasoning to mitigate irrational personalization. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/XueyangFeng/RPEval.
Abstract: Remote sensing change detection (RSCD) aims to identify the spatio-temporal changes of land cover, providing critical support for multi-disciplinary applications (e.g., environmental monitoring, disaster assessment, and climate change studies). Existing methods focus either on extracting features from localized patches, or pursue processing entire images holistically, which leads to the cross temporal feature matching deviation and exhibiting sensitivity to radiometric and geometric noise. Following the above issues, we propose a dual-module collaboration guided hierarchical adaptive aggregation framework, namely HA2F, which consists of dynamic hierarchical feature calibration module (DHFCM) and noise-adaptive feature refinement module (NAFRM). The former dynamically fuses adjacent-level features through perceptual feature selection, suppressing irrelevant discrepancies to address multi-temporal feature alignment deviations. The NAFRM utilizes the dual feature selection mechanism to highlight the change sensitive regions and generate spatial masks, suppressing the interference of irrelevant regions or shadows. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed HA2F, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, and SYSU-CD datasets, surpassing existing comparative methods in terms of both precision metrics and computational efficiency. In addition, ablation experiments show that DHFCM and NAFRM are effective. \href{https://huggingface.co/InPeerReview/RemoteSensingChangeDetection-RSCD.HA2F}{HA2F Official Code is Available Here!}
Abstract: Hierarchical open-set classification handles previously unseen classes by assigning them to the most appropriate high-level category in a class taxonomy. We extend this paradigm to the semi-supervised setting, enabling the use of large-scale, uncurated datasets containing a mixture of known and unknown classes to improve the hierarchical open-set performance. To this end, we propose a teacher-student framework based on pseudo-labeling. Two key components are introduced: 1) subtree pseudo-labels, which provide reliable supervision in the presence of unknown data, and 2) age-gating, a mechanism that mitigates overconfidence in pseudo-labels. Experiments show that our framework outperforms self-supervised pretraining followed by supervised adaptation, and even matches the fully supervised counterpart when using only 20 labeled samples per class on the iNaturalist19 benchmark. Our code is available at https://github.com/walline/semihoc.
Abstract: Time series data from the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) provides critical information for patient monitoring. While recent advancements in applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to time series modeling (TSM) have shown great promise, their effectiveness on the irregular ICU data, characterized by particularly high rates of missing values, remains largely unexplored. This work investigates two key components underlying the success of LLMs for TSM: the time series encoder and the multimodal alignment strategy. To this end, we establish a systematic testbed to evaluate their impact across various state-of-the-art LLM-based methods on benchmark ICU datasets against strong supervised and self-supervised baselines. Results reveal that the encoder design is more critical than the alignment strategy. Encoders that explicitly model irregularity achieve substantial performance gains, yielding an average AUPRC increase of $12.8\%$ over the vanilla Transformer. While less impactful, the alignment strategy is also noteworthy, with the best-performing semantically rich, fusion-based strategy achieving a modest $2.9\%$ improvement over cross-attention. However, LLM-based methods require at least 10$\times$ longer training than the best-performing irregular supervised models, while delivering only comparable performance. They also underperform in data-scarce few-shot learning settings. These findings highlight both the promise and current limitations of LLMs for irregular ICU time series. The code is available at https://github.com/mHealthUnimelb/LLMTS.
Abstract: Introduction. AI Ethics is framed distinctly across actors and stakeholder groups. We report results from a case study of OpenAI analysing ethical AI discourse. Method. Research addressed: How has OpenAI's public discourse leveraged 'ethics', 'safety', 'alignment' and adjacent related concepts over time, and what does discourse signal about framing in practice? A structured corpus, differentiating between communication for a general audience and communication with an academic audience, was assembled from public documentation. Analysis. Qualitative content analysis of ethical themes combined inductively derived and deductively applied codes. Quantitative analysis leveraged computational content analysis methods via NLP to model topics and quantify changes in rhetoric over time. Visualizations report aggregate results. For reproducible results, we have released our code at https://github.com/famous-blue-raincoat/AI_Ethics_Discourse. Results. Results indicate that safety and risk discourse dominate OpenAI's public communication and documentation, without applying academic and advocacy ethics frameworks or vocabularies. Conclusions. Implications for governance are presented, along with discussion of ethics-washing practices in industry.
Abstract: Accurate fine-grained tree species classification is critical for forest inventory and biodiversity monitoring. Existing methods predominantly focus on designing complex architectures to fit local data distributions. However, they often overlook the long-tailed distributions and high inter-class similarity inherent in limited data, thereby struggling to distinguish between few-shot or confusing categories. In the process of knowledge dissemination in the human world, individuals will actively seek expert assistance to transcend the limitations of local thinking. Inspired by this, we introduce an external "Domain Expert" and propose an Expert Knowledge-Guided Classification Decision Calibration Network (EKDC-Net) to overcome these challenges. Our framework addresses two core issues: expert knowledge extraction and utilization. Specifically, we first develop a Local Prior Guided Knowledge Extraction Module (LPKEM). By leveraging Class Activation Map (CAM) analysis, LPKEM guides the domain expert to focus exclusively on discriminative features essential for classification. Subsequently, to effectively integrate this knowledge, we design an Uncertainty-Guided Decision Calibration Module (UDCM). This module dynamically corrects the local model's decisions by considering both overall category uncertainty and instance-level prediction uncertainty. Furthermore, we present a large-scale classification dataset covering 102 tree species, named CU-Tree102 to address the issue of scarce diversity in current benchmarks. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance. Crucially, as a lightweight plug-and-play module, EKDC-Net improves backbone accuracy by 6.42% and precision by 11.46% using only 0.08M additional learnable parameters. The dataset, code, and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/WHU-USI3DV/TreeCLS.
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in domains such as education, mental health and customer support, where stable and consistent personas are critical for reliability. Yet, existing studies focus on narrative or role-playing tasks and overlook how adversarial conversational history alone can reshape induced personas. Black-box persona manipulation remains unexplored, raising concerns for robustness in realistic interactions. In response, we introduce the task of persona editing, which adversarially steers LLM traits through user-side inputs under a black-box, inference-only setting. To this end, we propose PHISH (Persona Hijacking via Implicit Steering in History), the first framework to expose a new vulnerability in LLM safety that embeds semantically loaded cues into user queries to gradually induce reverse personas. We also define a metric to quantify attack success. Across 3 benchmarks and 8 LLMs, PHISH predictably shifts personas, triggers collateral changes in correlated traits, and exhibits stronger effects in multi-turn settings. In high-risk domains mental health, tutoring, and customer support, PHISH reliably manipulates personas, validated by both human and LLM-as-Judge evaluations. Importantly, PHISH causes only a small reduction in reasoning benchmark performance, leaving overall utility largely intact while still enabling significant persona manipulation. While current guardrails offer partial protection, they remain brittle under sustained attack. Our findings expose new vulnerabilities in personas and highlight the need for context-resilient persona in LLMs. Our codebase and dataset is available at: https://github.com/Jivnesh/PHISH
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a dominant paradigm for mitigating hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge. Nevertheless, effectively integrating and interpreting key evidence scattered across noisy documents remains a critical challenge for existing RAG systems. In this paper, we propose GraphAnchor, a novel Graph-Anchored Knowledge Indexing approach that reconceptualizes graph structures from static knowledge representations into active, evolving knowledge indices. GraphAnchor incrementally updates a graph during iterative retrieval to anchor salient entities and relations, yielding a structured index that guides the LLM in evaluating knowledge sufficiency and formulating subsequent subqueries. The final answer is generated by jointly leveraging all retrieved documents and the final evolved graph. Experiments on four multi-hop question answering benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of GraphAnchor, and reveal that GraphAnchor modulates the LLM's attention to more effectively associate key information distributed in retrieved documents. All code and data are available at https://github.com/NEUIR/GraphAnchor.
Abstract: Accurate semantic segmentation for histopathology image is crucial for quantitative tissue analysis and downstream clinical modeling. Recent segmentation foundation models have improved generalization through large-scale pretraining, yet remain poorly aligned with pathology because they treat segmentation as a static visual prediction task. Here we present VISTA-PATH, an interactive, class-aware pathology segmentation foundation model designed to resolve heterogeneous structures, incorporate expert feedback, and produce pixel-level segmentation that are directly meaningful for clinical interpretation. VISTA-PATH jointly conditions segmentation on visual context, semantic tissue descriptions, and optional expert-provided spatial prompts, enabling precise multi-class segmentation across heterogeneous pathology images. To support this paradigm, we curate VISTA-PATH Data, a large-scale pathology segmentation corpus comprising over 1.6 million image-mask-text triplets spanning 9 organs and 93 tissue classes. Across extensive held-out and external benchmarks, VISTA-PATH consistently outperforms existing segmentation foundation models. Importantly, VISTA-PATH supports dynamic human-in-the-loop refinement by propagating sparse, patch-level bounding-box annotation feedback into whole-slide segmentation. Finally, we show that the high-fidelity, class-aware segmentation produced by VISTA-PATH is a preferred model for computational pathology. It improve tissue microenvironment analysis through proposed Tumor Interaction Score (TIS), which exhibits strong and significant associations with patient survival. Together, these results establish VISTA-PATH as a foundation model that elevates pathology image segmentation from a static prediction to an interactive and clinically grounded representation for digital pathology. Source code and demo can be found at https://github.com/zhihuanglab/VISTA-PATH.
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in reasoning tasks such as mathematics and coding, matching or surpassing human capabilities. However, these impressive reasoning abilities face significant challenges in specialized domains. Taking Go as an example, although AlphaGo has established the high performance ceiling of AI systems in Go, mainstream LLMs still struggle to reach even beginner-level proficiency, let alone perform natural language reasoning. This performance gap between general-purpose LLMs and domain experts is significantly limiting the application of LLMs on a wider range of domain-specific tasks. In this work, we aim to bridge the divide between LLMs' general reasoning capabilities and expert knowledge in domain-specific tasks. We perform mixed fine-tuning with structured Go expertise and general long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning data as a cold start, followed by reinforcement learning to integrate expert knowledge in Go with general reasoning capabilities. Through this methodology, we present \textbf{LoGos}, a powerful LLM that not only maintains outstanding general reasoning abilities, but also conducts Go gameplay in natural language, demonstrating effective strategic reasoning and accurate next-move prediction. LoGos achieves performance comparable to human professional players, substantially surpassing all existing LLMs. Through this work, we aim to contribute insights on applying general LLM reasoning capabilities to specialized domains. We will release the first large-scale Go dataset for LLM training, the first LLM Go evaluation benchmark, and the first general LLM that reaches human professional-level performance in Go at: https://github.com/Entarochuan/LoGos.
Abstract: Existing face-swapping methods often deliver competitive results in constrained settings but exhibit substantial quality degradation when handling extreme facial poses. To improve facial pose robustness, explicit geometric features are applied, but this approach remains problematic since it introduces additional dependencies and increases computational cost. Diffusion-based methods have achieved remarkable results; however, they are impractical for real-time processing. We introduce AlphaFace, which leverages an open-source vision-language model and CLIP image and text embeddings to apply novel visual and textual semantic contrastive losses. AlphaFace enables stronger identity representation and more precise attribute preservation, all while maintaining real-time performance. Comprehensive experiments across FF++, MPIE, and LPFF demonstrate that AlphaFace surpasses state-of-the-art methods in pose-challenging cases. The project is publicly available on `https://github.com/andrewyu90/Alphaface_Official.git'.
Abstract: Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) is critical for applications like remote sensing and surveillance, which aims to identify small, low-contrast targets against complex backgrounds. However, existing methods often struggle with inadequate joint modeling of local-global features (harming target-background discrimination) or feature redundancy and semantic dilution (degrading target representation quality). To tackle these issues, we propose DCCS-Det (Directional Context and Cross-Scale Aware Detector for Infrared Small Target), a novel detector that incorporates a Dual-stream Saliency Enhancement (DSE) block and a Latent-aware Semantic Extraction and Aggregation (LaSEA) module. The DSE block integrates localized perception with direction-aware context aggregation to help capture long-range spatial dependencies and local details. On this basis, the LaSEA module mitigates feature degradation via cross-scale feature extraction and random pooling sampling strategies, enhancing discriminative features and suppressing noise. Extensive experiments show that DCCS-Det achieves state-of-the-art detection accuracy with competitive efficiency across multiple datasets. Ablation studies further validate the contributions of DSE and LaSEA in improving target perception and feature representation under complex scenarios. \href{https://huggingface.co/InPeerReview/InfraredSmallTargetDetection-IRSTD.DCCS}{DCCS-Det Official Code is Available Here!}
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) make next-token predictions based on clues present in their context, such as semantic descriptions and in-context examples. Yet, elucidating which prior tokens most strongly influence a given prediction remains challenging due to the proliferation of layers and attention heads in modern architectures. We propose Jacobian Scopes, a suite of gradient-based, token-level causal attribution methods for interpreting LLM predictions. By analyzing the linearized relations of final hidden state with respect to inputs, Jacobian Scopes quantify how input tokens influence a model's prediction. We introduce three variants - Semantic, Fisher, and Temperature Scopes - which respectively target sensitivity of specific logits, the full predictive distribution, and model confidence (inverse temperature). Through case studies spanning instruction understanding, translation and in-context learning (ICL), we uncover interesting findings, such as when Jacobian Scopes point to implicit political biases. We believe that our proposed methods also shed light on recently debated mechanisms underlying in-context time-series forecasting. Our code and interactive demonstrations are publicly available at https://github.com/AntonioLiu97/JacobianScopes.
Abstract: Algorithmic audits are essential tools for examining systems for properties required by regulators or desired by operators. Current audits of large language models (LLMs) primarily rely on black-box evaluations that assess model behavior only through input-output testing. These methods are limited to tests constructed in the input space, often generated by heuristics. In addition, many socially relevant model properties (e.g., gender bias) are abstract and difficult to measure through text-based inputs alone. To address these limitations, we propose a white-box sensitivity auditing framework for LLMs that leverages activation steering to conduct more rigorous assessments through model internals. Our auditing method conducts internal sensitivity tests by manipulating key concepts relevant to the model's intended function for the task. We demonstrate its application to bias audits in four simulated high-stakes LLM decision tasks. Our method consistently reveals substantial dependence on protected attributes in model predictions, even in settings where standard black-box evaluations suggest little or no bias. Our code is openly available at https://github.com/hannahxchen/llm-steering-audit
Abstract: While 3D foundational models have shown promise for promptable segmentation of medical volumes, their robustness to imprecise prompts remains under-explored. In this work, we aim to address this gap by systematically studying the effect of various controlled perturbations of dense visual prompts, that closely mimic real-world imprecision. By conducting experiments with two recent foundational models on a multi-organ abdominal segmentation task, we reveal several facets of promptable medical segmentation, especially pertaining to reliance on visual shape and spatial cues, and the extent of resilience of models towards certain perturbations. Codes are available at: https://github.com/ucsdbiag/Prompt-Robustness-MedSegFMs
Abstract: Simulating and validating coordination among multiple autonomous vehicles (AVs) is a challenging task as most existing simulation architectures are limited to single-vehicle operation or rely on centralized control. This paper presents a Distributed Multi-AV Architecture (DMAVA) that enables synchronized, real-time autonomous driving simulation across multiple physical hosts. Each vehicle runs its own complete AV stack and operates independently from other AVs. The vehicles in the simulation maintain synchronized coordination through a low-latency data-centric communication layer. The proposed system integrates ROS 2 Humble, Autoware Universe, AWSIM Labs, and Zenoh to support concurrent execution of multiple Autoware stacks within a shared Unity-based environment. Experiments conducted on multiple-host configurations demonstrate stable localization, reliable inter-host communication, and fully synchronized closed-loop control. The DMAVA also serves as a foundation for Multi-Vehicle Autonomous Valet Parking, demonstrating its extensibility toward higher-level cooperative autonomy. Demo videos and source code are available at: https://github.com/zubxxr/distributed-multi-autonomous-vehicle-architecture.
Abstract: This paper presents the DMV-AVP System, a distributed simulation of Multi-Vehicle Autonomous Valet Parking (AVP). The system was implemented as an application of the Distributed Multi-Vehicle Architecture (DMAVA) for synchronized multi-host execution. Most existing simulation approaches rely on centralized or non-distributed designs that constrain scalability and limit fully autonomous control. This work introduces two modules built on top of the DMAVA: 1) a Multi-Vehicle AVP Node that performs state-based coordination, queuing, and reservation management across multiple vehicles, and 2) a Unity-Integrated YOLOv5 Parking Spot Detection Module that provides real-time, vision-based perception within AWSIM Labs. Both modules integrate seamlessly with the DMAVA and extend it specifically for multi-vehicle AVP operation, supported by a Zenoh-based communication layer that ensures low-latency topic synchronization and coordinated behavior across hosts. Experiments conducted on two- and three-host configurations demonstrate deterministic coordination, conflict-free parking behavior, and scalable performance across distributed Autoware instances. The results confirm that the proposed Distributed Multi-Vehicle AVP System supports cooperative AVP simulation and establishes a foundation for future real-world and hardware-in-the-loop validation. Demo videos and source code are available at https://github.com/zubxxr/multi-vehicle-avp
Abstract: Recent foundational video-to-video diffusion models have achieved impressive results in editing user provided videos by modifying appearance, motion, or camera movement. However, real-world video editing is often an iterative process, where users refine results across multiple rounds of interaction. In this multi-turn setting, current video editors struggle to maintain cross-consistency across sequential edits. In this work, we tackle, for the first time, the problem of cross-consistency in multi-turn video editing and introduce Memory-V2V, a simple, yet effective framework that augments existing video-to-video models with explicit memory. Given an external cache of previously edited videos, Memory-V2V employs accurate retrieval and dynamic tokenization strategies to condition the current editing step on prior results. To further mitigate redundancy and computational overhead, we propose a learnable token compressor within the DiT backbone that compresses redundant conditioning tokens while preserving essential visual cues, achieving an overall speedup of 30%. We validate Memory-V2V on challenging tasks including video novel view synthesis and text-conditioned long video editing. Extensive experiments show that Memory-V2V produces videos that are significantly more cross-consistent with minimal computational overhead, while maintaining or even improving task-specific performance over state-of-the-art baselines. Project page: https://dohunlee1.github.io/MemoryV2V
Abstract: VIBETENSOR is an open-source research system software stack for deep learning, generated by LLM-powered coding agents under high-level human guidance. In this paper, "fully generated" refers to code provenance: implementation changes were produced and applied as agent-proposed diffs; validation relied on agent-run builds, tests, and differential checks, without per-change manual diff review. It implements a PyTorch-style eager tensor library with a C++20 core (CPU+CUDA), a torch-like Python overlay via nanobind, and an experimental Node.js/TypeScript interface. Unlike thin bindings, VIBETENSOR includes its own tensor/storage system, schema-lite dispatcher, reverse-mode autograd, CUDA runtime (streams/events/graphs), a stream-ordered caching allocator with diagnostics, and a stable C ABI for dynamically loaded operator plugins. We view this release as a milestone for AI-assisted software engineering: it shows coding agents can generate a coherent deep learning runtime spanning language bindings down to CUDA memory management, validated primarily by builds and tests. We describe the architecture, summarize the workflow used to produce and validate the system, and evaluate the artifact. We report repository scale and test-suite composition, and summarize reproducible microbenchmarks from an accompanying AI-generated kernel suite, including fused attention versus PyTorch SDPA/FlashAttention. We also report end-to-end training sanity checks on 3 small workloads (sequence reversal, ViT, miniGPT) on NVIDIA H100 (Hopper, SM90) and Blackwell-class GPUs; multi-GPU results are Blackwell-only and use an optional CUTLASS-based ring-allreduce plugin gated on CUDA 13+ and sm103a toolchain support. Finally, we discuss failure modes in generated system software, including a "Frankenstein" composition effect where locally correct subsystems interact to yield globally suboptimal performance.
Abstract: Recent advances in camera-controlled video diffusion models have significantly improved video-camera alignment. However, the camera controllability still remains limited. In this work, we build upon Reward Feedback Learning and aim to further improve camera controllability. However, directly borrowing existing ReFL approaches faces several challenges. First, current reward models lack the capacity to assess video-camera alignment. Second, decoding latent into RGB videos for reward computation introduces substantial computational overhead. Third, 3D geometric information is typically neglected during video decoding. To address these limitations, we introduce an efficient camera-aware 3D decoder that decodes video latent into 3D representations for reward quantization. Specifically, video latent along with the camera pose are decoded into 3D Gaussians. In this process, the camera pose not only acts as input, but also serves as a projection parameter. Misalignment between the video latent and camera pose will cause geometric distortions in the 3D structure, resulting in blurry renderings. Based on this property, we explicitly optimize pixel-level consistency between the rendered novel views and ground-truth ones as reward. To accommodate the stochastic nature, we further introduce a visibility term that selectively supervises only deterministic regions derived via geometric warping. Extensive experiments conducted on RealEstate10K and WorldScore benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Project page: \href{https://a-bigbao.github.io/CamPilot/}{CamPilot Page}.
Abstract: We study Compositional Video Understanding (CVU), where models must recognize verbs and objects and compose them to generalize to unseen combinations. We find that existing Zero-Shot Compositional Action Recognition (ZS-CAR) models fail primarily due to an overlooked failure mode: object-driven verb shortcuts. Through systematic analysis, we show that this behavior arises from two intertwined factors: severe sparsity and skewness of compositional supervision, and the asymmetric learning difficulty between verbs and objects. As training progresses, the existing ZS-CAR model increasingly ignores visual evidence and overfits to co-occurrence statistics. Consequently, the existing model does not gain the benefit of compositional recognition in unseen verb-object compositions. To address this, we propose RCORE, a simple and effective framework that enforces temporally grounded verb learning. RCORE introduces (i) a composition-aware augmentation that diversifies verb-object combinations without corrupting motion cues, and (ii) a temporal order regularization loss that penalizes shortcut behaviors by explicitly modeling temporal structure. Across two benchmarks, Sth-com and our newly constructed EK100-com, RCORE significantly improves unseen composition accuracy, reduces reliance on co-occurrence bias, and achieves consistently positive compositional gaps. Our findings reveal object-driven shortcuts as a critical limiting factor in ZS-CAR and demonstrate that addressing them is essential for robust compositional video understanding.
Abstract: Representation Autoencoders (RAEs) have shown distinct advantages in diffusion modeling on ImageNet by training in high-dimensional semantic latent spaces. In this work, we investigate whether this framework can scale to large-scale, freeform text-to-image (T2I) generation. We first scale RAE decoders on the frozen representation encoder (SigLIP-2) beyond ImageNet by training on web, synthetic, and text-rendering data, finding that while scale improves general fidelity, targeted data composition is essential for specific domains like text. We then rigorously stress-test the RAE design choices originally proposed for ImageNet. Our analysis reveals that scaling simplifies the framework: while dimension-dependent noise scheduling remains critical, architectural complexities such as wide diffusion heads and noise-augmented decoding offer negligible benefits at scale Building on this simplified framework, we conduct a controlled comparison of RAE against the state-of-the-art FLUX VAE across diffusion transformer scales from 0.5B to 9.8B parameters. RAEs consistently outperform VAEs during pretraining across all model scales. Further, during finetuning on high-quality datasets, VAE-based models catastrophically overfit after 64 epochs, while RAE models remain stable through 256 epochs and achieve consistently better performance. Across all experiments, RAE-based diffusion models demonstrate faster convergence and better generation quality, establishing RAEs as a simpler and stronger foundation than VAEs for large-scale T2I generation. Additionally, because both visual understanding and generation can operate in a shared representation space, the multimodal model can directly reason over generated latents, opening new possibilities for unified models.
Abstract: Lifting perspective images and videos to 360° panoramas enables immersive 3D world generation. Existing approaches often rely on explicit geometric alignment between the perspective and the equirectangular projection (ERP) space. Yet, this requires known camera metadata, obscuring the application to in-the-wild data where such calibration is typically absent or noisy. We propose 360Anything, a geometry-free framework built upon pre-trained diffusion transformers. By treating the perspective input and the panorama target simply as token sequences, 360Anything learns the perspective-to-equirectangular mapping in a purely data-driven way, eliminating the need for camera information. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on both image and video perspective-to-360° generation, outperforming prior works that use ground-truth camera information. We also trace the root cause of the seam artifacts at ERP boundaries to zero-padding in the VAE encoder, and introduce Circular Latent Encoding to facilitate seamless generation. Finally, we show competitive results in zero-shot camera FoV and orientation estimation benchmarks, demonstrating 360Anything's deep geometric understanding and broader utility in computer vision tasks. Additional results are available at https://360anything.github.io/.
Authors:Mert Yuksekgonul, Daniel Koceja, Xinhao Li, Federico Bianchi, Jed McCaleb, Xiaolong Wang, Jan Kautz, Yejin Choi, James Zou, Carlos Guestrin, Yu Sun
Abstract: How can we use AI to discover a new state of the art for a scientific problem? Prior work in test-time scaling, such as AlphaEvolve, performs search by prompting a frozen LLM. We perform reinforcement learning at test time, so the LLM can continue to train, but now with experience specific to the test problem. This form of continual learning is quite special, because its goal is to produce one great solution rather than many good ones on average, and to solve this very problem rather than generalize to other problems. Therefore, our learning objective and search subroutine are designed to prioritize the most promising solutions. We call this method Test-Time Training to Discover (TTT-Discover). Following prior work, we focus on problems with continuous rewards. We report results for every problem we attempted, across mathematics, GPU kernel engineering, algorithm design, and biology. TTT-Discover sets the new state of the art in almost all of them: (i) Erdős' minimum overlap problem and an autocorrelation inequality; (ii) a GPUMode kernel competition (up to $2\times$ faster than prior art); (iii) past AtCoder algorithm competitions; and (iv) denoising problem in single-cell analysis. Our solutions are reviewed by experts or the organizers. All our results are achieved with an open model, OpenAI gpt-oss-120b, and can be reproduced with our publicly available code, in contrast to previous best results that required closed frontier models. Our test-time training runs are performed using Tinker, an API by Thinking Machines, with a cost of only a few hundred dollars per problem.
Authors:Sylvestre-Alvise Rebuffi, Tuan Tran, Valeriu Lacatusu, Pierre Fernandez, Tomáš Souček, Nikola Jovanović, Tom Sander, Hady Elsahar, Alexandre Mourachko
Abstract: Existing approaches for watermarking AI-generated images often rely on post-hoc methods applied in pixel space, introducing computational overhead and potential visual artifacts. In this work, we explore latent space watermarking and introduce DistSeal, a unified approach for latent watermarking that works across both diffusion and autoregressive models. Our approach works by training post-hoc watermarking models in the latent space of generative models. We demonstrate that these latent watermarkers can be effectively distilled either into the generative model itself or into the latent decoder, enabling in-model watermarking. The resulting latent watermarks achieve competitive robustness while offering similar imperceptibility and up to 20x speedup compared to pixel-space baselines. Our experiments further reveal that distilling latent watermarkers outperforms distilling pixel-space ones, providing a solution that is both more efficient and more robust.
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents often exhibit abrupt shifts in tone and persona during extended interaction, reflecting the absence of explicit temporal structure governing agent-level state. While prior work emphasizes turn-local sentiment or static emotion classification, the role of explicit affective dynamics in shaping long-horizon agent behavior remains underexplored. This work investigates whether imposing dynamical structure on an external affective state can induce temporal coherence and controlled recovery in multi-turn dialogue. We introduce an agent-level affective subsystem that maintains a continuous Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) state external to the language model and governed by first- and second-order update rules. Instantaneous affective signals are extracted using a fixed, memoryless estimator and integrated over time via exponential smoothing or momentum-based dynamics. The resulting affective state is injected back into generation without modifying model parameters. Using a fixed 25-turn dialogue protocol, we compare stateless, first-order, and second-order affective dynamics. Stateless agents fail to exhibit coherent trajectories or recovery, while state persistence enables delayed responses and reliable recovery. Second-order dynamics introduce affective inertia and hysteresis that increase with momentum, revealing a trade-off between stability and responsiveness.
Abstract: Human motion reconstruction from monocular videos is a fundamental challenge in computer vision, with broad applications in AR/VR, robotics, and digital content creation, but remains challenging under frequent occlusions in real-world settings. Existing regression-based methods are efficient but fragile to missing observations, while optimization- and diffusion-based approaches improve robustness at the cost of slow inference speed and heavy preprocessing steps. To address these limitations, we leverage recent advances in generative masked modeling and present MoRo: Masked Modeling for human motion Recovery under Occlusions. MoRo is an occlusion-robust, end-to-end generative framework that formulates motion reconstruction as a video-conditioned task, and efficiently recover human motion in a consistent global coordinate system from RGB videos. By masked modeling, MoRo naturally handles occlusions while enabling efficient, end-to-end inference. To overcome the scarcity of paired video-motion data, we design a cross-modality learning scheme that learns multi-modal priors from a set of heterogeneous datasets: (i) a trajectory-aware motion prior trained on MoCap datasets, (ii) an image-conditioned pose prior trained on image-pose datasets, capturing diverse per-frame poses, and (iii) a video-conditioned masked transformer that fuses motion and pose priors, finetuned on video-motion datasets to integrate visual cues with motion dynamics for robust inference. Extensive experiments on EgoBody and RICH demonstrate that MoRo substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods in accuracy and motion realism under occlusions, while performing on-par in non-occluded scenarios. MoRo achieves real-time inference at 70 FPS on a single H200 GPU.
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) can aid synthesis planning in chemistry, but standard prompting methods often yield hallucinated or outdated suggestions. We study LLM interactions with a reaction knowledge graph by casting reaction path retrieval as a Text2Cypher (natural language to graph query) generation problem, and define single- and multi-step retrieval tasks. We compare zero-shot prompting to one-shot variants using static, random, and embedding-based exemplar selection, and assess a checklist-driven validator/corrector loop. To evaluate our framework, we consider query validity and retrieval accuracy. We find that one-shot prompting with aligned exemplars consistently performs best. Our checklist-style self-correction loop mainly improves executability in zero-shot settings and offers limited additional retrieval gains once a good exemplar is present. We provide a reproducible Text2Cypher evaluation setup to facilitate further work on KG-grounded LLMs for synthesis planning. Code is available at https://github.com/Intelligent-molecular-systems/KG-LLM-Synthesis-Retrieval.
Abstract: We study the problem of collision-free humanoid traversal in cluttered indoor scenes, such as hurdling over objects scattered on the floor, crouching under low-hanging obstacles, or squeezing through narrow passages. To achieve this goal, the humanoid needs to map its perception of surrounding obstacles with diverse spatial layouts and geometries to the corresponding traversal skills. However, the lack of an effective representation that captures humanoid-obstacle relationships during collision avoidance makes directly learning such mappings difficult. We therefore propose Humanoid Potential Field (HumanoidPF), which encodes these relationships as collision-free motion directions, significantly facilitating RL-based traversal skill learning. We also find that HumanoidPF exhibits a surprisingly negligible sim-to-real gap as a perceptual representation. To further enable generalizable traversal skills through diverse and challenging cluttered indoor scenes, we further propose a hybrid scene generation method, incorporating crops of realistic 3D indoor scenes and procedurally synthesized obstacles. We successfully transfer our policy to the real world and develop a teleoperation system where users could command the humanoid to traverse in cluttered indoor scenes with just a single click. Extensive experiments are conducted in both simulation and the real world to validate the effectiveness of our method. Demos and code can be found in our website: https://axian12138.github.io/CAT/.
Abstract: Accurate calibration and robust localization are fundamental for downstream tasks in spinning actuated LiDAR applications. Existing methods, however, require parameterizing extrinsic parameters based on different mounting configurations, limiting their generalizability. Additionally, spinning actuated LiDAR inevitably scans featureless regions, which complicates the balance between scanning coverage and localization robustness. To address these challenges, this letter presents a targetless LiDAR-motor calibration (LM-Calibr) on the basis of the Denavit-Hartenberg convention and an environmental adaptive LiDAR-inertial odometry (EVA-LIO). LM-Calibr supports calibration of LiDAR-motor systems with various mounting configurations. Extensive experiments demonstrate its accuracy and convergence across different scenarios, mounting angles, and initial values. Additionally, EVA-LIO adaptively selects downsample rates and map resolutions according to spatial scale. This adaptivity enables the actuator to operate at maximum speed, thereby enhancing scanning completeness while ensuring robust localization, even when LiDAR briefly scans featureless areas. The source code and hardware design are available on GitHub: \textcolor{blue}{\href{https://github.com/zijiechenrobotics/lm_calibr}{github.com/zijiechenrobotics/lm\_calibr}}. The video is available at \textcolor{blue}{\href{https://youtu.be/cZyyrkmeoSk}{youtu.be/cZyyrkmeoSk}}
Abstract: Model merging (MM) offers an efficient mechanism for integrating multiple specialized models without access to original training data or costly retraining. While MM has demonstrated success in domains like computer vision, its role in recommender systems (RSs) remains largely unexplored. Recently, Generative Recommendation (GR) has emerged as a new paradigm in RSs, characterized by rapidly growing model scales and substantial computational costs, making MM particularly appealing for cost-sensitive deployment scenarios. In this work, we present the first systematic study of MM in GR through a contextual lens. We focus on a fundamental yet underexplored challenge in real-world: how to merge generative recommenders specialized to different real-world contexts, arising from temporal evolving user behaviors and heterogeneous application domains. To this end, we propose a unified framework MMGRid, a structured contextual grid of GR checkpoints that organizes models trained under diverse contexts induced by temporal evolution and domain diversity. All checkpoints are derived from a shared base LLM but fine-tuned on context-specific data, forming a realistic and controlled model space for systematically analyzing MM across GR paradigms and merging algorithms. Our investigation reveals several key insights. First, training GR models from LLMs can introduce parameter conflicts during merging due to token distribution shifts and objective disparities; such conflicts can be alleviated by disentangling task-aware and context-specific parameter changes via base model replacement. Second, incremental training across contexts induces recency bias, which can be effectively balanced through weighted contextual merging. Notably, we observe that optimal merging weights correlate with context-dependent interaction characteristics, offering practical guidance for weight selection in real-world deployments.
Abstract: Contrast medium plays a pivotal role in radiological imaging, as it amplifies lesion conspicuity and improves detection for the diagnosis of tumor-related diseases. However, depending on the patient's health condition or the medical resources available, the use of contrast medium is not always feasible. Recent work has explored AI-based image translation to synthesize contrast-enhanced images directly from non-contrast scans, aims to reduce side effects and streamlines clinical workflows. Progress in this direction has been constrained by data limitations: (1) existing public datasets focus almost exclusively on brain-related paired MR modalities; (2) other collections include partially paired data but suffer from missing modalities/timestamps and imperfect spatial alignment; (3) explicit labeling of CT vs. CTC or DCE phases is often absent; (4) substantial resources remain private. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first public, fully paired, pan-cancer medical imaging dataset spanning 11 human organs. The MR data include complete dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) sequences covering all three phases (DCE1-DCE3), while the CT data provide paired non-contrast and contrast-enhanced acquisitions (CTC). The dataset is curated for anatomical correspondence, enabling rigorous evaluation of 1-to-1, N-to-1, and N-to-N translation settings (e.g., predicting DCE phases from non-contrast inputs). Built upon this resource, we establish a comprehensive benchmark. We report results from representative baselines of contemporary image-to-image translation. We release the dataset and benchmark to catalyze research on safe, effective contrast synthesis, with direct relevance to multi-organ oncology imaging workflows. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/YifanChen02/PMPBench.
Abstract: Table retrieval is the task of retrieving the most relevant tables from large-scale corpora given natural language queries. However, structural and semantic discrepancies between unstructured text and structured tables make embedding alignment particularly challenging. Recent methods such as QGpT attempt to enrich table semantics by generating synthetic queries, yet they still rely on coarse partial-table sampling and simple fusion strategies, which limit semantic diversity and hinder effective query-table alignment. We propose STAR (Semantic Table Representation), a lightweight framework that improves semantic table representation through semantic clustering and weighted fusion. STAR first applies header-aware K-means clustering to group semantically similar rows and selects representative centroid instances to construct a diverse partial table. It then generates cluster-specific synthetic queries to comprehensively cover the table's semantic space. Finally, STAR employs weighted fusion strategies to integrate table and query embeddings, enabling fine-grained semantic alignment. This design enables STAR to capture complementary information from structured and textual sources, improving the expressiveness of table representations. Experiments on five benchmarks show that STAR achieves consistently higher Recall than QGpT on all datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of semantic clustering and adaptive weighted fusion for robust table representation. Our code is available at https://github.com/adsl135789/STAR.
Abstract: General-purpose embedding models have demonstrated strong performance in text retrieval but remain suboptimal for table retrieval, where highly structured content leads to semantic compression and query-table mismatch. Recent LLM-based retrieval augmentation methods mitigate this issue by generating synthetic queries, yet they often rely on heuristic partial-table selection and seldom leverage these synthetic queries as supervision to improve the embedding model. We introduce CGPT, a training framework that enhances table retrieval through LLM-generated supervision. CGPT constructs semantically diverse partial tables by clustering table instances using K-means and sampling across clusters to broaden semantic coverage. An LLM then generates synthetic queries for these partial tables, which are used in hard-negative contrastive fine-tuning to refine the embedding model. Experiments across four public benchmarks (MimoTable, OTTQA, FetaQA, and E2E-WTQ) show that CGPT consistently outperforms retrieval baselines, including QGpT, with an average R@1 improvement of 16.54 percent. In a unified multi-domain corpus setting, CGPT further demonstrates strong cross-domain generalization and remains effective even when using smaller LLMs for synthetic query generation. These results indicate that semantically guided partial-table construction, combined with contrastive training from LLM-generated supervision, provides an effective and scalable paradigm for large-scale table retrieval. Our code is available at https://github.com/yumeow0122/CGPT.
Abstract: Recent years have witnessed the remarkable success of deep learning in remote sensing image interpretation, driven by the availability of large-scale benchmark datasets. However, this reliance on massive training data also brings two major challenges: (1) high storage and computational costs, and (2) the risk of data leakage, especially when sensitive categories are involved. To address these challenges, this study introduces the concept of dataset distillation into the field of remote sensing image interpretation for the first time. Specifically, we train a text-to-image diffusion model to condense a large-scale remote sensing dataset into a compact and representative distilled dataset. To improve the discriminative quality of the synthesized samples, we propose a classifier-driven guidance by injecting a classification consistency loss from a pre-trained model into the diffusion training process. Besides, considering the rich semantic complexity of remote sensing imagery, we further perform latent space clustering on training samples to select representative and diverse prototypes as visual style guidance, while using a visual language model to provide aggregated text descriptions. Experiments on three high-resolution remote sensing scene classification benchmarks show that the proposed method can distill realistic and diverse samples for downstream model training. Code and pre-trained models are available online (https://github.com/YonghaoXu/DPD).
Abstract: Neuron segmentation in electron microscopy (EM) aims to reconstruct the complete neuronal connectome; however, current deep learning-based methods are limited by their reliance on large-scale training data and extensive, time-consuming manual annotations. Traditional methods augment the training set through geometric and photometric transformations; however, the generated samples remain highly correlated with the original images and lack structural diversity. To address this limitation, we propose a diffusion-based data augmentation framework capable of generating diverse and structurally plausible image-label pairs for neuron segmentation. Specifically, the framework employs a resolution-aware conditional diffusion model with multi-scale conditioning and EM resolution priors to enable voxel-level image synthesis from 3D masks. It further incorporates a biology-guided mask remodeling module that produces augmented masks with enhanced structural realism. Together, these components effectively enrich the training set and improve segmentation performance. On the AC3 and AC4 datasets under low-annotation regimes, our method improves the ARAND metric by 32.1% and 30.7%, respectively, when combined with two different post-processing methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/HeadLiuYun/NeuroDiff.
Abstract: Drug-drug interaction (DDI) prediction is central to drug discovery and clinical development, particularly in the context of increasingly prevalent polypharmacy. Although existing computational methods achieve strong performance on standard benchmarks, they often fail to generalize to realistic deployment scenarios, where most candidate drug pairs involve previously unseen drugs and validated interactions are scarce. We demonstrate that proximity in the embedding spaces of prevailing molecule-centric DDI models does not reliably correspond to interaction labels, and that simply scaling up model capacity therefore fails to improve generalization. To address these limitations, we propose GenRel-DDI, a generalizable relation learning framework that reformulates DDI prediction as a relation-centric learning problem, in which interaction representations are learned independently of drug identities. This relation-level abstraction enables the capture of transferable interaction patterns that generalize to unseen drugs and novel drug pairs. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark demonstrate that GenRel-DDI consistently and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with particularly large gains on strict entity-disjoint evaluations, highlighting the effectiveness and practical utility of relation learning for robust DDI prediction. The code is available at https://github.com/SZU-ADDG/GenRel-DDI.
Abstract: Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the cornerstone of small-molecule structure elucidation. While deep learning has demonstrated significant potential in automating structure elucidation and spectral simulation, current progress is severely impeded by the reliance on synthetic datasets, which introduces significant domain shifts when applied to real-world experimental spectra. Furthermore, the lack of standardized evaluation protocols and rigorous data splitting strategies frequently leads to unfair comparisons and data leakage. To address these challenges, we introduce \textbf{NMRGym}, the largest and most comprehensive standardized dataset and benchmark derived from high-quality experimental NMR data to date. Comprising \textbf{269,999} unique molecules paired with high-fidelity $^1$H and $^{13}$C spectra, NMRGym bridges the critical gap between synthetic approximations and real-world diversity. We implement a strict quality control pipeline and unify data formats to ensure fair comparison. To strictly prevent data leakage, we enforce a scaffold-based split. Additionally, we provide fine-grained peak-atom level annotations to support future usage. Leveraging this resource, we establish a comprehensive evaluation suite covering diverse downstream tasks, including structure elucidation, functional group prediction from NMR, toxicity prediction from NMR, and spectral simulation, benchmarking representative state-of-the-art methodologies. Finally, we release an open-source leadboard with an automated leaderboard to foster community collaboration and standardize future research. The dataset, benchmark and leaderboard are publicly available at \textcolor{blue}{https://AIMS-Lab-HKUSTGZ.github.io/NMRGym/}.
Abstract: The performance of modern AI systems is fundamentally constrained by the quality of their underlying kernels, which translate high-level algorithmic semantics into low-level hardware operations. Achieving near-optimal kernels requires expert-level understanding of hardware architectures and programming models, making kernel engineering a critical but notoriously time-consuming and non-scalable process. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and LLM-based agents have opened new possibilities for automating kernel generation and optimization. LLMs are well-suited to compress expert-level kernel knowledge that is difficult to formalize, while agentic systems further enable scalable optimization by casting kernel development as an iterative, feedback-driven loop. Rapid progress has been made in this area. However, the field remains fragmented, lacking a systematic perspective for LLM-driven kernel generation. This survey addresses this gap by providing a structured overview of existing approaches, spanning LLM-based approaches and agentic optimization workflows, and systematically compiling the datasets and benchmarks that underpin learning and evaluation in this domain. Moreover, key open challenges and future research directions are further outlined, aiming to establish a comprehensive reference for the next generation of automated kernel optimization. To keep track of this field, we maintain an open-source GitHub repository at https://github.com/flagos-ai/awesome-LLM-driven-kernel-generation.
Abstract: Role-play prompting is known to steer the behavior of language models by injecting a persona into the prompt, improving their zero-shot reasoning capabilities. However, such improvements are inconsistent across different tasks or instances. This inconsistency suggests that zero-shot and role-play prompting may offer complementary strengths rather than one being universally superior. Building on this insight, we propose Persona Switch, a novel decoding method that dynamically combines the benefits of both prompting strategies. Our method proceeds step-by-step, selecting the better output between zero-shot and role-play prompting at each step by comparing their output confidence, as measured by the logit gap. Experiments with widely-used LLMs demonstrate that Persona Switch consistently outperforms competitive baselines, achieving up to 5.13% accuracy improvement. Furthermore, we show that output confidence serves as an informative measure for selecting the more reliable output.
Abstract: Few-shot recognition in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery remains a critical bottleneck for real-world applications due to extreme data scarcity. A promising strategy involves synthesizing a large dataset with a generative adversarial network (GAN), pre-training a model via self-supervised learning (SSL), and then fine-tuning on the few labeled samples. However, this approach faces a fundamental paradox: conventional GANs themselves require abundant data for stable training, contradicting the premise of few-shot learning. To resolve this, we propose the consistency-regularized generative adversarial network (Cr-GAN), a novel framework designed to synthesize diverse, high-fidelity samples even when trained under these severe data limitations. Cr-GAN introduces a dual-branch discriminator that decouples adversarial training from representation learning. This architecture enables a channel-wise feature interpolation strategy to create novel latent features, complemented by a dual-domain cycle consistency mechanism that ensures semantic integrity. Our Cr-GAN framework is adaptable to various GAN architectures, and its synthesized data effectively boosts multiple SSL algorithms. Extensive experiments on the MSTAR and SRSDD datasets validate our approach, with Cr-GAN achieving a highly competitive accuracy of 71.21% and 51.64%, respectively, in the 8-shot setting, significantly outperforming leading baselines, while requiring only ~5 of the parameters of state-of-the-art diffusion models. Code is available at: https://github.com/yikuizhai/Cr-GAN.
Abstract: Contemporary sequential recommendation methods are becoming more complex, shifting from classification to a diffusion-guided generative paradigm. However, the quality of guidance in the form of user information is often compromised by missing data in the observed sequences, leading to suboptimal generation quality. Existing methods address this by removing locally similar items, but overlook ``critical turning points'' in user interest, which are crucial for accurately predicting subsequent user intent. To address this, we propose a novel Counterfactual Attention Regulation Diffusion model (CARD), which focuses on amplifying the signal from key interest-turning-point items while concurrently identifying and suppressing noise within the user sequence. CARD consists of (1) a Dual-side Thompson Sampling method to identify sequences undergoing significant interest shift, and (2) a counterfactual attention mechanism for these sequences to quantify the importance of each item. In this manner, CARD provides the diffusion model with a high-quality guidance signal composed of dynamically re-weighted interaction vectors to enable effective generation. Experiments show our method works well on real-world data without being computationally expensive. Our code is available at https://github.com/yanqilong3321/CARD.
Abstract: Transformer-based models, despite their promise for long-term time series forecasting (LTSF), suffer from an inherent low-pass filtering effect that limits their effectiveness. This issue arises due to undifferentiated propagation of frequency components across layers, causing a progressive attenuation of high-frequency information crucial for capturing fine-grained temporal variations. To address this limitation, we propose Dualformer, a principled dual-domain framework that rethinks frequency modeling from a layer-wise perspective. Dualformer introduces three key components: (1) a dual-branch architecture that concurrently models complementary temporal patterns in both time and frequency domains; (2) a hierarchical frequency sampling module that allocates distinct frequency bands to different layers, preserving high-frequency details in lower layers while modeling low-frequency trends in deeper layers; and (3) a periodicity-aware weighting mechanism that dynamically balances contributions from the dual branches based on the harmonic energy ratio of inputs, supported theoretically by a derived lower bound. This design enables structured frequency modeling and adaptive integration of time-frequency features, effectively preserving high-frequency information and enhancing generalization. Extensive experiments conducted on eight widely used benchmarks demonstrate Dualformer's robustness and superior performance, particularly on heterogeneous or weakly periodic data. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Akira-221/Dualformer.
Abstract: Emotional information in speech plays a unique role in multimodal perception. However, current Speech Large Language Models (SpeechLLMs), similar to conventional speech emotion recognition (SER) systems, still treat emotion understanding as a simple classification problem. This provides limited interpretability of predictions, while leaving the LLMs' expressive and reasoning capabilities underutilized. In this work, we take the first step to reformulate SER as a deep reasoning problem through reinforcement learning (RL). We propose EmotionThinker, which is designed to generate accurate emotion predictions with interpretable explanations grounded in fine-grained acoustic cues. To achieve this, we first construct EmotionCoT-35K, an emotional reasoning dataset with Chain-of-Thought annotations and detailed captions. Second, we observe that current SpeechLLMs exhibit weak prosody perception, whereas prosodic cues constitute fundamental signals for interpreting emotions. To address this, we develop the prosody-enhanced foundation model EmotionThinker-Base, and demonstrate that prosody enhancement improves emotion understanding. Third, we introduce Group-Relative-Policy-Optimization with Progressive-Trust-aware-Reasoning-Reward (GRPO-PTR) for RL. Different from standard GRPO, which relies only on rule-based outcome rewards, GRPO-PTR progressively introduces reasoning reward, dynamically adjusts it with a trustworthiness weight reflecting the alignment between reasoning and outcome, and evaluates the overall reasoning quality with a reward model based on multi-dimensional criteria. EmotionThinker outperforms previous state-of-the-art evaluation models both in emotion accuracy and explanation quality, advancing SER toward interpretable multimodal reasoning. Project page: https://github.com/dingdongwang/EmotionThinker
Abstract: 3D occupancy prediction plays a pivotal role in the realm of autonomous driving, as it provides a comprehensive understanding of the driving environment. Most existing methods construct dense scene representations for occupancy prediction, overlooking the inherent sparsity of real-world driving scenes. Recently, 3D superquadric representation has emerged as a promising sparse alternative to dense scene representations due to the strong geometric expressiveness of superquadrics. However, existing superquadric frameworks still suffer from insufficient temporal modeling, a challenging trade-off between query sparsity and geometric expressiveness, and inefficient superquadric-to-voxel splatting. To address these issues, we propose SuperOcc, a novel framework for superquadric-based 3D occupancy prediction. SuperOcc incorporates three key designs: (1) a cohesive temporal modeling mechanism to simultaneously exploit view-centric and object-centric temporal cues; (2) a multi-superquadric decoding strategy to enhance geometric expressiveness without sacrificing query sparsity; and (3) an efficient superquadric-to-voxel splatting scheme to improve computational efficiency. Extensive experiments on the SurroundOcc and Occ3D benchmarks demonstrate that SuperOcc achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining superior efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/Yzichen/SuperOcc.
Abstract: In the study of time-dependent (i.e., temporal) networks, researchers often examine the evolution of communities, which are sets of densely connected sets of nodes that are connected sparsely to other nodes. An increasingly prominent approach to studying community structure in temporal networks is statistical inference. In the present paper, we study the performance of a class of statistical-inference methods for community detection in temporal networks. We represent temporal networks as multilayer networks, with each layer encoding a time step, and we illustrate that statistical-inference models that generate community assignments via either a uniform distribution on community assignments or discrete-time Markov processes are biased against generating communities with large or small numbers of nodes. In particular, we demonstrate that statistical-inference methods that use such generative models tend to poorly identify community structure in networks with large or small communities. To rectify this issue, we introduce a novel statistical model that generates the community assignments of the nodes in given layer (i.e., at a given time) using all of the community assignments in the previous layer. We prove results that guarantee that our approach greatly mitigates the bias against large and small communities, so using our generative model is beneficial for studying community structure in networks with large or small communities. Our code is available at https://github.com/tfaust0196/TemporalCommunityComparison.
Abstract: Most prior deepfake detection methods lack explainable outputs. With the growing interest in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), researchers have started exploring their use in interpretable deepfake detection. However, a major obstacle in applying MLLMs to this task is the scarcity of high-quality datasets with detailed forgery attribution annotations, as textual annotation is both costly and challenging - particularly for high-fidelity forged images or videos. Moreover, multiple studies have shown that reinforcement learning (RL) can substantially enhance performance in visual tasks, especially in improving cross-domain generalization. To facilitate the adoption of mainstream MLLM frameworks in deepfake detection with reduced annotation cost, and to investigate the potential of RL in this context, we propose an automated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) data generation framework based on Self-Blended Images, along with an RL-enhanced deepfake detection framework. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our CoT data construction pipeline, tailored reward mechanism, and feedback-driven synthetic data generation approach. Our method achieves performance competitive with state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches across multiple cross-dataset benchmarks. Implementation details are available at https://github.com/deon1219/rlsbi.
Abstract: In this report, we present the Qwen3-TTS series, a family of advanced multilingual, controllable, robust, and streaming text-to-speech models. Qwen3-TTS supports state-of-the-art 3-second voice cloning and description-based control, allowing both the creation of entirely novel voices and fine-grained manipulation over the output speech. Trained on over 5 million hours of speech data spanning 10 languages, Qwen3-TTS adopts a dual-track LM architecture for real-time synthesis, coupled with two speech tokenizers: 1) Qwen-TTS-Tokenizer-25Hz is a single-codebook codec emphasizing semantic content, which offers seamlessly integration with Qwen-Audio and enables streaming waveform reconstruction via a block-wise DiT. 2) Qwen-TTS-Tokenizer-12Hz achieves extreme bitrate reduction and ultra-low-latency streaming, enabling immediate first-packet emission ($97\,\mathrm{ms}$) through its 12.5 Hz, 16-layer multi-codebook design and a lightweight causal ConvNet. Extensive experiments indicate state-of-the-art performance across diverse objective and subjective benchmark (e.g., TTS multilingual test set, InstructTTSEval, and our long speech test set). To facilitate community research and development, we release both tokenizers and models under the Apache 2.0 license.
Abstract: Cross-subject EEG-based emotion recognition (EER) remains challenging due to strong inter-subject variability, which induces substantial distribution shifts in EEG signals, as well as the high complexity of emotion-related neural representations in both spatial organization and temporal evolution. Existing approaches typically improve spatial modeling, temporal modeling, or generalization strategies in isolation, which limits their ability to align representations across subjects while capturing multi-scale dynamics and suppressing subject-specific bias within a unified framework. To address these gaps, we propose a Region-aware Spatiotemporal Modeling framework with Collaborative Domain Generalization (RSM-CoDG) for cross-subject EEG emotion recognition. RSM-CoDG incorporates neuroscience priors derived from functional brain region partitioning to construct region-level spatial representations, thereby improving cross-subject comparability. It also employs multi-scale temporal modeling to characterize the dynamic evolution of emotion-evoked neural activity. In addition, the framework employs a collaborative domain generalization strategy, incorporating multidimensional constraints to reduce subject-specific bias in a fully unseen target subject setting, which enhances the generalization to unknown individuals. Extensive experimental results on SEED series datasets demonstrate that RSM-CoDG consistently outperforms existing competing methods, providing an effective approach for improving robustness. The source code is available at https://github.com/RyanLi-X/RSM-CoDG.
Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are promising energy-efficient models and powerful framworks of modeling neuron dynamics. However, existing binary spiking neurons exhibit limited biological plausibilities and low information capacity. Recently developed ternary spiking neuron possesses higher consistency with biological principles (i.e. excitation-inhibition balance mechanism). Despite of this, the ternary spiking neuron suffers from defects including iterative information loss, temporal gradient vanishing and irregular distributions of membrane potentials. To address these issues, we propose Complemented Ternary Spiking Neuron (CTSN), a novel ternary spiking neuron model that incorporates an learnable complemental term to store information from historical inputs. CTSN effectively improves the deficiencies of ternary spiking neuron, while the embedded learnable factors enable CTSN to adaptively adjust neuron dynamics, providing strong neural heterogeneity. Furthermore, based on the temporal evolution features of ternary spiking neurons' membrane potential distributions, we propose the Temporal Membrane Potential Regularization (TMPR) training method. TMPR introduces time-varying regularization strategy utilizing membrane potentials, furhter enhancing the training process by creating extra backpropagation paths. We validate our methods through extensive experiments on various datasets, demonstrating remarkable performance advances.
Abstract: Recent image generation models have shown impressive progress, yet they often struggle to yield controllable and consistent results when users attempt to edit specific elements within an existing image. Layered representations enable flexible, user-driven content creation, but existing approaches often fail to produce layers with coherent compositing relationships, and their object layers typically lack realistic visual effects such as shadows and reflections. To overcome these limitations, we propose LASAGNA, a novel, unified framework that generates an image jointly with its composing layers--a photorealistic background and a high-quality transparent foreground with compelling visual effects. Unlike prior work, LASAGNA efficiently learns correct image composition from a wide range of conditioning inputs--text prompts, foreground, background, and location masks--offering greater controllability for real-world applications. To enable this, we introduce LASAGNA-48K, a new dataset composed of clean backgrounds and RGBA foregrounds with physically grounded visual effects. We also propose LASAGNABENCH, the first benchmark for layer editing. We demonstrate that LASAGNA excels in generating highly consistent and coherent results across multiple image layers simultaneously, enabling diverse post-editing applications that accurately preserve identity and visual effects. LASAGNA-48K and LASAGNABENCH will be publicly released to foster open research in the community. The project page is https://rayjryang.github.io/LASAGNA-Page/.
Abstract: Standard autoregressive decoding in large language models (LLMs) is inherently short-sighted, often failing to find globally optimal reasoning paths due to its token-by-token generation process. While inference-time strategies like foresight sampling attempt to mitigate this by simulating future steps, they typically rely on ad-hoc heuristics for valuing paths and pruning the search space. This paper introduces Martingale Foresight Sampling (MFS), a principled framework that reformulates LLM decoding as a problem of identifying an optimal stochastic process. By modeling the quality of a reasoning path as a stochastic process, we leverage Martingale theory to design a theoretically-grounded algorithm. Our approach replaces heuristic mechanisms with principles from probability theory: step valuation is derived from the Doob Decomposition Theorem to measure a path's predictable advantage, path selection uses Optional Stopping Theory for principled pruning of suboptimal candidates, and an adaptive stopping rule based on the Martingale Convergence Theorem terminates exploration once a path's quality has provably converged. Experiments on six reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that MFS surpasses state-of-the-art methods in accuracy while significantly improving computational efficiency. Code will be released at https://github.com/miraclehetech/EACL2026-Martingale-Foresight-Sampling.
Abstract: The safe deployment of large language models (LLMs) in high-stakes fields like biomedicine, requires them to be able to reason about cause and effect. We investigate this ability by testing 13 open-source LLMs on a fundamental task: pairwise causal discovery (PCD) from text. Our benchmark, using 12 diverse datasets, evaluates two core skills: 1) \textbf{Causal Detection} (identifying if a text contains a causal link) and 2) \textbf{Causal Extraction} (pulling out the exact cause and effect phrases). We tested various prompting methods, from simple instructions (zero-shot) to more complex strategies like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Few-shot In-Context Learning (FICL). The results show major deficiencies in current models. The best model for detection, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B, only achieved a mean score of 49.57\% ($C_{detect}$), while the best for extraction, Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct, reached just 47.12\% ($C_{extract}$). Models performed best on simple, explicit, single-sentence relations. However, performance plummeted for more difficult (and realistic) cases, such as implicit relationships, links spanning multiple sentences, and texts containing multiple causal pairs. We provide a unified evaluation framework, built on a dataset validated with high inter-annotator agreement ($κ\ge 0.758$), and make all our data, code, and prompts publicly available to spur further research. \href{https://github.com/sydneyanuyah/CausalDiscovery}{Code available here: https://github.com/sydneyanuyah/CausalDiscovery}
Abstract: Graph neural network (GNN) have demonstrated exceptional performance in solving critical problems across diverse domains yet remain susceptible to backdoor attacks. Existing studies on backdoor attack for graph classification are limited to single target attack using subgraph replacement based mechanism where the attacker implants only one trigger into the GNN model. In this paper, we introduce the first multi-targeted backdoor attack for graph classification task, where multiple triggers simultaneously redirect predictions to different target labels. Instead of subgraph replacement, we propose subgraph injection which preserves the structure of the original graphs while poisoning the clean graphs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, where our attack achieves high attack success rates for all target labels with minimal impact on the clean accuracy. Experimental results on five dataset demonstrate the superior performance of our attack framework compared to the conventional subgraph replacement-based attack. Our analysis on four GNN models confirms the generalization capability of our attack which is effective regardless of the GNN model architectures and training parameters settings. We further investigate the impact of the attack design parameters including injection methods, number of connections, trigger sizes, trigger edge density and poisoning ratios. Additionally, our evaluation against state-of-the-art defenses (randomized smoothing and fine-pruning) demonstrates the robustness of our proposed multi-target attacks. This work highlights the GNN vulnerability against multi-targeted backdoor attack in graph classification task. Our source codes will be available at https://github.com/SiSL-URI/Multi-Targeted-Graph-Backdoor-Attack.
Abstract: Training modern deep learning models is increasingly constrained by GPU memory and compute limits. While Randomized Numerical Linear Algebra (RandNLA) offers proven techniques to compress these models, the lack of a unified, production-grade library prevents widely adopting these methods. We present Panther, a PyTorch-compatible library that consolidates established RandNLA algorithms into a single high-performance framework. Panther engineers efficient, drop-in replacements for standard components including sketched linear layers, 2D convolution, multi-head attention, and randomized matrix decompositions (such as pivoted CholeskyQR). By implementing a custom C++/CUDA backend (pawX), Panther provides an optimized implementation that can run on both CPUs and GPUs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RandNLA techniques and Panther's ease of adoption. By replacing standard PyTorch linear layers with Panther layers (requiring only a few lines of code) we achieve significant memory savings (up to 75%) on BERT while maintaining comparable loss. Source code is available (MIT License) at https://github.com/FahdSeddik/panther, along with demonstration video at https://youtu.be/7M3RQb4KWxs.
Abstract: Motivation: The multiple sequence alignment (MSA) problem has been extensively studied, with numerous approaches developed over recent years. With the rapid growth of sequence data, there is an increasing need for fast and accurate MSA tools that scale effectively to large datasets. Building on our previous work on CLAM, we are able to use exact dynamic programming (Needleman-Wunsch) while scaling to large datasets. We introduce MuSAlS (Multiple Sequence Alignment at Scale), a fast and scalable de novo MSA aligner. MuSAlS uses hierarchical clustering to construct a guide tree based on the Levenshtein distance metric, enabling efficient and accurate alignment through a bottom-up approach. Results: MuSAlS achieves competitive accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods while significantly improving runtime performance. This makes it a valuable tool for researchers analyzing large-scale genomic and metagenomic datasets, addressing the growing demand for scalable bioinformatics solutions. Availability and Implementation: MuSAlS is implemented in the Rust programming language, and available at https://github.com/URI-ABD/clam
Abstract: Radiance field-based rendering methods have attracted significant interest from the computer vision and computer graphics communities. They enable high-fidelity rendering with complex real-world lighting effects, but at the cost of high rendering time. 3D Gaussian Splatting solves this issue with a rasterisation-based approach for real-time rendering, enabling applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, virtual reality, and extended reality. However, current 3DGS implementations are difficult to integrate into traditional mesh-based rendering pipelines, which is a common use case for interactive applications and artistic exploration. To address this limitation, this software solution uses Nvidia's interprocess communication (IPC) APIs to easily integrate into implementations and allow the results to be viewed in external clients such as Unity, Blender, Unreal Engine, and OpenGL viewers. The code is available at https://github.com/RockyXu66/splatbus.
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) generate fluent answers but can struggle with trustworthy, domain-specific reasoning. We evaluate whether domain knowledge graphs (KGs) improve Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for healthcare by constructing three PubMed-derived graphs: $\mathbb{G}_1$ (T2DM), $\mathbb{G}_2$ (Alzheimer's disease), and $\mathbb{G}_3$ (AD+T2DM). We design two probes: Probe 1 targets merged AD T2DM knowledge, while Probe 2 targets the intersection of $\mathbb{G}_1$ and $\mathbb{G}_2$. Seven instruction-tuned LLMs are tested across retrieval sources {No-RAG, $\mathbb{G}_1$, $\mathbb{G}_2$, $\mathbb{G}_1$ + $\mathbb{G}_2$, $\mathbb{G}_3$, $\mathbb{G}_1$+$\mathbb{G}_2$ + $\mathbb{G}_3$} and three decoding temperatures. Results show that scope alignment between probe and KG is decisive: precise, scope-matched retrieval (notably $\mathbb{G}_2$) yields the most consistent gains, whereas indiscriminate graph unions often introduce distractors that reduce accuracy. Larger models frequently match or exceed KG-RAG with a No-RAG baseline on Probe 1, indicating strong parametric priors, whereas smaller/mid-sized models benefit more from well-scoped retrieval. Temperature plays a secondary role; higher values rarely help. We conclude that precision-first, scope-matched KG-RAG is preferable to breadth-first unions, and we outline practical guidelines for graph selection, model sizing, and retrieval/reranking. Code and Data available here - https://github.com/sydneyanuyah/RAGComparison
Abstract: Medical vision-language models can automate the generation of radiology reports but struggle with accurate visual grounding and factual consistency. Existing models often misalign textual findings with visual evidence, leading to unreliable or weakly grounded predictions. We present CURE, an error-aware curriculum learning framework that improves grounding and report quality without any additional data. CURE fine-tunes a multimodal instructional model on phrase grounding, grounded report generation, and anatomy-grounded report generation using public datasets. The method dynamically adjusts sampling based on model performance, emphasizing harder samples to improve spatial and textual alignment. CURE improves grounding accuracy by +0.37 IoU, boosts report quality by +0.188 CXRFEScore, and reduces hallucinations by 18.6%. CURE is a data-efficient framework that enhances both grounding accuracy and report reliability. Code is available at https://github.com/PabloMessina/CURE and model weights at https://huggingface.co/pamessina/medgemma-4b-it-cure
Abstract: Biomedical research increasingly relies on integrating diverse data modalities, including gene expression profiles, medical images, and clinical metadata. While medical images and clinical metadata are routinely collected in clinical practice, gene expression data presents unique challenges for widespread research use, mainly due to stringent privacy regulations and costly laboratory experiments. To address these limitations, we present GeMM-GAN, a novel Generative Adversarial Network conditioned on histopathology tissue slides and clinical metadata, designed to synthesize realistic gene expression profiles. GeMM-GAN combines a Transformer Encoder for image patches with a final Cross Attention mechanism between patches and text tokens, producing a conditioning vector to guide a generative model in generating biologically coherent gene expression profiles. We evaluate our approach on the TCGA dataset and demonstrate that our framework outperforms standard generative models and generates more realistic and functionally meaningful gene expression profiles, improving by more than 11\% the accuracy on downstream disease type prediction compared to current state-of-the-art generative models. Code will be available at: https://github.com/francescapia/GeMM-GAN
Abstract: Continuous attractor networks (CANs) are a well-established class of models for representing low-dimensional continuous variables such as head direction, spatial position, and phase. In canonical spatial domains, transitions along the attractor manifold are driven by continuous displacement signals, such as angular velocity-provided by sensorimotor systems external to the CAN itself. When such signals are not explicitly provided as dedicated displacement inputs, it remains unclear whether attractor-based circuits can reliably acquire recurrent dynamics that support stable state transitions, or whether alternative predictive strategies dominate. In this work, we present an experimental framework for training CANs to perform successor-like transitions between stable attractor states in the absence of externally provided displacement signals. We compare two recurrent topologies, a circular ring and a folded snake manifold, and systematically vary the temporal regime under which stability is evaluated. We find that, under short evaluation windows, networks consistently converge to impulse-driven associative solutions that achieve high apparent accuracy yet lack persistent attractor dynamics. Only when stability is explicitly enforced over extended free-run periods do genuine attractor-based transition dynamics emerge. This suggests that shortcut solutions are the default outcome of local learning in recurrent networks, while attractor dynamics represent a constrained regime rather than a generic result. Furthermore, we demonstrate that topology strictly limits the capacity for learned transitions. While the continuous ring topology achieves perfect stability over long horizons, the folded snake topology hits a geometric limit characterized by failure at manifold discontinuities, which neither curriculum learning nor basal ganglia-inspired gating can fully overcome.
Abstract: The deployment of large language models (LLMs) has raised security concerns due to their susceptibility to producing harmful or policy-violating outputs when exposed to adversarial prompts. While alignment and guardrails mitigate common misuse, they remain vulnerable to automated jailbreaking methods such as GCG, PEZ, and GBDA, which generate adversarial suffixes via training and gradient-based search. Although effective, these methods particularly GCG are computationally expensive, limiting their practicality for organisations with constrained resources. This paper introduces a resource-efficient adversarial prompting approach that eliminates the need for retraining by matching new prompts to a database of pre-trained adversarial prompts. A dataset of 1,000 prompts was classified into seven harm-related categories, and GCG, PEZ, and GBDA were evaluated on a Llama 3 8B model to identify the most effective attack method per category. Results reveal a correlation between prompt type and algorithm effectiveness. By retrieving semantically similar successful adversarial prompts, the proposed method achieves competitive attack success rates with significantly reduced computational cost. This work provides a practical framework for scalable red-teaming and security evaluation of aligned LLMs, including in settings where model internals are inaccessible.
Abstract: Background: Conventional electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis faces a persistent dichotomy: expert-driven features ensure interpretability but lack sensitivity to latent patterns, while deep learning offers high accuracy but functions as a black box with high data dependency. We introduce ECGomics, a systematic paradigm and open-source platform for the multidimensional deconstruction of cardiac signals into digital biomarker. Methods: Inspired by the taxonomic rigor of genomics, ECGomics deconstructs cardiac activity across four dimensions: Structural, Intensity, Functional, and Comparative. This taxonomy synergizes expert-defined morphological rules with data-driven latent representations, effectively bridging the gap between handcrafted features and deep learning embeddings. Results: We operationalized this framework into a scalable ecosystem consisting of a web-based research platform and a mobile-integrated solution (https://github.com/PKUDigitalHealth/ECGomics). The web platform facilitates high-throughput analysis via precision parameter configuration, high-fidelity data ingestion, and 12-lead visualization, allowing for the systematic extraction of biomarkers across the four ECGomics dimensions. Complementarily, the mobile interface, integrated with portable sensors and a cloud-based engine, enables real-time signal acquisition and near-instantaneous delivery of structured diagnostic reports. This dual-interface architecture successfully transitions ECGomics from theoretical discovery to decentralized, real-world health management, ensuring professional-grade monitoring in diverse clinical and home-based settings. Conclusion: ECGomics harmonizes diagnostic precision, interpretability, and data efficiency. By providing a deployable software ecosystem, this paradigm establishes a robust foundation for digital biomarker discovery and personalized cardiovascular medicine.
Abstract: LLM agents struggle with regulatory audit replay: when asked to reproduce a flagged transaction decision with identical inputs, most deployments fail to return consistent results. This paper introduces the Determinism-Faithfulness Assurance Harness (DFAH), a framework for measuring trajectory determinism and evidence-conditioned faithfulness in tool-using agents deployed in financial services. Across 74 configurations (12 models, 4 providers, 8-24 runs each at T=0.0) in non-agentic baseline experiments, 7-20B parameter models achieved 100% determinism, while 120B+ models required 3.7x larger validation samples to achieve equivalent statistical reliability. Agentic tool-use introduces additional variance (see Tables 4-7). Contrary to the assumed reliability-capability trade-off, a positive Pearson correlation emerged (r = 0.45, p < 0.01, n = 51 at T=0.0) between determinism and faithfulness; models producing consistent outputs also tended to be more evidence-aligned. Three financial benchmarks are provided (compliance triage, portfolio constraints, DataOps exceptions; 50 cases each) along with an open-source stress-test harness. In these benchmarks and under DFAH evaluation settings, Tier 1 models with schema-first architectures achieved determinism levels consistent with audit replay requirements.
Abstract: In recent years, the rapid evolution of large vision-language models (LVLMs) has driven a paradigm shift in multimodal fake news detection (MFND), transforming it from traditional feature-engineering approaches to unified, end-to-end multimodal reasoning frameworks. Early methods primarily relied on shallow fusion techniques to capture correlations between text and images, but they struggled with high-level semantic understanding and complex cross-modal interactions. The emergence of LVLMs has fundamentally changed this landscape by enabling joint modeling of vision and language with powerful representation learning, thereby enhancing the ability to detect misinformation that leverages both textual narratives and visual content. Despite these advances, the field lacks a systematic survey that traces this transition and consolidates recent developments. To address this gap, this paper provides a comprehensive review of MFND through the lens of LVLMs. We first present a historical perspective, mapping the evolution from conventional multimodal detection pipelines to foundation model-driven paradigms. Next, we establish a structured taxonomy covering model architectures, datasets, and performance benchmarks. Furthermore, we analyze the remaining technical challenges, including interpretability, temporal reasoning, and domain generalization. Finally, we outline future research directions to guide the next stage of this paradigm shift. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive survey to systematically document and analyze the transformative role of LVLMs in combating multimodal fake news. The summary of existing methods mentioned is in our Github: \href{https://github.com/Tan-YiLong/Overview-of-Fake-News-Detection}{https://github.com/Tan-YiLong/Overview-of-Fake-News-Detection}.
Abstract: The rapid adoption of LLMs has increased the need for reliable AI text detection, yet existing detectors often fail outside controlled benchmarks. We systematically evaluate 2 dominant paradigms (training-free and supervised) and show that both are brittle under distribution shift, unseen generators, and simple stylistic perturbations. To address these limitations, we propose a supervised contrastive learning (SCL) framework that learns discriminative style embeddings. Experiments show that while supervised detectors excel in-domain, they degrade sharply out-of-domain, and training-free methods remain highly sensitive to proxy choice. Overall, our results expose fundamental challenges in building domain-agnostic detectors. Our code is available at: https://github.com/HARSHITJAIS14/DetectAI
Abstract: Topic modeling is a crucial technique for extracting latent themes from unstructured text data, particularly valuable in analyzing survey responses. However, traditional methods often only consider free-text responses and do not natively incorporate structured or categorical survey responses for topic modeling. And they produce abstract topics, requiring extensive human interpretation. To address these limitations, we propose the Multi-Agent LLM Topic Modeling Framework (MALTopic). This framework decomposes topic modeling into specialized tasks executed by individual LLM agents: an enrichment agent leverages structured data to enhance textual responses, a topic modeling agent extracts latent themes, and a deduplication agent refines the results. Comparative analysis on a survey dataset demonstrates that MALTopic significantly improves topic coherence, diversity, and interpretability compared to LDA and BERTopic. By integrating structured data and employing a multi-agent approach, MALTopic generates human-readable topics with enhanced contextual relevance, offering a more effective solution for analyzing complex survey data.
Abstract: Face swapping aims to transfer the identity of a source face onto a target face while preserving target-specific attributes such as pose, expression, lighting, skin tone, and makeup. However, since real ground truth for face swapping is unavailable, achieving both accurate identity transfer and high-quality attribute preservation remains challenging. In addition, recent diffusion-based approaches attempt to improve visual fidelity through conditional inpainting on masked target images, but the masked condition removes crucial appearance cues of target, resulting in plausible yet misaligned attributes. To address these limitations, we propose APPLE (Attribute-Preserving Pseudo-Labeling), a diffusion-based teacher-student framework that enhances attribute fidelity through attribute-aware pseudo-label supervision. We reformulate face swapping as a conditional deblurring task to more faithfully preserve target-specific attributes such as lighting, skin tone, and makeup. In addition, we introduce an attribute-aware inversion scheme to further improve detailed attribute preservation. Through an elaborate attribute-preserving design for teacher learning, APPLE produces high-quality pseudo triplets that explicitly provide the student with direct face-swapping supervision. Overall, APPLE achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of attribute preservation and identity transfer, producing more photorealistic and target-faithful results.
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) deliver impressive results for a variety of tasks, but state-of-the-art systems require fast GPUs with large amounts of memory. To reduce both the memory and latency of these systems, practitioners quantize their learned parameters, typically at half precision. A growing body of research focuses on preserving the model performance with more aggressive bit widths, and some work has been done to apply these strategies to other models, like vision transformers. In our study we investigate how a variety of quantization methods, including state-of-the-art GPTQ and AWQ, can be applied effectively to multimodal pipelines comprised of vision models, language models, and their connectors. We address how performance on captioning, retrieval, and question answering can be affected by bit width, quantization method, and which portion of the pipeline the quantization is used for. Results reveal that ViT and LLM exhibit comparable importance in model performance, despite significant differences in parameter size, and that lower-bit quantization of the LLM achieves high accuracy at reduced bits per weight (bpw). These findings provide practical insights for efficient deployment of MLLMs and highlight the value of exploration for understanding component sensitivities in multimodal models. Our code is available at https://github.com/gautomdas/mmq.
Abstract: Video generation models have significantly advanced embodied intelligence, unlocking new possibilities for generating diverse robot data that capture perception, reasoning, and action in the physical world. However, synthesizing high-quality videos that accurately reflect real-world robotic interactions remains challenging, and the lack of a standardized benchmark limits fair comparisons and progress. To address this gap, we introduce a comprehensive robotics benchmark, RBench, designed to evaluate robot-oriented video generation across five task domains and four distinct embodiments. It assesses both task-level correctness and visual fidelity through reproducible sub-metrics, including structural consistency, physical plausibility, and action completeness. Evaluation of 25 representative models highlights significant deficiencies in generating physically realistic robot behaviors. Furthermore, the benchmark achieves a Spearman correlation coefficient of 0.96 with human evaluations, validating its effectiveness. While RBench provides the necessary lens to identify these deficiencies, achieving physical realism requires moving beyond evaluation to address the critical shortage of high-quality training data. Driven by these insights, we introduce a refined four-stage data pipeline, resulting in RoVid-X, the largest open-source robotic dataset for video generation with 4 million annotated video clips, covering thousands of tasks and enriched with comprehensive physical property annotations. Collectively, this synergistic ecosystem of evaluation and data establishes a robust foundation for rigorous assessment and scalable training of video models, accelerating the evolution of embodied AI toward general intelligence.
Abstract: Perception is a cornerstone of autonomous driving, enabling vehicles to understand their surroundings and make safe, reliable decisions. Developing robust perception algorithms requires large-scale, high-quality datasets that cover diverse driving conditions and support thorough evaluation. Existing datasets often lack a high-fidelity digital twin, limiting systematic testing, edge-case simulation, sensor modification, and sim-to-real evaluations. To address this gap, we present DrivIng, a large-scale multimodal dataset with a complete geo-referenced digital twin of a ~18 km route spanning urban, suburban, and highway segments. Our dataset provides continuous recordings from six RGB cameras, one LiDAR, and high-precision ADMA-based localization, captured across day, dusk, and night. All sequences are annotated at 10 Hz with 3D bounding boxes and track IDs across 12 classes, yielding ~1.2 million annotated instances. Alongside the benefits of a digital twin, DrivIng enables a 1-to-1 transfer of real traffic into simulation, preserving agent interactions while enabling realistic and flexible scenario testing. To support reproducible research and robust validation, we benchmark DrivIng with state-of-the-art perception models and publicly release the dataset, digital twin, HD map, and codebase.
Abstract: The advances in generative AI have enabled the creation of synthetic audio which is perceptually indistinguishable from real, genuine audio. Although this stellar progress enables many positive applications, it also raises risks of misuse, such as for impersonation, disinformation and fraud. Despite a growing number of open-source fake audio detection codes released through numerous challenges and initiatives, most are tailored to specific competitions, datasets or models. A standardized and unified toolkit that supports the fair benchmarking and comparison of competing solutions with not just common databases, protocols, metrics, but also a shared codebase, is missing. To address this, we propose WeDefense, the first open-source toolkit to support both fake audio detection and localization. Beyond model training, WeDefense emphasizes critical yet often overlooked components: flexible input and augmentation, calibration, score fusion, standardized evaluation metrics, and analysis tools for deeper understanding and interpretation. The toolkit is publicly available at https://github.com/zlin0/wedefense with interactive demos for fake audio detection and localization.
Abstract: Estimating task progress requires reasoning over long-horizon dynamics rather than recognizing static visual content. While modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at describing what is visible, it remains unclear whether they can infer how far a task has progressed from partial observations. To this end, we introduce Progress-Bench, a benchmark for systematically evaluating progress reasoning in VLMs. Beyond benchmarking, we further explore a human-inspired two-stage progress reasoning paradigm through both training-free prompting and training-based approach based on curated dataset ProgressLM-45K. Experiments on 14 VLMs show that most models are not yet ready for task progress estimation, exhibiting sensitivity to demonstration modality and viewpoint changes, as well as poor handling of unanswerable cases. While training-free prompting that enforces structured progress reasoning yields limited and model-dependent gains, the training-based ProgressLM-3B achieves consistent improvements even at a small model scale, despite being trained on a task set fully disjoint from the evaluation tasks. Further analyses reveal characteristic error patterns and clarify when and why progress reasoning succeeds or fails.
Abstract: Most 2D human pose estimation benchmarks are nearly saturated, with the exception of crowded scenes. We introduce PMPose, a top-down 2D pose estimator that incorporates the probabilistic formulation and the mask-conditioning. PMPose improves crowded pose estimation without sacrificing performance on standard scenes. Building on this, we present BBoxMaskPose v2 (BMPv2) integrating PMPose and an enhanced SAM-based mask refinement module. BMPv2 surpasses state-of-the-art by 1.5 average precision (AP) points on COCO and 6 AP points on OCHuman, becoming the first method to exceed 50 AP on OCHuman. We demonstrate that BMP's 2D prompting of 3D model improves 3D pose estimation in crowded scenes and that advances in 2D pose quality directly benefit 3D estimation. Results on the new OCHuman-Pose dataset show that multi-person performance is more affected by pose prediction accuracy than by detection. The code, models, and data are available on https://MiraPurkrabek.github.io/BBox-Mask-Pose/.
Abstract: The rapid expansion of research across machine learning, vision, and language has produced a volume of publications that is increasingly difficult to synthesize. Traditional bibliometric tools rely mainly on metadata and offer limited visibility into the semantic content of papers, making it hard to track how research themes evolve over time or how different areas influence one another. To obtain a clearer picture of recent developments, we compile a unified corpus of more than 100,000 papers from 22 major conferences between 2020 and 2025 and construct a multidimensional profiling pipeline to organize and analyze their textual content. By combining topic clustering, LLM-assisted parsing, and structured retrieval, we derive a comprehensive representation of research activity that supports the study of topic lifecycles, methodological transitions, dataset and model usage patterns, and institutional research directions. Our analysis highlights several notable shifts, including the growth of safety, multimodal reasoning, and agent-oriented studies, as well as the gradual stabilization of areas such as neural machine translation and graph-based methods. These findings provide an evidence-based view of how AI research is evolving and offer a resource for understanding broader trends and identifying emerging directions. Code and dataset: https://github.com/xzc-zju/Profiling_Scientific_Literature
Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) break the rigid left-to-right constraint of traditional LLMs, enabling token generation in arbitrary orders. Intuitively, this flexibility implies a solution space that strictly supersets the fixed autoregressive trajectory, theoretically unlocking superior reasoning potential for general tasks like mathematics and coding. Consequently, numerous works have leveraged reinforcement learning (RL) to elicit the reasoning capability of dLLMs. In this paper, we reveal a counter-intuitive reality: arbitrary order generation, in its current form, narrows rather than expands the reasoning boundary of dLLMs. We find that dLLMs tend to exploit this order flexibility to bypass high-uncertainty tokens that are crucial for exploration, leading to a premature collapse of the solution space. This observation motivates a rethink of RL approaches for dLLMs, where considerable complexities, such as handling combinatorial trajectories and intractable likelihoods, are often devoted to preserving this flexibility. We demonstrate that effective reasoning can be better elicited by intentionally forgoing arbitrary order and applying standard Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) instead. Our approach, JustGRPO, is minimalist yet surprisingly effective (e.g., 89.1% accuracy on GSM8K) while fully retaining the parallel decoding ability of dLLMs. Project page: https://nzl-thu.github.io/the-flexibility-trap
Abstract: Federated Neural Architecture Search (FedNAS) aims to automate model design for privacy-preserving Federated Learning (FL) but currently faces two critical bottlenecks: unguided supernet training that yields suboptimal models, and costly multi-hour pipelines for post-training subnet discovery. We introduce DeepFedNAS, a novel, two-phase framework underpinned by a multi-objective fitness function that synthesizes mathematical network design with architectural heuristics. Enabled by a re-engineered supernet, DeepFedNAS introduces Federated Pareto Optimal Supernet Training, which leverages a pre-computed Pareto-optimal cache of high-fitness architectures as an intelligent curriculum to optimize shared supernet weights. Subsequently, its Predictor-Free Search Method eliminates the need for costly accuracy surrogates by utilizing this fitness function as a direct, zero-cost proxy for accuracy, enabling on-demand subnet discovery in mere seconds. DeepFedNAS achieves state-of-the-art accuracy (e.g., up to 1.21% absolute improvement on CIFAR-100), superior parameter and communication efficiency, and a substantial ~61x speedup in total post-training search pipeline time. By reducing the pipeline from over 20 hours to approximately 20 minutes (including initial cache generation) and enabling 20-second individual subnet searches, DeepFedNAS makes hardware-aware FL deployments instantaneous and practical. The complete source code and experimental scripts are available at: https://github.com/bostankhan6/DeepFedNAS
Abstract: Promptable segmentation models such as SAM have established a powerful paradigm, enabling strong generalization to unseen objects and domains with minimal user input, including points, bounding boxes, and text prompts. Among these, bounding boxes stand out as particularly effective, often outperforming points while significantly reducing annotation costs. However, current training and evaluation protocols typically rely on synthetic prompts generated through simple heuristics, offering limited insight into real-world robustness. In this paper, we investigate the robustness of promptable segmentation models to natural variations in bounding box prompts. First, we conduct a controlled user study and collect thousands of real bounding box annotations. Our analysis reveals substantial variability in segmentation quality across users for the same model and instance, indicating that SAM-like models are highly sensitive to natural prompt noise. Then, since exhaustive testing of all possible user inputs is computationally prohibitive, we reformulate robustness evaluation as a white-box optimization problem over the bounding box prompt space. We introduce BREPS, a method for generating adversarial bounding boxes that minimize or maximize segmentation error while adhering to naturalness constraints. Finally, we benchmark state-of-the-art models across 10 datasets, spanning everyday scenes to medical imaging. Code - https://github.com/emb-ai/BREPS.
Abstract: Hateful videos pose serious risks by amplifying discrimination, inciting violence, and undermining online safety. Existing training-based hateful video detection methods are constrained by limited training data and lack of interpretability, while directly prompting large vision-language models often struggle to deliver reliable hate detection. To address these challenges, this paper introduces MARS, a training-free Multi-stage Adversarial ReaSoning framework that enables reliable and interpretable hateful content detection. MARS begins with the objective description of video content, establishing a neutral foundation for subsequent analysis. Building on this, it develops evidence-based reasoning that supports potential hateful interpretations, while in parallel incorporating counter-evidence reasoning to capture plausible non-hateful perspectives. Finally, these perspectives are synthesized into a conclusive and explainable decision. Extensive evaluation on two real-world datasets shows that MARS achieves up to 10% improvement under certain backbones and settings compared to other training-free approaches and outperforms state-of-the-art training-based methods on one dataset. In addition, MARS produces human-understandable justifications, thereby supporting compliance oversight and enhancing the transparency of content moderation workflows. The code is available at https://github.com/Multimodal-Intelligence-Lab-MIL/MARS.
Abstract: Effective decision-making in the real world depends on memory that is both stable and adaptive: environments change over time, and agents must retain relevant information over long horizons while also updating or overwriting outdated content when circumstances shift. Existing Reinforcement Learning (RL) benchmarks and memory-augmented agents focus primarily on retention, leaving the equally critical ability of memory rewriting largely unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce a benchmark that explicitly tests continual memory updating under partial observability, i.e. the natural setting where an agent must rely on memory rather than current observations, and use it to compare recurrent, transformer-based, and structured memory architectures. Our experiments reveal that classic recurrent models, despite their simplicity, demonstrate greater flexibility and robustness in memory rewriting tasks than modern structured memories, which succeed only under narrow conditions, and transformer-based agents, which often fail beyond trivial retention cases. These findings expose a fundamental limitation of current approaches and emphasize the necessity of memory mechanisms that balance stable retention with adaptive updating. Our work highlights this overlooked challenge, introduces benchmarks to evaluate it, and offers insights for designing future RL agents with explicit and trainable forgetting mechanisms. Code: https://quartz-admirer.github.io/Memory-Rewriting/
Abstract: CLIP-based foreground-background (FG-BG) decomposition methods have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in improving few-shot out-of-distribution (OOD) detection performance. However, existing approaches still suffer from several limitations. For background regions obtained from decomposition, existing methods adopt a uniform suppression strategy for all patches, overlooking the varying contributions of different patches to the prediction. For foreground regions, existing methods fail to adequately consider that some local patches may exhibit appearance or semantic similarity to other classes, which may mislead the training process. To address these issues, we propose a new plug-and-play framework. This framework consists of three core components: (1) a Foreground-Background Decomposition module, which follows previous FG-BG methods to separate an image into foreground and background regions; (2) an Adaptive Background Suppression module, which adaptively weights patch classification entropy; and (3) a Confusable Foreground Rectification module, which identifies and rectifies confusable foreground patches. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed plug-and-play framework significantly improves the performance of existing FG-BG decomposition methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/lounwb/FoBoR.
Abstract: Current evaluation methods for Attributed Question Answering (AQA) suffer from \textit{attribution myopia}: they emphasize verification of isolated statements and their attributions but overlook the global logical integrity of long-form answers. Consequently, Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce factually grounded yet logically incoherent responses with elusive deductive gaps. To mitigate this limitation, we present \textsc{LogicScore}, a unified evaluation framework that shifts the paradigm from local assessment to global reasoning scrutiny. Grounded in Horn Rules, our approach integrates a backward verification mechanism to systematically evaluate three key reasoning dimensions: \textit{Completeness} (logically sound deduction), \textit{Conciseness} (non-redundancy), and \textit{Determinateness} (consistent answer entailment). Extensive experiments across three multi-hop QA datasets (HotpotQA, MusiQue, and 2WikiMultiHopQA) and over 20 LLMs (including GPT-5, Gemini-3-Pro, LLaMA3, and task-specific tuned models) reveal a critical capability gap: leading models often achieve high attribution scores (e.g., 92.85\% precision for Gemini-3 Pro) but struggle with global reasoning quality (e.g., 35.11\% Conciseness for Gemini-3 Pro). Our work establishes a robust standard for logical evaluation, highlighting the need to prioritize reasoning coherence alongside factual grounding in LLM development. Codes are available at: https://github.com/zhichaoyan11/LogicScore.
Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures enable conditional computation by routing inputs to multiple expert subnetworks and are often motivated as a mechanism for scaling large language models. In this project, we instead study MoE behavior in an image classification setting, focusing on predictive performance, expert utilization, and generalization. We compare dense, SoftMoE, and SparseMoE classifier heads on the CIFAR10 dataset under comparable model capacity. Both MoE variants achieve slightly higher validation accuracy than the dense baseline while maintaining balanced expert utilization through regularization, avoiding expert collapse. To analyze generalization, we compute Hessian-based sharpness metrics at convergence, including the largest eigenvalue and trace of the loss Hessian, evaluated on both training and test data. We find that SoftMoE exhibits higher sharpness by these metrics, while Dense and SparseMoE lie in a similar curvature regime, despite all models achieving comparable generalization performance. Complementary loss surface perturbation analyses reveal qualitative differences in non-local behavior under finite parameter perturbations between dense and MoE models, which help contextualize curvature-based measurements without directly explaining validation accuracy. We further evaluate empirical inference efficiency and show that naively implemented conditional routing does not yield inference speedups on modern hardware at this scale, highlighting the gap between theoretical and realized efficiency in sparse MoE models.
Abstract: While video-to-audio generation has achieved remarkable progress in semantic and temporal alignment, most existing studies focus solely on these aspects, paying limited attention to the spatial perception and immersive quality of the synthesized audio. This limitation stems largely from current models' reliance on mono audio datasets, which lack the binaural spatial information needed to learn visual-to-spatial audio mappings. To address this gap, we introduce two key contributions: we construct BinauralVGGSound, the first large-scale video-binaural audio dataset designed to support spatially aware video-to-audio generation; and we propose a end-to-end spatial audio generation framework guided by visual cues, which explicitly models spatial features. Our framework incorporates a visual-guided audio spatialization module that ensures the generated audio exhibits realistic spatial attributes and layered spatial depth while maintaining semantic and temporal alignment. Experiments show that our approach substantially outperforms state-of-the-art models in spatial fidelity and delivers a more immersive auditory experience, without sacrificing temporal or semantic consistency. The demo page can be accessed at https://github.com/renlinjie868-web/SpatialV2A.
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promising results in active flow control (AFC), yet progress in the field remains difficult to assess as existing studies rely on heterogeneous observation and actuation schemes, numerical setups, and evaluation protocols. Current AFC benchmarks attempt to address these issues but heavily rely on external computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solvers, are not fully differentiable, and provide limited 3D and multi-agent support. To overcome these limitations, we introduce FluidGym, the first standalone, fully differentiable benchmark suite for RL in AFC. Built entirely in PyTorch on top of the GPU-accelerated PICT solver, FluidGym runs in a single Python stack, requires no external CFD software, and provides standardized evaluation protocols. We present baseline results with PPO and SAC and release all environments, datasets, and trained models as public resources. FluidGym enables systematic comparison of control methods, establishes a scalable foundation for future research in learning-based flow control, and is available at https://github.com/safe-autonomous-systems/fluidgym.
Abstract: Batch inference workloads for causal transformer models frequently process sequences that share common prefixes, such as system prompts, few-shot examples, or shared queries. Standard inference engines treat each sequence independently, redundantly recomputing identical MLP activations for every copy of the shared prefix. We introduce RadixMLP, a technique that exploits the position-wise nature of MLPs, LayerNorms, linear projections, and embeddings to eliminate this redundancy. RadixMLP dynamically maps batches to a prefix trie, gathering shared segments into a compressed representation for position-wise computation and scattering results back only at attention boundaries. RadixMLP is stateless and operates within a single forward pass. In end-to-end serving benchmarks on MS~MARCO v1.1 with Qwen3 models (0.6B to 8B parameters), RadixMLP achieves 1.44-1.59$\times$ speedups in realistic reranking workloads, with up to $5\times$ speedups on synthetic benchmarks with longer shared prefixes. Our code is available at https://github.com/michaelfeil/radix-mlp.
Abstract: Pure pursuit and its variants are widely used for mobile robot path tracking owing to their simplicity and computational efficiency. However, many conventional approaches do not explicitly account for velocity and acceleration constraints, resulting in discrepancies between commanded and actual velocities that result in overshoot and degraded tracking performance. To address this problem, this paper proposes dynamic window pure pursuit (DWPP), which fundamentally reformulates the command velocity computation process to explicitly incorporate velocity and acceleration constraints. Specifically, DWPP formulates command velocity computation in the velocity space (the $v$-$ω$ plane) and selects the command velocity as the point within the dynamic window that is closest to the line $ω= κv$. Experimental results demonstrate that DWPP avoids constraint-violating commands and achieves superior path-tracking accuracy compared with conventional pure pursuit methods. The proposed method has been integrated into the official Nav2 repository and is publicly available (https://github.com/ros-navigation/navigation2).
Abstract: Existing video frame interpolation (VFI) methods often adopt a frame-centric approach, processing videos as independent short segments (e.g., triplets), which leads to temporal inconsistencies and motion artifacts. To overcome this, we propose a holistic, video-centric paradigm named \textbf{L}ocal \textbf{D}iffusion \textbf{F}orcing for \textbf{V}ideo \textbf{F}rame \textbf{I}nterpolation (LDF-VFI). Our framework is built upon an auto-regressive diffusion transformer that models the entire video sequence to ensure long-range temporal coherence. To mitigate error accumulation inherent in auto-regressive generation, we introduce a novel skip-concatenate sampling strategy that effectively maintains temporal stability. Furthermore, LDF-VFI incorporates sparse, local attention and tiled VAE encoding, a combination that not only enables efficient processing of long sequences but also allows generalization to arbitrary spatial resolutions (e.g., 4K) at inference without retraining. An enhanced conditional VAE decoder, which leverages multi-scale features from the input video, further improves reconstruction fidelity. Empirically, LDF-VFI achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging long-sequence benchmarks, demonstrating superior per-frame quality and temporal consistency, especially in scenes with large motion. The source code is available at https://github.com/xypeng9903/LDF-VFI.
Abstract: Unsupervised Environment Design (UED) seeks to automatically generate training curricula for reinforcement learning (RL) agents, with the goal of improving generalisation and zero-shot performance. However, designing effective curricula remains a difficult problem, particularly in settings where small subsets of environment parameterisations result in significant increases in the complexity of the required policy. Current methods struggle with a difficult credit assignment problem and rely on regret approximations that fail to identify challenging levels, both of which are compounded as the size of the environment grows. We propose Dynamic Environment Generation for UED (DEGen) to enable a denser level generator reward signal, reducing the difficulty of credit assignment and allowing for UED to scale to larger environment sizes. We also introduce a new regret approximation, Maximised Negative Advantage (MNA), as a significantly improved metric to optimise for, that better identifies more challenging levels. We show empirically that MNA outperforms current regret approximations and when combined with DEGen, consistently outperforms existing methods, especially as the size of the environment grows. We have made all our code available here: https://github.com/HarryMJMead/Dynamic-Environment-Generation-for-UED.
Abstract: With the rapid growth of Web-based academic publications, more and more papers are being published annually, making it increasingly difficult to find relevant prior work. Citation prediction aims to automatically suggest appropriate references, helping scholars navigate the expanding scientific literature. Here we present \textbf{CiteRAG}, the first comprehensive retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-integrated benchmark for evaluating large language models on academic citation prediction, featuring a multi-level retrieval strategy, specialized retrievers, and generators. Our benchmark makes four core contributions: (1) We establish two instances of the citation prediction task with different granularity. Task 1 focuses on coarse-grained list-specific citation prediction, while Task 2 targets fine-grained position-specific citation prediction. To enhance these two tasks, we build a dataset containing 7,267 instances for Task 1 and 8,541 instances for Task 2, enabling comprehensive evaluation of both retrieval and generation. (2) We construct a three-level large-scale corpus with 554k papers spanning many major subfields, using an incremental pipeline. (3) We propose a multi-level hybrid RAG approach for citation prediction, fine-tuning embedding models with contrastive learning to capture complex citation relationships, paired with specialized generation models. (4) We conduct extensive experiments across state-of-the-art language models, including closed-source APIs, open-source models, and our fine-tuned generators, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework. Our open-source toolkit enables reproducible evaluation and focuses on academic literature, providing the first comprehensive evaluation framework for citation prediction and serving as a methodological template for other scientific domains. Our source code and data are released at https://github.com/LQgdwind/CiteRAG.
Abstract: We propose a rank-one Riemannian subspace descent algorithm for computing symmetric positive definite (SPD) solutions to nonlinear matrix equations arising in control theory, dynamic programming, and stochastic filtering. For solution matrices of size $n\times n$, standard approaches for dense matrix equations typically incur $\mathcal{O}(n^3)$ cost per-iteration, while the efficient $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ methods either rely on sparsity or low-rank solutions, or have iteration counts that scale poorly. The proposed method entails updating along the dominant eigen-component of a transformed Riemannian gradient, identified using at most $\mathcal{O}(\log(n))$ power iterations. The update structure also enables exact step-size selection in many cases at minimal additional cost. For objectives defined as compositions of standard matrix operations, each iteration can be implemented using only matrix--vector products, yielding $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ arithmetic cost. We prove an $\mathcal{O}(n)$ iteration bound under standard smoothness assumptions, with improved bounds under geodesic strong convexity. Numerical experiments on large-scale CARE, DARE, and other nonlinear matrix equations show that the proposed algorithm solves instances (up to $n=10{,}000$ in our tests) for which the compared solvers, including MATLAB's \texttt{icare}, structure-preserving doubling, and subspace-descent baselines fail to return a solution. These results demonstrate that rank-one manifold updates provide a practical approach for high-dimensional and dense SPD-constrained matrix equations. MATLAB code implementation is publicly available on GitHub : \href{https://github.com/yogeshd-iitk/nonlinear_matrix_equation_R1RSD}{\textcolor{blue}{https://github.com/yogeshd-iitk/nonlinear\_matrix \_equation\_R1RSD}}
Abstract: Multilingual retrieval-augmented generation (MRAG) requires models to effectively acquire and integrate beneficial external knowledge from multilingual collections. However, most existing studies employ a unitive process where queries of equivalent semantics across different languages are processed through a single-turn retrieval and subsequent optimization. Such a ``one-size-fits-all'' strategy is often suboptimal in multilingual settings, as the models occur to knowledge bias and conflict during the interaction with the search engine. To alleviate the issues, we propose LcRL, a multilingual search-augmented reinforcement learning framework that integrates a language-coupled Group Relative Policy Optimization into the policy and reward models. We adopt the language-coupled group sampling in the rollout module to reduce knowledge bias, and regularize an auxiliary anti-consistency penalty in the reward models to mitigate the knowledge conflict. Experimental results demonstrate that LcRL not only achieves competitive performance but is also appropriate for various practical scenarios such as constrained training data and retrieval over collections encompassing a large number of languages. Our code is available at https://github.com/Cherry-qwq/LcRL-Open.
Abstract: Patch-based methods are widely used in 3D medical image segmentation to address memory constraints in processing high-resolution volumetric data. However, these approaches often neglect the patch's location within the global volume, which can limit segmentation performance when anatomical context is important. In this paper, we investigate the role of location context in patch-based 3D segmentation and propose a novel attention mechanism, LocBAM, that explicitly processes spatial information. Experiments on BTCV, AMOS22, and KiTS23 demonstrate that incorporating location context stabilizes training and improves segmentation performance, particularly under low patch-to-volume coverage where global context is missing. Furthermore, LocBAM consistently outperforms classical coordinate encoding via CoordConv. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/compai-lab/2026-ISBI-hooft
Abstract: Recent advances in text-to-music generation (TTM) have yielded high-quality results, but often at the cost of extensive compute and the use of large proprietary internal data. To improve the affordability and openness of TTM training, an open-source generative model backbone that is more training- and data-efficient is needed. In this paper, we constrain the number of trainable parameters in the generative model to match that of the MusicGen-small benchmark (with about 300M parameters), and replace its Transformer backbone with the emerging class of state-space models (SSMs). Specifically, we explore different SSM variants for sequence modeling, and compare a single-stage SSM-based design with a decomposable two-stage SSM/diffusion hybrid design. All proposed models are trained from scratch on a purely public dataset comprising 457 hours of CC-licensed music, ensuring full openness. Our experimental findings are three-fold. First, we show that SSMs exhibit superior training efficiency compared to the Transformer counterpart. Second, despite using only 9% of the FLOPs and 2% of the training data size compared to the MusicGen-small benchmark, our model achieves competitive performance in both objective metrics and subjective listening tests based on MusicCaps captions. Finally, our scaling-down experiment demonstrates that SSMs can maintain competitive performance relative to the Transformer baseline even at the same training budget (measured in iterations), when the model size is reduced to four times smaller. To facilitate the democratization of TTM research, the processed captions, model checkpoints, and source code are available on GitHub via the project page: https://lonian6.github.io/ssmttm/.
Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has achieved remarkable success in unlocking the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Although CoT prompting enhances reasoning, its verbosity imposes substantial computational overhead. Recent works often focus exclusively on outcome alignment and lack supervision on the intermediate reasoning process. These deficiencies obscure the analyzability of the latent reasoning chain. To address these challenges, we introduce Render-of-Thought (RoT), the first framework to reify the reasoning chain by rendering textual steps into images, making the latent rationale explicit and traceable. Specifically, we leverage the vision encoders of existing Vision Language Models (VLMs) as semantic anchors to align the vision embeddings with the textual space. This design ensures plug-and-play implementation without incurring additional pre-training overhead. Extensive experiments on mathematical and logical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves 3-4x token compression and substantial inference acceleration compared to explicit CoT. Furthermore, it maintains competitive performance against other methods, validating the feasibility of this paradigm. Our code is available at https://github.com/TencentBAC/RoT
Abstract: AI models for drug discovery and chemical literature mining must interpret molecular images and generate outputs consistent with 3D geometry and stereochemistry. Most molecular language models rely on strings or graphs, while vision-language models often miss stereochemical details and struggle to map continuous 3D structures into discrete tokens. We propose DeepMoLM: Deep Molecular Language M odeling, a dual-view framework that grounds high-resolution molecular images in geometric invariants derived from molecular conformations. DeepMoLM preserves high-frequency evidence from 1024 $\times$ 1024 inputs, encodes conformer neighborhoods as discrete Extended 3-Dimensional Fingerprints, and fuses visual and geometric streams with cross-attention, enabling physically grounded generation without atom coordinates. DeepMoLM improves PubChem captioning with a 12.3% relative METEOR gain over the strongest generalist baseline while staying competitive with specialist methods. It produces valid numeric outputs for all property queries and attains MAE 13.64 g/mol on Molecular Weight and 37.89 on Complexity in the specialist setting. On ChEBI-20 description generation from images, it exceeds generalist baselines and matches state-of-the-art vision-language models. Code is available at https://github.com/1anj/DeepMoLM.
Abstract: In this paper, we present LookBench (We use the term "look" to reflect retrieval that mirrors how people shop -- finding the exact item, a close substitute, or a visually consistent alternative.), a live, holistic and challenging benchmark for fashion image retrieval in real e-commerce settings. LookBench includes both recent product images sourced from live websites and AI-generated fashion images, reflecting contemporary trends and use cases. Each test sample is time-stamped and we intend to update the benchmark periodically, enabling contamination-aware evaluation aligned with declared training cutoffs. Grounded in our fine-grained attribute taxonomy, LookBench covers single-item and outfit-level retrieval across. Our experiments reveal that LookBench poses a significant challenge on strong baselines, with many models achieving below $60\%$ Recall@1. Our proprietary model achieves the best performance on LookBench, and we release an open-source counterpart that ranks second, with both models attaining state-of-the-art results on legacy Fashion200K evaluations. LookBench is designed to be updated semi-annually with new test samples and progressively harder task variants, providing a durable measure of progress. We publicly release our leaderboard, dataset, evaluation code, and trained models.
Abstract: Infrared small target detection (ISTD) under complex backgrounds remains a critical yet challenging task, primarily due to the extremely low signal-to-clutter ratio, persistent dynamic interference, and the lack of distinct target features. While multi-frame detection methods leverages temporal cues to improve upon single-frame approaches, existing methods still struggle with inefficient long-range dependency modeling and insufficient robustness. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel scheme for ISTD, realized through a sparse frames-based spatio-temporal semantic feedback network named FeedbackSTS-Det. The core of our approach is a novel spatio-temporal semantic feedback strategy with a closed-loop semantic association mechanism, which consists of paired forward and backward refinement modules that work cooperatively across the encoder and decoder. Moreover, both modules incorporate an embedded sparse semantic module (SSM), which performs structured sparse temporal modeling to capture long-range dependencies with low computational cost. This integrated design facilitates robust implicit inter-frame registration and continuous semantic refinement, effectively suppressing false alarms. Furthermore, our overall procedure maintains a consistent training-inference pipeline, which ensures reliable performance transfer and increases model robustness. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets confirm the effectiveness of FeedbackSTS-Det. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/IDIP-Lab/FeedbackSTS-Det.
Abstract: Federated Rank Learning (FRL) is a promising Federated Learning (FL) paradigm designed to be resilient against model poisoning attacks due to its discrete, ranking-based update mechanism. Unlike traditional FL methods that rely on model updates, FRL leverages discrete rankings as a communication parameter between clients and the server. This approach significantly reduces communication costs and limits an adversary's ability to scale or optimize malicious updates in the continuous space, thereby enhancing its robustness. This makes FRL particularly appealing for applications where system security and data privacy are crucial, such as web-based auction and bidding platforms. While FRL substantially reduces the attack surface, we demonstrate that it remains vulnerable to a new class of local model poisoning attack, i.e., fine-grained control attacks. We introduce the Edge Control Attack (ECA), the first fine-grained control attack tailored to ranking-based FL frameworks. Unlike conventional denial-of-service (DoS) attacks that cause conspicuous disruptions, ECA enables an adversary to precisely degrade a competitor's accuracy to any target level while maintaining a normal-looking convergence trajectory, thereby avoiding detection. ECA operates in two stages: (i) identifying and manipulating Ascending and Descending Edges to align the global model with the target model, and (ii) widening the selection boundary gap to stabilize the global model at the target accuracy. Extensive experiments across seven benchmark datasets and nine Byzantine-robust aggregation rules (AGRs) show that ECA achieves fine-grained accuracy control with an average error of only 0.224%, outperforming the baseline by up to 17x. Our findings highlight the need for stronger defenses against advanced poisoning attacks. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Chenzh0205/ECA
Abstract: Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has shown that reasoning improves when intermediate thoughts are externalized into explicit workspaces, such as chain-of-thought traces or tool-augmented reasoning. Yet, visual language models (VLMs) lack an analogous mechanism for spatial reasoning, limiting their ability to generate images that accurately reflect geometric relations, object identities, and compositional intent. We introduce the concept of a spatial scratchpad -- a 3D reasoning substrate that bridges linguistic intent and image synthesis. Given a text prompt, our framework parses subjects and background elements, instantiates them as editable 3D meshes, and employs agentic scene planning for placement, orientation, and viewpoint selection. The resulting 3D arrangement is rendered back into the image domain with identity-preserving cues, enabling the VLM to generate spatially consistent and visually coherent outputs. Unlike prior 2D layout-based methods, our approach supports intuitive 3D edits that propagate reliably into final images. Empirically, it achieves a 32% improvement in text alignment on GenAI-Bench, demonstrating the benefit of explicit 3D reasoning for precise, controllable image generation. Our results highlight a new paradigm for vision-language models that deliberate not only in language, but also in space. Code and visualizations at https://oindrilasaha.github.io/3DScratchpad/
Abstract: The requirement for expert annotations limits the effectiveness of deep learning for medical image analysis. Although 3D self-supervised methods like volume contrast learning (VoCo) are powerful and partially address the labeling scarcity issue, their high computational cost and memory consumption are barriers. We propose 2D-VoCo, an efficient adaptation of the VoCo framework for slice-level self-supervised pre-training that learns spatial-semantic features from unlabeled 2D CT slices via contrastive learning. The pre-trained CNN backbone is then integrated into a CNN-LSTM architecture to classify multi-organ injuries. In the RSNA 2023 Abdominal Trauma dataset, 2D-VoCo pre-training significantly improves mAP, precision, recall, and RSNA score over training from scratch. Our framework provides a practical method to reduce the dependency on labeled data and enhance model performance in clinical CT analysis. We release the code for reproducibility. https://github.com/tkz05/2D-VoCo-CT-Classifier
Abstract: MITRE ATT&CK is a cybersecurity knowledge base that organizes threat actor and cyber-attack information into a set of tactics describing the reasons and goals threat actors have for carrying out attacks, with each tactic having a set of techniques that describe the potential methods used in these attacks. One major application of ATT&CK is the use of its tactic and technique hierarchy by security specialists as a framework for annotating cyber-threat intelligence reports, vulnerability descriptions, threat scenarios, inter alia, to facilitate downstream analyses. To date, the tagging process is still largely done manually. In this technical note, we provide a stratified "task space" characterization of the MITRE ATT&CK text tagging task for organizing previous efforts toward automation using AIML methods, while also clarifying pathways for constructing new methods. To illustrate one of the pathways, we use the task space strata to stage-wise construct our own multi-label hierarchical classification models for the text tagging task via experimentation over general cyber-threat intelligence text -- using shareable computational tools and publicly releasing the models to the security community (via https://github.com/jpmorganchase/MITRE_models). Our multi-label hierarchical approach yields accuracy scores of roughly 94% at the tactic level, as well as accuracy scores of roughly 82% at the technique level. The models also meet or surpass state-of-the-art performance while relying only on classical machine learning methods -- removing any dependence on LLMs, RAG, agents, or more complex hierarchical approaches. Moreover, we show that GPT-4o model performance at the tactic level is significantly lower (roughly 60% accuracy) than our own approach. We also extend our baseline model to a corpus of threat scenarios for financial applications produced by subject matter experts.
Abstract: This report distills the discussions and recommendations from the NSF Workshop on AI for Electronic Design Automation (EDA), held on December 10, 2024 in Vancouver alongside NeurIPS 2024. Bringing together experts across machine learning and EDA, the workshop examined how AI-spanning large language models (LLMs), graph neural networks (GNNs), reinforcement learning (RL), neurosymbolic methods, etc.-can facilitate EDA and shorten design turnaround. The workshop includes four themes: (1) AI for physical synthesis and design for manufacturing (DFM), discussing challenges in physical manufacturing process and potential AI applications; (2) AI for high-level and logic-level synthesis (HLS/LLS), covering pragma insertion, program transformation, RTL code generation, etc.; (3) AI toolbox for optimization and design, discussing frontier AI developments that could potentially be applied to EDA tasks; and (4) AI for test and verification, including LLM-assisted verification tools, ML-augmented SAT solving, security/reliability challenges, etc. The report recommends NSF to foster AI/EDA collaboration, invest in foundational AI for EDA, develop robust data infrastructures, promote scalable compute infrastructure, and invest in workforce development to democratize hardware design and enable next-generation hardware systems. The workshop information can be found on the website https://ai4eda-workshop.github.io/.
Abstract: Many LLM-based open-ended search systems freeze the foundation model that proposes improvements to existing solutions, which may bottleneck long-run progress. Recent work has explored updating the proposal model at test time [arXiv:2511.23473], but the update strategy is still typically hand-specified. Therefore, this study investigated whether an LLM can use task feedback to decide how it should update its weights. For tractability, we focused on the simpler case where there is only one round of self-improvement, and restricted the update operator to self-supervised next token prediction (NTP), leaving the model freedom in choosing its training data and key NTP hyperparameters. Using the Self-Adapting Language Models (SEAL) [arXiv:2506.10943] framework as a testbed, we relaxed its fixed human template constraint and allowed the model to generate its own self-edit templates, thereby giving it more control over its training data and hyperparameters. Two variants were studied, differing in whether template generation was conditioned on a lightweight archive of past templates. In SEAL's Single-Passage Knowledge Incorporation setting with Qwen3-8B on SQuAD [arXiv:1606.05250], the no-archive variant performed comparably to the weaker "Implications" baseline, while the archive variant outperformed "Implications" and approached the strongest human-designed "Rewrite" baseline without surpassing it. Further analysis of collapse in the model's exploration revealed that a naive archive can confer some short-term robustness but can also accelerate homogenization, suggesting that explicit novelty pressure may be required to consistently advance beyond carefully optimized human strategies. Our code is available at https://github.com/cheongalc/search-self-edit-strategies .
Abstract: Optimizing scientific computing algorithms for modern GPUs is a labor-intensive and iterative process involving repeated code modification, benchmarking, and tuning across complex hardware and software stacks. Recent work has explored large language model (LLM)-assisted evolutionary methods for automated code optimization, but these approaches primarily rely on outcome-based selection and random mutation, underutilizing the rich trajectory information generated during iterative optimization. We propose PhyloEvolve, an LLM-agent system that reframes GPU-oriented algorithm optimization as an In-Context Reinforcement Learning (ICRL) problem. This formulation enables trajectory-conditioned reuse of optimization experience without model retraining. PhyloEvolve integrates Algorithm Distillation and prompt-based Decision Transformers into an iterative workflow, treating sequences of algorithm modifications and performance feedback as first-class learning signals. To organize optimization history, we introduce a phylogenetic tree representation that captures inheritance, divergence, and recombination among algorithm variants, enabling backtracking, cross-lineage transfer, and reproducibility. The system combines elite trajectory pooling, multi-island parallel exploration, and containerized execution to balance exploration and exploitation across heterogeneous hardware. We evaluate PhyloEvolve on scientific computing workloads including PDE solvers, manifold learning, and spectral graph algorithms, demonstrating consistent improvements in runtime, memory efficiency, and correctness over baseline and evolutionary methods. Code is published at: https://github.com/annihi1ation/phylo_evolve
Abstract: High-altitude, multi-spectral, aerial imagery is scarce and expensive to acquire, yet it is necessary for algorithmic advances and application of machine learning models to high-impact problems such as wildfire detection. We introduce a human-annotated dataset from the NASA Autonomous Modular Sensor (AMS) using 12-channel, medium to high altitude (3 - 50 km) aerial wildfire images similar to those used in current US wildfire missions. Our dataset combines spectral data from 12 different channels, including infrared (IR), short-wave IR (SWIR), and thermal. We take imagery from 20 wildfire missions and randomly sample small patches to generate over 4000 images with high variability, including occlusions by smoke/clouds, easily-confused false positives, and nighttime imagery. We demonstrate results from a deep-learning model to automate the human-intensive process of fire perimeter determination. We train two deep neural networks, one for image classification and the other for pixel-level segmentation. The networks are combined into a unique real-time segmentation model to efficiently localize active wildfire on an incoming image feed. Our model achieves 96% classification accuracy, 74% Intersection-over-Union(IoU), and 84% recall surpassing past methods, including models trained on satellite data and classical color-rule algorithms. By leveraging a multi-spectral dataset, our model is able to detect active wildfire at nighttime and behind clouds, while distinguishing between false positives. We find that data from the SWIR, IR, and thermal bands is the most important to distinguish fire perimeters. Our code and dataset can be found here: https://github.com/nasa/Autonomous-Modular-Sensor-Wildfire-Segmentation/tree/main and https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-u4vs9rqwkwgdeeeoUhftCxrfe_4QPTn?=usp=drive_link
Abstract: This paper presents a fractional approximation of the AC optimal power flow (AC OPF) problem based on an all-pass approximation of the exponential power flow kernel. The classical AC OPF relies on trigonometric coupling between bus voltage phasors, which yields a nonconvex program with oscillatory derivatives that can slow, or in some cases destabilize, interior-point methods. We replace the trigonometric terms with an all-pass fractional (APF) approximation whose real and imaginary components act as smooth surrogates for the cosine and sine functions, and we introduce a pre-rotation to shift the argument of the approximation toward its most accurate region, ensuring that the reformulated power flow model preserves physical loss behavior, maintains the symmetry of the classical kernels, and improves the conditioning of the Jacobian and Hessian matrices. The proposed APF OPF formulation remains nonconvex, as in the classical model, but it eliminates trigonometric evaluations and empirically produces larger and more stable Newton steps under standard interior-point solvers. Numerical results on more than 25 IEEE and PGLib test systems ranging from 9 to 10{,}000 buses demonstrate that the APF OPF model achieves solutions with accuracy comparable to that of the classical formulation while reducing solver times, indicating a more solver-friendly nonconvex representation of AC OPF. All code, functions, verification scripts, and generated results are publicly available on \href{https://github.com/LSU-RAISE-LAB/APF-OPF}{GitHub}, along with a README describing how to run and reproduce the experiments.
Abstract: Large-scale medical segmentation datasets often combine manual and pseudo-labels of uneven quality, which can compromise training and evaluation. Low-quality labels may hamper performance and make the model training less robust. To address this issue, we propose SegAE (Segmentation Assessment Engine), a lightweight vision-language model (VLM) that automatically predicts label quality across 142 anatomical structures. Trained on over four million image-label pairs with quality scores, SegAE achieves a high correlation coefficient of 0.902 with ground-truth Dice similarity and evaluates a 3D mask in 0.06s. SegAE shows several practical benefits: (I) Our analysis reveals widespread low-quality labeling across public datasets; (II) SegAE improves data efficiency and training performance in active and semi-supervised learning, reducing dataset annotation cost by one-third and quality-checking time by 70% per label. This tool provides a simple and effective solution for quality control in large-scale medical segmentation datasets. The dataset, model weights, and codes are released at https://github.com/Schuture/SegAE.
Abstract: Motivation: Developing high-performing bioinformatics models typically requires repeated cycles of hypothesis formulation, architectural redesign, and empirical validation, making progress slow, labor-intensive, and difficult to reproduce. Although recent LLM-based assistants can automate isolated steps, they lack performance-grounded reasoning and stability-aware mechanisms required for reliable, iterative model improvement in bioinformatics workflows. Results: We introduce MARBLE, an execution-stable autonomous model refinement framework for bioinformatics models. MARBLE couples literature-aware reference selection with structured, debate-driven architectural reasoning among role-specialized agents, followed by autonomous execution, evaluation, and memory updates explicitly grounded in empirical performance. Across spatial transcriptomics domain segmentation, drug-target interaction prediction, and drug response prediction, MARBLE consistently achieves sustained performance improvements over strong baselines across multiple refinement cycles, while maintaining high execution robustness and low regression rates. Framework-level analyses demonstrate that structured debate, balanced evidence selection, and performance-grounded memory are critical for stable, repeatable model evolution, rather than single-run or brittle gains. Availability: Source code, data and Supplementary Information are available at https://github.com/PRISM-DGU/MARBLE.
Abstract: Deformable image registration is a critical technology in medical image analysis, with broad applications in clinical practice such as disease diagnosis, multi-modal fusion, and surgical navigation. Traditional methods often rely on iterative optimization, which is computationally intensive and lacks generalizability. Recent advances in deep learning have introduced attention-based mechanisms that improve feature alignment, yet accurately registering regions with high anatomical variability remains challenging. In this study, we proposed a novel unsupervised deformable image registration framework, LGANet++, which employs a novel local-global attention mechanism integrated with a unique technique for feature interaction and fusion to enhance registration accuracy, robustness, and generalizability. We evaluated our approach using five publicly available datasets, representing three distinct registration scenarios: cross-patient, cross-time, and cross-modal CT-MR registration. The results demonstrated that our approach consistently outperforms several state-of-the-art registration methods, improving registration accuracy by 1.39% in cross-patient registration, 0.71% in cross-time registration, and 6.12% in cross-modal CT-MR registration tasks. These results underscore the potential of LGANet++ to support clinical workflows requiring reliable and efficient image registration. The source code is available at https://github.com/huangzyong/LGANet-Registration.
Abstract: Hard-label black-box settings, where only top-1 predicted labels are observable, pose a fundamentally constrained yet practically important feedback model for understanding model behavior. A central challenge in this regime is whether meaningful gradient information can be recovered from such discrete responses. In this work, we develop a unified theoretical perspective showing that a wide range of existing sign-flipping hard-label attacks can be interpreted as implicitly approximating the sign of the true loss gradient. This observation reframes hard-label attacks from heuristic search procedures into instances of gradient sign recovery under extremely limited feedback. Motivated by this first-principles understanding, we propose a new attack framework that combines a zero-query frequency-domain initialization with a Pattern-Driven Optimization (PDO) strategy. We establish theoretical guarantees demonstrating that, under mild assumptions, our initialization achieves higher expected cosine similarity to the true gradient sign compared to random baselines, while the proposed PDO procedure attains substantially lower query complexity than existing structured search approaches. We empirically validate our framework through extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, ImageNet, and ObjectNet, covering standard and adversarially trained models, commercial APIs, and CLIP-based models. The results show that our method consistently surpasses SOTA hard-label attacks in both attack success rate and query efficiency, particularly in low-query regimes. Beyond image classification, our approach generalizes effectively to corrupted data, biomedical datasets, and dense prediction tasks. Notably, it also successfully circumvents Blacklight, a SOTA stateful defense, resulting in a $0\%$ detection rate. Our code will be released publicly soon at https://github.com/csjunjun/DPAttack.git.
Abstract: Understanding research papers remains challenging for foundation models due to specialized scientific discourse and complex figures and tables, yet existing benchmarks offer limited fine-grained evaluation at scale. To address this gap, we introduce RPC-Bench, a large-scale question-answering benchmark built from review-rebuttal exchanges of high-quality computer science papers, containing 15K human-verified QA pairs. We design a fine-grained taxonomy aligned with the scientific research flow to assess models' ability to understand and answer why, what, and how questions in scholarly contexts. We also define an elaborate LLM-human interaction annotation framework to support large-scale labeling and quality control. Following the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm, we develop a scalable framework that evaluates models on correctness-completeness and conciseness, with high agreement to human judgment. Experiments reveal that even the strongest models (GPT-5) achieve only 68.2% correctness-completeness, dropping to 37.46% after conciseness adjustment, highlighting substantial gaps in precise academic paper understanding. Our code and data are available at https://rpc-bench.github.io/.
Abstract: We present \textbf{DeepInflation}, an AI agent designed for research and model discovery in inflationary cosmology. Built upon a multi-agent architecture, \textbf{DeepInflation} integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with a symbolic regression (SR) engine and a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) knowledge base. This framework enables the agent to automatically explore and verify the vast landscape of inflationary potentials while grounding its outputs in established theoretical literature. We demonstrate that \textbf{DeepInflation} can successfully discover simple and viable single-field slow-roll inflationary potentials consistent with the latest observations (here ACT DR6 results as example) or any given $n_s$ and $r$, and provide accurate theoretical context for obscure inflationary scenarios. \textbf{DeepInflation} serves as a prototype for a new generation of autonomous scientific discovery engines in cosmology, which enables researchers and non-experts alike to explore the inflationary landscape using natural language. This agent is available at https://github.com/pengzy-cosmo/DeepInflation.
Abstract: Currently, the field of structure-based drug design is dominated by three main types of algorithms: search-based algorithms, deep generative models, and reinforcement learning. While existing works have typically focused on comparing models within a single algorithmic category, cross-algorithm comparisons remain scarce. In this paper, to fill the gap, we establish a benchmark to evaluate the performance of fifteen models across these different algorithmic foundations by assessing the pharmaceutical properties of the generated molecules and their docking affinities and poses with specified target proteins. We highlight the unique advantages of each algorithmic approach and offer recommendations for the design of future SBDD models. We emphasize that 1D/2D ligand-centric drug design methods can be used in SBDD by treating the docking function as a black-box oracle, which is typically neglected. Our evaluation reveals distinct patterns across model categories. 3D structure-based models excel in binding affinities but show inconsistencies in chemical validity and pose quality. 1D models demonstrate reliable performance in standard molecular metrics but rarely achieve optimal binding affinities. 2D models offer balanced performance, maintaining high chemical validity while achieving moderate binding scores. Through detailed analysis across multiple protein targets, we identify key improvement areas for each model category, providing insights for researchers to combine strengths of different approaches while addressing their limitations. All the code that are used for benchmarking is available in https://github.com/zkysfls/2025-sbdd-benchmark
Abstract: Multimodal emotion recognition in conversation (MERC) requires representations that effectively integrate signals from multiple modalities. These signals include modality-specific cues, information shared across modalities, and interactions that emerge only when modalities are combined. In information-theoretic terms, these correspond to \emph{unique}, \emph{redundant}, and \emph{synergistic} contributions. An ideal representation should leverage all three, yet achieving such balance remains challenging. Recent advances in contrastive learning and augmentation-based methods have made progress, but they often overlook the role of data preparation in preserving these components. In particular, applying augmentations directly to raw inputs or fused embeddings can blur the boundaries between modality-unique and cross-modal signals. To address this challenge, we propose a two-phase framework \emph{\textbf{D}ivide and \textbf{R}efine} (\textbf{DnR}). In the \textbf{Divide} phase, each modality is explicitly decomposed into uniqueness, pairwise redundancy, and synergy. In the \textbf{Refine} phase, tailored objectives enhance the informativeness of these components while maintaining their distinct roles. The refined representations are plug-and-play compatible with diverse multimodal pipelines. Extensive experiments on IEMOCAP and MELD demonstrate consistent improvements across multiple MERC backbones. These results highlight the effectiveness of explicitly dividing, refining, and recombining multimodal representations as a principled strategy for advancing emotion recognition. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/mattam301/DnR-WACV2026
Abstract: Long chain-of-thought (CoT) trajectories provide rich supervision signals for distilling reasoning from teacher to student LLMs. However, both prior work and our experiments show that trajectories from stronger teachers do not necessarily yield better students, highlighting the importance of data-student suitability in distillation. Existing methods assess suitability primarily through student likelihood, favoring trajectories that align closely with the student model's current behavior but overlooking more informative ones. Addressing this, we propose Rank-Surprisal Ratio (RSR), a simple metric that captures both alignment and informativeness to assess the suitability of a reasoning trajectory. RSR is motivated by the observation that effective trajectories typically balance learning signal strength and behavioral alignment by combining low absolute probability with relatively high-ranked tokens under the student model. Concretely, RSR is defined as the ratio of a trajectory's average token-wise rank to its average negative log-likelihood, and is straightforward to compute and interpret. Across five student models and reasoning trajectories from 11 diverse teachers, RSR strongly correlates with post-training reasoning performance (average Spearman 0.86), consistently outperforming existing metrics. We further demonstrate its practical utility in both trajectory selection and teacher selection.
Abstract: Retrieval is being redefined by agentic AI, demanding multimodal reasoning beyond conventional similarity-based paradigms. Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) exemplifies this shift as each query combines a reference image with textual modifications, requiring compositional understanding across modalities. While embedding-based CIR methods have achieved progress, they remain narrow in perspective, capturing limited cross-modal cues and lacking semantic reasoning. To address these limitations, we introduce XR, a training-free multi-agent framework that reframes retrieval as a progressively coordinated reasoning process. It orchestrates three specialized types of agents: imagination agents synthesize target representations through cross-modal generation, similarity agents perform coarse filtering via hybrid matching, and question agents verify factual consistency through targeted reasoning for fine filtering. Through progressive multi-agent coordination, XR iteratively refines retrieval to meet both semantic and visual query constraints, achieving up to a 38% gain over strong training-free and training-based baselines on FashionIQ, CIRR, and CIRCO, while ablations show each agent is essential. Code is available: https://01yzzyu.github.io/xr.github.io/.
Abstract: We study zero-shot 3D alignment of two given meshes, using a text prompt describing their spatial relation -- an essential capability for content creation and scene assembly. Earlier approaches primarily rely on geometric alignment procedures, while recent work leverages pretrained 2D diffusion models to model language-conditioned object-object spatial relationships. In contrast, we directly optimize the relative pose at test time, updating translation, rotation, and isotropic scale with CLIP-driven gradients via a differentiable renderer, without training a new model. Our framework augments language supervision with geometry-aware objectives: a variant of soft-Iterative Closest Point (ICP) term to encourage surface attachment and a penetration loss to discourage interpenetration. A phased schedule strengthens contact constraints over time, and camera control concentrates the optimization on the interaction region. To enable evaluation, we curate a benchmark containing diverse categories and relations, and compare against baselines. Our method outperforms all alternatives, yielding semantically faithful and physically plausible alignments.
Abstract: We study sentence-level detection of the 19 human values in the refined Schwartz continuum in about 74k English sentences from news and political manifestos (ValueEval'24 corpus). Each sentence is annotated with value presence, yielding a binary moral-presence label and a 19-way multi-label task under severe class imbalance. First, we show that moral presence is learnable from single sentences: a DeBERTa-base classifier attains positive-class F1 = 0.74 with calibrated thresholds. Second, we compare direct multi-label value detectors with presence-gated hierarchies under a single 8 GB GPU budget. Under matched compute, presence gating does not improve over direct prediction, indicating that gate recall becomes a bottleneck. Third, we investigate lightweight auxiliary signals - short-range context, LIWC-22 and moral lexica, and topic features - and small ensembles. Our best supervised configuration, a soft-voting ensemble of DeBERTa-based models enriched with such signals, reaches macro-F1 = 0.332 on the 19 values, improving over the best previous English-only baseline on this corpus (macro-F1 $\approx$ 0.28). We additionally benchmark 7-9B instruction-tuned LLMs (Gemma 2 9B, Llama 3.1 8B, Mistral 8B, Qwen 2.5 7B) in zero-/few-shot and QLoRA setups, and find that they lag behind the supervised ensemble under the same hardware constraint. Overall, our results provide empirical guidance for building compute-efficient, value-aware NLP models under realistic GPU budgets.
Abstract: The fundamental premise of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models is to harness the extensive general capabilities of pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for generalized embodied intelligence. However, standard robotic fine-tuning inevitably disrupts the pre-trained feature space, leading to "catastrophic forgetting" that compromises the general visual understanding we aim to leverage. To effectively utilize the uncorrupted general capabilities of VLMs for robotic tasks, we propose TwinBrainVLA, which coordinates two isomorphic VLM pathways: a frozen generalist (also called "Left Brain") and a trainable specialist (also called "Right Brain"). Our architecture utilizes a Asymmetric Mixture-of-Transformers (AsyMoT) mechanism, enabling the Right Brain to dynamically query and fuse intact semantic knowledge from the Left Brain with proprioceptive states. This fused representation conditions a flow-matching action expert for precise continuous control. Empirical results on SimplerEnv and RoboCasa benchmarks demonstrate that by explicitly retaining general capabilities, TwinBrainVLA achieves substantial performance gains over baseline models in complex manipulation tasks.
Abstract: Table learning, which lies at the intersection of machine learning and modern database systems, has recently attracted growing attention. However, existing frameworks typically require explicit data export and extensive feature engineering, creating a high barrier for database practitioners. We present TLSQL (Table Learning Structured Query Language), a system that enables table learning directly over relational databases via SQL-like declarative specifications. TLSQL is implemented as a lightweight Python library that translates these specifications into standard SQL queries and structured learning task descriptions. The generated SQL queries are executed natively by the database engine, while the task descriptions are consumed by downstream table learning frameworks. This design allows users to focus on modeling and analysis rather than low-level data preparation and pipeline orchestration. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that TLSQL effectively lowers the barrier to integrating machine learning into databasecentric workflows. Our code is available at https://github.com/rllm-project/tlsql/.
Abstract: Mechanistic Interpretability (MI) has emerged as a vital approach to demystify the opaque decision-making of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing reviews primarily treat MI as an observational science, summarizing analytical insights while lacking a systematic framework for actionable intervention. To bridge this gap, we present a practical survey structured around the pipeline: "Locate, Steer, and Improve." We formally categorize Localizing (diagnosis) and Steering (intervention) methods based on specific Interpretable Objects to establish a rigorous intervention protocol. Furthermore, we demonstrate how this framework enables tangible improvements in Alignment, Capability, and Efficiency, effectively operationalizing MI as an actionable methodology for model optimization. The curated paper list of this work is available at https://github.com/rattlesnakey/Awesome-Actionable-MI-Survey.
Abstract: The quality of data augmentation serves as a critical determinant for the performance of contrastive learning in EEG tasks. Although this paradigm is promising for utilizing unlabeled data, static or random augmentation strategies often fail to preserve intrinsic information due to the non-stationarity of EEG signals where statistical properties change over time. To address this, we propose RL-BioAug, a framework that leverages a label-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) agent to autonomously determine optimal augmentation policies. While utilizing only a minimal fraction (10%) of labeled data to guide the agent's policy, our method enables the encoder to learn robust representations in a strictly self-supervised manner. Experimental results demonstrate that RL-BioAug significantly outperforms the random selection strategy, achieving substantial improvements of 9.69% and 8.80% in Macro-F1 score on the Sleep-EDFX and CHB-MIT datasets, respectively. Notably, this agent mainly chose optimal strategies for each task--for example, Time Masking with a 62% probability for sleep stage classification and Crop & Resize with a 77% probability for seizure detection. Our framework suggests its potential to replace conventional heuristic-based augmentations and establish a new autonomous paradigm for data augmentation. The source code is available at https://github.com/dlcjfgmlnasa/RL-BioAug.
Abstract: Learning precise Boolean logic via gradient descent remains challenging: neural networks typically converge to "fuzzy" approximations that degrade under quantization. We introduce Hierarchical Spectral Composition, a differentiable architecture that selects spectral coefficients from a frozen Boolean Fourier basis and composes them via Sinkhorn-constrained routing with column-sign modulation. Our approach draws on recent insights from Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC), which demonstrated that projecting routing matrices onto the Birkhoff polytope preserves identity mappings and stabilizes large-scale training. We adapt this framework to logic synthesis, adding column-sign modulation to enable Boolean negation -- a capability absent in standard doubly stochastic routing. We validate our approach across four phases of increasing complexity: (1) For n=2 (16 Boolean operations over 4-dim basis), gradient descent achieves 100% accuracy with zero routing drift and zero-loss quantization to ternary masks. (2) For n=3 (10 three-variable operations), gradient descent achieves 76% accuracy, but exhaustive enumeration over 3^8 = 6561 configurations proves that optimal ternary masks exist for all operations (100% accuracy, 39% sparsity). (3) For n=4 (10 four-variable operations over 16-dim basis), spectral synthesis -- combining exact Walsh-Hadamard coefficients, ternary quantization, and MCMC refinement with parallel tempering -- achieves 100% accuracy on all operations. This progression establishes (a) that ternary polynomial threshold representations exist for all tested functions, and (b) that finding them requires methods beyond pure gradient descent as dimensionality grows. All operations enable single-cycle combinational logic inference at 10,959 MOps/s on GPU, demonstrating viability for hardware-efficient neuro-symbolic logic synthesis.
Abstract: Large language models and agents have achieved remarkable progress in code generation. However, existing benchmarks focus on isolated function/class-level generation (e.g., ClassEval) or modifications to existing codebases (e.g., SWE-Bench), neglecting complete microservice repository generation that reflects real-world 0-to-1 development workflows. To bridge this gap, we introduce RepoGenesis, the first multilingual benchmark for repository-level end-to-end web microservice generation, comprising 106 repositories (60 Python, 46 Java) across 18 domains and 11 frameworks, with 1,258 API endpoints and 2,335 test cases verified through a "review-rebuttal" quality assurance process. We evaluate open-source agents (e.g., DeepCode) and commercial IDEs (e.g., Cursor) using Pass@1, API Coverage (AC), and Deployment Success Rate (DSR). Results reveal that despite high AC (up to 73.91%) and DSR (up to 100%), the best-performing system achieves only 23.67% Pass@1 on Python and 21.45% on Java, exposing deficiencies in architectural coherence, dependency management, and cross-file consistency. Notably, GenesisAgent-8B, fine-tuned on RepoGenesis (train), achieves performance comparable to GPT-5 mini, demonstrating the quality of RepoGenesis for advancing microservice generation. We release our benchmark at https://github.com/microsoft/DKI_LLM/tree/main/RepoGenesis.
Abstract: Recent advances in singing voice synthesis (SVS) have attracted substantial attention from both academia and industry. With the advent of large language models and novel generative paradigms, producing controllable, high-fidelity singing voices has become an attainable goal. Yet the field still lacks a comprehensive survey that systematically analyzes deep-learning-based singing voice synthesis systems and their enabling technologies. To address the aforementioned issue, this survey first categorizes existing systems by task type and then organizes current architectures into two major paradigms: cascaded and end-to-end approaches. Moreover, we provide an in-depth analysis of core technologies, covering singing modeling and control techniques. Finally, we review relevant datasets, annotation tools, and evaluation benchmarks that support training and assessment. In appendix, we introduce training strategies and further discussion of SVS. This survey provides an up-to-date review of the literature on SVS models, which would be a useful reference for both researchers and engineers. Related materials are available at https://github.com/David-Pigeon/SyntheticSingers.
Abstract: Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) aims to answer questions by integrating images with external knowledge. Effective knowledge filtering is crucial for improving accuracy. Typical filtering methods use similarity metrics to locate relevant article sections from one article, leading to information selection errors at the article and intra-article levels. Although recent explorations of Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based filtering methods demonstrate superior semantic understanding and cross-article filtering capabilities, their high computational cost limits practical application. To address these issues, this paper proposes a question-focused filtering method. This approach can perform question-focused, cross-article filtering, efficiently obtaining high-quality filtered knowledge while keeping computational costs comparable to typical methods. Specifically, we design a trainable Question-Focused Filter (QFF) and a Chunk-based Dynamic Multi-Article Selection (CDA) module, which collectively alleviate information selection errors at both the article and intra-article levels. Experiments show that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art models by 4.9% on E-VQA and 3.8% on InfoSeek, validating its effectiveness. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/leaffeall/QKVQA.
Abstract: Graph diffusion models achieve state-of-the-art performance in graph generation but suffer from quadratic complexity in the number of nodes -- and much of their capacity is wasted modeling the absence of edges in sparse graphs. Inspired by latent diffusion in other modalities, a natural idea is to compress graphs into a low-dimensional latent space and perform diffusion there. However, unlike images or text, graph generation requires nearly lossless reconstruction, as even a single error in decoding an adjacency matrix can render the entire sample invalid. This challenge has remained largely unaddressed. We propose LG-Flow, a latent graph diffusion framework that directly overcomes these obstacles. A permutation-equivariant autoencoder maps each node into a fixed-dimensional embedding from which the full adjacency is provably recoverable, enabling near-lossless reconstruction for both undirected graphs and DAGs. The dimensionality of this latent representation scales linearly with the number of nodes, eliminating the quadratic bottleneck and making it feasible to train larger and more expressive models. In this latent space, we train a Diffusion Transformer with flow matching, enabling efficient and expressive graph generation. Our approach achieves competitive results against state-of-the-art graph diffusion models, while achieving up to $1000\times$ speed-up. Our code is available at https://github.com/asiraudin/LG-Flow .
Abstract: Self-play with large language models has emerged as a promising paradigm for achieving self-improving artificial intelligence. However, existing self-play frameworks often suffer from optimization instability, due to (i) non-stationary objectives induced by solver-dependent reward feedback for the Questioner, and (ii) bootstrapping errors from self-generated pseudo-labels used to supervise the Solver. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce DARC (Decoupled Asymmetric Reasoning Curriculum), a two-stage framework that stabilizes the self-evolution process. First, we train the Questioner to synthesize difficulty-calibrated questions, conditioned on explicit difficulty levels and external corpora. Second, we train the Solver with an asymmetric self-distillation mechanism, where a document-augmented teacher generates high-quality pseudo-labels to supervise the student Solver that lacks document access. Empirical results demonstrate that DARC is model-agnostic, yielding an average improvement of 10.9 points across nine reasoning benchmarks and three backbone models. Moreover, DARC consistently outperforms all baselines and approaches the performance of fully supervised models without relying on human annotations. The code is available at https://github.com/RUCBM/DARC.
Abstract: Natural disaster monitoring through continuous satellite observation requires processing multi-temporal data under strict operational constraints. This paper addresses flood detection, a critical application for hazard management, by developing an onboard change detection system that operates within the memory and computational limits of small satellites. We propose History Injection mechanism for Transformer models (HiT), that maintains historical context from previous observations while reducing data storage by over 99\% of original image size. Moreover, testing on the STTORM-CD flood dataset confirms that the HiT mechanism within the Prithvi-tiny foundation model maintains detection accuracy compared to the bitemporal baseline. The proposed HiT-Prithvi model achieved 43 FPS on Jetson Orin Nano, a representative onboard hardware used in nanosats. This work establishes a practical framework for satellite-based continuous monitoring of natural disasters, supporting real-time hazard assessment without dependency on ground-based processing infrastructure. Architecture as well as model checkpoints is available at https://github.com/zaitra/HiT-change-detection
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) based coding agents increasingly act as autonomous contributors that generate and merge pull requests, yet their real-world effects on software projects are unclear-especially compared with widely adopted IDE-based AI assistants. We present a longitudinal causal study of agent adoption in open-source repositories using staggered difference-in-differences with matched controls. Using the AIDev dataset, we define adoption as the first agent-generated pull request and analyze monthly repository-level outcomes spanning development velocity (commits, lines added) and software quality (static-analysis warnings, cognitive complexity, duplication, and comment density). Results show large, front-loaded velocity gains only when agents are the first observable AI tool in a project; repositories with prior AI IDE usage experience minimal or short-lived throughput increases. In contrast, quality risks are persistent across settings, with static-analysis warnings and cognitive complexity rising by roughly 18% and 39%, indicating sustained agent-induced technical debt even when velocity advantages fade. These heterogeneous effects suggest diminishing returns to AI assistance and highlight the need for quality safeguards, provenance tracking, and selective deployment of autonomous agents. Our findings establish an empirical basis for understanding how agentic and IDE-based tools interact, and motivate research on balancing acceleration with maintainability in AI-integrated development workflows. The replication package for this study is publicly available at https://github.com/shyamagarwal13/agentic-coding-impact.
Abstract: Time series generation (TSG) is widely used across domains, yet most existing methods assume regular sampling and fixed output resolutions. These assumptions are often violated in practice, where observations are irregular and sparse, while downstream applications require continuous and high-resolution TS. Although Neural Controlled Differential Equation (NCDE) is promising for modeling irregular TS, it is constrained by a single dynamics function, tightly coupled optimization, and limited ability to adapt learned dynamics to newly generated samples from the generative model. We propose Diff-MN, a continuous TSG framework that enhances NCDE with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) dynamics function and a decoupled architectural design for dynamics-focused training. To further enable NCDE to generalize to newly generated samples, Diff-MN employs a diffusion model to parameterize the NCDE temporal dynamics parameters (MoE weights), i.e., jointly learn the distribution of TS data and MoE weights. This design allows sample-specific NCDE parameters to be generated for continuous TS generation. Experiments on ten public and synthetic datasets demonstrate that Diff-MN consistently outperforms strong baselines on both irregular-to-regular and irregular-to-continuous TSG tasks. The code is available at the link https://github.com/microsoft/TimeCraft/tree/main/Diff-MN.
Abstract: Existing image-based virtual try-on (VTON) methods primarily focus on single-layer or multi-garment VTON, neglecting multi-layer VTON (ML-VTON), which involves dressing multiple layers of garments onto the human body with realistic deformation and layering to generate visually plausible outcomes. The main challenge lies in accurately modeling occlusion relationships between inner and outer garments to reduce interference from redundant inner garment features. To address this, we propose GO-MLVTON, the first multi-layer VTON method, introducing the Garment Occlusion Learning module to learn occlusion relationships and the StableDiffusion-based Garment Morphing & Fitting module to deform and fit garments onto the human body, producing high-quality multi-layer try-on results. Additionally, we present the MLG dataset for this task and propose a new metric named Layered Appearance Coherence Difference (LACD) for evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of GO-MLVTON. Project page: https://upyuyang.github.io/go-mlvton/.
Abstract: While recent automated red-teaming methods show promise for systematically exposing model vulnerabilities, most existing approaches rely on human-specified workflows. This dependence on manually designed workflows suffers from human biases and makes exploring the broader design space expensive. We introduce AgenticRed, an automated pipeline that leverages LLMs' in-context learning to iteratively design and refine red-teaming systems without human intervention. Rather than optimizing attacker policies within predefined structures, AgenticRed treats red-teaming as a system design problem. Inspired by methods like Meta Agent Search, we develop a novel procedure for evolving agentic systems using evolutionary selection, and apply it to the problem of automatic red-teaming. Red-teaming systems designed by AgenticRed consistently outperform state-of-the-art approaches, achieving 96% attack success rate (ASR) on Llama-2-7B (36% improvement) and 98% on Llama-3-8B on HarmBench. Our approach exhibits strong transferability to proprietary models, achieving 100% ASR on GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4o, and 60% on Claude-Sonnet-3.5 (24% improvement). This work highlights automated system design as a powerful paradigm for AI safety evaluation that can keep pace with rapidly evolving models.
Abstract: We present PepEDiff, a novel peptide binder generator that designs binding sequences given a target receptor protein sequence and its pocket residues. Peptide binder generation is critical in therapeutic and biochemical applications, yet many existing methods rely heavily on intermediate structure prediction, adding complexity and limiting sequence diversity. Our approach departs from this paradigm by generating binder sequences directly in a continuous latent space derived from a pretrained protein embedding model, without relying on predicted structures, thereby improving structural and sequence diversity. To encourage the model to capture binding-relevant features rather than memorizing known sequences, we perform latent-space exploration and diffusion-based sampling, enabling the generation of peptides beyond the limited distribution of known binders. This zero-shot generative strategy leverages the global protein embedding manifold as a semantic prior, allowing the model to propose novel peptide sequences in previously unseen regions of the protein space. We evaluate PepEDiff on TIGIT, a challenging target with a large, flat protein-protein interaction interface that lacks a druggable pocket. Despite its simplicity, our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across benchmark tests and in the TIGIT case study, demonstrating its potential as a general, structure-free framework for zero-shot peptide binder design. The code for this research is available at GitHub: https://github.com/LabJunBMI/PepEDiff-An-Peptide-binder-Embedding-Diffusion-Model
Abstract: Angular margin losses, such as AAM-Softmax, have become the de facto in speaker and face verification. Their success hinges on directly manipulating the angle between features and class prototypes. However, this manipulation relies on the arccos function to recover the angle, introducing a significant yet overlooked source of training instability. The derivative of arccos explodes at its boundaries, causing gradient peaks during optimisation. Furthermore, the formulation fails to generate a sufficiently sharp gradient for hard-to-classify examples. We address these issues by proposing ChebyAAM, a loss that replaces the arccos operation with its Chebyshev polynomial approximation. This substitution eliminates gradient explosion and applies a stronger corrective signal to hard examples, leading to more effective optimisation. Experiments on three benchmarks (VoxCeleb, SITW, and CN-Celeb) demonstrate that our method resolves the instability and consistently improves performance. Our work suggests that approximating angular operations, rather than calculating them explicitly, offers a more robust path for designing future metric learning losses. Code is available at https://github.com/ExtraOrdinaryLab/vibe.
Abstract: 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.
Abstract: This work presents Interactive Conversational 3D Virtual Human (ICo3D), a method for generating an interactive, conversational, and photorealistic 3D human avatar. Based on multi-view captures of a subject, we create an animatable 3D face model and a dynamic 3D body model, both rendered by splatting Gaussian primitives. Once merged together, they represent a lifelike virtual human avatar suitable for real-time user interactions. We equip our avatar with an LLM for conversational ability. During conversation, the audio speech of the avatar is used as a driving signal to animate the face model, enabling precise synchronization. We describe improvements to our dynamic Gaussian models that enhance photorealism: SWinGS++ for body reconstruction and HeadGaS++ for face reconstruction, and provide as well a solution to merge the separate face and body models without artifacts. We also present a demo of the complete system, showcasing several use cases of real-time conversation with the 3D avatar. Our approach offers a fully integrated virtual avatar experience, supporting both oral and written form interactions in immersive environments. ICo3D is applicable to a wide range of fields, including gaming, virtual assistance, and personalized education, among others. Project page: https://ico3d.github.io/
Abstract: Realistic text-to-SQL workflows often require joining multiple tables. As a result, accurately retrieving the relevant set of tables becomes a key bottleneck for end-to-end performance. We study an open-book setting where queries must be answered over large, heterogeneous table collections pooled from many sources, without clean scoping signals such as database identifiers. Here, dense retrieval (DR) achieves high recall but returns many distractors, while join-aware alternatives often rely on extra assumptions and/or incur high inference overhead. We propose CORE-T, a scalable, training-free framework that enriches tables with LLM-generated purpose metadata and pre-computes a lightweight table-compatibility cache. At inference time, DR returns top-K candidates; a single LLM call selects a coherent, joinable subset, and a simple additive adjustment step restores strongly compatible tables. Across Bird, Spider, and MMQA, CORE-T improves table-selection F1 by up to 22.7 points while retrieving up to 42% fewer tables, improving multi-table execution accuracy by up to 5.0 points on Bird and 6.9 points on MMQA, and using 4-5x fewer tokens than LLM-intensive baselines.
Abstract: Arabic is a highly diglossic language where most daily communication occurs in regional dialects rather than Modern Standard Arabic. Despite this, machine translation (MT) systems often generalize poorly to dialectal input, limiting their utility for millions of speakers. We introduce \textbf{Alexandria}, a large-scale, community-driven, human-translated dataset designed to bridge this gap. Alexandria covers 13 Arab countries and 11 high-impact domains, including health, education, and agriculture. Unlike previous resources, Alexandria provides unprecedented granularity by associating contributions with city-of-origin metadata, capturing authentic local varieties beyond coarse regional labels. The dataset consists of multi-turn conversational scenarios annotated with speaker-addressee gender configurations, enabling the study of gender-conditioned variation in dialectal use. Comprising 107K total samples, Alexandria serves as both a training resource and a rigorous benchmark for evaluating MT and Large Language Models (LLMs). Our automatic and human evaluation of Arabic-aware LLMs benchmarks current capabilities in translating across diverse Arabic dialects and sub-dialects, while exposing significant persistent challenges.
Abstract: Maritime port inspection plays a critical role in ensuring safety, regulatory compliance, and operational efficiency in complex maritime environments. However, existing inspection methods often rely on manual operations and conventional computer vision techniques that lack scalability and contextual understanding. This study introduces a novel integrated engineering framework that utilizes the synergy between Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) to enable autonomous maritime port inspection using cooperative aerial and surface robotic platforms. The proposed framework replaces traditional state-machine mission planners with LLM-driven symbolic planning and improved perception pipelines through VLM-based semantic inspection, enabling context-aware and adaptive monitoring. The LLM module translates natural language mission instructions into executable symbolic plans with dependency graphs that encode operational constraints and ensure safe UAV-USV coordination. Meanwhile, the VLM module performs real-time semantic inspection and compliance assessment, generating structured reports with contextual reasoning. The framework was validated using the extended MBZIRC Maritime Simulator with realistic port infrastructure and further assessed through real-world robotic inspection trials. The lightweight on-board design ensures suitability for resource-constrained maritime platforms, advancing the development of intelligent, autonomous inspection systems. Project resources (code and videos) can be found here: https://github.com/Muhayyuddin/llm-vlm-fusion-port-inspection
Abstract: Crack detection is critical for concrete infrastructure safety, but real-world cracks often appear in low-light environments like tunnels and bridge undersides, degrading computer vision segmentation accuracy. Pixel-level annotation of low-light crack images is extremely time-consuming, yet most deep learning methods require large, well-illuminated datasets. We propose a dual-branch prototype learning network integrating Retinex theory with few-shot learning for low-light crack segmentation. Retinex-based reflectance components guide illumination-invariant global representation learning, while metric learning reduces dependence on large annotated datasets. We introduce a cross-similarity prior mask generation module that computes high-dimensional similarities between query and support features to capture crack location and structure, and a multi-scale feature enhancement module that fuses multi-scale features with the prior mask to alleviate spatial inconsistency. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate consistent state-of-the-art performance under low-light conditions. Code: https://github.com/YulunGuo/CrackFSS.
Abstract: Understanding and reasoning about the physical world requires spatial intelligence: the ability to interpret geometry, perspective, and spatial relations beyond 2D perception. While recent vision large models (VLMs) excel at visual understanding, they remain fundamentally 2D perceivers and struggle with genuine 3D reasoning. We introduce Think3D, a framework that enables VLM agents to think with 3D space. By leveraging 3D reconstruction models that recover point clouds and camera poses from images or videos, Think3D allows the agent to actively manipulate space through camera-based operations and ego/global-view switching, transforming spatial reasoning into an interactive 3D chain-of-thought process. Without additional training, Think3D significantly improves the spatial reasoning performance of advanced models such as GPT-4.1 and Gemini 2.5 Pro, yielding average gains of +7.8% on BLINK Multi-view and MindCube, and +4.7% on VSI-Bench. We further show that smaller models, which struggle with spatial exploration, benefit significantly from a reinforcement learning policy that enables the model to select informative viewpoints and operations. With RL, the benefit from tool usage increases from +0.7% to +6.8%. Our findings demonstrate that training-free, tool-augmented spatial exploration is a viable path toward more flexible and human-like 3D reasoning in multimodal agents, establishing a new dimension of multimodal intelligence. Code and weights are released at https://github.com/zhangzaibin/spagent.
Abstract: Recovering accurate architecture from large-scale legacy software is hindered by architectural drift, missing relations, and the limited context of Large Language Models (LLMs). We present ArchAgent, a scalable agent-based framework that combines static analysis, adaptive code segmentation, and LLM-powered synthesis to reconstruct multiview, business-aligned architectures from cross-repository codebases. ArchAgent introduces scalable diagram generation with contextual pruning and integrates cross-repository data to identify business-critical modules. Evaluations of typical large-scale GitHub projects show significant improvements over existing benchmarks. An ablation study confirms that dependency context improves the accuracy of generated architectures of production-level repositories, and a real-world case study demonstrates effective recovery of critical business logics from legacy projects. The dataset is available at https://github.com/panrusheng/arch-eval-benchmark.
Abstract: Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) offer a powerful paradigm for solving complex problems, yet their performance is critically dependent on the design of their underlying collaboration topology. As MAS become increasingly deployed in web services (e.g., search engines), designing adaptive topologies for diverse cross-domain user queries becomes essential. Current graph learning-based design methodologies often adhere to a "one-for-one" paradigm, where a specialized model is trained for each specific task domain. This approach suffers from poor generalization to unseen domains and fails to leverage shared structural knowledge across different tasks. To address this, we propose OFA-TAD, a one-for-all framework that generates adaptive collaboration graphs for any task described in natural language through a single universal model. Our approach integrates a Task-Aware Graph State Encoder (TAGSE) that filters task-relevant node information via sparse gating, and a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture that dynamically selects specialized sub-networks to drive node and edge prediction. We employ a three-stage training strategy: unconditional pre-training on canonical topologies for structural priors, large-scale conditional pre-training on LLM-generated datasets for task-topology mappings, and supervised fine-tuning on empirically validated graphs. Experiments across six diverse benchmarks show that OFA-TAD significantly outperforms specialized one-for-one models, generating highly adaptive MAS topologies. Code: https://github.com/Shiy-Li/OFA-MAS.
Abstract: The advent of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has significantly enhanced the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to produce factually accurate and up-to-date responses. However, the performance of a RAG system is not determined by a single component but emerges from a complex interplay of modular choices, such as embedding models and retrieval algorithms. This creates a vast and often opaque configuration space, making it challenging for developers to understand performance trade-offs and identify optimal designs. To address this challenge, we present RAGExplorer, a visual analytics system for the systematic comparison and diagnosis of RAG configurations. RAGExplorer guides users through a seamless macro-to-micro analytical workflow. Initially, it empowers developers to survey the performance landscape across numerous configurations, allowing for a high-level understanding of which design choices are most effective. For a deeper analysis, the system enables users to drill down into individual failure cases, investigate how differences in retrieved information contribute to errors, and interactively test hypotheses by manipulating the provided context to observe the resulting impact on the generated answer. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RAGExplorer through detailed case studies and user studies, validating its ability to empower developers in navigating the complex RAG design space. Our code and user guide are publicly available at https://github.com/Thymezzz/RAGExplorer.
Abstract: Ensuring that large language models (LLMs) respect diverse cultural values is crucial for social equity. However, existing approaches often treat cultural groups as homogeneous and overlook within-group heterogeneity induced by intersecting demographic attributes, leading to unstable behavior under varying persona granularity. We propose ACE-Align (Attribute Causal Effect Alignment), a causal-effect framework that aligns how specific demographic attributes shift different cultural values, rather than treating each culture as a homogeneous group. We evaluate ACE-Align across 14 countries spanning five continents, with personas specified by subsets of four attributes (gender, education, residence, and marital status) and granularity instantiated by the number of specified attributes. Across all persona granularities, ACE-Align consistently outperforms baselines. Moreover, it improves geographic equity by reducing the average alignment gap between high-resource and low-resource regions from 9.81 to 4.92 points, while Africa shows the largest average gain (+8.48 points). Code is available at https://github.com/Wells-Luo/ACE-Align.
Abstract: Existing spacecraft rendezvous and docking control methods largely rely on predefined dynamic models and often exhibit limited robustness in realistic on-orbit environments. To address this issue, this paper proposes an Imitation Learning-based spacecraft rendezvous and docking control framework (IL-SRD) that directly learns control policies from expert demonstrations, thereby reducing dependence on accurate modeling. We propose an anchored decoder target mechanism, which conditions the decoder queries on state-related anchors to explicitly constrain the control generation process. This mechanism enforces physically consistent control evolution and effectively suppresses implausible action deviations in sequential prediction, enabling reliable six-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) rendezvous and docking control. To further enhance stability, a temporal aggregation mechanism is incorporated to mitigate error accumulation caused by the sequential prediction nature of Transformer-based models, where small inaccuracies at each time step can propagate and amplify over long horizons. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed IL-SRD framework achieves accurate and energy-efficient model-free rendezvous and docking control. Robustness evaluations further confirm its capability to maintain competitive performance under significant unknown disturbances. The source code is available at https://github.com/Dongzhou-1996/IL-SRD.
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have become powerful and widely used systems for language understanding and generation, while multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms provide a principled framework for adaptive decision-making under uncertainty. This survey explores the potential at the intersection of these two fields. As we know, it is the first survey to systematically review the bidirectional interaction between large language models and multi-armed bandits at the component level. We highlight the bidirectional benefits: MAB algorithms address critical LLM challenges, spanning from pre-training to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and personalization. Conversely, LLMs enhance MAB systems by redefining core components such as arm definition and environment modeling, thereby improving decision-making in sequential tasks. We analyze existing LLM-enhanced bandit systems and bandit-enhanced LLM systems, providing insights into their design, methodologies, and performance. Key challenges and representative findings are identified to help guide future research. An accompanying GitHub repository that indexes relevant literature is available at https://github.com/bucky1119/Awesome-LLM-Bandit-Interaction.
Abstract: Temporal Graph Clustering (TGC) is a new task with little attention, focusing on node clustering in temporal graphs. Compared with existing static graph clustering, it can find the balance between time requirement and space requirement (Time-Space Balance) through the interaction sequence-based batch-processing pattern. However, there are two major challenges that hinder the development of TGC, i.e., inapplicable clustering techniques and inapplicable datasets. To address these challenges, we propose a comprehensive benchmark, called BenchTGC. Specially, we design a BenchTGC Framework to illustrate the paradigm of temporal graph clustering and improve existing clustering techniques to fit temporal graphs. In addition, we also discuss problems with public temporal graph datasets and develop multiple datasets suitable for TGC task, called BenchTGC Datasets. According to extensive experiments, we not only verify the advantages of BenchTGC, but also demonstrate the necessity and importance of TGC task. We wish to point out that the dynamically changing and complex scenarios in real world are the foundation of temporal graph clustering. The code and data is available at: https://github.com/MGitHubL/BenchTGC.
Abstract: Diffusion Policy has dominated action generation due to its strong capabilities for modeling multi-modal action distributions, but its multi-step denoising processes make it impractical for real-time visuomotor control. Existing caching-based acceleration methods typically rely on $\textit{static}$ schedules that fail to adapt to the $\textit{dynamics}$ of robot-environment interactions, thereby leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose $\underline{\textbf{S}}$parse $\underline{\textbf{A}}$ction$\underline{\textbf{G}}$en ($\textbf{SAG}$) for extremely sparse action generation. To accommodate the iterative interactions, SAG customizes a rollout-adaptive prune-then-reuse mechanism that first identifies prunable computations globally and then reuses cached activations to substitute them during action diffusion. To capture the rollout dynamics, SAG parameterizes an observation-conditioned diffusion pruner for environment-aware adaptation and instantiates it with a highly parameter- and inference-efficient design for real-time prediction. Furthermore, SAG introduces a one-for-all reusing strategy that reuses activations across both timesteps and blocks in a zig-zag manner, minimizing the global redundancy. Extensive experiments on multiple robotic benchmarks demonstrate that SAG achieves up to 4$\times$ generation speedup without sacrificing performance. Project Page: https://sparse-actiongen.github.io/.
Abstract: Recently, deep learning based facial landmark detection (FLD) methods have achieved considerable success. However, in challenging scenarios such as large pose variations, illumination changes, and facial expression variations, they still struggle to accurately capture the geometric structure of the face, resulting in performance degradation. Moreover, the limited size and diversity of existing FLD datasets hinder robust model training, leading to reduced detection accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose a Frequency-Guided Task-Balancing Transformer (FGTBT), which enhances facial structure perception through frequency-domain modeling and multi-dataset unified training. Specifically, we propose a novel Fine-Grained Multi-Task Balancing loss (FMB-loss), which moves beyond coarse task-level balancing by assigning weights to individual landmarks based on their occurrence across datasets. This enables more effective unified training and mitigates the issue of inconsistent gradient magnitudes. Additionally, a Frequency-Guided Structure-Aware (FGSA) model is designed to utilize frequency-guided structure injection and regularization to help learn facial structure constraints. Extensive experimental results on popular benchmark datasets demonstrate that the integration of the proposed FMB-loss and FGSA model into our FGTBT framework achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Xi0ngxinyu/FGTBT.
Abstract: Large foundation models are integrated into Computer Use Agents (CUAs), enabling autonomous interaction with operating systems through graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to perform complex tasks. This autonomy introduces serious security risks: malicious instructions or visual prompt injections can trigger unsafe reasoning and cause harmful system-level actions. Existing defenses, such as detection-based blocking, prevent damage but often abort tasks prematurely, reducing agent utility. In this paper, we present MirrorGuard, a plug-and-play defense framework that uses simulation-based training to improve CUA security in the real world. To reduce the cost of large-scale training in operating systems, we propose a novel neural-symbolic simulation pipeline, which generates realistic, high-risk GUI interaction trajectories entirely in a text-based simulated environment, which captures unsafe reasoning patterns and potential system hazards without executing real operations. In the simulation environment, MirrorGuard learns to intercept and rectify insecure reasoning chains of CUAs before they produce and execute unsafe actions. In real-world testing, extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks and CUA architectures show that MirrorGuard significantly mitigates security risks. For instance, on the ByteDance UI-TARS system, it reduces the unsafe rate from 66.5% to 13.0% while maintaining a marginal false refusal rate (FRR). In contrast, the state-of-the-art GuardAgent only achieves a reduction to 53.9% and suffers from a 15.4% higher FRR. Our work proves that simulation-derived defenses can provide robust, real-world protection while maintaining the fundamental utility of the agent. Our code and model are publicly available at https://bmz-q-q.github.io/MirrorGuard/.
Abstract: Continual learning aims to enable neural networks to acquire new knowledge on sequential tasks. However, the key challenge in such settings is to learn new tasks without catastrophically forgetting previously learned tasks. We propose the Fisher-Orthogonal Projected Natural Gradient Descent (FOPNG) optimizer, which enforces Fisher-orthogonal constraints on parameter updates to preserve old task performance while learning new tasks. Unlike existing methods that operate in Euclidean parameter space, FOPNG projects gradients onto the Fisher-orthogonal complement of previous task gradients. This approach unifies natural gradient descent with orthogonal gradient methods within an information-geometric framework. We provide theoretical analysis deriving the projected update, describe efficient and practical implementations using the diagonal Fisher, and demonstrate strong results on standard continual learning benchmarks such as Permuted-MNIST, Split-MNIST, Rotated-MNIST, Split-CIFAR10, and Split-CIFAR100. Our code is available at https://github.com/ishirgarg/FOPNG.
Abstract: Humanoid robots are capable of performing various actions such as greeting, dancing and even backflipping. However, these motions are often hard-coded or specifically trained, which limits their versatility. In this work, we present FRoM-W1, an open-source framework designed to achieve general humanoid whole-body motion control using natural language. To universally understand natural language and generate corresponding motions, as well as enable various humanoid robots to stably execute these motions in the physical world under gravity, FRoM-W1 operates in two stages: (a) H-GPT: utilizing massive human data, a large-scale language-driven human whole-body motion generation model is trained to generate diverse natural behaviors. We further leverage the Chain-of-Thought technique to improve the model's generalization in instruction understanding. (b) H-ACT: After retargeting generated human whole-body motions into robot-specific actions, a motion controller that is pretrained and further fine-tuned through reinforcement learning in physical simulation enables humanoid robots to accurately and stably perform corresponding actions. It is then deployed on real robots via a modular simulation-to-reality module. We extensively evaluate FRoM-W1 on Unitree H1 and G1 robots. Results demonstrate superior performance on the HumanML3D-X benchmark for human whole-body motion generation, and our introduced reinforcement learning fine-tuning consistently improves both motion tracking accuracy and task success rates of these humanoid robots. We open-source the entire FRoM-W1 framework and hope it will advance the development of humanoid intelligence.
Abstract: Time Series foundation models (TSFMs) deliver strong forecasting performance through large-scale pretraining, but their large parameter sizes make deployment costly. While knowledge distillation offers a natural and effective approach for model compression, techniques developed for general machine learning tasks are not directly applicable to time series forecasting due to the unique characteristics. To address this, we present DistilTS, the first distillation framework specifically designed for TSFMs. DistilTS addresses two key challenges: (1) task difficulty discrepancy, specific to forecasting, where uniform weighting makes optimization dominated by easier short-term horizons, while long-term horizons receive weaker supervision; and (2) architecture discrepancy, a general challenge in distillation, for which we design an alignment mechanism in the time series forecasting. To overcome these issues, DistilTS introduces horizon-weighted objectives to balance learning across horizons, and a temporal alignment strategy that reduces architectural mismatch, enabling compact models. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that DistilTS achieves forecasting performance comparable to full-sized TSFMs, while reducing parameters by up to 1/150 and accelerating inference by up to 6000x. Code is available at: https://github.com/itsnotacie/DistilTS-ICASSP2026.
Abstract: Building 3D animatable head avatars from a single image is an important yet challenging problem. Existing methods generally collapse under large camera pose variations, compromising the realism of 3D avatars. In this work, we propose a new framework to tackle the novel setting of one-shot 3D full-head animatable avatar reconstruction in a single feed-forward pass, enabling real-time animation and simultaneous 360$^\circ$ rendering views. To facilitate efficient animation control, we model 3D head avatars with Gaussian primitives embedded on the surface of a parametric face model within the UV space. To obtain knowledge of full-head geometry and textures, we leverage rich 3D full-head priors within a pretrained 3D generative adversarial network (GAN) for global full-head feature extraction and multi-view supervision. To increase the fidelity of the 3D reconstruction of the input image, we take advantage of the symmetric nature of the UV space and human faces to fuse local fine-grained input image features with the global full-head textures. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving high-quality 3D full-head modeling as well as real-time animation, thereby improving the realism of 3D talking avatars.
Abstract: Video-text retrieval (VTR) aims to locate relevant videos using natural language queries. Current methods, often based on pre-trained models like CLIP, are hindered by video's inherent redundancy and their reliance on coarse, final-layer features, limiting matching accuracy. To address this, we introduce the HVP-Net (Hierarchical Visual Perception Network), a framework that mines richer video semantics by extracting and refining features from multiple intermediate layers of a vision encoder. Our approach progressively distills salient visual concepts from raw patch-tokens at different semantic levels, mitigating redundancy while preserving crucial details for alignment. This results in a more robust video representation, leading to new state-of-the-art performance on challenging benchmarks including MSRVTT, DiDeMo, and ActivityNet. Our work validates the effectiveness of exploiting hierarchical features for advancing video-text retrieval. Our codes are available at https://github.com/boyun-zhang/HVP-Net.
Abstract: Zero-shot Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) agents leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in generalization but suffer from insufficient spatial perception. Focusing on complex continuous environments, we categorize key perceptual bottlenecks into three spatial challenges: door interaction,multi-room navigation, and ambiguous instruction execution, where existing methods consistently suffer high failure rates. We present Spatial-VLN, a perception-guided exploration framework designed to overcome these challenges. The framework consists of two main modules. The Spatial Perception Enhancement (SPE) module integrates panoramic filtering with specialized door and region experts to produce spatially coherent, cross-view consistent perceptual representations. Building on this foundation, our Explored Multi-expert Reasoning (EMR) module uses parallel LLM experts to address waypoint-level semantics and region-level spatial transitions. When discrepancies arise between expert predictions, a query-and-explore mechanism is activated, prompting the agent to actively probe critical areas and resolve perceptual ambiguities. Experiments on VLN-CE demonstrate that Spatial VLN achieves state-of-the-art performance using only low-cost LLMs. Furthermore, to validate real-world applicability, we introduce a value-based waypoint sampling strategy that effectively bridges the Sim2Real gap. Extensive real-world evaluations confirm that our framework delivers superior generalization and robustness in complex environments. Our codes and videos are available at https://yueluhhxx.github.io/Spatial-VLN-web/.
Abstract: Equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with external tools enables them to solve complex real-world problems. However, the robustness of existing methods remains a critical challenge when confronting novel or evolving tools. Existing trajectory-centric paradigms primarily rely on memorizing static solution paths during training, which limits the ability of LLMs to generalize tool usage to newly introduced or previously unseen tools. In this paper, we propose ToolMaster, a framework that shifts tool use from imitating golden tool-calling trajectories to actively learning tool usage through interaction with the environment. To optimize LLMs for tool planning and invocation, ToolMaster adopts a trial-and-execution paradigm, which trains LLMs to first imitate teacher-generated trajectories containing explicit tool trials and self-correction, followed by reinforcement learning to coordinate the trial and execution phases jointly. This process enables agents to autonomously explore correct tool usage by actively interacting with environments and forming experiential knowledge that benefits tool execution. Experimental results demonstrate that ToolMaster significantly outperforms existing baselines in terms of generalization and robustness across unseen or unfamiliar tools. All code and data are available at https://github.com/NEUIR/ToolMaster.
Abstract: We propose KaoLRM to re-target the learned prior of the Large Reconstruction Model (LRM) for parametric 3D face reconstruction from single-view images. Parametric 3D Morphable Models (3DMMs) have been widely used for facial reconstruction due to their compact and interpretable parameterization, yet existing 3DMM regressors often exhibit poor consistency across varying viewpoints. To address this, we harness the pre-trained 3D prior of LRM and incorporate FLAME-based 2D Gaussian Splatting into LRM's rendering pipeline. Specifically, KaoLRM projects LRM's pre-trained triplane features into the FLAME parameter space to recover geometry, and models appearance via 2D Gaussian primitives that are tightly coupled to the FLAME mesh. The rich prior enables the FLAME regressor to be aware of the 3D structure, leading to accurate and robust reconstructions under self-occlusions and diverse viewpoints. Experiments on both controlled and in-the-wild benchmarks demonstrate that KaoLRM achieves superior reconstruction accuracy and cross-view consistency, while existing methods remain sensitive to viewpoint variations. The code is released at https://github.com/CyberAgentAILab/KaoLRM.
Abstract: The exploration-exploitation (EE) trade-off is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs). With Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), training tends to be exploitation driven: entropy decreases monotonically, samples convergence, and exploration fades. Most existing fixes are \textbf{sample-centric}: they seek or bonus rare samples, assuming exploration comes from novel trajectories and tokens. These heuristics depend on the "luck" of informative samples, lack principled control of the policy, and often yield limited or inconsistent gains. In this work, we are the first to introduce a \textbf{distribution-centric} perspective for RL, in which exploration is always guided by a "better" target distribution, and reveal that a policy's ability to resist entropy collapse is governed by the distribution itself rather than individual samples. Building on this insight, we propose Distribution-Centric Policy Optimization (DCPO), which reformulates entropy regulation as distribution-level regularization. DCPO achieves controllable entropy fully on-policy without sampling from external distributions, enabling efficient exploration while maintaining training stability. Across multiple models and seven benchmarks, DCPO improves over GRPO by about 20\% on average. Overall, DCPO replaces sample-level heuristics with distribution-level principles, offering a theoretically grounded and flexible framework for controllable exploration and a stronger EE trade-off. The code is available in https://github.com/597358816/DCPO.
Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have recently shown impressive performance on complex reasoning tasks, often by engaging in self-reflective behaviors such as self-critique and backtracking. However, not all reflections are beneficial-many are superficial, offering little to no improvement over the original answer and incurring computation overhead. In this paper, we identify and address the problem of superficial reflection in LRMs. We first propose Self-Critique Fine-Tuning (SCFT), a training framework that enhances the model's reflective reasoning ability using only self-generated critiques. SCFT prompts models to critique their own outputs, filters high-quality critiques through rejection sampling, and fine-tunes the model using a critique-based objective. Building on this strong foundation, we further introduce Reinforcement Learning with Effective Reflection Rewards (RLERR). RLERR leverages the high-quality reflections initialized by SCFT to construct reward signals, guiding the model to internalize the self-correction process via reinforcement learning. Experiments on two challenging benchmarks, AIME2024 and AIME2025, show that SCFT and RLERR significantly improve both reasoning accuracy and reflection quality, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines. All data and codes are available at https://github.com/wanghanbinpanda/SCFT.
Abstract: Current guardian models are predominantly Western-centric and optimized for high-resource languages, leaving low-resource African languages vulnerable to evolving harms, cross-lingual safety failures, and cultural misalignment. Moreover, most guardian models rely on rigid, predefined safety categories that fail to generalize across diverse linguistic and sociocultural contexts. Robust safety, therefore, requires flexible, runtime-enforceable policies and benchmarks that reflect local norms, harm scenarios, and cultural expectations. We introduce UbuntuGuard, the first African policy-based safety benchmark built from adversarial queries authored by 155 domain experts across sensitive fields, including healthcare. From these expert-crafted queries, we derive context-specific safety policies and reference responses that capture culturally grounded risk signals, enabling policy-aligned evaluation of guardian models. We evaluate 13 models, comprising six general-purpose LLMs and seven guardian models across three distinct variants: static, dynamic, and multilingual. Our findings reveal that existing English-centric benchmarks overestimate real-world multilingual safety, cross-lingual transfer provides partial but insufficient coverage, and dynamic models, while better equipped to leverage policies at inference time, still struggle to fully localize African-language contexts. These findings highlight the urgent need for multilingual, culturally grounded safety benchmarks to enable the development of reliable and equitable guardian models for low-resource languages. Our code can be found online.\footnote{Code repository available at https://github.com/hemhemoh/UbuntuGuard.
Abstract: Interpretability is essential for user trust in real-world anomaly detection applications. However, deep learning models, despite their strong performance, often lack transparency. In this work, we study the interpretability of autoencoder-based models for audio anomaly detection, by comparing a standard autoencoder (AE) with a mask autoencoder (MAE) in terms of detection performance and interpretability. We applied several attribution methods, including error maps, saliency maps, SmoothGrad, Integrated Gradients, GradSHAP, and Grad-CAM. Although MAE shows a slightly lower detection, it consistently provides more faithful and temporally precise explanations, suggesting a better alignment with true anomalies. To assess the relevance of the regions highlighted by the explanation method, we propose a perturbation-based faithfulness metric that replaces them with their reconstructions to simulate normal input. Our findings, based on experiments in a real industrial scenario, highlight the importance of incorporating interpretability into anomaly detection pipelines and show that masked training improves explanation quality without compromising performance.
Abstract: Spatio-temporal reasoning is a remarkable capability of Vision Language Models (VLMs), but the underlying mechanisms of such abilities remain largely opaque. We postulate that visual/geometrical and textual representations of spatial structure must be combined at some point in VLM computations. We search for such confluence, and ask whether the identified representation can causally explain aspects of input-output model behavior through a linear model. We show empirically that VLMs encode object locations by linearly binding \textit{spatial IDs} to textual activations, then perform reasoning via language tokens. Through rigorous causal interventions we demonstrate that these IDs, which are ubiquitous across the model, can systematically mediate model beliefs at intermediate VLM layers. Additionally, we find that spatial IDs serve as a diagnostic tool for identifying limitations in existing VLMs, and as a valuable learning signal. We extend our analysis to video VLMs and identify an analogous linear temporal ID mechanism. By characterizing our proposed spatiotemporal ID mechanism, we elucidate a previously underexplored internal reasoning process in VLMs, toward improved interpretability and the principled design of more aligned and capable models. We release our code for reproducibility: https://github.com/Raphoo/linear-mech-vlms.
Abstract: Linear recurrent neural networks have emerged as efficient alternatives to the original Transformer's softmax attention mechanism, thanks to their highly parallelizable training and constant memory and computation requirements at inference. Iterative refinements of these models have introduced an increasing number of architectural mechanisms, leading to increased complexity and computational costs. Nevertheless, systematic direct comparisons among these models remain limited. Existing benchmark tasks are either too simplistic to reveal substantial differences or excessively resource-intensive for experimentation. In this work, we propose a refined taxonomy of linear recurrent models and introduce SelectivBench, a set of lightweight and customizable synthetic benchmark tasks for systematically evaluating sequence models. SelectivBench specifically evaluates selectivity in sequence models at small to medium scale, such as the capacity to focus on relevant inputs while ignoring context-based distractors. It employs rule-based grammars to generate sequences with adjustable complexity, incorporating irregular gaps that intentionally violate transition rules. Evaluations of linear recurrent models on SelectivBench reveal performance patterns consistent with results from large-scale language tasks. Our analysis clarifies the roles of essential architectural features: gating and rapid forgetting mechanisms facilitate recall, in-state channel mixing is unnecessary for selectivity, but critical for generalization, and softmax attention remains dominant due to its memory capacity scaling with sequence length. Our benchmark enables targeted, efficient exploration of linear recurrent models and provides a controlled setting for studying behaviors observed in large-scale evaluations. Code is available at https://github.com/symseqbench/selectivbench
Abstract: Reasoning is a fundamental cognitive process underlying inference, problem-solving, and decision-making. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities in closed-world settings, they struggle in open-ended and dynamic environments. Agentic reasoning marks a paradigm shift by reframing LLMs as autonomous agents that plan, act, and learn through continual interaction. In this survey, we organize agentic reasoning along three complementary dimensions. First, we characterize environmental dynamics through three layers: foundational agentic reasoning, which establishes core single-agent capabilities including planning, tool use, and search in stable environments; self-evolving agentic reasoning, which studies how agents refine these capabilities through feedback, memory, and adaptation; and collective multi-agent reasoning, which extends intelligence to collaborative settings involving coordination, knowledge sharing, and shared goals. Across these layers, we distinguish in-context reasoning, which scales test-time interaction through structured orchestration, from post-training reasoning, which optimizes behaviors via reinforcement learning and supervised fine-tuning. We further review representative agentic reasoning frameworks across real-world applications and benchmarks, including science, robotics, healthcare, autonomous research, and mathematics. This survey synthesizes agentic reasoning methods into a unified roadmap bridging thought and action, and outlines open challenges and future directions, including personalization, long-horizon interaction, world modeling, scalable multi-agent training, and governance for real-world deployment.
Abstract: Sparse keypoint matching is crucial for 3D vision tasks, yet current keypoint detectors often produce spatially inaccurate matches. Existing refinement methods mitigate this issue through alignment of matched keypoint locations, but they are typically detector-specific, requiring retraining for each keypoint detector. We introduce XRefine, a novel, detector-agnostic approach for sub-pixel keypoint refinement that operates solely on image patches centered at matched keypoints. Our cross-attention-based architecture learns to predict refined keypoint coordinates without relying on internal detector representations, enabling generalization across detectors. Furthermore, XRefine can be extended to handle multi-view feature tracks. Experiments on MegaDepth, KITTI, and ScanNet demonstrate that the approach consistently improves geometric estimation accuracy, achieving superior performance compared to existing refinement methods while maintaining runtime efficiency. Our code and trained models can be found at https://github.com/boschresearch/xrefine.
Abstract: In remote sensing images, complex backgrounds, weak object signals, and small object scales make accurate detection particularly challenging, especially under low-quality imaging conditions. A common strategy is to integrate single-image super-resolution (SR) before detection; however, such serial pipelines often suffer from misaligned optimization objectives, feature redundancy, and a lack of effective interaction between SR and detection. To address these issues, we propose a Saliency-Driven multi-task Collaborative Network (SDCoNet) that couples SR and detection through implicit feature sharing while preserving task specificity. SDCoNet employs the swin transformer-based shared encoder, where hierarchical window-shifted self-attention supports cross-task feature collaboration and adaptively balances the trade-off between texture refinement and semantic representation. In addition, a multi-scale saliency prediction module produces importance scores to select key tokens, enabling focused attention on weak object regions, suppression of background clutter, and suppression of adverse features introduced by multi-task coupling. Furthermore, a gradient routing strategy is introduced to mitigate optimization conflicts. It first stabilizes detection semantics and subsequently routes SR gradients along a detection-oriented direction, enabling the framework to guide the SR branch to generate high-frequency details that are explicitly beneficial for detection. Experiments on public datasets, including NWPU VHR-10-Split, DOTAv1.5-Split, and HRSSD-Split, demonstrate that the proposed method, while maintaining competitive computational efficiency, significantly outperforms existing mainstream algorithms in small object detection on low-quality remote sensing images. Our code is available at https://github.com/qiruo-ya/SDCoNet.
Abstract: Medical Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown remarkable performances in various medical imaging domains such as histo\-pathology by leveraging pre-trained, contrastive models that exploit visual and textual information. However, histopathology images may exhibit severe domain shifts, such as staining, contamination, blurring, and noise, which may severely degrade the VLM's downstream performance. In this work, we introduce Histopath-C, a new benchmark with realistic synthetic corruptions designed to mimic real-world distribution shifts observed in digital histopathology. Our framework dynamically applies corruptions to any available dataset and evaluates Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) mechanisms on the fly. We then propose LATTE, a transductive, low-rank adaptation strategy that exploits multiple text templates, mitigating the sensitivity of histopathology VLMs to diverse text inputs. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art TTA methods originally designed for natural images across a breadth of histopathology datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed design for robust adaptation in histopathology images. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Mehrdad-Noori/Histopath-C.
Abstract: Neural codec language models achieve impressive zero-shot Text-to-Speech (TTS) by fully imitating the acoustic characteristics of a short speech prompt, including timbre, prosody, and paralinguistic information. However, such holistic imitation limits their ability to isolate and control individual attributes. In this paper, we present a unified codec language model SpeechEdit that extends zero-shot TTS with a selective control mechanism. By default, SpeechEdit reproduces the complete acoustic profile inferred from the speech prompt, but it selectively overrides only the attributes specified by explicit control instructions. To enable controllable modeling, SpeechEdit is trained on our newly constructed LibriEdit dataset, which provides delta (difference-aware) training pairs derived from LibriHeavy. Experimental results show that our approach maintains naturalness and robustness while offering flexible and localized control over desired attributes. Audio samples are available at https://speech-editing.github.io/speech-editing/.
Abstract: The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform reasoning tasks such as deduction has been widely investigated in recent years. Yet, their capacity to generate proofs-faithful, human-readable explanations of why conclusions follow-remains largely under explored. In this work, we study proof generation in the context of OWL ontologies, which are widely adopted for representing and reasoning over complex knowledge, by developing an automated dataset construction and evaluation framework. Our evaluation encompassing three sequential tasks for complete proving: Extraction, Simplification, and Explanation, as well as an additional task of assessing Logic Completeness of the premise. Through extensive experiments on widely used reasoning LLMs, we achieve important findings including: (1) Some models achieve overall strong results but remain limited on complex cases; (2) Logical complexity, rather than representation format (formal logic language versus natural language), is the dominant factor shaping LLM performance; and (3) Noise and incompleteness in input data substantially diminish LLMs' performance. Together, these results underscore both the promise of LLMs for explanation with rigorous logics and the gap of supporting resilient reasoning under complex or imperfect conditions. Code and data are available at https://github.com/HuiYang1997/LLMOwlR.
Abstract: Skeleton-based action recognition leverages human pose keypoints to categorize human actions, which shows superior generalization and interoperability compared to regular end-to-end action recognition. Existing solutions use RGB cameras to annotate skeletal keypoints, but their performance declines in dark environments and raises privacy concerns, limiting their use in smart homes and hospitals. This paper explores non-invasive wireless sensors, i.e., LiDAR and mmWave, to mitigate these challenges as a feasible alternative. Two problems are addressed: (1) insufficient data on wireless sensor modality to train an accurate skeleton estimation model, and (2) skeletal keypoints derived from wireless sensors are noisier than RGB, causing great difficulties for subsequent action recognition models. Our work, SkeFi, overcomes these gaps through a novel cross-modal knowledge transfer method acquired from the data-rich RGB modality. We propose the enhanced Temporal Correlation Adaptive Graph Convolution (TC-AGC) with frame interactive enhancement to overcome the noise from missing or inconsecutive frames. Additionally, our research underscores the effectiveness of enhancing multiscale temporal modeling through dual temporal convolution. By integrating TC-AGC with temporal modeling for cross-modal transfer, our framework can extract accurate poses and actions from noisy wireless sensors. Experiments demonstrate that SkeFi realizes state-of-the-art performances on mmWave and LiDAR. The code is available at https://github.com/Huang0035/Skefi.
Abstract: Interpretability is critical for applications of large language models in the legal domain which requires trust and transparency. While some studies develop task-specific approaches, other use the classification model's parameters to explain the decisions. However, which technique explains the legal outcome prediction best remains an open question. To address this challenge, we propose a comparative analysis framework for model-agnostic interpretability techniques. Among these, we employ two rationale extraction methods, which justify outcomes with human-interpretable and concise text fragments (i.e., rationales) from the given input text. We conduct comparison by evaluating faithfulness-via normalized sufficiency and comprehensiveness metrics along with plausibility-by asking legal experts to evaluate extracted rationales. We further assess the feasibility of LLM-as-a-Judge using legal expert evaluation results. We show that the model's "reasons" for predicting a violation differ substantially from those of legal experts, despite highly promising quantitative analysis results and reasonable downstream classification performance. The source code of our experiments is publicly available at https://github.com/trusthlt/IntEval.
Abstract: Imitation learning has demonstrated strong performance in robotic manipulation by learning from large-scale human demonstrations. While existing models excel at single-task learning, it is observed in practical applications that their performance degrades in the multi-task setting, where interference across tasks leads to an averaging effect. To address this issue, we propose to learn diverse skills for behavior models with Mixture of Experts, referred to as Di-BM. Di-BM associates each expert with a distinct observation distribution, enabling experts to specialize in sub-regions of the observation space. Specifically, we employ energy-based models to represent expert-specific observation distributions and jointly train them alongside the corresponding action models. Our approach is plug-and-play and can be seamlessly integrated into standard imitation learning methods. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world robotic manipulation tasks demonstrate that Di-BM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, fine-tuning the pretrained Di-BM on novel tasks exhibits superior data efficiency and the reusable of expert-learned knowledge. Code is available at https://github.com/robotnav-bot/Di-BM.
Abstract: Hyperspectral images (HSIs) are a type of image that contains abundant spectral information. As a type of real-world data, the high-dimensional spectra in hyperspectral images are actually determined by only a few factors, such as chemical composition and illumination. Thus, spectra in hyperspectral images are highly likely to satisfy the manifold hypothesis. Based on the hyperspectral manifold hypothesis, we propose a novel hyperspectral anomaly detection method (named ScoreAD) that leverages the time-dependent gradient field of the data distribution (i.e., the score), as learned by a score-based generative model (SGM). Our method first trains the SGM on the entire set of spectra from the hyperspectral image. At test time, each spectrum is passed through a perturbation kernel, and the resulting perturbed spectrum is fed into the trained SGM to obtain the estimated score. The manifold hypothesis of HSIs posits that background spectra reside on one or more low-dimensional manifolds. Conversely, anomalous spectra, owing to their unique spectral signatures, are considered outliers that do not conform to the background manifold. Based on this fundamental discrepancy in their manifold distributions, we leverage a generative SGM to achieve hyperspectral anomaly detection. Experiments on the four hyperspectral datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/jiahuisheng/ScoreAD.
Abstract: Deep Research Agents are increasingly used for automated survey generation. However, whether they can write surveys like human experts remains unclear. Existing benchmarks focus on fluency or citation accuracy, but none evaluates the core capabilities: retrieving essential papers and organizing them into coherent knowledge structures. We introduce TaxoBench, a diagnostic benchmark derived from 72 highly-cited computer science surveys. We manually extract expert-authored taxonomy trees containing 3,815 precisely categorized citations as ground truth. Our benchmark supports two evaluation modes: Deep Research mode tests end-to-end retrieval and organization given only a topic, while Bottom-Up mode isolates structuring capability by providing the exact papers human experts used. We evaluate 7 leading Deep Research agents and 12 frontier LLMs. Results reveal a dual bottleneck: the best agent recalls only 20.9% of expert-selected papers, and even with perfect input, the best model achieves only 0.31 ARI in organization. Current deep research agents remain far from expert-level survey writing. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/KongLongGeFDU/TaxoBench.
Abstract: Recent advances in semantic correspondence have been largely driven by the use of pre-trained large-scale models. However, a limitation of these approaches is their dependence on high-resolution input images to achieve optimal performance, which results in considerable computational overhead. In this work, we address a fundamental limitation in current methods: the irreversible fusion of adjacent keypoint features caused by deep downsampling operations. This issue is triggered when semantically distinct keypoints fall within the same downsampled receptive field (e.g., 16x16 patches). To address this issue, we present SimpleMatch, a simple yet effective framework for semantic correspondence that delivers strong performance even at low resolutions. We propose a lightweight upsample decoder that progressively recovers spatial detail by upsampling deep features to 1/4 resolution, and a multi-scale supervised loss that ensures the upsampled features retain discriminative features across different spatial scales. In addition, we introduce sparse matching and window-based localization to optimize training memory usage and reduce it by 51%. At a resolution of 252x252 (3.3x smaller than current SOTA methods), SimpleMatch achieves superior performance with 84.1% PCK@0.1 on the SPair-71k benchmark. We believe this framework provides a practical and efficient baseline for future research in semantic correspondence. Code is available at: https://github.com/hailong23-jin/SimpleMatch.
Abstract: As a key task in hyperspectral image processing, hyperspectral anomaly detection has garnered significant attention and undergone extensive research. Existing methods primarily relt on two prior assumption: low-rank background and sparse anomaly, along with additional spatial assumptions of the background. However, most methods only utilize the sparsity prior assumption for anomalies and rarely expand on this hypothesis. From observations of hyperspectral images, we find that anomalous pixels exhibit certain spatial distribution characteristics: they often manifest as small, clustered groups in space, which we refer to as cluster sparsity of anomalies. Then, we combined the cluster sparsity prior with the classical GoDec algorithm, incorporating the cluster sparsity prior into the S-step of GoDec. This resulted in a new hyperspectral anomaly detection method, which we called Turbo-GoDec. In this approach, we modeled the cluster sparsity prior of anomalies using a Markov random field and computed the marginal probabilities of anomalies through message passing on a factor graph. Locations with high anomalous probabilities were treated as the sparse component in the Turbo-GoDec. Experiments are conducted on three real hyperspectral image (HSI) datasets which demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed Turbo-GoDec method in detecting small-size anomalies comparing with the vanilla GoDec (LSMAD) and state-of-the-art anomaly detection methods. The code is available at https://github.com/jiahuisheng/Turbo-GoDec.
Abstract: Reward-guided search methods have demonstrated strong potential in enhancing tool-using agents by effectively guiding sampling and exploration over complex action spaces. As a core design, those search methods utilize process reward models (PRMs) to provide step-level rewards, enabling more fine-grained monitoring. However, there is a lack of systematic and reliable evaluation benchmarks for PRMs in tool-using settings. In this paper, we introduce ToolPRMBench, a large-scale benchmark specifically designed to evaluate PRMs for tool-using agents. ToolPRMBench is built on top of several representative tool-using benchmarks and converts agent trajectories into step-level test cases. Each case contains the interaction history, a correct action, a plausible but incorrect alternative, and relevant tool metadata. We respectively utilize offline sampling to isolate local single-step errors and online sampling to capture realistic multi-step failures from full agent rollouts. A multi-LLM verification pipeline is proposed to reduce label noise and ensure data quality. We conduct extensive experiments across large language models, general PRMs, and tool-specialized PRMs on ToolPRMBench. The results reveal clear differences in PRM effectiveness and highlight the potential of specialized PRMs for tool-using. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/David-Li0406/ToolPRMBench.
Abstract: Scalable and maintainable map representations are fundamental to enabling large-scale visual navigation and facilitating the deployment of robots in real-world environments. While collaborative localization across multi-session mapping enhances efficiency, traditional structure-based methods struggle with high maintenance costs and fail in feature-less environments or under significant viewpoint changes typical of crowd-sourced data. To address this, we propose OPENNAVMAP, a lightweight, structure-free topometric system leveraging 3D geometric foundation models for on-demand reconstruction. Our method unifies dynamic programming-based sequence matching, geometric verification, and confidence-calibrated optimization to robust, coarse-to-fine submap alignment without requiring pre-built 3D models. Evaluations on the Map-Free benchmark demonstrate superior accuracy over structure-from-motion and regression baselines, achieving an average translation error of 0.62m. Furthermore, the system maintains global consistency across 15km of multi-session data with an absolute trajectory error below 3m for map merging. Finally, we validate practical utility through 12 successful autonomous image-goal navigation tasks on simulated and physical robots. Code and datasets will be publicly available in https://rpl-cs-ucl.github.io/OpenNavMap_page.
Abstract: Recently, deep learning has significantly advanced the performance of point cloud geometry compression. However, the learning-based lossless attribute compression of point clouds with varying densities is under-explored. In this paper, we develop a learning-based framework, namely DALD-PCAC that leverages Levels of Detail (LoD) to tailor for point cloud lossless attribute compression. We develop a point-wise attention model using a permutation-invariant Transformer to tackle the challenges of sparsity and irregularity of point clouds during context modeling. We also propose a Density-Adaptive Learning Descriptor (DALD) capable of capturing structure and correlations among points across a large range of neighbors. In addition, we develop a prior-guided block partitioning to reduce the attribute variance within blocks and enhance the performance. Experiments on LiDAR and object point clouds show that DALD-PCAC achieves the state-of-the-art performance on most data. Our method boosts the compression performance and is robust to the varying densities of point clouds. Moreover, it guarantees a good trade-off between performance and complexity, exhibiting great potential in real-world applications. The source code is available at https://github.com/zb12138/DALD_PCAC.
Abstract: Regional Adaptive Hierarchical Transform (RAHT) is an effective point cloud attribute compression (PCAC) method. However, its application in deep learning lacks research. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end RAHT framework for lossy PCAC based on the sparse tensor, called DeepRAHT. The RAHT transform is performed within the learning reconstruction process, without requiring manual RAHT for preprocessing. We also introduce the predictive RAHT to reduce bitrates and design a learning-based prediction model to enhance performance. Moreover, we devise a bitrate proxy that applies run-length coding to entropy model, achieving seamless variable-rate coding and improving robustness. DeepRAHT is a reversible and distortion-controllable framework, ensuring its lower bound performance and offering significant application potential. The experiments demonstrate that DeepRAHT is a high-performance, faster, and more robust solution than the baseline methods. Project Page: https://github.com/zb12138/DeepRAHT.
Abstract: Recent advances in audio-aware large language models have shown strong performance on audio question answering. However, existing benchmarks mainly cover answerable questions and overlook the challenge of unanswerable ones, where no reliable answer can be inferred from the audio. Such cases are common in real-world settings, where questions may be misleading, ill-posed, or incompatible with the information. To address this gap, we present AQUA-Bench, a benchmark for Audio Question Unanswerability Assessment. It systematically evaluates three scenarios: Absent Answer Detection (the correct option is missing), Incompatible Answer Set Detection (choices are categorically mismatched with the question), and Incompatible Audio Question Detection (the question is irrelevant or lacks sufficient grounding in the audio). By assessing these cases, AQUA-Bench offers a rigorous measure of model reliability and promotes the development of audio-language systems that are more robust and trustworthy. Our experiments suggest that while models excel on standard answerable tasks, they often face notable challenges with unanswerable ones, pointing to a blind spot in current audio-language understanding.
Abstract: The deployment of Artificial Intelligence on edge devices (TinyML) is often constrained by the high power consumption and latency associated with traditional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and their reliance on intensive Matrix-Multiply (MAC) operations. Neuromorphic computing offers a compelling alternative by mimicking biological efficiency through event-driven processing. This paper presents the design and implementation of a cycle-accurate, hardware-oriented Spiking Neural Network (SNN) core implemented in SystemVerilog. Unlike conventional accelerators, this design utilizes a Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neuron model powered by fixed-point arithmetic and bit-wise primitives (shifts and additions) to eliminate the need for complex floating-point hardware. The architecture features an on-chip Poisson encoder for stochastic spike generation and a novel active pruning mechanism that dynamically disables neurons post-classification to minimize dynamic power consumption. We demonstrate the hardware's efficacy through a fully connected layer implementation targeting digit classification. Simulation results indicate that the design achieves rapid convergence (89% accuracy) within limited timesteps while maintaining a significantly reduced computational footprint compared to traditional dense architectures. This work serves as a foundational building block for scalable, energy-efficient neuromorphic hardware on FPGA and ASIC platforms.
Abstract: The relentless scaling of deep learning models has led to unsustainable computational demands, positioning Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures as a promising path towards greater efficiency. However, MoE models are plagued by two fundamental challenges: 1) a load imbalance problem known as the``rich get richer" phenomenon, where a few experts are over-utilized, and 2) an expert homogeneity problem, where experts learn redundant representations, negating their purpose. Current solutions typically employ an auxiliary load-balancing loss that, while mitigating imbalance, often exacerbates homogeneity by enforcing uniform routing at the expense of specialization. To resolve this, we introduce the Eigen-Mixture-of-Experts (EMoE), a novel architecture that leverages a routing mechanism based on a learned orthonormal eigenbasis. EMoE projects input tokens onto this shared eigenbasis and routes them based on their alignment with the principal components of the feature space. This principled, geometric partitioning of data intrinsically promotes both balanced expert utilization and the development of diverse, specialized experts, all without the need for a conflicting auxiliary loss function. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Belis0811/EMoE.
Abstract: The use of synthetic data in health applications raises privacy concerns, yet the lack of open frameworks for privacy evaluations has slowed its adoption. A major challenge is the absence of accessible benchmark datasets for evaluating privacy risks, due to difficulties in acquiring sensitive data. To address this, we introduce SynQP, an open framework for benchmarking privacy in synthetic data generation (SDG) using simulated sensitive data, ensuring that original data remains confidential. We also highlight the need for privacy metrics that fairly account for the probabilistic nature of machine learning models. As a demonstration, we use SynQP to benchmark CTGAN and propose a new identity disclosure risk metric that offers a more accurate estimation of privacy risks compared to existing approaches. Our work provides a critical tool for improving the transparency and reliability of privacy evaluations, enabling safer use of synthetic data in health-related applications. % In our quality evaluations, non-private models achieved near-perfect machine-learning efficacy \(\ge0.97\). Our privacy assessments (Table II) reveal that DP consistently lowers both identity disclosure risk (SD-IDR) and membership-inference attack risk (SD-MIA), with all DP-augmented models staying below the 0.09 regulatory threshold. Code available at https://github.com/CAN-SYNH/SynQP
Abstract: Accurate trajectory prediction of vehicles at roundabouts is critical for reducing traffic accidents, yet it remains highly challenging due to their circular road geometry, continuous merging and yielding interactions, and absence of traffic signals. Developing accurate prediction algorithms relies on reliable, multimodal, and realistic datasets; however, such datasets for roundabout scenarios are scarce, as real-world data collection is often limited by incomplete observations and entangled factors that are difficult to isolate. We present CARLA-Round, a systematically designed simulation dataset for roundabout trajectory prediction. The dataset varies weather conditions (five types) and traffic density levels (spanning Level-of-Service A-E) in a structured manner, resulting in 25 controlled scenarios. Each scenario incorporates realistic mixtures of driving behaviors and provides explicit annotations that are largely absent from existing datasets. Unlike randomly sampled simulation data, this structured design enables precise analysis of how different conditions influence trajectory prediction performance. Validation experiments using standard baselines (LSTM, GCN, GRU+GCN) reveal traffic density dominates prediction difficulty with strong monotonic effects, while weather shows non-linear impacts. The best model achieves 0.312m ADE on real-world rounD dataset, demonstrating effective sim-to-real transfer. This systematic approach quantifies factor impacts impossible to isolate in confounded real-world datasets. Our CARLA-Round dataset is available at https://github.com/Rebecca689/CARLA-Round.
Abstract: Robots are essential in industrial manufacturing due to their reliability and efficiency. They excel in performing simple and repetitive unimanual tasks but still face challenges with bimanual manipulation. This difficulty arises from the complexities of coordinating dual arms and handling multi-stage processes. Recent integration of generative models into imitation learning (IL) has made progress in tackling specific challenges. However, few approaches explicitly consider the multi-stage nature of bimanual tasks while also emphasizing the importance of inference speed. In multi-stage tasks, failures or delays at any stage can cascade over time, impacting the success and efficiency of subsequent sub-stages and ultimately hindering overall task performance. In this paper, we propose a novel keypose-conditioned coordination-aware consistency policy tailored for bimanual manipulation. Our framework instantiates hierarchical imitation learning with a high-level keypose predictor and a low-level trajectory generator. The predicted keyposes serve as sub-goals for trajectory generation, indicating targets for individual sub-stages. The trajectory generator is formulated as a consistency model, generating action sequences based on historical observations and predicted keyposes in a single inference step. In particular, we devise an innovative approach for identifying bimanual keyposes, considering both robot-centric action features and task-centric operation styles. Simulation and real-world experiments illustrate that our approach significantly outperforms baseline methods in terms of success rates and operational efficiency. Implementation codes can be found at https://github.com/JoanaHXU/BiKC-plus.
Abstract: Fine-tuned language models pose significant privacy risks, as they may memorize and expose sensitive information from their training data. Membership inference attacks (MIAs) provide a principled framework for auditing these risks, yet existing methods achieve limited detection rates, particularly at the low false-positive thresholds required for practical privacy auditing. We present EZ-MIA, a membership inference attack that exploits a key observation: memorization manifests most strongly at error positions, specifically tokens where the model predicts incorrectly yet still shows elevated probability for training examples. We introduce the Error Zone (EZ) score, which measures the directional imbalance of probability shifts at error positions relative to a pretrained reference model. This principled statistic requires only two forward passes per query and no model training of any kind. On WikiText with GPT-2, EZ-MIA achieves 3.8x higher detection than the previous state-of-the-art under identical conditions (66.3% versus 17.5% true positive rate at 1% false positive rate), with near-perfect discrimination (AUC 0.98). At the stringent 0.1% FPR threshold critical for real-world auditing, we achieve 8x higher detection than prior work (14.0% versus 1.8%), requiring no reference model training. These gains extend to larger architectures: on AG News with Llama-2-7B, we achieve 3x higher detection (46.7% versus 15.8% TPR at 1% FPR). These results establish that privacy risks of fine-tuned language models are substantially greater than previously understood, with implications for both privacy auditing and deployment decisions. Code is available at https://github.com/JetBrains-Research/ez-mia.
Abstract: Spatio-Temporal (ST) Foundation Models (STFMs) promise cross-dataset generalization, yet joint ST pretraining is computationally expensive and grapples with the heterogeneity of domain-specific spatial patterns. Substantially extending our preliminary conference version, we present FactoST-v2, an enhanced factorized framework redesigned for full weight transfer and arbitrary-length generalization. FactoST-v2 decouples universal temporal learning from domain-specific spatial adaptation. The first stage pretrains a minimalist encoder-only backbone using randomized sequence masking to capture invariant temporal dynamics, enabling probabilistic quantile prediction across variable horizons. The second stage employs a streamlined adapter to rapidly inject spatial awareness via meta adaptive learning and prompting. Comprehensive evaluations across diverse domains demonstrate that FactoST-v2 achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with linear efficiency - significantly outperforming existing foundation models in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios while rivaling domain-specific expert baselines. This factorized paradigm offers a practical, scalable path toward truly universal STFMs. Code is available at https://github.com/CityMind-Lab/FactoST.
Abstract: Assisting pathologists in the analysis of histopathological images has high clinical value, as it supports cancer detection and staging. In this context, histology foundation models have recently emerged. Among them, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) provide strong yet imperfect zero-shot predictions. We propose to refine these predictions by adapting Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) to histopathological applications, requiring no additional model training. We present HistoCRF, a CRF-based framework, with a novel definition of the pairwise potential that promotes label diversity and leverages expert annotations. We consider three experiments: without annotations, with expert annotations, and with iterative human-in-the-loop annotations that progressively correct misclassified patches. Experiments on five patch-level classification datasets covering different organs and diseases demonstrate average accuracy gains of 16.0% without annotations and 27.5% with only 100 annotations, compared to zero-shot predictions. Moreover, integrating a human in the loop reaches a further gain of 32.6% with the same number of annotations. The code will be made available on https://github.com/tgodelaine/HistoCRF.
Abstract: We propose EmoLat, a novel emotion latent space that enables fine-grained, text-driven image sentiment transfer by modeling cross-modal correlations between textual semantics and visual emotion features. Within EmoLat, an emotion semantic graph is constructed to capture the relational structure among emotions, objects, and visual attributes. To enhance the discriminability and transferability of emotion representations, we employ adversarial regularization, aligning the latent emotion distributions across modalities. Building upon EmoLat, a cross-modal sentiment transfer framework is proposed to manipulate image sentiment via joint embedding of text and EmoLat features. The network is optimized using a multi-objective loss incorporating semantic consistency, emotion alignment, and adversarial regularization. To support effective modeling, we construct EmoSpace Set, a large-scale benchmark dataset comprising images with dense annotations on emotions, object semantics, and visual attributes. Extensive experiments on EmoSpace Set demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative metrics and qualitative transfer fidelity, establishing a new paradigm for controllable image sentiment editing guided by textual input. The EmoSpace Set and all the code are available at http://github.com/JingVIPLab/EmoLat.
Abstract: Existing video object removal methods predominantly rely on diffusion models following a noise-to-data paradigm, where generation starts from uninformative Gaussian noise. This approach discards the rich structural and contextual priors present in the original input video. Consequently, such methods often lack sufficient guidance, leading to incomplete object erasure or the synthesis of implausible content that conflicts with the scene's physical logic. In this paper, we reformulate video object removal as a video-to-video translation task via a stochastic bridge model. Unlike noise-initialized methods, our framework establishes a direct stochastic path from the source video (with objects) to the target video (objects removed). This bridge formulation effectively leverages the input video as a strong structural prior, guiding the model to perform precise removal while ensuring that the filled regions are logically consistent with the surrounding environment. To address the trade-off where strong bridge priors hinder the removal of large objects, we propose a novel adaptive mask modulation strategy. This mechanism dynamically modulates input embeddings based on mask characteristics, balancing background fidelity with generative flexibility. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing methods in both visual quality and temporal consistency. The project page is https://bridgeremoval.github.io/.
Abstract: In federated learning, Transformer, as a popular architecture, faces critical challenges in defending against gradient attacks and improving model performance in both Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. It has been revealed that the gradient of Position Embeddings (PEs) in Transformer contains sufficient information, which can be used to reconstruct the input data. To mitigate this issue, we introduce a Masked Jigsaw Puzzle (MJP) framework. MJP starts with random token shuffling to break the token order, and then a learnable \textit{unknown (unk)} position embedding is used to mask out the PEs of the shuffled tokens. In this manner, the local spatial information which is encoded in the position embeddings is disrupted, and the models are forced to learn feature representations that are less reliant on the local spatial information. Notably, with the careful use of MJP, we can not only improve models' robustness against gradient attacks, but also boost their performance in both vision and text application scenarios, such as classification for images (\textit{e.g.,} ImageNet-1K) and sentiment analysis for text (\textit{e.g.,} Yelp and Amazon). Experimental results suggest that MJP is a unified framework for different Transformer-based models in both vision and language tasks. Code is publicly available via https://github.com/ywxsuperstar/transformerattack
Abstract: This definitive research memoria presents a comprehensive, mathematically verified paradigm for neural communication with Bitcoin mining Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), integrating five complementary frameworks: thermodynamic reservoir computing, hierarchical number system theory, algorithmic analysis, network latency optimization, and machine-checked mathematical formalization. We establish that obsolete cryptocurrency mining hardware exhibits emergent computational properties enabling bidirectional information exchange between AI systems and silicon substrates. The research program demonstrates: (1) reservoir computing with NARMA-10 Normalized Root Mean Square Error (NRMSE) of 0.8661; (2) the Thermodynamic Probability Filter (TPF) achieving 92.19% theoretical energy reduction; (3) the Virtual Block Manager achieving +25% effective hashrate; and (4) hardware universality across multiple ASIC families including Antminer S9, Lucky Miner LV06, and Goldshell LB-Box. A significant contribution is the machine-checked mathematical formalization using Lean 4 and Mathlib, providing unambiguous definitions, machine-verified theorems, and reviewer-proof claims. Key theorems proven include: independence implies zero leakage, predictor beats baseline implies non-independence (the logical core of TPF), energy savings theoretical maximum, and Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) distinguishability witnesses. Vladimir Veselov's hierarchical number system theory explains why early-round information contains predictive power. This work establishes a new paradigm: treating ASICs not as passive computational substrates but as active conversational partners whose thermodynamic state encodes exploitable computational information.
Abstract: Fake News Video Detection (FNVD) is critical for social stability. Existing methods typically assume consistent news topic distribution between training and test phases, failing to detect fake news videos tied to emerging events and unseen topics. To bridge this gap, we introduce RADAR, the first framework that enables test-time adaptation to unseen news videos. RADAR pioneers a new retrieval-guided adaptation paradigm that leverages stable (source-close) videos from the target domain to guide robust adaptation of semantically related but unstable instances. Specifically, we propose an Entropy Selection-Based Retrieval mechanism that provides videos with stable (low-entropy), relevant references for adaptation. We also introduce a Stable Anchor-Guided Alignment module that explicitly aligns unstable instances' representations to the source domain via distribution-level matching with their stable references, mitigating severe domain discrepancies. Finally, our novel Target-Domain Aware Self-Training paradigm can generate informative pseudo-labels augmented by stable references, capturing varying and imbalanced category distributions in the target domain and enabling RADAR to adapt to the fast-changing label distributions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RADAR achieves superior performance for test-time FNVD, enabling strong on-the-fly adaptation to unseen fake news video topics.
Abstract: Multi-page Document Visual Question Answering (MP-DocVQA) remains challenging because long documents not only strain computational resources but also reduce the effectiveness of the attention mechanism in large vision-language models (LVLMs). We tackle these issues with an Adaptive Visual In-document Retrieval (AVIR) framework. A lightweight retrieval model first scores each page for question relevance. Pages are then clustered according to the score distribution to adaptively select relevant content. The clustered pages are screened again by Top-K to keep the context compact. However, for short documents, clustering reliability decreases, so we use a relevance probability threshold to select pages. The selected pages alone are fed to a frozen LVLM for answer generation, eliminating the need for model fine-tuning. The proposed AVIR framework reduces the average page count required for question answering by 70%, while achieving an ANLS of 84.58% on the MP-DocVQA dataset-surpassing previous methods with significantly lower computational cost. The effectiveness of the proposed AVIR is also verified on the SlideVQA and DUDE benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/Li-yachuan/AVIR.
Abstract: Reinforcement learning has become a central paradigm for improving LLM reasoning. However, existing methods use a single policy to produce both inference responses and training optimization trajectories. The objective conflict between generating stable inference responses and diverse training trajectories leads to insufficient exploration, which harms reasoning capability. In this paper, to address the problem, we propose R$^2$PO (Residual Rollout Policy Optimization), which introduces a lightweight Residual Rollout-Head atop the policy to decouple training trajectories from inference responses, enabling controlled trajectory diversification during training while keeping inference generation stable. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show that our method consistently outperforms baselines, achieving average accuracy gains of 3.4% on MATH-500 and 1.3% on APPS, while also reducing formatting errors and mitigating length bias for stable optimization. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/RRPO-ARR/Code.
Abstract: Preterm infants (born between 28 and 37 weeks of gestation) face elevated risks of neurodevelopmental delays, making early identification crucial for timely intervention. While deep learning-based volumetric segmentation of brain MRI scans offers a promising avenue for assessing neonatal neurodevelopment, achieving accurate segmentation of white matter (WM) and gray matter (GM) in preterm infants remains challenging due to their comparable signal intensities (isointense appearance) on MRI during early brain development. To address this, we propose a novel segmentation neural network, named Hierarchical Dense Attention Network. Our architecture incorporates a 3D spatial-channel attention mechanism combined with an attention-guided dense upsampling strategy to enhance feature discrimination in low-contrast volumetric data. Quantitative experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior segmentation performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines, effectively tackling the challenge of isointense tissue differentiation. Furthermore, application of our algorithm confirms that WM and GM volumes in preterm infants are significantly lower than those in term infants, providing additional imaging evidence of the neurodevelopmental delays associated with preterm birth. The code is available at: https://github.com/ICL-SUST/HDAN.
Abstract: High-Energy Physics (HEP) experiments, such as those at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), generate massive datasets that challenge classical computational limits. Quantum Machine Learning (QML) offers a potential advantage in processing high-dimensional data; however, finding the optimal architecture for current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices remains an open challenge. This study investigates the performance of Variational Quantum Classifiers (VQC) in detecting Higgs Boson signals using the ATLAS Higgs Boson Machine Learning Challenge 2014 experiment dataset. We implemented a dimensionality reduction pipeline using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to map 30 physical features into 4-qubit and 8-qubit latent spaces. We benchmarked three configurations: (A) a shallow 4-qubit circuit, (B) a deep 4-qubit circuit with increased entanglement layers, and (C) an expanded 8-qubit circuit. Experimental results demonstrate that increasing circuit depth significantly improves performance, yielding the highest accuracy of 56.2% (Configuration B), compared to a baseline of 51.9%. Conversely, simply scaling to 8 qubits resulted in a performance degradation to 50.6% due to optimization challenges associated with Barren Plateaus in the larger Hilbert space. These findings suggest that for near-term quantum hardware, prioritizing circuit depth and entanglement capability is more critical than increasing qubit count for effective anomaly detection in HEP data.
Abstract: Gait recognition is emerging as a promising technology and an innovative field within computer vision, with a wide range of applications in remote human identification. However, existing methods typically rely on complex architectures to directly extract features from images and apply pooling operations to obtain sequence-level representations. Such designs often lead to overfitting on static noise (e.g., clothing), while failing to effectively capture dynamic motion regions, such as the arms and legs. This bottleneck is particularly challenging in the presence of intra-class variation, where gait features of the same individual under different environmental conditions are significantly distant in the feature space. To address the above challenges, we present a Languageguided and Motion-aware gait recognition framework, named LMGait. To the best of our knowledge, LMGait is the first method to introduce natural language descriptions as explicit semantic priors into the gait recognition task. In particular, we utilize designed gait-related language cues to capture key motion features in gait sequences. To improve cross-modal alignment, we propose the Motion Awareness Module (MAM), which refines the language features by adaptively adjusting various levels of semantic information to ensure better alignment with the visual representations. Furthermore, we introduce the Motion Temporal Capture Module (MTCM) to enhance the discriminative capability of gait features and improve the model's motion tracking ability. We conducted extensive experiments across multiple datasets, and the results demonstrate the significant advantages of our proposed network. Specifically, our model achieved accuracies of 88.5%, 97.1%, and 97.5% on the CCPG, SUSTech1K, and CASIAB datasets, respectively, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Homepage: https://dingwu1021.github.io/LMGait/
Abstract: Remote sensing change detection aims to localize and characterize scene changes between two time points and is central to applications such as environmental monitoring and disaster assessment. Meanwhile, visual autoregressive models (VARs) have recently shown impressive image generation capability, but their adoption for pixel-level discriminative tasks remains limited due to weak controllability, suboptimal dense prediction performance and exposure bias. We introduce RemoteVAR, a new VAR-based change detection framework that addresses these limitations by conditioning autoregressive prediction on multi-resolution fused bi-temporal features via cross-attention, and by employing an autoregressive training strategy designed specifically for change map prediction. Extensive experiments on standard change detection benchmarks show that RemoteVAR delivers consistent and significant improvements over strong diffusion-based and transformer-based baselines, establishing a competitive autoregressive alternative for remote sensing change detection. Code will be available \href{https://github.com/yilmazkorkmaz1/RemoteVAR}{\underline{here}}.
Abstract: Agentic search has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm, where an agent interleaves multi-step reasoning with on-demand retrieval to solve complex questions. Despite its success, how to design a retriever for agentic search remains largely underexplored. Existing search agents typically rely on similarity-based retrievers, while similar passages are not always useful for final answer generation. In this paper, we propose a novel retriever training framework tailored for agentic search. Unlike retrievers designed for single-turn retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that only rely on local passage utility, we propose to use both local query-passage relevance and global answer correctness to measure passage utility in a multi-turn agentic search. We further introduce an iterative training strategy, where the search agent and the retriever are optimized bidirectionally and iteratively. Different from RAG retrievers that are only trained once with fixed questions, our retriever is continuously improved using evolving and higher-quality queries from the agent. Extensive experiments on seven single-hop and multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that our retriever, termed \ours{}, consistently outperforms strong baselines across different search agents. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/8421BCD/Agentic-R.
Abstract: Most pseudo-label selection strategies in semi-supervised learning rely on fixed confidence thresholds, implicitly assuming that prediction confidence reliably indicates correctness. In practice, deep networks are often overconfident: high-confidence predictions can still be wrong, while informative low-confidence samples near decision boundaries are discarded. This paper introduces a Confidence-Variance (CoVar) theory framework that provides a principled joint reliability criterion for pseudo-label selection. Starting from the entropy minimization principle, we derive a reliability measure that combines maximum confidence (MC) with residual-class variance (RCV), which characterizes how probability mass is distributed over non-maximum classes. The derivation shows that reliable pseudo-labels should have both high MC and low RCV, and that the influence of RCV increases as confidence grows, thereby correcting overconfident but unstable predictions. From this perspective, we cast pseudo-label selection as a spectral relaxation problem that maximizes separability in a confidence-variance feature space, and design a threshold-free selection mechanism to distinguish high- from low-reliability predictions. We integrate CoVar as a plug-in module into representative semi-supervised semantic segmentation and image classification methods. Across PASCAL VOC 2012, Cityscapes, CIFAR-10, and Mini-ImageNet with varying label ratios and backbones, it consistently improves over strong baselines, indicating that combining confidence with residual-class variance provides a more reliable basis for pseudo-label selection than fixed confidence thresholds. (Code: https://github.com/ljs11528/CoVar_Pseudo_Label_Selection.git)
Abstract: Issue resolution, a complex Software Engineering (SWE) task integral to real-world development, has emerged as a compelling challenge for artificial intelligence. The establishment of benchmarks like SWE-bench revealed this task as profoundly difficult for large language models, thereby significantly accelerating the evolution of autonomous coding agents. This paper presents a systematic survey of this emerging domain. We begin by examining data construction pipelines, covering automated collection and synthesis approaches. We then provide a comprehensive analysis of methodologies, spanning training-free frameworks with their modular components to training-based techniques, including supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. Subsequently, we discuss critical analyses of data quality and agent behavior, alongside practical applications. Finally, we identify key challenges and outline promising directions for future research. An open-source repository is maintained at https://github.com/DeepSoftwareAnalytics/Awesome-Issue-Resolution to serve as a dynamic resource in this field.
Abstract: Interactive graph-based segmentation methods partition an image into foreground and background regions with the aid of user inputs. However, existing approaches often suffer from high computational costs, sensitivity to user interactions, and degraded performance when the foreground and background share similar color distributions. A key factor influencing segmentation performance is the similarity measure used for assigning edge weights in the graph. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Pixel Segment Similarity Index (PSSI), which leverages the harmonic mean of inter-channel similarities by incorporating both pixel intensity and spatial smoothness features. The harmonic mean effectively penalizes dissimilarities in any individual channel, enhancing robustness. The computational complexity of PSSI is $\mathcal{O}(B)$, where $B$ denotes the number of histogram bins. Our segmentation framework begins with low-level segmentation using MeanShift, which effectively captures color, texture, and segment shape. Based on the resulting pixel segments, we construct a pixel-segment graph with edge weights determined by PSSI. For partitioning, we employ the Maximum Spanning Tree (MaxST), which captures strongly connected local neighborhoods beneficial for precise segmentation. The integration of the proposed PSSI, MeanShift, and MaxST allows our method to jointly capture color similarity, smoothness, texture, shape, and strong local connectivity. Experimental evaluations on the GrabCut and Images250 datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms current graph-based interactive segmentation methods such as AMOE, OneCut, and SSNCut in terms of segmentation quality, as measured by Jaccard Index (IoU), $F_1$ score, execution time and Mean Error (ME). Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/KaustubhShejole/PSSI-MaxST.
Abstract: Despite the remarkable progress of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in adopting "Thinking-with-Images" capabilities, accurately evaluating the authenticity of their reasoning process remains a critical challenge. Existing benchmarks mainly rely on outcome-oriented accuracy, lacking the capability to assess whether models can accurately leverage fine-grained visual cues for multi-step reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose ViEBench, a process-verifiable benchmark designed to evaluate faithful visual reasoning. Comprising 200 multi-scenario high-resolution images with expert-annotated visual evidence, ViEBench uniquely categorizes tasks by difficulty into perception and reasoning dimensions, where reasoning tasks require utilizing localized visual details with prior knowledge. To establish comprehensive evaluation criteria, we introduce a dual-axis matrix that provides fine-grained metrics through four diagnostic quadrants, enabling transparent diagnosis of model behavior across varying task complexities. Our experiments yield several interesting observations: (1) VLMs can sometimes produce correct final answers despite grounding on irrelevant regions, and (2) they may successfully locate the correct evidence but still fail to utilize it to reach accurate conclusions. Our findings demonstrate that ViEBench can serve as a more explainable and practical benchmark for comprehensively evaluating the effectiveness agentic VLMs. The codes will be released at: https://github.com/Xuchen-Li/ViEBench.
Abstract: This paper presents a two-phase algorithm for computing exact Catalan numbers at an unprecedented scale. The method is demonstrated by computing $C(n)$ for $n = 2,050,572,903$ yielding a result with a targeted $1,234,567,890$ decimal digits. To circumvent the memory limitations associated with evaluating large factorials, the algorithm operates exclusively in the prime-exponent domain. Phase 1 employs a parallel segmented sieve to enumerate primes up to $2n$ and applies Legendre's formula to determine the precise prime factorization of $C(n)$. The primes are grouped by exponent and serialized to disk. Phase 2 reconstructs the final integer using a memory-efficient balanced product tree with chunking. The algorithm runs on a time complexity of $Θ(n(\log n)^2)$ bit-operations and a space complexity of $Θ(n \log n)$ bits. This result represents the largest exact Catalan number computed to date. Performance statistics for a single-machine execution are reported, and verification strategies -- including modular checks and SHA-256 hash validation -- are discussed. The source code and factorization data are provided to ensure reproducibility.
Abstract: We investigate the impact of domain-specific self-supervised pre-training on agricultural disease classification using hierarchical vision transformers. Our key finding is that SimCLR pre-training on just 3,000 unlabeled agricultural images provides a +4.57% accuracy improvement--exceeding the +3.70% gain from hierarchical architecture design. Critically, we show this SSL benefit is architecture-agnostic: applying the same pre-training to Swin-Base yields +4.08%, to ViT-Base +4.20%, confirming practitioners should prioritize domain data collection over architectural choices. Using HierarchicalViT (HVT), a Swin-style hierarchical transformer, we evaluate on three datasets: Cotton Leaf Disease (7 classes, 90.24%), PlantVillage (38 classes, 96.3%), and PlantDoc (27 classes, 87.1%). At matched parameter counts, HVT-Base (78M) achieves 88.91% vs. Swin-Base (88M) at 87.23%, a +1.68% improvement. For deployment reliability, we report calibration analysis showing HVT achieves 3.56% ECE (1.52% after temperature scaling). Code: https://github.com/w2sg-arnav/HierarchicalViT
Abstract: The MIMIC-IV dataset is a large, publicly available electronic health record (EHR) resource widely used for clinical machine learning research. It comprises multiple modalities, including structured data, clinical notes, waveforms, and imaging data. Working with these disjointed modalities requires an extensive manual effort to preprocess and align them for downstream analysis. While several pipelines for MIMIC-IV data extraction are available, they target a small subset of modalities or do not fully support arbitrary downstream applications. In this work, we greatly expand our prior popular unimodal pipeline and present a comprehensive and customizable multimodal pipeline that can significantly reduce multimodal processing time and enhance the reproducibility of MIMIC-based studies. Our pipeline systematically integrates the listed modalities, enabling automated cohort selection, temporal alignment across modalities, and standardized multimodal output formats suitable for arbitrary static and time-series downstream applications. We release the code, a simple UI, and a Python package for selective integration (with embedding) at https://github.com/healthylaife/MIMIC-IV-Data-Pipeline.
Abstract: Despite recent progress, medical foundation models still struggle to unify visual understanding and generation, as these tasks have inherently conflicting goals: semantic abstraction versus pixel-level reconstruction. Existing approaches, typically based on parameter-shared autoregressive architectures, frequently lead to compromised performance in one or both tasks. To address this, we present UniX, a next-generation unified medical foundation model for chest X-ray understanding and generation. UniX decouples the two tasks into an autoregressive branch for understanding and a diffusion branch for high-fidelity generation. Crucially, a cross-modal self-attention mechanism is introduced to dynamically guide the generation process with understanding features. Coupled with a rigorous data cleaning pipeline and a multi-stage training strategy, this architecture enables synergistic collaboration between tasks while leveraging the strengths of diffusion models for superior generation. On two representative benchmarks, UniX achieves a 46.1% improvement in understanding performance (Micro-F1) and a 24.2% gain in generation quality (FD-RadDino), using only a quarter of the parameters of LLM-CXR. By achieving performance on par with task-specific models, our work establishes a scalable paradigm for synergistic medical image understanding and generation. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/ZrH42/UniX.
Authors:Yawar Siddiqui, Duncan Frost, Samir Aroudj, Armen Avetisyan, Henry Howard-Jenkins, Daniel DeTone, Pierre Moulon, Qirui Wu, Zhengqin Li, Julian Straub, Richard Newcombe, Jakob Engel
Abstract: Recent advances in 3D shape generation have achieved impressive results, but most existing methods rely on clean, unoccluded, and well-segmented inputs. Such conditions are rarely met in real-world scenarios. We present ShapeR, a novel approach for conditional 3D object shape generation from casually captured sequences. Given an image sequence, we leverage off-the-shelf visual-inertial SLAM, 3D detection algorithms, and vision-language models to extract, for each object, a set of sparse SLAM points, posed multi-view images, and machine-generated captions. A rectified flow transformer trained to effectively condition on these modalities then generates high-fidelity metric 3D shapes. To ensure robustness to the challenges of casually captured data, we employ a range of techniques including on-the-fly compositional augmentations, a curriculum training scheme spanning object- and scene-level datasets, and strategies to handle background clutter. Additionally, we introduce a new evaluation benchmark comprising 178 in-the-wild objects across 7 real-world scenes with geometry annotations. Experiments show that ShapeR significantly outperforms existing approaches in this challenging setting, achieving an improvement of 2.7x in Chamfer distance compared to state of the art.
Abstract: We study first-hitting times in Differential Evolution (DE) through a conditional hazard frame work. Instead of analyzing convergence via Markov-chain transition kernels or drift arguments, we ex press the survival probability of a measurable target set $A$ as a product of conditional first-hit probabilities (hazards) $p_t=\Prob(E_t\mid\mathcal F_{t-1})$. This yields distribution-free identities for survival and explicit tail bounds whenever deterministic lower bounds on the hazard hold on the survival event. For the L-SHADE algorithm with current-to-$p$best/1 mutation, we construct a checkable algorithmic witness event $\mathcal L_t$ under which the conditional hazard admits an explicit lower bound depending only on sampling rules, population size, and crossover statistics. This separates theoretical constants from empirical event frequencies and explains why worst-case constant-hazard bounds are typically conservative. We complement the theory with a Kaplan--Meier survival analysis on the CEC2017 benchmark suite . Across functions and budgets, we identify three distinct empirical regimes: (i) strongly clustered success, where hitting times concentrate in short bursts; (ii) approximately geometric tails, where a constant-hazard model is accurate; and (iii) intractable cases with no observed hits within the evaluation horizon. The results show that while constant-hazard bounds provide valid tail envelopes, the practical behavior of L-SHADE is governed by burst-like transitions rather than homogeneous per-generati on success probabilities.
Abstract: Large-scale livestock operations pose significant risks to human health and the environment, while also being vulnerable to threats such as infectious diseases and extreme weather events. As the number of such operations continues to grow, accurate and scalable mapping has become increasingly important. In this work, we present an infrastructure-first, explainable pipeline for identifying and characterizing Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) from aerial and satellite imagery. Our method (i) detects candidate infrastructure (e.g., barns, feedlots, manure lagoons, silos) with a domain-tuned YOLOv8 detector, then derives SAM2 masks from these boxes and filters component-specific criteria; (ii) extracts structured descriptors (e.g., counts, areas, orientations, and spatial relations) and fuses them with deep visual features using a lightweight spatial cross-attention classifier; and (iii) outputs both CAFO type predictions and mask-level attributions that link decisions to visible infrastructure. Through comprehensive evaluation, we show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, with Swin-B+PRISM-CAFO surpassing the best performing baseline by up to 15\%. Beyond strong predictive performance across diverse U.S. regions, we run systematic gradient--activation analyses that quantify the impact of domain priors and show how specific infrastructure (e.g., barns, lagoons) shapes classification decisions. We release code, infrastructure masks, and descriptors to support transparent, scalable monitoring of livestock infrastructure, enabling risk modeling, change detection, and targeted regulatory action. Github: https://github.com/Nibir088/PRISM-CAFO.
Abstract: Diffusion models now generate high-quality, diverse samples, with an increasing focus on more powerful models. Although ensembling is a well-known way to improve supervised models, its application to unconditional score-based diffusion models remains largely unexplored. In this work we investigate whether it provides tangible benefits for generative modelling. We find that while ensembling the scores generally improves the score-matching loss and model likelihood, it fails to consistently enhance perceptual quality metrics such as FID on image datasets. We confirm this observation across a breadth of aggregation rules using Deep Ensembles, Monte Carlo Dropout, on CIFAR-10 and FFHQ. We attempt to explain this discrepancy by investigating possible explanations, such as the link between score estimation and image quality. We also look into tabular data through random forests, and find that one aggregation strategy outperforms the others. Finally, we provide theoretical insights into the summing of score models, which shed light not only on ensembling but also on several model composition techniques (e.g. guidance).
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a powerful approach for enhancing large language models' question-answering capabilities through the integration of external knowledge. However, when adapting RAG systems to specialized domains, challenges arise from distribution shifts, resulting in suboptimal generalization performance. In this work, we propose TTARAG, a test-time adaptation method that dynamically updates the language model's parameters during inference to improve RAG system performance in specialized domains. Our method introduces a simple yet effective approach where the model learns to predict retrieved content, enabling automatic parameter adjustment to the target domain. Through extensive experiments across six specialized domains, we demonstrate that TTARAG achieves substantial performance improvements over baseline RAG systems. Code available at https://github.com/sunxin000/TTARAG.
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional performance across various domains, yet they face critical safety concerns. Model editing has emerged as an effective approach to mitigate these issues. Existing model editing methods often focus on optimizing an information matrix that blends new and old knowledge. While effective, these approaches can be computationally expensive and may cause conflicts. In contrast, we shift our attention to Hierarchical Orthogonal Residual SprEad of the information matrix, which reduces noisy gradients and enables more stable edits from a different perspective. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method HORSE through a clear theoretical comparison with several popular methods and extensive experiments conducted on two datasets across multiple LLMs. The results show that HORSE maintains precise massive editing across diverse scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/XiaojieGu/HORSE
Abstract: Chain-of-Thought reasoning has significantly enhanced the problem-solving capabilities of Large Language Models. Unfortunately, current models generate reasoning steps sequentially without foresight, often becoming trapped in suboptimal reasoning paths with redundant steps. In contrast, we introduce Neural Chain-of-Thought Search (NCoTS), a framework that reformulates reasoning as a dynamic search for the optimal thinking strategy. By quantitatively characterizing the solution space, we reveal the existence of sparse superior reasoning paths that are simultaneously more accurate and concise than standard outputs. Our method actively navigates towards these paths by evaluating candidate reasoning operators using a dual-factor heuristic that optimizes for both correctness and computational cost. Consequently, NCoTS achieves a Pareto improvement across diverse reasoning benchmarks, boosting accuracy by over 3.5% while reducing generation length by over 22%. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/MilkThink-Lab/Neural-CoT-Search.
Abstract: Separating the contributions of individual chromogenic stains in RGB histology whole slide images (WSIs) is essential for stain normalization, quantitative assessment of marker expression, and cell-level readouts in immunohistochemistry (IHC). Classical Beer-Lambert (BL) color deconvolution is well-established for two- or three-stain settings, but becomes under-determined and unstable for multiplex IHC (mIHC) with K>3 chromogens. We present a simple, data-driven encoder-decoder architecture that learns cohort-specific stain characteristics for mIHC RGB WSIs and yields crisp, well-separated per-stain concentration maps. The encoder is a compact U-Net that predicts K nonnegative concentration channels; the decoder is a differentiable BL forward model with a learnable stain matrix initialized from typical chromogen hues. Training is unsupervised with a perceptual reconstruction objective augmented by loss terms that discourage unnecessary stain mixing. On a colorectal mIHC panel comprising 5 stains (H, CDX2, MUC2, MUC5, CD8) we show excellent RGB reconstruction, and significantly reduced inter-channel bleed-through compared with matrix-based deconvolution. Code and model are available at https://github.com/measty/StainQuant.git.
Abstract: The rise of data-intensive AI workloads has exacerbated the ``memory wall'' bottleneck. Digital Compute-in-Memory (DCiM) using SRAM offers a scalable solution, but its vast design space makes manual design impractical, creating a need for automated compilers. A key opportunity lies in approximate computing, which leverages the error tolerance of AI applications for significant energy savings. However, existing DCiM compilers focus on exact arithmetic, failing to exploit this optimization. This paper introduces OpenACM, the first open-source, accuracy-aware compiler for SRAM-based approximate DCiM architectures. OpenACM bridges the gap between application error tolerance and hardware automation. Its key contribution is an integrated library of accuracy-configurable multipliers (exact, tunable approximate, and logarithmic), enabling designers to make fine-grained accuracy-energy trade-offs. The compiler automates the generation of the DCiM architecture, integrating a transistor-level customizable SRAM macro with variation-aware characterization into a complete, open-source physical design flow based on OpenROAD and the FreePDK45 library. This ensures full reproducibility and accessibility, removing dependencies on proprietary tools. Experimental results on representative convolutional neural networks (CNNs) demonstrate that OpenACM achieves energy savings of up to 64\% with negligible loss in application accuracy. The framework is available on \href{https://github.com/ShenShan123/OpenACM}{OpenACM:URL}
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are emerging as powerful tools for nonlinear Model Order Reduction (MOR) of time-dependent parameterized Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). However, existing methodologies struggle to combine geometric inductive biases with interpretable latent behavior, overlooking dynamics-driven features or disregarding spatial information. In this work, we address this gap by introducing Latent Dynamics Graph Convolutional Network (LD-GCN), a purely data-driven, encoder-free architecture that learns a global, low-dimensional representation of dynamical systems conditioned on external inputs and parameters. The temporal evolution is modeled in the latent space and advanced through time-stepping, allowing for time-extrapolation, and the trajectories are consistently decoded onto geometrically parameterized domains using a GNN. Our framework enhances interpretability by enabling the analysis of the reduced dynamics and supporting zero-shot prediction through latent interpolation. The methodology is mathematically validated via a universal approximation theorem for encoder-free architectures, and numerically tested on complex computational mechanics problems involving physical and geometric parameters, including the detection of bifurcating phenomena for Navier-Stokes equations. Code availability: https://github.com/lorenzotomada/ld-gcn-rom
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has demonstrated significant effectiveness in enhancing large language models (LLMs) for complex multi-hop question answering (QA). For multi-hop QA tasks, current iterative approaches predominantly rely on LLMs to self-guide and plan multi-step exploration paths during retrieval, leading to substantial challenges in maintaining reasoning coherence across steps from inaccurate query decomposition and error propagation. To address these issues, we introduce Reasoning Tree Guided RAG (RT-RAG), a novel hierarchical framework for complex multi-hop QA. RT-RAG systematically decomposes multi-hop questions into explicit reasoning trees, minimizing inaccurate decomposition through structured entity analysis and consensus-based tree selection that clearly separates core queries, known entities, and unknown entities. Subsequently, a bottom-up traversal strategy employs iterative query rewriting and refinement to collect high-quality evidence, thereby mitigating error propagation. Comprehensive experiments show that RT-RAG substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 7.0% F1 and 6.0% EM, demonstrating the effectiveness of RT-RAG in complex multi-hop QA.
Abstract: Recent advances in video anomaly detection (VAD) mainly focus on ground-based surveillance or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) videos with static backgrounds, whereas research on UAV videos with dynamic backgrounds remains limited. Unlike static scenarios, dynamically captured UAV videos exhibit multi-source motion coupling, where the motion of objects and UAV-induced global motion are intricately intertwined. Consequently, existing methods may misclassify normal UAV movements as anomalies or fail to capture true anomalies concealed within dynamic backgrounds. Moreover, many approaches do not adequately address the joint modeling of inter-frame continuity and local spatial correlations across diverse temporal scales. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Frequency-Assisted Temporal Dilation Mamba (FTDMamba) network for UAV VAD, including two core components: (1) a Frequency Decoupled Spatiotemporal Correlation Module, which disentangles coupled motion patterns and models global spatiotemporal dependencies through frequency analysis; and (2) a Temporal Dilation Mamba Module, which leverages Mamba's sequence modeling capability to jointly learn fine-grained temporal dynamics and local spatial structures across multiple temporal receptive fields. Additionally, unlike existing UAV VAD datasets which focus on static backgrounds, we construct a large-scale Moving UAV VAD dataset (MUVAD), comprising 222,736 frames with 240 anomaly events across 12 anomaly types. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FTDMamba achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on two public static benchmarks and the new MUVAD dataset. The code and MUVAD dataset will be available at: https://github.com/uavano/FTDMamba.
Abstract: The rapid emergence of Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) has a significant impact on robotics. However, their deployment remains complex due to the fragmented interfaces and the inherent communication latency in distributed setups. To address this, we introduce VLAgents, a modular policy server that abstracts VLA inferencing behind a unified Gymnasium-style protocol. Crucially, its communication layer transparently adapts to the context by supporting both zero-copy shared memory for high-speed simulation and compressed streaming for remote hardware. In this work, we present the architecture of VLAgents and validate it by integrating seven policies -- including OpenVLA and Pi Zero. In a benchmark with both local and remote communication, we further demonstrate how it outperforms the default policy servers provided by OpenVLA, OpenPi, and LeRobot. VLAgents is available at https://github.com/RobotControlStack/vlagents
Abstract: Deep learning has significantly advanced image analysis across diverse domains but often depends on large, annotated datasets for success. Transfer learning addresses this challenge by utilizing pre-trained models to tackle new tasks with limited labeled data. However, discrepancies between source and target domains can hinder effective transfer learning. We introduce BioTune, a novel adaptive fine-tuning technique utilizing evolutionary optimization. BioTune enhances transfer learning by optimally choosing which layers to freeze and adjusting learning rates for unfrozen layers. Through extensive evaluation on nine image classification datasets, spanning natural and specialized domains such as medical imaging, BioTune demonstrates superior accuracy and efficiency over state-of-the-art fine-tuning methods, including AutoRGN and LoRA, highlighting its adaptability to various data characteristics and distribution changes. Additionally, BioTune consistently achieves top performance across four different CNN architectures, underscoring its flexibility. Ablation studies provide valuable insights into the impact of BioTune's key components on overall performance. The source code is available at https://github.com/davilac/BioTune.
Abstract: Output diversity is crucial for Large Language Models as it underpins pluralism and creativity. In this work, we reveal that controlling the language used during model thinking-the language of thought-provides a novel and structural source of output diversity. Our preliminary study shows that different thinking languages occupy distinct regions in a model's thinking space. Based on this observation, we study two repeated sampling strategies under multilingual thinking-Single-Language Sampling and Mixed-Language Sampling-and conduct diversity evaluation on outputs that are controlled to be in English, regardless of the thinking language used. Across extensive experiments, we demonstrate that switching the thinking language from English to non-English languages consistently increases output diversity, with a clear and consistent positive correlation such that languages farther from English in the thinking space yield larger gains. We further show that aggregating samples across multiple thinking languages yields additional improvements through compositional effects, and that scaling sampling with linguistic heterogeneity expands the model's diversity ceiling. Finally, we show that these findings translate into practical benefits in pluralistic alignment scenarios, leading to broader coverage of cultural knowledge and value orientations in LLM outputs. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/iNLP-Lab/Multilingual-LoT-Diversity.
Abstract: Unsupervised domain adaptation tackles the problem that domain shifts between training and test data impair the performance of neural networks in many real-world applications. Thereby, in realistic scenarios, the source data may no longer be available during adaptation, and the label space of the target domain may differ from the source label space. This setting, known as source-free universal domain adaptation (SF-UniDA), has recently gained attention, but all existing approaches only assume a single domain shift from source to target. In this work, we present the first study on continual SF-UniDA, where the model must adapt sequentially to a stream of multiple different unlabeled target domains. Building upon our previous methods for online SF-UniDA, we combine their key ideas by integrating Gaussian mixture model-based pseudo-labeling within a mean teacher framework for improved stability over long adaptation sequences. Additionally, we introduce consistency losses for further robustness. The resulting method GMM-COMET provides a strong first baseline for continual SF-UniDA and is the only approach in our experiments to consistently improve upon the source-only model across all evaluated scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/pascalschlachter/GMM-COMET.
Abstract: Recent end-to-end spoken dialogue systems leverage speech tokenizers and neural audio codecs to enable LLMs to operate directly on discrete speech representations. However, these models often exhibit limited speaker identity preservation, hindering personalized voice interaction. In this work, we present Chroma 1.0, the first open-source, real-time, end-to-end spoken dialogue model that achieves both low-latency interaction and high-fidelity personalized voice cloning. Chroma achieves sub-second end-to-end latency through an interleaved text-audio token schedule (1:2) that supports streaming generation, while maintaining high-quality personalized voice synthesis across multi-turn conversations. Our experimental results demonstrate that Chroma achieves a 10.96% relative improvement in speaker similarity over the human baseline, with a Real-Time Factor (RTF) of 0.43, while maintaining strong reasoning and dialogue capabilities. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/FlashLabs-AI-Corp/FlashLabs-Chroma and https://huggingface.co/FlashLabs/Chroma-4B .
Abstract: We propose Comprehensive Robust Dynamic Mode Decomposition (CR-DMD), a novel framework that robustifies the entire DMD process - from mode extraction to dimensional reduction - against mixed noise. Although standard DMD widely used for uncovering spatio-temporal patterns and constructing low-dimensional models of dynamical systems, it suffers from significant performance degradation under noise due to its reliance on least-squares estimation for computing the linear time evolution operator. Existing robust variants typically modify the least-squares formulation, but they remain unstable and fail to ensure faithful low-dimensional representations. First, we introduce a convex optimization-based preprocessing method designed to effectively remove mixed noise, achieving accurate and stable mode extraction. Second, we propose a new convex formulation for dimensional reduction that explicitly links the robustly extracted modes to the original noisy observations, constructing a faithful representation of the original data via a sparse weighted sum of the modes. Both stages are efficiently solved by a preconditioned primal-dual splitting method. Experiments on fluid dynamics datasets demonstrate that CR-DMD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art robust DMD methods in terms of mode accuracy and fidelity of low-dimensional representations under noisy conditions.
Abstract: Vision-as-inverse-graphics, the concept of reconstructing an image as an editable graphics program is a long-standing goal of computer vision. Yet even strong VLMs aren't able to achieve this in one-shot as they lack fine-grained spatial and physical grounding capability. Our key insight is that closing this gap requires interleaved multimodal reasoning through iterative execution and verification. Stemming from this, we present VIGA (Vision-as-Inverse-Graphic Agent) that starts from an empty world and reconstructs or edits scenes through a closed-loop write-run-render-compare-revise procedure. To support long-horizon reasoning, VIGA combines (i) a skill library that alternates generator and verifier roles and (ii) an evolving context memory that contains plans, code diffs, and render history. VIGA is task-agnostic as it doesn't require auxiliary modules, covering a wide range of tasks such as 3D reconstruction, multi-step scene editing, 4D physical interaction, and 2D document editing, etc. Empirically, we found VIGA substantially improves one-shot baselines on BlenderGym (35.32%) and SlideBench (117.17%). Moreover, VIGA is also model-agnostic as it doesn't require finetuning, enabling a unified protocol to evaluate heterogeneous foundation VLMs. To better support this protocol, we introduce BlenderBench, a challenging benchmark that stress-tests interleaved multimodal reasoning with graphics engine, where VIGA improves by 124.70%.
Abstract: Character image animation is gaining significant importance across various domains, driven by the demand for robust and flexible multi-subject rendering. While existing methods excel in single-person animation, they struggle to handle arbitrary subject counts, diverse character types, and spatial misalignment between the reference image and the driving poses. We attribute these limitations to an overly rigid spatial binding that forces strict pixel-wise alignment between the pose and reference, and an inability to consistently rebind motion to intended subjects. To address these challenges, we propose CoDance, a novel Unbind-Rebind framework that enables the animation of arbitrary subject counts, types, and spatial configurations conditioned on a single, potentially misaligned pose sequence. Specifically, the Unbind module employs a novel pose shift encoder to break the rigid spatial binding between the pose and the reference by introducing stochastic perturbations to both poses and their latent features, thereby compelling the model to learn a location-agnostic motion representation. To ensure precise control and subject association, we then devise a Rebind module, leveraging semantic guidance from text prompts and spatial guidance from subject masks to direct the learned motion to intended characters. Furthermore, to facilitate comprehensive evaluation, we introduce a new multi-subject CoDanceBench. Extensive experiments on CoDanceBench and existing datasets show that CoDance achieves SOTA performance, exhibiting remarkable generalization across diverse subjects and spatial layouts. The code and weights will be open-sourced.
Abstract: The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) into autonomous agents has expanded the scope of AI coding from localized code generation to complex, repository-level, and execution-driven problem solving. However, current benchmarks predominantly evaluate code logic in static contexts, neglecting the dynamic, full-process requirements of real-world engineering, particularly in backend development which demands rigorous environment configuration and service deployment. To address this gap, we introduce ABC-Bench, a benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate agentic backend coding within a realistic, executable workflow. Using a scalable automated pipeline, we curated 224 practical tasks spanning 8 languages and 19 frameworks from open-source repositories. Distinct from previous evaluations, ABC-Bench require the agents to manage the entire development lifecycle from repository exploration to instantiating containerized services and pass the external end-to-end API tests. Our extensive evaluation reveals that even state-of-the-art models struggle to deliver reliable performance on these holistic tasks, highlighting a substantial disparity between current model capabilities and the demands of practical backend engineering. Our code is available at https://github.com/OpenMOSS/ABC-Bench.
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is highly effective for enhancing LLM reasoning, yet recent evidence shows models like Qwen 2.5 achieve significant gains even with spurious or incorrect rewards. We investigate this phenomenon and identify a "Perplexity Paradox": spurious RLVR triggers a divergence where answer-token perplexity drops while prompt-side coherence degrades, suggesting the model is bypassing reasoning in favor of memorization. Using Path Patching, Logit Lens, JSD analysis, and Neural Differential Equations, we uncover a hidden Anchor-Adapter circuit that facilitates this shortcut. We localize a Functional Anchor in the middle layers (L18-20) that triggers the retrieval of memorized solutions, followed by Structural Adapters in later layers (L21+) that transform representations to accommodate the shortcut signal. Finally, we demonstrate that scaling specific MLP keys within this circuit allows for bidirectional causal steering-artificially amplifying or suppressing contamination-driven performance. Our results provide a mechanistic roadmap for identifying and mitigating data contamination in RLVR-tuned models. Code is available at https://github.com/idwts/How-RLVR-Activates-Memorization-Shortcuts.
Abstract: Graph Random Walks (GRWs) offer efficient approximations of key graph properties and have been widely adopted in many applications. However, GRW workloads are notoriously difficult to accelerate due to their strong data dependencies, irregular memory access patterns, and imbalanced execution behavior. While recent work explores FPGA-based accelerators for GRWs, existing solutions fall far short of hardware potential due to inefficient pipelining and static scheduling. This paper presents RidgeWalker, a high-performance GRW accelerator designed for datacenter FPGAs. The key insight behind RidgeWalker is that the Markov property of GRWs allows decomposition into stateless, fine-grained tasks that can be executed out-of-order without compromising correctness. Building on this, RidgeWalker introduces an asynchronous pipeline architecture with a feedback-driven scheduler grounded in queuing theory, enabling perfect pipelining and adaptive load balancing. We prototype RidgeWalker on datacenter FPGAs and evaluated it across a range of GRW algorithms and real-world graph datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that RidgeWalker achieves an average speedup of 7.0x over state-of-the-art FPGA solutions and 8.1x over GPU solutions, with peak speedups of up to 71.0x and 22.9x, respectively. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Xtra-Computing/RidgeWalker.
Abstract: M3DDM provides a computationally efficient framework for video outpainting via latent diffusion modeling. However, it exhibits significant quality degradation -- manifested as spatial blur and temporal inconsistency -- under challenging scenarios characterized by limited camera motion or large outpainting regions, where inter-frame information is limited. We identify the cause as a training-inference mismatch in the masking strategy: M3DDM's training applies random mask directions and widths across frames, whereas inference requires consistent directional outpainting throughout the video. To address this, we propose M3DDM+, which applies uniform mask direction and width across all frames during training, followed by fine-tuning of the pretrained M3DDM model. Experiments demonstrate that M3DDM+ substantially improves visual fidelity and temporal coherence in information-limited scenarios while maintaining computational efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/tamaki-lab/M3DDM-Plus.
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) based autonomous agents demonstrate multifaceted capabilities to contribute substantially to economic production. However, existing benchmarks remain focused on single agentic capability, failing to capture long-horizon real-world scenarios. Moreover, the reliance on human-in-the-loop feedback for realistic tasks creates a scalability bottleneck, hindering automated rollout collection and evaluation. To bridge this gap, we introduce AgencyBench, a comprehensive benchmark derived from daily AI usage, evaluating 6 core agentic capabilities across 32 real-world scenarios, comprising 138 tasks with specific queries, deliverables, and rubrics. These scenarios require an average of 90 tool calls, 1 million tokens, and hours of execution time to resolve. To enable automated evaluation, we employ a user simulation agent to provide iterative feedback, and a Docker sandbox to conduct visual and functional rubric-based assessment. Experiments reveal that closed-source models significantly outperform open-source models (48.4% vs 32.1%). Further analysis reveals significant disparities across models in resource efficiency, feedback-driven self-correction, and specific tool-use preferences. Finally, we investigate the impact of agentic scaffolds, observing that proprietary models demonstrate superior performance within their native ecosystems (e.g., Claude-4.5-Opus via Claude-Agent-SDK), while open-source models exhibit distinct performance peaks, suggesting potential optimization for specific execution frameworks. AgencyBench serves as a critical testbed for next-generation agents, highlighting the necessity of co-optimizing model architecture with agentic frameworks. We believe this work sheds light on the future direction of autonomous agents, and we release the full benchmark and evaluation toolkit at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/AgencyBench.
Abstract: RL-based agentic search enables LLMs to solve complex questions via dynamic planning and external search. While this approach significantly enhances accuracy with agent policies optimized via large-scale reinforcement learning, we identify a critical gap in reliability: these agents fail to recognize their reasoning boundaries and rarely admit ``I DON'T KNOW'' (IDK) even when evidence is insufficient or reasoning reaches its limit. The lack of reliability often leads to plausible but unreliable answers, introducing significant risks in many real-world scenarios. To this end, we propose Boundary-Aware Policy Optimization (BAPO), a novel RL framework designed to cultivate reliable boundary awareness without compromising accuracy. BAPO introduces two key components: (i) a group-based boundary-aware reward that encourages an IDK response only when the reasoning reaches its limit, and (ii) an adaptive reward modulator that strategically suspends this reward during early exploration, preventing the model from exploiting IDK as a shortcut. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that BAPO substantially enhances the overall reliability of agentic search.
Abstract: Recent advances in generative modeling can create remarkably realistic synthetic videos, making it increasingly difficult for humans to distinguish them from real ones and necessitating reliable detection methods. However, two key limitations hinder the development of this field. \textbf{From the dataset perspective}, existing datasets are often limited in scale and constructed using outdated or narrowly scoped generative models, making it difficult to capture the diversity and rapid evolution of modern generative techniques. Moreover, the dataset construction process frequently prioritizes quantity over quality, neglecting essential aspects such as semantic diversity, scenario coverage, and technological representativeness. \textbf{From the benchmark perspective}, current benchmarks largely remain at the stage of dataset creation, leaving many fundamental issues and in-depth analysis yet to be systematically explored. Addressing this gap, we propose AIGVDBench, a benchmark designed to be comprehensive and representative, covering \textbf{31} state-of-the-art generation models and over \textbf{440,000} videos. By executing more than \textbf{1,500} evaluations on \textbf{33} existing detectors belonging to four distinct categories. This work presents \textbf{8 in-depth analyses} from multiple perspectives and identifies \textbf{4 novel findings} that offer valuable insights for future research. We hope this work provides a solid foundation for advancing the field of AI-generated video detection. Our benchmark is open-sourced at https://github.com/LongMa-2025/AIGVDBench.
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently exhibit strong translation abilities, even without task-specific fine-tuning. However, the internal mechanisms governing this innate capability remain largely opaque. To demystify this process, we leverage Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) and introduce a novel framework for identifying task-specific features. Our method first recalls features that are frequently co-activated on translation inputs and then filters them for functional coherence using a PCA-based consistency metric. This framework successfully isolates a small set of **translation initiation** features. Causal interventions demonstrate that amplifying these features steers the model towards correct translation, while ablating them induces hallucinations and off-task outputs, confirming they represent a core component of the model's innate translation competency. Moving from analysis to application, we leverage this mechanistic insight to propose a new data selection strategy for efficient fine-tuning. Specifically, we prioritize training on **mechanistically hard** samples-those that fail to naturally activate the translation initiation features. Experiments show this approach significantly improves data efficiency and suppresses hallucinations. Furthermore, we find these mechanisms are transferable to larger models of the same family. Our work not only decodes a core component of the translation mechanism in LLMs but also provides a blueprint for using internal model mechanism to create more robust and efficient models. The codes are available at https://github.com/flamewei123/AAAI26-translation-Initiation-Features.
Abstract: The ability to engineer optimized protein variants has transformative potential for biotechnology and medicine. Prior sequence-based optimization methods struggle with the high-dimensional complexities due to the epistasis effect and the disregard for structural constraints. To address this, we propose HADES, a Bayesian optimization method utilizing Hamiltonian dynamics to efficiently sample from a structure-aware approximated posterior. Leveraging momentum and uncertainty in the simulated physical movements, HADES enables rapid transition of proposals toward promising areas. A position discretization procedure is introduced to propose discrete protein sequences from such a continuous state system. The posterior surrogate is powered by a two-stage encoder-decoder framework to determine the structure and function relationships between mutant neighbors, consequently learning a smoothed landscape to sample from. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in in-silico evaluations across most metrics. Remarkably, our approach offers a unique advantage by leveraging the mutual constraints between protein structure and sequence, facilitating the design of protein sequences with similar structures and optimized properties. The code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/GENTEL-lab/HADES.
Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve from static chatbots into autonomous agents capable of tool execution, the landscape of AI safety is shifting from content moderation to action security. However, existing red-teaming frameworks remain bifurcated: they either focus on rigid, script-based text attacks or lack the architectural modularity to simulate complex, multi-turn agentic exploitations. In this paper, we introduce AJAR (Adaptive Jailbreak Architecture for Red-teaming), a proof-of-concept framework designed to bridge this gap through Protocol-driven Cognitive Orchestration. Built upon the robust runtime of Petri, AJAR leverages the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to decouple adversarial logic from the execution loop, encapsulating state-of-the-art algorithms like X-Teaming as standardized, plug-and-play services. We validate the architectural feasibility of AJAR through a controlled qualitative case study, demonstrating its ability to perform stateful backtracking within a tool-use environment. Furthermore, our preliminary exploration of the "Agentic Gap" reveals a complex safety dynamic: while tool usage introduces new injection vectors via code execution, the cognitive load of parameter formatting can inadvertently disrupt persona-based attacks. AJAR is open-sourced to facilitate the standardized, environment-aware evaluation of this emerging attack surface. The code and data are available at https://github.com/douyipu/ajar.
Abstract: Multimodal sequential recommendation (MSR) leverages diverse item modalities to improve recommendation accuracy, while achieving effective and adaptive fusion remains challenging. Existing MSR models often overlook synergistic information that emerges only through modality combinations. Moreover, they typically assume a fixed importance for different modality interactions across users. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{P}ersonalized \textbf{R}ecommend-ation via \textbf{I}nformation \textbf{S}ynergy \textbf{M}odule (PRISM), a plug-and-play framework for sequential recommendation (SR). PRISM explicitly decomposes multimodal information into unique, redundant, and synergistic components through an Interaction Expert Layer and dynamically weights them via an Adaptive Fusion Layer guided by user preferences. This information-theoretic design enables fine-grained disentanglement and personalized fusion of multimodal signals. Extensive experiments on four datasets and three SR backbones demonstrate its effectiveness and versatility. The code is available at https://github.com/YutongLi2024/PRISM.
Abstract: Sequential recommendation (SR) learns user preferences based on their historical interaction sequences and provides personalized suggestions. In real-world scenarios, most users can only interact with a handful of items, while the majority of items are seldom consumed. This pervasive long-tail challenge limits the model's ability to learn user preferences. Despite previous efforts to enrich tail items/users with knowledge from head parts or improve tail learning through additional contextual information, they still face the following issues: 1) They struggle to improve the situation where interactions of tail users/items are scarce, leading to incomplete preferences learning for the tail parts. 2) Existing methods often degrade overall or head parts performance when improving accuracy for tail users/items, thereby harming the user experience. We propose Tail-Aware Data Augmentation (TADA) for long-tail sequential recommendation, which enhances the interaction frequency for tail items/users while maintaining head performance, thereby promoting the model's learning capabilities for the tail. Specifically, we first capture the co-occurrence and correlation among low-popularity items by a linear model. Building upon this, we design two tail-aware augmentation operators, T-Substitute and T-Insert. The former replaces the head item with a relevant item, while the latter utilizes co-occurrence relationships to extend the original sequence by incorporating both head and tail items. The augmented and original sequences are mixed at the representation level to preserve preference knowledge. We further extend the mix operation across different tail-user sequences and augmented sequences to generate richer augmented samples, thereby improving tail performance. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method. The codes are provided at https://github.com/KingGugu/TADA.
Abstract: Multi-Classification Chest X-Ray Images are one of the most prevalent forms of radiological examination used for diagnosing thoracic diseases. In this study, we offer a concise overview of several methods employed for tackling this task, including DenseNet121. In addition, we deploy an open-source web-based application. In our study, we conduct tests to compare different methods and see how well they work. We also look closely at the weaknesses of the methods we propose and suggest ideas for making them better in the future. Our code is available at: https://github.com/AML4206-MINE20242/Proyecto_AML
Abstract: Human motion generation from text prompts has made remarkable progress in recent years. However, existing methods primarily rely on either sequence-level or action-level descriptions due to the absence of fine-grained, part-level motion annotations. This limits their controllability over individual body parts. In this work, we construct a high-quality motion dataset with atomic, temporally-aware part-level text annotations, leveraging the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Unlike prior datasets that either provide synchronized part captions with fixed time segments or rely solely on global sequence labels, our dataset captures asynchronous and semantically distinct part movements at fine temporal resolution. Based on this dataset, we introduce a diffusion-based part-aware motion generation framework, namely FrankenMotion, where each body part is guided by its own temporally-structured textual prompt. This is, to our knowledge, the first work to provide atomic, temporally-aware part-level motion annotations and have a model that allows motion generation with both spatial (body part) and temporal (atomic action) control. Experiments demonstrate that FrankenMotion outperforms all previous baseline models adapted and retrained for our setting, and our model can compose motions unseen during training. Our code and dataset will be publicly available upon publication.
Abstract: Promptable segmentation foundation models such as SAM3 have demonstrated strong generalization capabilities through interactive and concept-based prompting. However, their direct applicability to medical image segmentation remains limited by severe domain shifts, the absence of privileged spatial prompts, and the need to reason over complex anatomical and volumetric structures. Here we present Medical SAM3, a foundation model for universal prompt-driven medical image segmentation, obtained by fully fine-tuning SAM3 on large-scale, heterogeneous 2D and 3D medical imaging datasets with paired segmentation masks and text prompts. Through a systematic analysis of vanilla SAM3, we observe that its performance degrades substantially on medical data, with its apparent competitiveness largely relying on strong geometric priors such as ground-truth-derived bounding boxes. These findings motivate full model adaptation beyond prompt engineering alone. By fine-tuning SAM3's model parameters on 33 datasets spanning 10 medical imaging modalities, Medical SAM3 acquires robust domain-specific representations while preserving prompt-driven flexibility. Extensive experiments across organs, imaging modalities, and dimensionalities demonstrate consistent and significant performance gains, particularly in challenging scenarios characterized by semantic ambiguity, complex morphology, and long-range 3D context. Our results establish Medical SAM3 as a universal, text-guided segmentation foundation model for medical imaging and highlight the importance of holistic model adaptation for achieving robust prompt-driven segmentation under severe domain shift. Code and model will be made available at https://github.com/AIM-Research-Lab/Medical-SAM3.
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong multilingual capabilities, yet remain fundamentally constrained by the severe imbalance in global language resources. While over 7,000 languages are spoken worldwide, only a small subset (fewer than 100) has sufficient digital presence to meaningfully influence modern LLM training. This disparity leads to systematic underperformance, cultural misalignment, and limited accessibility for speakers of low-resource and extreme-low-resource languages. To address this gap, we introduce Bring Your Own Language (BYOL), a unified framework for scalable, language-aware LLM development tailored to each language's digital footprint. BYOL begins with a language resource classification that maps languages into four tiers (Extreme-Low, Low, Mid, High) using curated web-scale corpora, and uses this classification to select the appropriate integration pathway. For low-resource languages, we propose a full-stack data refinement and expansion pipeline that combines corpus cleaning, synthetic text generation, continual pretraining, and supervised finetuning. Applied to Chichewa and Maori, this pipeline yields language-specific LLMs that achieve approximately 12 percent average improvement over strong multilingual baselines across 12 benchmarks, while preserving English and multilingual capabilities via weight-space model merging. For extreme-low-resource languages, we introduce a translation-mediated inclusion pathway, and show on Inuktitut that a tailored machine translation system improves over a commercial baseline by 4 BLEU, enabling high-accuracy LLM access when direct language modeling is infeasible. Finally, we release human-translated versions of the Global MMLU-Lite benchmark in Chichewa, Maori, and Inuktitut, and make our codebase and models publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/byol .
Abstract: Current progress in out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is limited by the lack of large, high-quality datasets with clearly defined OOD categories across varying difficulty levels (near- to far-OOD) that support both fine- and coarse-grained computer vision tasks. To address this limitation, we introduce ICONIC-444 (Image Classification and OOD Detection with Numerous Intricate Complexities), a specialized large-scale industrial image dataset containing over 3.1 million RGB images spanning 444 classes tailored for OOD detection research. Captured with a prototype industrial sorting machine, ICONIC-444 closely mimics real-world tasks. It complements existing datasets by offering structured, diverse data suited for rigorous OOD evaluation across a spectrum of task complexities. We define four reference tasks within ICONIC-444 to benchmark and advance OOD detection research and provide baseline results for 22 state-of-the-art post-hoc OOD detection methods.
Abstract: An ideal embodied agent should possess lifelong learning capabilities to handle long-horizon and complex tasks, enabling continuous operation in general environments. This not only requires the agent to accurately accomplish given tasks but also to leverage long-term episodic memory to optimize decision-making. However, existing mainstream one-shot embodied tasks primarily focus on task completion results, neglecting the crucial process of exploration and memory utilization. To address this, we propose Long-term Memory Embodied Exploration (LMEE), which aims to unify the agent's exploratory cognition and decision-making behaviors to promote lifelong learning.We further construct a corresponding dataset and benchmark, LMEE-Bench, incorporating multi-goal navigation and memory-based question answering to comprehensively evaluate both the process and outcome of embodied exploration. To enhance the agent's memory recall and proactive exploration capabilities, we propose MemoryExplorer, a novel method that fine-tunes a multimodal large language model through reinforcement learning to encourage active memory querying. By incorporating a multi-task reward function that includes action prediction, frontier selection, and question answering, our model achieves proactive exploration. Extensive experiments against state-of-the-art embodied exploration models demonstrate that our approach achieves significant advantages in long-horizon embodied tasks.
Abstract: Wheeled-legged robots combine the efficiency of wheels with the versatility of legs, but face significant energy optimization challenges when navigating diverse environments. In this work, we present a hierarchical control framework that integrates predictive power modeling with residual reinforcement learning to optimize omnidirectional locomotion efficiency for wheeled quadrupedal robots. Our approach employs a novel power prediction network that forecasts energy consumption across different gait patterns over a 1-second horizon, enabling intelligent selection of the most energy-efficient nominal gait. A reinforcement learning policy then generates residual adjustments to this nominal gait, fine-tuning the robot's actions to balance energy efficiency with performance objectives. Comparative analysis shows our method reduces energy consumption by up to 35\% compared to fixed-gait approaches while maintaining comparable velocity tracking performance. We validate our framework through extensive simulations and real-world experiments on a modified Unitree Go1 platform, demonstrating robust performance even under external disturbances. Videos and implementation details are available at \href{https://sites.google.com/view/switching-wpg}{https://sites.google.com/view/switching-wpg}.
Abstract: Perceived trustworthiness underpins how users navigate online information, yet it remains unclear whether large language models (LLMs),increasingly embedded in search, recommendation, and conversational systems, represent this construct in psychologically coherent ways. We analyze how instruction-tuned LLMs (Llama 3.1 8B, Qwen 2.5 7B, Mistral 7B) encode perceived trustworthiness in web-like narratives using the PEACE-Reviews dataset annotated for cognitive appraisals, emotions, and behavioral intentions. Across models, systematic layer- and head-level activation differences distinguish high- from low-trust texts, revealing that trust cues are implicitly encoded during pretraining. Probing analyses show linearly de-codable trust signals and fine-tuning effects that refine rather than restructure these representations. Strongest associations emerge with appraisals of fairness, certainty, and accountability-self -- dimensions central to human trust formation online. These findings demonstrate that modern LLMs internalize psychologically grounded trust signals without explicit supervision, offering a representational foundation for designing credible, transparent, and trust-worthy AI systems in the web ecosystem. Code and appendix are available at: https://github.com/GerardYeo/TrustworthinessLLM.
Abstract: We introduce Alterbute, a diffusion-based method for editing an object's intrinsic attributes in an image. We allow changing color, texture, material, and even the shape of an object, while preserving its perceived identity and scene context. Existing approaches either rely on unsupervised priors that often fail to preserve identity or use overly restrictive supervision that prevents meaningful intrinsic variations. Our method relies on: (i) a relaxed training objective that allows the model to change both intrinsic and extrinsic attributes conditioned on an identity reference image, a textual prompt describing the target intrinsic attributes, and a background image and object mask defining the extrinsic context. At inference, we restrict extrinsic changes by reusing the original background and object mask, thereby ensuring that only the desired intrinsic attributes are altered; (ii) Visual Named Entities (VNEs) - fine-grained visual identity categories (e.g., ''Porsche 911 Carrera'') that group objects sharing identity-defining features while allowing variation in intrinsic attributes. We use a vision-language model to automatically extract VNE labels and intrinsic attribute descriptions from a large public image dataset, enabling scalable, identity-preserving supervision. Alterbute outperforms existing methods on identity-preserving object intrinsic attribute editing.
Abstract: Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) empowers large language models (LLMs) to tackle complex tasks by interleaving reasoning steps with external tool interactions. However, existing reinforcement learning methods typically rely on outcome- or trajectory-level rewards, assigning uniform advantages to all steps within a trajectory. This coarse-grained credit assignment fails to distinguish effective tool calls from redundant or erroneous ones, particularly in long-horizon multi-turn scenarios. To address this, we propose MatchTIR, a framework that introduces fine-grained supervision via bipartite matching-based turn-level reward assignment and dual-level advantage estimation. Specifically, we formulate credit assignment as a bipartite matching problem between predicted and ground-truth traces, utilizing two assignment strategies to derive dense turn-level rewards. Furthermore, to balance local step precision with global task success, we introduce a dual-level advantage estimation scheme that integrates turn-level and trajectory-level signals, assigning distinct advantage values to individual interaction turns. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of MatchTIR. Notably, our 4B model surpasses the majority of 8B competitors, particularly in long-horizon and multi-turn tasks. Our codes are available at https://github.com/quchangle1/MatchTIR.
Abstract: Fast algorithms for approximation by rational functions exist for both barycentric and Thiele continued fraction (TCF) representations. We present the first numerically stable methods for derivative evaluation in the barycentric representation, including an $O(n)$ algorithm for all derivatives. We also extend an earlier $O(n)$ algorithm for evaluation of the TCF first derivative to higher orders. Numerical experiments confirm the robustness and efficiency of the proposed methods.
Abstract: Recent advancements in video models have shown tremendous progress, particularly in long video understanding. However, current benchmarks predominantly feature western-centric data and English as the dominant language, introducing significant biases in evaluation. To address this, we introduce CURVE (Cultural Understanding and Reasoning in Video Evaluation), a challenging benchmark for multicultural and multilingual video reasoning. CURVE comprises high-quality, entirely human-generated annotations from diverse, region-specific cultural videos across 18 global locales. Unlike prior work that relies on automatic translations, CURVE provides complex questions, answers, and multi-step reasoning steps, all crafted in native languages. Making progress on CURVE requires a deeply situated understanding of visual cultural context. Furthermore, we leverage CURVE's reasoning traces to construct evidence-based graphs and propose a novel iterative strategy using these graphs to identify fine-grained errors in reasoning. Our evaluations reveal that SoTA Video-LLMs struggle significantly, performing substantially below human-level accuracy, with errors primarily stemming from the visual perception of cultural elements. CURVE will be publicly available under https://github.com/google-deepmind/neptune?tab=readme-ov-file\#minerva-cultural
Abstract: Retrieval models are key components of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, which generate search queries, process the documents returned, and generate a response. RAG systems are often dynamic and may involve multiple rounds of retrieval. While many state-of-the-art retrieval methods are available through academic IR platforms, these platforms are typically designed for the Cranfield paradigm in which all queries are known up front and can be batch processed offline. This simplification accelerates research but leaves state-of-the-art retrieval models unable to support downstream applications that require online services, such as arbitrary dynamic RAG pipelines that involve looping, feedback, or even self-organizing agents. In this work, we introduce RoutIR, a Python package that provides a simple and efficient HTTP API that wraps arbitrary retrieval methods, including first stage retrieval, reranking, query expansion, and result fusion. By providing a minimal JSON configuration file specifying the retrieval models to serve, RoutIR can be used to construct and query retrieval pipelines on-the-fly using any permutation of available models (e.g., fusing the results of several first-stage retrieval methods followed by reranking). The API automatically performs asynchronous query batching and caches results by default. While many state-of-the-art retrieval methods are already supported by the package, RoutIR is also easily expandable by implementing the Engine abstract class. The package is open-sourced and publicly available on GitHub: http://github.com/hltcoe/routir.
Abstract: In this paper, we find that the generation of 3D human motions and 2D human videos is intrinsically coupled. 3D motions provide the structural prior for plausibility and consistency in videos, while pre-trained video models offer strong generalization capabilities for motions, which necessitate coupling their generation processes. Based on this, we present CoMoVi, a co-generative framework that couples two video diffusion models (VDMs) to generate 3D human motions and videos synchronously within a single diffusion denoising loop. To achieve this, we first propose an effective 2D human motion representation that can inherit the powerful prior of pre-trained VDMs. Then, we design a dual-branch diffusion model to couple human motion and video generation process with mutual feature interaction and 3D-2D cross attentions. Moreover, we curate CoMoVi Dataset, a large-scale real-world human video dataset with text and motion annotations, covering diverse and challenging human motions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in both 3D human motion and video generation tasks.
Abstract: Addressing itinerary modification is crucial for enhancing the travel experience as it is a frequent requirement during traveling. However, existing research mainly focuses on fixed itinerary planning, leaving modification underexplored due to the scarcity of need-to-modify itinerary data. To bridge this gap, we formally define the itinerary modification task and propose a general pipeline to construct the corresponding dataset, namely iTIMO. This pipeline frames the generation of need-to-modify itinerary data as an intent-driven perturbation task. It instructs large language models to perturb real-world itineraries using three operations: REPLACE, ADD, and DELETE. Each perturbation is grounded in three intents: disruptions of popularity, spatial distance, and category diversity. Furthermore, hybrid evaluation metrics are introduced to ensure perturbation effectiveness. We conduct comprehensive benchmarking on iTIMO to analyze the capabilities and limitations of state-of-the-art LLMs. Overall, iTIMO provides a comprehensive testbed for the modification task, and empowers the evolution of traditional travel recommender systems into adaptive frameworks capable of handling dynamic travel needs. Dataset, code and supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/zelo2/iTIMO.
Abstract: Multi-agent systems (MAS) enable complex reasoning by coordinating multiple agents, but often incur high inference latency due to multi-step execution and repeated model invocations, severely limiting their scalability and usability in time-sensitive scenarios. Most existing approaches primarily optimize task performance and inference cost, and explicitly or implicitly assume sequential execution, making them less optimal for controlling latency under parallel execution. In this work, we investigate learning-based orchestration of multi-agent systems with explicit latency supervision under parallel execution. We propose Latency-Aware Multi-agent System (LAMaS), a latency-aware multi-agent orchestration framework that enables parallel execution and explicitly optimizes the critical execution path, allowing the controller to construct execution topology graphs with lower latency under parallel execution. Our experiments show that our approach reduces critical path length by 38-46% compared to the state-of-the-art baseline for multi-agent architecture search across multiple benchmarks, while maintaining or even improving task performance. These results highlight the importance of explicitly optimizing latency under parallel execution when designing efficient multi-agent systems. The code is available at https://github.com/xishi404/LAMaS
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across natural language tasks and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. Despite extensive safety alignment efforts, recent studies show that such alignment is often shallow and remains vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Existing defense mechanisms, including decoding-based constraints and post-hoc content detectors, struggle against sophisticated jailbreaks, often intervening robust detection or excessively degrading model utility. In this work, we examine the decoding process of LLMs and make a key observation: even when successfully jailbroken, models internally exhibit latent safety-related signals during generation. However, these signals are overridden by the model's drive for fluent continuation, preventing timely self-correction or refusal. Building on this observation, we propose a simple yet effective approach that explicitly surfaces and leverages these latent safety signals for early detection of unsafe content during decoding. Experiments across diverse jailbreak attacks demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances safety, while maintaining low over-refusal rates on benign inputs and preserving response quality. Our results suggest that activating intrinsic safety-awareness during decoding offers a promising and complementary direction for defending against jailbreak attacks. Code is available at: https://github.com/zyz13590/SafeProbing.
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in human-centric applications, yet they often fail to provide substantive emotional support. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been utilized to enhance empathy of LLMs, existing reward models typically evaluate empathy from a single perspective, overlooking the inherently bidirectional interaction nature of empathy between the supporter and seeker as defined by Empathy Cycle theory. To address this limitation, we propose Psychology-grounded Empathetic Reward Modeling (PERM). PERM operationalizes empathy evaluation through a bidirectional decomposition: 1) Supporter perspective, assessing internal resonation and communicative expression; 2) Seeker perspective, evaluating emotional reception. Additionally, it incorporates a bystander perspective to monitor overall interaction quality. Extensive experiments on a widely-used emotional intelligence benchmark and an industrial daily conversation dataset demonstrate that PERM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by over 10\%. Furthermore, a blinded user study reveals a 70\% preference for our approach, highlighting its efficacy in generating more empathetic responses. Our code, dataset, and models are available at https://github.com/ZhengWwwq/PERM.
Abstract: Fine-tuning vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP often leads to catastrophic forgetting of pretrained knowledge. Prior work primarily aims to mitigate forgetting during adaptation; however, forgetting often remains inevitable during this process. We introduce a novel paradigm, continued fine-tuning (CFT), which seeks to recover pretrained knowledge after a zero-shot model has already been adapted. We propose a simple, model-agnostic CFT strategy (named MERGETUNE) guided by linear mode connectivity (LMC), which can be applied post hoc to existing fine-tuned models without requiring architectural changes. Given a fine-tuned model, we continue fine-tuning its trainable parameters (e.g., soft prompts or linear heads) to search for a continued model which has two low-loss paths to the zero-shot (e.g., CLIP) and the fine-tuned (e.g., CoOp) solutions. By exploiting the geometry of the loss landscape, the continued model implicitly merges the two solutions, restoring pretrained knowledge lost in the fine-tuned counterpart. A challenge is that the vanilla LMC constraint requires data replay from the pretraining task. We approximate this constraint for the zero-shot model via a second-order surrogate, eliminating the need for large-scale data replay. Experiments show that MERGETUNE improves the harmonic mean of CoOp by +5.6% on base-novel generalisation without adding parameters. On robust fine-tuning evaluations, the LMC-merged model from MERGETUNE surpasses ensemble baselines with lower inference cost, achieving further gains and state-of-the-art results when ensembled with the zero-shot model. Our code is available at https://github.com/Surrey-UP-Lab/MERGETUNE.
Abstract: As hubs of human activity, urban surfaces consist of a wealth of semantic entities. Segmenting these various entities from satellite imagery is crucial for a range of downstream applications. Current advanced segmentation models can reliably segment entities defined by physical attributes (e.g., buildings, water bodies) but still struggle with socially defined categories (e.g., schools, parks). In this work, we achieve socio-semantic segmentation by vision-language model reasoning. To facilitate this, we introduce the Urban Socio-Semantic Segmentation dataset named SocioSeg, a new resource comprising satellite imagery, digital maps, and pixel-level labels of social semantic entities organized in a hierarchical structure. Additionally, we propose a novel vision-language reasoning framework called SocioReasoner that simulates the human process of identifying and annotating social semantic entities via cross-modal recognition and multi-stage reasoning. We employ reinforcement learning to optimize this non-differentiable process and elicit the reasoning capabilities of the vision-language model. Experiments demonstrate our approach's gains over state-of-the-art models and strong zero-shot generalization. Our dataset and code are available in https://github.com/AMAP-ML/SocioReasoner.
Abstract: With advancements in deep learning (DL) and computer vision techniques, the field of chart understanding is evolving rapidly. In particular, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are proving to be efficient and accurate in understanding charts. To accurately measure the performance of MLLMs, the research community has developed multiple datasets to serve as benchmarks. By examining these datasets, we found that they are all limited to a small set of chart types. To bridge this gap, we propose the ChartComplete dataset. The dataset is based on a chart taxonomy borrowed from the visualization community, and it covers thirty different chart types. The dataset is a collection of classified chart images and does not include a learning signal. We present the ChartComplete dataset as is to the community to build upon it.
Abstract: We address the problem of estimating realistic, spatially varying reflectance for complex planetary surfaces such as the lunar regolith, which is critical for high-fidelity rendering and vision-based navigation. Existing lunar rendering pipelines rely on simplified or spatially uniform BRDF models whose parameters are difficult to estimate and fail to capture local reflectance variations, limiting photometric realism. We propose Lunar-G2R, a geometry-to-reflectance learning framework that predicts spatially varying BRDF parameters directly from a lunar digital elevation model (DEM), without requiring multi-view imagery, controlled illumination, or dedicated reflectance-capture hardware at inference time. The method leverages a U-Net trained with differentiable rendering to minimize photometric discrepancies between real orbital images and physically based renderings under known viewing and illumination geometry. Experiments on a geographically held-out region of the Tycho crater show that our approach reduces photometric error by 38 % compared to a state-of-the-art baseline, while achieving higher PSNR and SSIM and improved perceptual similarity, capturing fine-scale reflectance variations absent from spatially uniform models. To our knowledge, this is the first method to infer a spatially varying reflectance model directly from terrain geometry.
Abstract: Discrete diffusion models have recently emerged as a promising alternative to the autoregressive approach for generating discrete sequences. Sample generation via gradual denoising or demasking processes allows them to capture hierarchical non-sequential interdependencies in the data. These custom processes, however, do not assume a flexible control over the distribution of generated samples. We propose Discrete Feynman-Kac Correctors, a framework that allows for controlling the generated distribution of discrete masked diffusion models at inference time. We derive Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms that, given a trained discrete diffusion model, control the temperature of the sampled distribution (i.e. perform annealing), sample from the product of marginals of several diffusion processes (e.g. differently conditioned processes), and sample from the product of the marginal with an external reward function, producing likely samples from the target distribution that also have high reward. Notably, our framework does not require any training of additional models or fine-tuning of the original model. We illustrate the utility of our framework in several applications including: efficient sampling from the annealed Boltzmann distribution of the Ising model, improving the performance of language models for code generation and amortized learning, as well as reward-tilted protein sequence generation.
Abstract: We propose Strategy-aware Surprise (SuS), a novel intrinsic motivation framework that uses pre-post prediction mismatch as a novelty signal for exploration in reinforcement learning. Unlike traditional curiosity-driven methods that rely solely on state prediction error, SuS introduces two complementary components: Strategy Stability (SS) and Strategy Surprise (SuS). SS measures consistency in behavioral strategy across temporal steps, while SuS captures unexpected outcomes relative to the agent's current strategy representation. Our combined reward formulation leverages both signals through learned weighting coefficients. We evaluate SuS on mathematical reasoning tasks using large language models, demonstrating significant improvements in both accuracy and solution diversity. Ablation studies confirm that removing either component results in at least 10% performance degradation, validating the synergistic nature of our approach. SuS achieves 17.4% improvement in Pass@1 and 26.4% improvement in Pass@5 compared to baseline methods, while maintaining higher strategy diversity throughout training.
Abstract: Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery exhibits intrinsic information sparsity due to its unique electromagnetic scattering mechanism. Despite the widespread adoption of deep neural network (DNN)-based SAR automatic target recognition (SAR-ATR) systems, they remain vulnerable to adversarial examples and tend to over-rely on background regions, leading to degraded adversarial robustness. Existing adversarial attacks for SAR-ATR often require visually perceptible distortions to achieve effective performance, thereby necessitating an attack method that balances effectiveness and stealthiness. In this paper, a novel attack method termed Space-Reweighted Adversarial Warping (SRAW) is proposed, which generates adversarial examples through optimized spatial deformation with reweighted budgets across foreground and background regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SRAW significantly degrades the performance of state-of-the-art SAR-ATR models and consistently outperforms existing methods in terms of imperceptibility and adversarial transferability. Code is made available at https://github.com/boremycin/SAR-ATR-TransAttack.
Abstract: Recent Omni-multimodal Large Language Models show promise in unified audio, vision, and text modeling. However, streaming audio-video understanding remains challenging, as existing approaches suffer from disjointed capabilities: they typically exhibit incomplete modality support or lack autonomous proactive monitoring. To address this, we present ROMA, a real-time omni-multimodal assistant for unified reactive and proactive interaction. ROMA processes continuous inputs as synchronized multimodal units, aligning dense audio with discrete video frames to handle granularity mismatches. For online decision-making, we introduce a lightweight speak head that decouples response initiation from generation to ensure precise triggering without task conflict. We train ROMA with a curated streaming dataset and a two-stage curriculum that progressively optimizes for streaming format adaptation and proactive responsiveness. To standardize the fragmented evaluation landscape, we reorganize diverse benchmarks into a unified suite covering both proactive (alert, narration) and reactive (QA) settings. Extensive experiments across 12 benchmarks demonstrate ROMA achieves state-of-the-art performance on proactive tasks while competitive in reactive settings, validating its robustness in unified real-time omni-multimodal understanding.
Abstract: In this paper, we present BAR-SQL (Boundary-Aware Reliable NL2SQL), a unified training framework that embeds reliability and boundary awareness directly into the generation process. We introduce a Seed Mutation data synthesis paradigm that constructs a representative enterprise corpus, explicitly encompassing multi-step analytical queries alongside boundary cases including ambiguity and schema limitations. To ensure interpretability, we employ Knowledge-Grounded Reasoning Synthesis, which produces Chain-of-Thought traces explicitly anchored in schema metadata and business rules. The model is trained through a two-stage process: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning via Group Relative Policy Optimization. We design a Task-Conditioned Hybrid Reward mechanism that simultaneously optimizes SQL execution accuracy-leveraging Abstract Syntax Tree analysis and dense result matching-and semantic precision in abstention responses. To evaluate reliability alongside generation accuracy, we construct and release Ent-SQL-Bench, which jointly assesse SQL precision and boundary-aware abstention across ambiguous and unanswerable queries. Experimental results on this benchmark demonstrate that BAR-SQL achieves 91.48% average accuracy, outperforming leading proprietary models, including Claude 4.5 Sonnet and GPT-5, in both SQL generation quality and boundary-aware abstention capability. The source code and benchmark are available anonymously at: https://github.com/TianSongS/BAR-SQL.
Abstract: We approach multilinguality as sense adaptation: aligning latent meaning representations across languages rather than relying solely on shared parameters and scale. In this paper, we introduce SENse-based Symmetric Interlingual Alignment (SENSIA), which adapts a Backpack language model from one language to another by explicitly aligning sense-level mixtures and contextual representations on parallel data, while jointly training a target-language language modeling loss to preserve fluency. Across benchmarks on four typologically diverse languages, SENSIA generally outperforms comparable multilingual alignment methods and achieves competitive accuracy against monolingual from-scratch baselines while using 2-4x less target-language data. Analyses of learned sense geometry indicate that local sense topology and global structure relative to English are largely preserved, and ablations show that the method is robust in terms of design and scale.
Abstract: Current LLM safety research predominantly focuses on mitigating Goal Hijacking, preventing attackers from redirecting a model's high-level objective (e.g., from "summarizing emails" to "phishing users"). In this paper, we argue that this perspective is incomplete and highlight a critical vulnerability in Reasoning Alignment. We propose a new adversarial paradigm: Reasoning Hijacking and instantiate it with Criteria Attack, which subverts model judgments by injecting spurious decision criteria without altering the high-level task goal. Unlike Goal Hijacking, which attempts to override the system prompt, Reasoning Hijacking accepts the high-level goal but manipulates the model's decision-making logic by injecting spurious reasoning shortcut. Though extensive experiments on three different tasks (toxic comment, negative review, and spam detection), we demonstrate that even newest models are prone to prioritize injected heuristic shortcuts over rigorous semantic analysis. The results are consistent over different backbones. Crucially, because the model's "intent" remains aligned with the user's instructions, these attacks can bypass defenses designed to detect goal deviation (e.g., SecAlign, StruQ), exposing a fundamental blind spot in the current safety landscape. Data and code are available at https://github.com/Yuan-Hou/criteria_attack
Abstract: We present MoST (Mixture of Speech and Text), a novel multimodal large language model that seamlessly integrates speech and text processing through our proposed Modality-Aware Mixture of Experts (MAMoE) architecture. While current multimodal models typically process diverse modality representations with identical parameters, disregarding their inherent representational differences, we introduce specialized routing pathways that direct tokens to modality-appropriate experts based on input type. MAMoE simultaneously enhances modality-specific learning and cross-modal understanding through two complementary components: modality-specific expert groups that capture domain-specific patterns and shared experts that facilitate information transfer between modalities. Building on this architecture, we develop an efficient transformation pipeline that adapts the pretrained MoE language model through strategic post-training on ASR and TTS datasets, followed by fine-tuning with a carefully curated speech-text instruction dataset. A key feature of this pipeline is that it relies exclusively on fully accessible, open-source datasets to achieve strong performance and data efficiency. Comprehensive evaluations across ASR, TTS, audio language modeling, and spoken question answering benchmarks show that MoST consistently outperforms existing models of comparable parameter counts. Our ablation studies confirm that the modality-specific routing mechanism and shared experts design significantly contribute to performance gains across all tested domains. To our knowledge, MoST represents the first fully open-source speech-text LLM built on a Mixture of Experts architecture. \footnote{We release MoST model, training code, inference code, and training data at https://github.com/NUS-HPC-AI-Lab/MoST
Abstract: Imagine sitting in a presentation, trying to follow the speaker while simultaneously scanning the slides for relevant information. While the entire slide is visible, identifying the relevant regions can be challenging. As you focus on one part of the slide, the speaker moves on to a new sentence, leaving you scrambling to catch up visually. This constant back-and-forth creates a disconnect between what is being said and the most important visual elements, making it hard to absorb key details, especially in fast-paced or content-heavy presentations such as conference talks. This requires an understanding of slides, including text, graphics, and layout. We introduce a method that automatically identifies and highlights the most relevant slide regions based on the speaker's narrative. By analyzing spoken content and matching it with textual or graphical elements in the slides, our approach ensures better synchronization between what listeners hear and what they need to attend to. We explore different ways of solving this problem and assess their success and failure cases. Analyzing multimedia documents is emerging as a key requirement for seamless understanding of content-rich videos, such as educational videos and conference talks, by reducing cognitive strain and improving comprehension. Code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/meghamariamkm2002/Slide_Highlight
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with complex video QA benchmarks like HD-EPIC VQA due to ambiguous queries/options, poor long-range temporal reasoning, and non-standardized outputs. We propose a framework integrating query/choice pre-processing, domain-specific Qwen2.5-VL fine-tuning, a novel Temporal Chain-of-Thought (T-CoT) prompting for multi-step reasoning, and robust post-processing. This system achieves 41.6% accuracy on HD-EPIC VQA, highlighting the need for holistic pipeline optimization in demanding video understanding. Our code, fine-tuned models are available at https://github.com/YoungSeng/Egocentric-Co-Pilot.
Abstract: The prevalence of recommendation systems also brings privacy concerns to both the users and the sellers, as centralized platforms collect as much data as possible from them. To keep the data private, we propose PADER: a Paillier-based secure decentralized social recommendation system. In this system, the users and the sellers are nodes in a decentralized network. The training and inference of the recommendation model are carried out securely in a decentralized manner, without the involvement of a centralized platform. To this end, we apply the Paillier cryptosystem to the SoReg (Social Regularization) model, which exploits both user's ratings and social relations. We view the SoReg model as a two-party secure polynomial evaluation problem and observe that the simple bipartite computation may result in poor efficiency. To improve efficiency, we design secure addition and multiplication protocols to support secure computation on any arithmetic circuit, along with an optimal data packing scheme that is suitable for the polynomial computations of real values. Experiment results show that our method only takes about one second to iterate through one user with hundreds of ratings, and training with ~500K ratings for one epoch only takes <3 hours, which shows that the method is practical in real applications. The code is available at https://github.com/GarminQ/PADER.
Abstract: Aligning multilingual assistants with culturally grounded user preferences is essential for serving India's linguistically diverse population of over one billion speakers across multiple scripts. However, existing benchmarks either focus on a single language or conflate retrieval with generation, leaving open the question of whether current embedding models can encode persona-instruction compatibility without relying on response synthesis. We present a unified benchmark spanning 12 Indian languages and four evaluation tasks: monolingual and cross-lingual persona-to-instruction retrieval, reverse retrieval from instruction to persona, and binary compatibility classification. Eight multilingual embedding models are evaluated in a frozen-encoder setting with a thin logistic regression head for classification. E5-Large-Instruct achieves the highest Recall@1 of 27.4\% on monolingual retrieval and 20.7\% on cross-lingual transfer, while BGE-M3 leads reverse retrieval at 32.1\% Recall@1. For classification, LaBSE attains 75.3\% AUROC with strong calibration. These findings offer practical guidance for model selection in Indic multilingual retrieval and establish reproducible baselines for future work\footnote{Code, datasets, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/aryashah2k/PI-Indic-Align.
Abstract: We introduce ELITE, an Efficient Gaussian head avatar synthesis from a monocular video via Learned Initialization and TEst-time generative adaptation. Prior works rely either on a 3D data prior or a 2D generative prior to compensate for missing visual cues in monocular videos. However, 3D data prior methods often struggle to generalize in-the-wild, while 2D generative prior methods are computationally heavy and prone to identity hallucination. We identify a complementary synergy between these two priors and design an efficient system that achieves high-fidelity animatable avatar synthesis with strong in-the-wild generalization. Specifically, we introduce a feed-forward Mesh2Gaussian Prior Model (MGPM) that enables fast initialization of a Gaussian avatar. To further bridge the domain gap at test time, we design a test-time generative adaptation stage, leveraging both real and synthetic images as supervision. Unlike previous full diffusion denoising strategies that are slow and hallucination-prone, we propose a rendering-guided single-step diffusion enhancer that restores missing visual details, grounded on Gaussian avatar renderings. Our experiments demonstrate that ELITE produces visually superior avatars to prior works, even for challenging expressions, while achieving 60x faster synthesis than the 2D generative prior method.
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled the development of powerful agentic systems capable of automating complex workflows across various fields. However, these systems are highly vulnerable to indirect prompt injection attacks, where malicious instructions embedded in external data can hijack agent behavior. In this work, we present ReasAlign, a model-level solution to improve safety alignment against indirect prompt injection attacks. The core idea of ReasAlign is to incorporate structured reasoning steps to analyze user queries, detect conflicting instructions, and preserve the continuity of the user's intended tasks to defend against indirect injection attacks. To further ensure reasoning logic and accuracy, we introduce a test-time scaling mechanism with a preference-optimized judge model that scores reasoning steps and selects the best trajectory. Comprehensive evaluations across various benchmarks show that ReasAlign maintains utility comparable to an undefended model while consistently outperforming Meta SecAlign, the strongest prior guardrail. On the representative open-ended CyberSecEval2 benchmark, which includes multiple prompt-injected tasks, ReasAlign achieves 94.6% utility and only 3.6% ASR, far surpassing the state-of-the-art defensive model of Meta SecAlign (56.4% utility and 74.4% ASR). These results demonstrate that ReasAlign achieves the best trade-off between security and utility, establishing a robust and practical defense against prompt injection attacks in real-world agentic systems. Our code and experimental results could be found at https://github.com/leolee99/ReasAlign.
Abstract: We introduce AWED-FiNER, an open-source ecosystem designed to bridge the gap in Fine-grained Named Entity Recognition (FgNER) for 36 global languages spoken by more than 6.6 billion people. While Large Language Models (LLMs) dominate general Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, they often struggle with low-resource languages and fine-grained NLP tasks. AWED-FiNER provides a collection of agentic toolkits, web applications, and several state-of-the-art expert models that provides FgNER solutions across 36 languages. The agentic tools enable to route multilingual text to specialized expert models and fetch FgNER annotations within seconds. The web-based platforms provide ready-to-use FgNER annotation service for non-technical users. Moreover, the collection of language specific extremely small sized open-source state-of-the-art expert models facilitate offline deployment in resource contraint scenerios including edge devices. AWED-FiNER covers languages spoken by over 6.6 billion people, including a specific focus on vulnerable languages such as Bodo, Manipuri, Bishnupriya, and Mizo. The resources can be accessed here: Agentic Tool (https://github.com/PrachuryyaKaushik/AWED-FiNER), Web Application (https://hf.co/spaces/prachuryyaIITG/AWED-FiNER), and 49 Expert Detector Models (https://hf.co/collections/prachuryyaIITG/awed-finer).
Abstract: While LLM-based agents can interact with environments via invoking external tools, their expanded capabilities also amplify security risks. Monitoring step-level tool invocation behaviors in real time and proactively intervening before unsafe execution is critical for agent deployment, yet remains under-explored. In this work, we first construct TS-Bench, a novel benchmark for step-level tool invocation safety detection in LLM agents. We then develop a guardrail model, TS-Guard, using multi-task reinforcement learning. The model proactively detects unsafe tool invocation actions before execution by reasoning over the interaction history. It assesses request harmfulness and action-attack correlations, producing interpretable and generalizable safety judgments and feedback. Furthermore, we introduce TS-Flow, a guardrail-feedback-driven reasoning framework for LLM agents, which reduces harmful tool invocations of ReAct-style agents by 65 percent on average and improves benign task completion by approximately 10 percent under prompt injection attacks.
Abstract: Consistency learning with feature perturbation is a widely used strategy in semi-supervised medical image segmentation. However, many existing perturbation methods rely on dropout, and thus require a careful manual tuning of the dropout rate, which is a sensitive hyperparameter and often difficult to optimize and may lead to suboptimal regularization. To overcome this limitation, we propose VQ-Seg, the first approach to employ vector quantization (VQ) to discretize the feature space and introduce a novel and controllable Quantized Perturbation Module (QPM) that replaces dropout. Our QPM perturbs discrete representations by shuffling the spatial locations of codebook indices, enabling effective and controllable regularization. To mitigate potential information loss caused by quantization, we design a dual-branch architecture where the post-quantization feature space is shared by both image reconstruction and segmentation tasks. Moreover, we introduce a Post-VQ Feature Adapter (PFA) to incorporate guidance from a foundation model (FM), supplementing the high-level semantic information lost during quantization. Furthermore, we collect a large-scale Lung Cancer (LC) dataset comprising 828 CT scans annotated for central-type lung carcinoma. Extensive experiments on the LC dataset and other public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. Code available at: https://github.com/script-Yang/VQ-Seg.
Abstract: The automated extraction of structured questions from paper-based mathematics exams is fundamental to intelligent education, yet remains challenging in real-world settings due to severe visual noise. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on clean documents or generic layout analysis, overlooking both the structural integrity of mathematical problems and the ability of models to actively reject incomplete inputs. We introduce MathDoc, the first benchmark for document-level information extraction from authentic high school mathematics exam papers. MathDoc contains \textbf{3,609} carefully curated questions with real-world artifacts and explicitly includes unrecognizable samples to evaluate active refusal behavior. We propose a multi-dimensional evaluation framework covering stem accuracy, visual similarity, and refusal capability. Experiments on SOTA MLLMs, including Qwen3-VL and Gemini-2.5-Pro, show that although end-to-end models achieve strong extraction performance, they consistently fail to refuse illegible inputs, instead producing confident but invalid outputs. These results highlight a critical gap in current MLLMs and establish MathDoc as a benchmark for assessing model reliability under degraded document conditions. Our project repository is available at \href{https://github.com/winnk123/papers/tree/master}{GitHub repository}
Abstract: Multimodal models excel in English, supported by abundant image-text and audio-text data, but performance drops sharply for other languages due to limited multilingual multimodal resources. Existing solutions rely on machine translation, while advances in multilingual text modeling remain underutilized. We introduce M2M, a lightweight alignment method that learns only a few linear layers--using English text alone--to map multilingual text embeddings into multimodal space. Despite its simplicity, M2M matches baseline performance in English (94.9% Recall@10) and achieves strong zero-shot transfer (89.5% Recall@10 averaged across 11 languages, 10 unseen) on XTD Text-to-Image retrieval. Qualitative t-SNE visualizations show that multilingual embeddings align tightly with multimodal representations, while weight analysis reveals that the transformation reshapes embedding geometry rather than performing trivial rotations. Beyond image-text retrieval, M2M demonstrates robustness across datasets and tasks, extending to Audio-Text retrieval and Text-to-Image generation. We release code and checkpoints (https://github.com/piyushsinghpasi/M2M) along with multilingual evaluation datasets: MSCOCO Multilingual 30K (https://huggingface.co/datasets/piyushsinghpasi/mscoco-multilingual-30k), AudioCaps Multilingual (https://huggingface.co/datasets/piyushsinghpasi/audiocaps-multilingual), and Clotho Multilingual (https://huggingface.co/datasets/piyushsinghpasi/clotho-multilingual).
Abstract: Recent advances in multimodal learning have significantly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs). However, state-of-the-art approaches rely heavily on large-scale human-annotated datasets, which are costly and time-consuming to acquire. To overcome this limitation, we introduce V-Zero, a general post-training framework that facilitates self-improvement using exclusively unlabeled images. V-Zero establishes a co-evolutionary loop by instantiating two distinct roles: a Questioner and a Solver. The Questioner learns to synthesize high-quality, challenging questions by leveraging a dual-track reasoning reward that contrasts intuitive guesses with reasoned results. The Solver is optimized using pseudo-labels derived from majority voting over its own sampled responses. Both roles are trained iteratively via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), driving a cycle of mutual enhancement. Remarkably, without a single human annotation, V-Zero achieves consistent performance gains on Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct, improving visual mathematical reasoning by +1.7 and general vision-centric by +2.6, demonstrating the potential of self-improvement in multimodal systems. Code is available at https://github.com/SatonoDia/V-Zero
Abstract: Content-based recommendation systems (CRSs) utilize content features to predict user-item interactions, serving as essential tools for helping users navigate information-rich web services. However, ensuring the effectiveness of CRSs requires large-scale and even continuous model training to accommodate diverse user preferences, resulting in significant computational costs and resource demands. A promising approach to this challenge is coreset selection, which identifies a small but representative subset of data samples that preserves model quality while reducing training overhead. Yet, the selected coreset is vulnerable to the pervasive noise in user-item interactions, particularly when it is minimally sized. To this end, we propose Noise-aware Coreset Selection (NaCS), a specialized framework for CRSs. NaCS constructs coresets through submodular optimization based on training gradients, while simultaneously correcting noisy labels using a progressively trained model. Meanwhile, we refine the selected coreset by filtering out low-confidence samples through uncertainty quantification, thereby avoid training with unreliable interactions. Through extensive experiments, we show that NaCS produces higher-quality coresets for CRSs while achieving better efficiency than existing coreset selection techniques. Notably, NaCS recovers 93-95\% of full-dataset training performance using merely 1\% of the training data. The source code is available at \href{https://github.com/chenxing1999/nacs}{https://github.com/chenxing1999/nacs}.
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, particularly in solving complex mathematical problems. Recent studies show that distilling long reasoning trajectories can effectively enhance the reasoning performance of small-scale student models. However, teacher-generated reasoning trajectories are often excessively long and structurally complex, making them difficult for student models to learn. This mismatch leads to a gap between the provided supervision signal and the learning capacity of the student model. To address this challenge, we propose Prefix-ALIGNment distillation (P-ALIGN), a framework that fully exploits teacher CoTs for distillation through adaptive prefix alignment. Specifically, P-ALIGN adaptively truncates teacher-generated reasoning trajectories by determining whether the remaining suffix is concise and sufficient to guide the student model. Then, P-ALIGN leverages the teacher-generated prefix to supervise the student model, encouraging effective prefix alignment. Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that P-ALIGN outperforms all baselines by over 3%. Further analysis indicates that the prefixes constructed by P-ALIGN provide more effective supervision signals, while avoiding the negative impact of redundant and uncertain reasoning components. All code is available at https://github.com/NEUIR/P-ALIGN.
Abstract: Underwater imaging is fundamentally challenging due to wavelength-dependent light attenuation, strong scattering from suspended particles, turbidity-induced blur, and non-uniform illumination. These effects impair standard cameras and make ground-truth motion nearly impossible to obtain. On the other hand, event cameras offer microsecond resolution and high dynamic range. Nonetheless, progress on investigating event cameras for underwater environments has been limited due to the lack of datasets that pair realistic underwater optics with accurate optical flow. To address this problem, we introduce the first synthetic underwater benchmark dataset for event-based optical flow derived from physically-based ray-traced RGBD sequences. Using a modern video-to-event pipeline applied to rendered underwater videos, we produce realistic event data streams with dense ground-truth flow, depth, and camera motion. Moreover, we benchmark state-of-the-art learning-based and model-based optical flow prediction methods to understand how underwater light transport affects event formation and motion estimation accuracy. Our dataset establishes a new baseline for future development and evaluation of underwater event-based perception algorithms. The source code and dataset for this project are publicly available at https://robotic-vision-lab.github.io/ueof.
Abstract: We present a hybrid transformer architecture that replaces discrete middle layers with a continuous-depth Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) block, enabling inference-time control over generation attributes via a learned steering signal. Unlike standard transformers that process representations through fixed discrete layers, our approach treats depth as a continuous variable governed by a learned vector field $F_θ(H, τ, u)$, where $u$ is a low-dimensional control signal injected via explicit concatenation. We validate the architecture through four experiments: (1) gradient flow stability with zero exploding/vanishing gradient events, (2) semantic steering achieving 98\%/88\% accuracy for positive/negative sentiment control, (3) continuous interpolation validated by a negligible 0.068\% trajectory divergence between fixed and adaptive solvers, and (4) efficiency benchmarking demonstrating latency parity with standard discrete baselines. Additionally, we show that adaptive ODE solvers reveal geometric structure in the learned dynamics: the control signal partitions the vector field into distinct dynamical regimes with different curvature characteristics. The adjoint method enables $O(1)$ memory training regardless of integration depth. Our results demonstrate that continuous-depth dynamics with learned control signals provide a viable, efficient mechanism for steerable language generation.
Abstract: Many manipulation tasks require careful force modulation. With insufficient force the task may fail, while excessive force could cause damage. The high cost, bulky size and fragility of commercial force/torque (F/T) sensors have limited large-scale, force-aware policy learning. We introduce UMI-FT, a handheld data-collection platform that mounts compact, six-axis force/torque sensors on each finger, enabling finger-level wrench measurements alongside RGB, depth, and pose. Using the multimodal data collected from this device, we train an adaptive compliance policy that predicts position targets, grasp force, and stiffness for execution on standard compliance controllers. In evaluations on three contact-rich, force-sensitive tasks (whiteboard wiping, skewering zucchini, and lightbulb insertion), UMI-FT enables policies that reliably regulate external contact forces and internal grasp forces, outperforming baselines that lack compliance or force sensing. UMI-FT offers a scalable path to learning compliant manipulation from in-the-wild demonstrations. We open-source the hardware and software to facilitate broader adoption at:https://umi-ft.github.io/.
Abstract: Machine learning has achieved state-of-the-art results in network intrusion detection; however, its performance significantly degrades when confronted by a new attack class -- a zero-day attack. In simple terms, classical machine learning-based approaches are adept at identifying attack classes on which they have been previously trained, but struggle with those not included in their training data. One approach to addressing this shortcoming is to utilise anomaly detectors which train exclusively on benign data with the goal of generalising to all attack classes -- both known and zero-day. However, this comes at the expense of a prohibitively high false positive rate. This work proposes a novel contrastive loss function which is able to maintain the advantages of other contrastive learning-based approaches (robustness to imbalanced data) but can also generalise to zero-day attacks. Unlike anomaly detectors, this model learns the distributions of benign traffic using both benign and known malign samples, i.e. other well-known attack classes (not including the zero-day class), and consequently, achieves significant performance improvements. The proposed approach is experimentally verified on the Lycos2017 dataset where it achieves an AUROC improvement of .000065 and .060883 over previous models in known and zero-day attack detection, respectively. Finally, the proposed method is extended to open-set recognition achieving OpenAUC improvements of .170883 over existing approaches.
Abstract: Most existing Large Language Model (LLM)-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) rely on predefined workflows, where human engineers enumerate task states in advance and specify routing rules and contextual injections accordingly. Such workflow-driven designs are essentially rule-based decision trees, which suffer from two fundamental limitations: they require substantial manual effort to anticipate and encode possible task states, and they cannot exhaustively cover the state space of complex real-world tasks. To address these issues, we propose an Information-Flow-Orchestrated Multi-Agent Paradigm via Agent-to-Agent (A2A) Communication from CORAL, in which a dedicated information flow orchestrator continuously monitors task progress and dynamically coordinates other agents through the A2A toolkit using natural language, without relying on predefined workflows. We evaluate our approach on the general-purpose benchmark GAIA, using the representative workflow-based MAS OWL as the baseline while controlling for agent roles and underlying models. Under the pass@1 setting, our method achieves 63.64% accuracy, outperforming OWL's 55.15% by 8.49 percentage points with comparable token consumption. Further case-level analysis shows that our paradigm enables more flexible task monitoring and more robust handling of edge cases. Our implementation is publicly available at: https://github.com/Coral-Protocol/Beyond-Rule-Based-Workflows
Abstract: Real-world health questions from patients often unintentionally embed false assumptions or premises. In such cases, safe medical communication typically involves redirection: addressing the implicit misconception and then responding to the underlying patient context, rather than the original question. While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used by lay users for medical advice, they have not yet been tested for this crucial competency. Therefore, in this work, we investigate how LLMs react to false premises embedded within real-world health questions. We develop a semi-automated pipeline to curate MedRedFlag, a dataset of 1100+ questions sourced from Reddit that require redirection. We then systematically compare responses from state-of-the-art LLMs to those from clinicians. Our analysis reveals that LLMs often fail to redirect problematic questions, even when the problematic premise is detected, and provide answers that could lead to suboptimal medical decision making. Our benchmark and results reveal a novel and substantial gap in how LLMs perform under the conditions of real-world health communication, highlighting critical safety concerns for patient-facing medical AI systems. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/srsambara-1/MedRedFlag.
Abstract: Accurately localizing 3D objects like pedestrians, cyclists, and other vehicles is essential in Autonomous Driving. To ensure high detection performance, Autonomous Vehicles complement RGB cameras with LiDAR sensors, but effectively combining these data sources for 3D object detection remains challenging. We propose LCF3D, a novel sensor fusion framework that combines a 2D object detector on RGB images with a 3D object detector on LiDAR point clouds. By leveraging multimodal fusion principles, we compensate for inaccuracies in the LiDAR object detection network. Our solution combines two key principles: (i) late fusion, to reduce LiDAR False Positives by matching LiDAR 3D detections with RGB 2D detections and filtering out unmatched LiDAR detections; and (ii) cascade fusion, to recover missed objects from LiDAR by generating new 3D frustum proposals corresponding to unmatched RGB detections. Experiments show that LCF3D is beneficial for domain generalization, as it turns out to be successful in handling different sensor configurations between training and testing domains. LCF3D achieves significant improvements over LiDAR-based methods, particularly for challenging categories like pedestrians and cyclists in the KITTI dataset, as well as motorcycles and bicycles in nuScenes. Code can be downloaded from: https://github.com/CarloSgaravatti/LCF3D.
Abstract: Modern logical reasoning with LLMs primarily relies on employing complex interactive frameworks that decompose the reasoning process into subtasks solved through carefully designed prompts or requiring external resources (e.g., symbolic solvers) to exploit their strong logical structures. While interactive approaches introduce additional overhead or depend on external components, which limit their scalability. In this work, we introduce a non-interactive, end-to-end framework for reasoning tasks, enabling reasoning to emerge within the model itself-improving generalization while preserving analyzability without any external resources. We show that introducing structural information into the few-shot prompt activates a subset of attention heads that patterns aligned with logical reasoning operators. Building on this insight, we propose Attention-Aware Intervention (AAI), an inference-time intervention method that reweights attention scores across selected heads identified by their logical patterns. AAI offers an efficient way to steer the model's reasoning toward leveraging prior knowledge through attention modulation. Extensive experiments show that AAI enhances logical reasoning performance across diverse benchmarks, and model architectures, while incurring negligible additional computational overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/phuongnm94/aai_for_logical_reasoning.
Abstract: Punctuation plays a critical role in resolving semantic and structural ambiguity in written language. Machine Translation (MT) systems are now widely applied across diverse domains and languages, including many low-resource settings. In this work, we focus on Marathi, a low- to middle-resource language. We introduce Virām, the first diagnostic benchmark for assessing punctuation robustness in English-to-Marathi machine translation, consisting of 54 manually curated, punctuation-ambiguous instances. We evaluate two primary strategies for enhancing reliability: a pipeline-based restore-then-translate approach and direct fine-tuned on punctuation-varied data. Our results demonstrate that specialized fine-tuned models and pipeline systems significantly improve translation quality over standard baselines on the Virām benchmark. Qualitative analysis reveals that the original model may result in wrong translations leading to wrong interpretations, while fine-tuned models significantly improve overall reliability. Furthermore, we find that current Large Language Models (LLMs) lag behind these task-specific approaches in preserving meaning for punctuation-ambiguous text, thus necessitating further research in this area. The code and dataset is available at https://github.com/KaustubhShejole/Viram_Marathi.
Abstract: This study investigates how to efficiently build a domain-specialized large language model (LLM) for statistics using the lightweight LLaMA-3.2-3B family as the foundation model (FM). We systematically compare three multi-stage training pipelines, starting from a base FM with no instruction-following capability, a base FM augmented with post-hoc instruction tuning, and an instruction-tuned FM with strong general reasoning abilities across continual pretraining, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) preference alignment, and downstream task adaptation. Results show that pipelines beginning with a base FM fail to develop meaningful statistical reasoning, even after extensive instruction tuning, SFT, or RLHF alignment. In contrast, starting from LLaMA-3.2-3B-Instruct enables effective domain specialization. A comprehensive evaluation of SFT variants reveals clear trade-offs between domain expertise and general reasoning ability. We further demonstrate that direct preference optimization provides stable and effective RLHF preference alignment. Finally, we show that downstream fine-tuning must be performed with extremely low intensity to avoid catastrophic forgetting in highly optimized models. The final model, StatLLaMA, achieves strong and balanced performance on benchmarks of mathematical reasoning, common-sense reasoning, and statistical expertise, offering a practical blueprint for developing resource-efficient statistical LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/HuangDLab/StatLLaMA.
Abstract: Online medical consultations generate large volumes of conversational health data that often embed protected health information, requiring robust methods to classify data categories and assign risk levels in line with policies and practice. However, existing approaches lack unified standards and reliable automated methods to fulfill sensitivity classification for such conversational health data. This study presents a large language model-based extraction pipeline, SALP-CG, for classifying and grading privacy risks in online conversational health data. We concluded health-data classification and grading rules in accordance with GB/T 39725-2020. Combining few-shot guidance, JSON Schema constrained decoding, and deterministic high-risk rules, the backend-agnostic extraction pipeline achieves strong category compliance and reliable sensitivity across diverse LLMs. On the MedDialog-CN benchmark, models yields robust entity counts, high schema compliance, and accurate sensitivity grading, while the strongest model attains micro-F1=0.900 for maximum-level prediction. The category landscape stratified by sensitivity shows that Level 2-3 items dominate, enabling re-identification when combined; Level 4-5 items are less frequent but carry outsize harm. SALP-CG reliably helps classify categories and grading sensitivity in online conversational health data across LLMs, offering a practical method for health data governance. Code is available at https://github.com/dommii1218/SALP-CG.
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) tasks require reasoning over complex visual scenes and executing adaptive actions in dynamic environments. While recent studies on reasoning VLAs show that explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) can improve generalization, they suffer from high inference latency due to lengthy reasoning traces. We propose Fast-ThinkAct, an efficient reasoning framework that achieves compact yet performant planning through verbalizable latent reasoning. Fast-ThinkAct learns to reason efficiently with latent CoTs by distilling from a teacher, driven by a preference-guided objective to align manipulation trajectories that transfers both linguistic and visual planning capabilities for embodied control. This enables reasoning-enhanced policy learning that effectively connects compact reasoning to action execution. Extensive experiments across diverse embodied manipulation and reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that Fast-ThinkAct achieves strong performance with up to 89.3\% reduced inference latency over state-of-the-art reasoning VLAs, while maintaining effective long-horizon planning, few-shot adaptation, and failure recovery.
Abstract: Segment Anything 3 (SAM3) has established a powerful foundation that robustly detects, segments, and tracks specified targets in videos. However, in its original implementation, its group-level collective memory selection is suboptimal for complex multi-object scenarios, as it employs a synchronized decision across all concurrent targets conditioned on their average performance, often overlooking individual reliability. To this end, we propose SAM3-DMS, a training-free decoupled strategy that utilizes fine-grained memory selection on individual objects. Experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves robust identity preservation and tracking stability. Notably, our advantage becomes more pronounced with increased target density, establishing a solid foundation for simultaneous multi-target video segmentation in the wild.
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) routers dynamically select optimal models for given inputs. Existing approaches typically assume access to ground-truth labeled data, which is often unavailable in practice, especially when user request distributions are heterogeneous and unknown. We introduce Routing with Generated Data (RGD), a challenging setting in which routers are trained exclusively on generated queries and answers produced from high-level task descriptions by generator LLMs. We evaluate query-answer routers (using both queries and labels) and query-only routers across four diverse benchmarks and 12 models, finding that query-answer routers degrade faster than query-only routers as generator quality decreases. Our analysis reveals two crucial characteristics of effective generators: they must accurately respond to their own questions, and their questions must produce sufficient performance differentiation among the model pool. We then show how filtering for these characteristics can improve the quality of generated data. We further propose CASCAL, a novel query-only router that estimates model correctness through consensus voting and identifies model-specific skill niches via hierarchical clustering. CASCAL is substantially more robust to generator quality, outperforming the best query-answer router by 4.6% absolute accuracy when trained on weak generator data.
Abstract: Deep research systems are widely used for multi-step web research, analysis, and cross-source synthesis, yet their evaluation remains challenging. Existing benchmarks often require annotation-intensive task construction, rely on static evaluation dimensions, or fail to reliably verify facts when citations are missing. To bridge these gaps, we introduce DeepResearchEval, an automated framework for deep research task construction and agentic evaluation. For task construction, we propose a persona-driven pipeline generating realistic, complex research tasks anchored in diverse user profiles, applying a two-stage filter Task Qualification and Search Necessity to retain only tasks requiring multi-source evidence integration and external retrieval. For evaluation, we propose an agentic pipeline with two components: an Adaptive Point-wise Quality Evaluation that dynamically derives task-specific evaluation dimensions, criteria, and weights conditioned on each generated task, and an Active Fact-Checking that autonomously extracts and verifies report statements via web search, even when citations are missing.
Abstract: Identifying individual animals in long-duration videos is essential for behavioral ecology, wildlife monitoring, and livestock management. Traditional methods require extensive manual annotation, while existing self-supervised approaches are computationally demanding and ill-suited for long sequences due to memory constraints and temporal error propagation. We introduce a highly efficient, self-supervised method that reframes animal identification as a global clustering task rather than a sequential tracking problem. Our approach assumes a known, fixed number of individuals within a single video -- a common scenario in practice -- and requires only bounding box detections and the total count. By sampling pairs of frames, using a frozen pre-trained backbone, and employing a self-bootstrapping mechanism with the Hungarian algorithm for in-batch pseudo-label assignment, our method learns discriminative features without identity labels. We adapt a Binary Cross Entropy loss from vision-language models, enabling state-of-the-art accuracy ($>$97\%) while consuming less than 1 GB of GPU memory per batch -- an order of magnitude less than standard contrastive methods. Evaluated on challenging real-world datasets (3D-POP pigeons and 8-calves feeding videos), our framework matches or surpasses supervised baselines trained on over 1,000 labeled frames, effectively removing the manual annotation bottleneck. This work enables practical, high-accuracy animal identification on consumer-grade hardware, with broad applicability in resource-constrained research settings. All code written for this paper are \href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/tonyFang04/8-calves}{here}.
Abstract: Large-scale optimization is a key backbone of modern business decision-making. However, building these models is often labor-intensive and time-consuming. We address this by proposing LEAN-LLM-OPT, a LightwEight AgeNtic workflow construction framework for LLM-assisted large-scale OPTimization auto-formulation. LEAN-LLM-OPT takes as input a problem description together with associated datasets and orchestrates a team of LLM agents to produce an optimization formulation. Specifically, upon receiving a query, two upstream LLM agents dynamically construct a workflow that specifies, step-by-step, how optimization models for similar problems can be formulated. A downstream LLM agent then follows this workflow to generate the final output. The agentic workflow leverages common modeling practices to standardize the modeling process into a sequence of structured sub-tasks, offloading mechanical data-handling operations to auxiliary tools. This reduces the LLM's burden in planning and data handling, allowing us to exploit its flexibility to address unstructured components. Extensive simulations show that LEAN-LLM-OPT, instantiated with GPT-4.1 and the open source gpt-oss-20B, achieves strong performance on large-scale optimization modeling tasks and is competitive with state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, in a Singapore Airlines choice-based revenue management use case, LEAN-LLM-OPT demonstrates practical value by achieving leading performance across a range of scenarios. Along the way, we introduce Large-Scale-OR and Air-NRM, the first comprehensive benchmarks for large-scale optimization auto-formulation. The code and data of this work is available at https://github.com/CoraLiang01/lean-llm-opt.
Abstract: Accurate and early perception of potential intrusion targets is essential for ensuring the safety of railway transportation systems. However, most existing systems focus narrowly on object classification within fixed visual scopes and apply rule-based heuristics to determine intrusion status, often overlooking targets that pose latent intrusion risks. Anticipating such risks requires the cognition of spatial context and temporal dynamics for the object of interest (OOI), which presents challenges for conventional visual models. To facilitate deep intrusion perception, we introduce a novel benchmark, CogRail, which integrates curated open-source datasets with cognitively driven question-answer annotations to support spatio-temporal reasoning and prediction. Building upon this benchmark, we conduct a systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art visual-language models (VLMs) using multimodal prompts to identify their strengths and limitations in this domain. Furthermore, we fine-tune VLMs for better performance and propose a joint fine-tuning framework that integrates three core tasks, position perception, movement prediction, and threat analysis, facilitating effective adaptation of general-purpose foundation models into specialized models tailored for cognitive intrusion perception. Extensive experiments reveal that current large-scale multimodal models struggle with the complex spatial-temporal reasoning required by the cognitive intrusion perception task, underscoring the limitations of existing foundation models in this safety-critical domain. In contrast, our proposed joint fine-tuning framework significantly enhances model performance by enabling targeted adaptation to domain-specific reasoning demands, highlighting the advantages of structured multi-task learning in improving both accuracy and interpretability. Code will be available at https://github.com/Hub-Tian/CogRail.
Abstract: Experimental robot optimization often requires evaluating each candidate policy for seconds to minutes. The chosen evaluation time influences optimization because of a speed-accuracy tradeoff: shorter evaluations enable faster iteration, but are also more subject to noise. Here, we introduce a supplement to the CMA-ES optimization algorithm, named Adaptive Sampling CMA-ES (AS-CMA), which assigns sampling time to candidates based on predicted sorting difficulty, aiming to achieve consistent precision. We compared AS-CMA to CMA-ES and Bayesian optimization using a range of static sampling times in four simulated cost landscapes. AS-CMA converged on 98% of all runs without adjustment to its tunable parameter, and converged 24-65% faster and with 29-76% lower total cost than each landscape's best CMA-ES static sampling time. As compared to Bayesian optimization, AS-CMA converged more efficiently and reliably in complex landscapes, while in simpler landscapes, AS-CMA was less efficient but equally reliable. We deployed AS-CMA in an exoskeleton optimization experiment and found the optimizer's behavior was consistent with expectations. These results indicate that AS-CMA can improve optimization efficiency in the presence of noise while minimally affecting optimization setup complexity and tuning requirements.
Abstract: We propose OpenVoxel, a training-free algorithm for grouping and captioning sparse voxels for the open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding tasks. Given the sparse voxel rasterization (SVR) model obtained from multi-view images of a 3D scene, our OpenVoxel is able to produce meaningful groups that describe different objects in the scene. Also, by leveraging powerful Vision Language Models (VLMs) and Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), our OpenVoxel successfully build an informative scene map by captioning each group, enabling further 3D scene understanding tasks such as open-vocabulary segmentation (OVS) or referring expression segmentation (RES). Unlike previous methods, our method is training-free and does not introduce embeddings from a CLIP/BERT text encoder. Instead, we directly proceed with text-to-text search using MLLMs. Through extensive experiments, our method demonstrates superior performance compared to recent studies, particularly in complex referring expression segmentation (RES) tasks. The code will be open.
Abstract: Existing retrieval benchmarks primarily consist of text-based queries where keyword or semantic matching is usually sufficient. Many real-world queries contain multimodal elements, particularly, images such as diagrams, charts, and screenshots that require intensive reasoning to identify relevant documents. To address this gap, we introduce MM-BRIGHT, the first multimodal benchmark for reasoning-intensive retrieval. Our dataset consists of 2,803 real-world queries spanning 29 diverse technical domains, with four tasks of increasing complexity: text-to-text, multimodal-to-text, multimodal-to-image, and multimodal-to-multimodal retrieval. Extensive evaluation reveals that state-of-the-art models struggle across all tasks: BM25 achieves only 8.5 nDCG@10 on text-only retrieval, while the best multimodal model Nomic-Vision reaches just 27.6 nDCG@10 on multimodal-to-text retrieval actually underperforming the best text-only model (DiVeR: 32.2). These results highlight substantial headroom and position MM-BRIGHT as a testbed for next-generation retrieval models that better integrate visual reasoning. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/mm-bright/MM-BRIGHT. See also our official website: https://mm-bright.github.io/.
Abstract: This paper introduces a novel application of Video Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (V-JEPAs) for Facial Expression Recognition (FER). Departing from conventional pre-training methods for video understanding that rely on pixel-level reconstructions, V-JEPAs learn by predicting embeddings of masked regions from the embeddings of unmasked regions. This enables the trained encoder to not capture irrelevant information about a given video like the color of a region of pixels in the background. Using a pre-trained V-JEPA video encoder, we train shallow classifiers using the RAVDESS and CREMA-D datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance on RAVDESS and outperforming all other vision-based methods on CREMA-D (+1.48 WAR). Furthermore, cross-dataset evaluations reveal strong generalization capabilities, demonstrating the potential of purely embedding-based pre-training approaches to advance FER. We release our code at https://github.com/lennarteingunia/vjepa-for-fer.
Abstract: Existing temporal QA benchmarks focus on simple fact-seeking queries from news corpora, while reasoning-intensive retrieval benchmarks lack temporal grounding. However, real-world information needs often require reasoning about temporal evolution and synthesizing evidence across time periods. We introduce TEMPO, the first benchmark combining temporal reasoning with reasoning-intensive retrieval across 13 domains. TEMPO features: (1) 1,730 complex queries requiring deep temporal reasoning such as tracking changes, identifying trends, or comparing cross-period evidence; (2) step-wise retrieval planning with 3,976 decomposed steps and gold documents mapped to each step for multi-hop evaluation; and (3) novel temporal metrics including Temporal Coverage@k and Temporal Precision@k measuring whether results span required time periods. Evaluation of 12 retrieval systems reveals substantial challenges: the best model (DiVeR) achieves only 32.0 NDCG@10 and 71.4\% Temporal Coverage@10, demonstrating difficulty in retrieving temporally complete evidence. We believe TEMPO provides a challenging benchmark for improving temporal reasoning in retrieval and RAG systems. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/tempo-bench/Tempo. See also our official website: https://tempo-bench.github.io/.
Abstract: Deep learning models define the state-of-the-art in Automatic Drum Transcription (ADT), yet their performance is contingent upon large-scale, paired audio-MIDI datasets, which are scarce. Existing workarounds that use synthetic data often introduce a significant domain gap, as they typically rely on low-fidelity SoundFont libraries that lack acoustic diversity. While high-quality one-shot samples offer a better alternative, they are not available in a standardized, large-scale format suitable for training. This paper introduces a new paradigm for ADT that circumvents the need for paired audio-MIDI training data. Our primary contribution is a semi-supervised method to automatically curate a large and diverse corpus of one-shot drum samples from unlabeled audio sources. We then use this corpus to synthesize a high-quality dataset from MIDI files alone, which we use to train a sequence-to-sequence transcription model. We evaluate our model on the ENST and MDB test sets, where it achieves new state-of-the-art results, significantly outperforming both fully supervised methods and previous synthetic-data approaches. The code for reproducing our experiments is publicly available at https://github.com/pier-maker92/ADT_STR
Abstract: To teach robots complex manipulation tasks, it is now a common practice to fine-tune a pre-trained vision-language-action model (VLA) on task-specific data. However, since this recipe updates existing representations, it is unsuitable for long-term operation in the real world, where robots must continually adapt to new tasks and environments while retaining the knowledge they have already acquired. Existing continual learning methods for robotics commonly require storing previous data (exemplars), struggle with long task sequences, or rely on task identifiers for deployment. To address these limitations, we propose CLARE, a general, parameter-efficient framework for exemplar-free continual learning with VLAs. CLARE introduces lightweight modular adapters into selected feedforward layers and autonomously expands the model only where necessary when learning a new task, guided by layer-wise feature similarity. During deployment, an autoencoder-based routing mechanism dynamically activates the most relevant adapters without requiring task labels. Through extensive experiments on the LIBERO benchmark, we show that CLARE achieves high performance on new tasks without catastrophic forgetting of earlier tasks, significantly outperforming even exemplar-based methods. Code and data are available at https://tum-lsy.github.io/clare.
Abstract: Object detectors often perform well in-distribution, yet degrade sharply on a different benchmark. We study cross-dataset object detection (CD-OD) through a lens of setting specificity. We group benchmarks into setting-agnostic datasets with diverse everyday scenes and setting-specific datasets tied to a narrow environment, and evaluate a standard detector family across all train--test pairs. This reveals a clear structure in CD-OD: transfer within the same setting type is relatively stable, while transfer across setting types drops substantially and is often asymmetric. The most severe breakdowns occur when transferring from specific sources to agnostic targets, and persist after open-label alignment, indicating that domain shift dominates in the hardest regimes. To disentangle domain shift from label mismatch, we compare closed-label transfer with an open-label protocol that maps predicted classes to the nearest target label using CLIP similarity. Open-label evaluation yields consistent but bounded gains, and many corrected cases correspond to semantic near-misses supported by the image evidence. Overall, we provide a principled characterization of CD-OD under setting specificity and practical guidance for evaluating detectors under distribution shift. Code will be released at \href{[https://github.com/Ritabrata04/cdod-icpr.git}{https://github.com/Ritabrata04/cdod-icpr}.
Abstract: The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has fostered diverse paradigms for automated slide generation, ranging from code-driven layouts to image-centric synthesis. However, evaluating these heterogeneous systems remains challenging, as existing protocols often struggle to provide comparable scores across architectures or rely on uncalibrated judgments. In this paper, we introduce SlidesGen-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate slide generation through a lens of three core principles: universality, quantification, and reliability. First, to establish a unified evaluation framework, we ground our analysis in the visual domain, treating terminal outputs as renderings to remain agnostic to the underlying generation method. Second, we propose a computational approach that quantitatively assesses slides across three distinct dimensions - Content, Aesthetics, and Editability - offering reproducible metrics where prior works relied on subjective or reference-dependent proxies. Finally, to ensure high correlation with human preference, we construct the Slides-Align1.5k dataset, a human preference aligned dataset covering slides from nine mainstream generation systems across seven scenarios. Our experiments demonstrate that SlidesGen-Bench achieves a higher degree of alignment with human judgment than existing evaluation pipelines. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/YunqiaoYang/SlidesGen-Bench.
Abstract: Semantic understanding of popularity bias is a crucial yet underexplored challenge in recommender systems, where popular items are often favored at the expense of niche content. Most existing debiasing methods treat the semantic understanding of popularity bias as a matter of diversity enhancement or long-tail coverage, neglecting the deeper semantic layer that embodies the causal origins of the bias itself. Consequently, such shallow interpretations limit both their debiasing effectiveness and recommendation accuracy. In this paper, we propose FairLRM, a novel framework that bridges the gap in the semantic understanding of popularity bias with Recommendation via Large Language Model (RecLLM). FairLRM decomposes popularity bias into item-side and user-side components, using structured instruction-based prompts to enhance the model's comprehension of both global item distributions and individual user preferences. Unlike traditional methods that rely on surface-level features such as "diversity" or "debiasing", FairLRM improves the model's ability to semantically interpret and address the underlying bias. Through empirical evaluation, we show that FairLRM significantly enhances both fairness and recommendation accuracy, providing a more semantically aware and trustworthy approach to enhance the semantic understanding of popularity bias. The implementation is available at https://github.com/LuoRenqiang/FairLRM.
Abstract: Graph unlearning has emerged as a critical mechanism for supporting sustainable and privacy-preserving social networks, enabling models to remove the influence of deleted nodes and thereby better safeguard user information. However, we observe that existing graph unlearning techniques insufficiently protect sensitive attributes, often leading to degraded algorithmic fairness compared with traditional graph learning methods. To address this gap, we introduce FairGU, a fairness-aware graph unlearning framework designed to preserve both utility and fairness during the unlearning process. FairGU integrates a dedicated fairness-aware module with effective data protection strategies, ensuring that sensitive attributes are neither inadvertently amplified nor structurally exposed when nodes are removed. Through extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets, we demonstrate that FairGU consistently outperforms state-of-the-art graph unlearning methods and fairness-enhanced graph learning baselines in terms of both accuracy and fairness metrics. Our findings highlight a previously overlooked risk in current unlearning practices and establish FairGU as a robust and equitable solution for the next generation of socially sustainable networked systems. The codes are available at https://github.com/LuoRenqiang/FairGU.
Abstract: Recent video diffusion models generate photorealistic, temporally coherent videos, yet they fall short as reliable world models for autonomous driving, where structured motion and physically consistent interactions are essential. Adapting these generalist video models to driving domains has shown promise but typically requires massive domain-specific data and costly fine-tuning. We propose an efficient adaptation framework that converts generalist video diffusion models into controllable driving world models with minimal supervision. The key idea is to decouple motion learning from appearance synthesis. First, the model is adapted to predict structured motion in a simplified form: videos of skeletonized agents and scene elements, focusing learning on physical and social plausibility. Then, the same backbone is reused to synthesize realistic RGB videos conditioned on these motion sequences, effectively "dressing" the motion with texture and lighting. This two-stage process mirrors a reasoning-rendering paradigm: first infer dynamics, then render appearance. Our experiments show this decoupled approach is exceptionally efficient: adapting SVD, we match prior SOTA models with less than 6% of their compute. Scaling to LTX, our MAD-LTX model outperforms all open-source competitors, and supports a comprehensive suite of text, ego, and object controls. Project page: https://vita-epfl.github.io/MAD-World-Model/
Abstract: Spatial reasoning has emerged as a critical capability for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), drawing increasing attention and rapid advancement. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on single-step perception-to-judgment tasks, leaving scenarios requiring complex visual-spatial logical chains significantly underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce Video-MSR, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate Multi-hop Spatial Reasoning (MSR) in dynamic video scenarios. Video-MSR systematically probes MSR capabilities through four distinct tasks: Constrained Localization, Chain-based Reference Retrieval, Route Planning, and Counterfactual Physical Deduction. Our benchmark comprises 3,052 high-quality video instances with 4,993 question-answer pairs, constructed via a scalable, visually-grounded pipeline combining advanced model generation with rigorous human verification. Through a comprehensive evaluation of 20 state-of-the-art MLLMs, we uncover significant limitations, revealing that while models demonstrate proficiency in surface-level perception, they exhibit distinct performance drops in MSR tasks, frequently suffering from spatial disorientation and hallucination during multi-step deductions. To mitigate these shortcomings and empower models with stronger MSR capabilities, we further curate MSR-9K, a specialized instruction-tuning dataset, and fine-tune Qwen-VL, achieving a +7.82% absolute improvement on Video-MSR. Our results underscore the efficacy of multi-hop spatial instruction data and establish Video-MSR as a vital foundation for future research. The code and data will be available at https://github.com/ruiz-nju/Video-MSR.
Abstract: Osteosarcoma (OS) is an aggressive primary bone malignancy. Accurate histopathological assessment of viable versus non-viable tumor regions after neoadjuvant chemotherapy is critical for prognosis and treatment planning, yet manual evaluation remains labor-intensive, subjective, and prone to inter-observer variability. Recent advances in digital pathology have enabled automated necrosis quantification. Evaluating on test data, independently sampled on patient-level, revealed that the deep learning model performance dropped significantly from the tile-level generalization ability reported in previous studies. First, this work proposes the use of radiomic features as additional input in model training. We show that, despite that they are derived from the images, such a multimodal input effectively improved the classification performance, in addition to its added benefits in interpretability. Second, this work proposes to optimize two binary classification tasks with hierarchical classes (i.e. tumor-vs-non-tumor and viable-vs-non-viable), as opposed to the alternative ``flat'' three-class classification task (i.e. non-tumor, non-viable tumor, viable tumor), thereby enabling a hierarchical loss. We show that such a hierarchical loss, with trainable weightings between the two tasks, the per-class performance can be improved significantly. Using the TCIA OS Tumor Assessment dataset, we experimentally demonstrate the benefits from each of the proposed new approaches and their combination, setting a what we consider new state-of-the-art performance on this open dataset for this application. Code and trained models: https://github.com/YaxiiC/RadiomicsOS.git.
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge. Recently, some works have incorporated iterative knowledge accumulation processes into RAG models to progressively accumulate and refine query-related knowledge, thereby constructing more comprehensive knowledge representations. However, these iterative processes often lack a coherent organizational structure, which limits the construction of more comprehensive and cohesive knowledge representations. To address this, we propose PAGER, a page-driven autonomous knowledge representation framework for RAG. PAGER first prompts an LLM to construct a structured cognitive outline for a given question, which consists of multiple slots representing a distinct knowledge aspect. Then, PAGER iteratively retrieves and refines relevant documents to populate each slot, ultimately constructing a coherent page that serves as contextual input for guiding answer generation. Experiments on multiple knowledge-intensive benchmarks and backbone models show that PAGER consistently outperforms all RAG baselines. Further analyses demonstrate that PAGER constructs higher-quality and information-dense knowledge representations, better mitigates knowledge conflicts, and enables LLMs to leverage external knowledge more effectively. All code is available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/PAGER.
Abstract: Graph Transformers (GTs) are increasingly applied to social network analysis, yet their deployment is often constrained by fairness concerns. This issue is particularly critical in incomplete social networks, where sensitive attributes are frequently missing due to privacy and ethical restrictions. Existing solutions commonly generate these incomplete attributes, which may introduce additional biases and further compromise user privacy. To address this challenge, FairGE (Fair Graph Encoding) is introduced as a fairness-aware framework for GTs in incomplete social networks. Instead of generating sensitive attributes, FairGE encodes fairness directly through spectral graph theory. By leveraging the principal eigenvector to represent structural information and padding incomplete sensitive attributes with zeros to maintain independence, FairGE ensures fairness without data reconstruction. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that the method suppresses the influence of non-principal spectral components, thereby enhancing fairness. Extensive experiments on seven real-world social network datasets confirm that FairGE achieves at least a 16% improvement in both statistical parity and equality of opportunity compared with state-of-the-art baselines. The source code is shown in https://github.com/LuoRenqiang/FairGE.
Abstract: OpenStreetMap (OSM) has transitioned from a pioneering volunteered geographic information (VGI) project into a global, multi-disciplinary research nexus. This study presents a bibliometric and systematic analysis of the OSM research landscape, examining its development trajectory and key driving forces. By evaluating 1,926 publications from the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection and 782 State of the Map (SotM) presentations up to June 2024, we quantify publication growth, collaboration patterns, and thematic evolution. Results demonstrate simultaneous consolidation and diversification within the field. While a stable core of contributors continues to anchor OSM research, themes have shifted from initial concerns over data production and quality toward advanced analytical and applied uses. Comparative analysis of OSM-related research in WoS and SotM reveals distinct but complementary agendas between scholars and the OSM community. Building on these findings, we identify six emerging research directions and discuss how evolving partnerships among academia, the OSM community, and industry are poised to shape the future of OSM research. This study establishes a structured reference for understanding the state of OSM studies and offers strategic pathways for navigating its future trajectory.The data and code are available at https://github.com/ya0-sun/OSMbib.
Abstract: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) plays a vital role in clinical diagnostics, yet it remains hindered by long acquisition times and motion artifacts. Multi-contrast MRI reconstruction has emerged as a promising direction by leveraging complementary information from fully-sampled reference scans. However, existing approaches suffer from three major limitations: (1) superficial reference fusion strategies, such as simple concatenation, (2) insufficient utilization of the complementary information provided by the reference contrast, and (3) fixed under-sampling patterns. We propose an efficient and interpretable frequency error-guided reconstruction framework to tackle these issues. We first employ a conditional diffusion model to learn a Frequency Error Prior (FEP), which is then incorporated into a unified framework for jointly optimizing both the under-sampling pattern and the reconstruction network. The proposed reconstruction model employs a model-driven deep unfolding framework that jointly exploits frequency- and image-domain information. In addition, a spatial alignment module and a reference feature decomposition strategy are incorporated to improve reconstruction quality and bridge model-based optimization with data-driven learning for improved physical interpretability. Comprehensive validation across multiple imaging modalities, acceleration rates (4-30x), and sampling schemes demonstrates consistent superiority over state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative metrics and visual quality. All codes are available at https://github.com/fangxinming/JUF-MRI.
Abstract: Collaborative Filtering (CF) remains the cornerstone of modern recommender systems, with dense embedding--based methods dominating current practice. However, these approaches suffer from a critical limitation: our theoretical analysis reveals a fundamental signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) ceiling when modeling unpopular items, where parameter-based dense models experience diminishing SNR under severe data sparsity. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose SaD (Sparse and Dense), a unified framework that integrates the semantic expressiveness of dense embeddings with the structural reliability of sparse interaction patterns. We theoretically show that aligning these dual views yields a strictly superior global SNR. Concretely, SaD introduces a lightweight bidirectional alignment mechanism: the dense view enriches the sparse view by injecting semantic correlations, while the sparse view regularizes the dense model through explicit structural signals. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, under this dual-view alignment, even a simple matrix factorization--style dense model can achieve state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, SaD is plug-and-play and can be seamlessly applied to a wide range of existing recommender models, highlighting the enduring power of collaborative filtering when leveraged from dual perspectives. Further evaluations on real-world benchmarks show that SaD consistently outperforms strong baselines, ranking first on the BarsMatch leaderboard. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/harris26-G/SaD.
Abstract: With the rapid advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), their potential has gained significant attention in Chinese Classical Studies (CCS). While existing research primarily focuses on text and visual modalities, the audio corpus within this domain remains largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Multi-task Classical Chinese Literary Genre Audio Corpus (MCGA), a 119-hour corpus comprising 22,000 audio samples. It encompasses a diverse range of literary genres across six tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Speech-to-Text Translation (S2TT), Speech Emotion Captioning (SEC), Spoken Question Answering (SQA), Speech Understanding (SU), and Speech Reasoning (SR). Through the evaluation of ten MLLMs, our experimental results demonstrate that current MLLMs still face substantial challenges on the MCGA test set. Furthermore, we introduce a domain-specific metric for SEC and a metric to measure the consistency between speech and text capabilities. We release MCGA to the public to facilitate the development of more robust MLLMs. MCGA Corpus: https://github.com/yxduir/MCGA
Abstract: Delineating wildfire affected areas using satellite imagery remains challenging due to irregular and spatially heterogeneous spectral changes across the electromagnetic spectrum. While recent deep learning approaches achieve high accuracy when high-resolution multispectral data are available, their applicability in operational settings, where a quick delineation of the burn scar shortly after a wildfire incident is required, is limited by the trade-off between spatial resolution and temporal revisit frequency of current satellite systems. To address this limitation, we propose a novel deep learning model, namely BAM-MRCD, which employs multi-resolution, multi-source satellite imagery (MODIS and Sentinel-2) for the timely production of detailed burnt area maps with high spatial and temporal resolution. Our model manages to detect even small scale wildfires with high accuracy, surpassing similar change detection models as well as solid baselines. All data and code are available in the GitHub repository: https://github.com/Orion-AI-Lab/BAM-MRCD.
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) Agents exhibit inherent reasoning abilities through the collaboration of multiple tools. However, during agent inference, existing methods often suffer from (i) locally myopic generation, due to the absence of lookahead, and (ii) trajectory instability, where minor early errors can escalate into divergent reasoning paths. These issues make it difficult to balance global effectiveness and computational efficiency. To address these two issues, we propose meta-adaptive exploration with LLM agents https://github.com/exoskeletonzj/MAXS, a meta-adaptive reasoning framework based on LLM Agents that flexibly integrates tool execution and reasoning planning. MAXS employs a lookahead strategy to extend reasoning paths a few steps ahead, estimating the advantage value of tool usage, and combines step consistency variance and inter-step trend slopes to jointly select stable, consistent, and high-value reasoning steps. Additionally, we introduce a trajectory convergence mechanism that controls computational cost by halting further rollouts once path consistency is achieved, enabling a balance between resource efficiency and global effectiveness in multi-tool reasoning. We conduct extensive empirical studies across three base models (MiMo-VL-7B, Qwen2.5-VL-7B, Qwen2.5-VL-32B) and five datasets, demonstrating that MAXS consistently outperforms existing methods in both performance and inference efficiency. Further analysis confirms the effectiveness of our lookahead strategy and tool usage.
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for toxicity assessment in online moderation systems, where fairness across demographic groups is essential for equitable treatment. However, LLMs often produce inconsistent toxicity judgements for subtle expressions, particularly those involving implicit hate speech, revealing underlying biases that are difficult to correct through standard training. This raises a key question that existing approaches often overlook: when should corrective mechanisms be invoked to ensure fair and reliable assessments? To address this, we propose FairToT, an inference-time framework that enhances LLM fairness through prompt-guided toxicity assessment. FairToT identifies cases where demographic-related variation is likely to occur and determines when additional assessment should be applied. In addition, we introduce two interpretable fairness indicators that detect such cases and improve inference consistency without modifying model parameters. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that FairToT reduces group-level disparities while maintaining stable and reliable toxicity predictions, demonstrating that inference-time refinement offers an effective and practical approach for fairness improvement in LLM-based toxicity assessment systems. The source code can be found at https://aisuko.github.io/fair-tot/.
Abstract: The prevailing post-training paradigm for Large Reasoning Models (LRMs)--Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL)--suffers from an intrinsic optimization mismatch: the rigid supervision inherent in SFT induces distributional collapse, thereby exhausting the exploration space necessary for subsequent RL. In this paper, we reformulate SFT within a unified post-training framework and propose Gibbs Initialization with Finite Temperature (GIFT). We characterize standard SFT as a degenerate zero-temperature limit that suppresses base priors. Conversely, GIFT incorporates supervision as a finite-temperature energy potential, establishing a distributional bridge that ensures objective consistency throughout the post-training pipeline. Our experiments demonstrate that GIFT significantly outperforms standard SFT and other competitive baselines when utilized for RL initialization, providing a mathematically principled pathway toward achieving global optimality in post-training. Our code is available at https://github.com/zzy1127/GIFT.
Abstract: Purpose: Myocardium segmentation in echocardiography videos is a challenging task due to low contrast, noise, and anatomical variability. Traditional deep learning models either process frames independently, ignoring temporal information, or rely on memory-based feature propagation, which accumulates error over time. Methods: We propose Point-Seg, a transformer-based segmentation framework that integrates point tracking as a temporal cue to ensure stable and consistent segmentation of myocardium across frames. Our method leverages a point-tracking module trained on a synthetic echocardiography dataset to track key anatomical landmarks across video sequences. These tracked trajectories provide an explicit motion-aware signal that guides segmentation, reducing drift and eliminating the need for memory-based feature accumulation. Additionally, we incorporate a temporal smoothing loss to further enhance temporal consistency across frames. Results: We evaluate our approach on both public and private echocardiography datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that Point-Seg has statistically similar accuracy in terms of Dice to state-of-the-art segmentation models in high quality echo data, while it achieves better segmentation accuracy in lower quality echo with improved temporal stability. Furthermore, Point-Seg has the key advantage of pixel-level myocardium motion information as opposed to other segmentation methods. Such information is essential in the computation of other downstream tasks such as myocardial strain measurement and regional wall motion abnormality detection. Conclusion: Point-Seg demonstrates that point tracking can serve as an effective temporal cue for consistent video segmentation, offering a reliable and generalizable approach for myocardium segmentation in echocardiography videos. The code is available at https://github.com/DeepRCL/PointSeg.
Abstract: The rapid development of generative AI has brought value- and ethics-related risks to the forefront, making value safety a critical concern while a unified consensus remains lacking. In this work, we propose an internationally inclusive and resilient unified value framework, the GenAI Value Safety Scale (GVS-Scale): Grounded in a lifecycle-oriented perspective, we develop a taxonomy of GenAI value safety risks and construct the GenAI Value Safety Incident Repository (GVSIR), and further derive the GVS-Scale through grounded theory and operationalize it via the GenAI Value Safety Benchmark (GVS-Bench). Experiments on mainstream text generation models reveal substantial variation in value safety performance across models and value categories, indicating uneven and fragmented value alignment in current systems. Our findings highlight the importance of establishing shared safety foundations through dialogue and advancing technical safety mechanisms beyond reactive constraints toward more flexible approaches. Data and evaluation guidelines are available at https://github.com/acl2026/GVS-Bench. This paper includes examples that may be offensive or harmful.
Abstract: Accurately localizing and segmenting relevant objects from optical remote sensing images (ORSIs) is critical for advancing remote sensing applications. Existing methods are typically built upon moderate-scale pre-trained models and employ diverse optimization strategies to achieve promising performance under full-parameter fine-tuning. In fact, deeper and larger-scale foundation models can provide stronger support for performance improvement. However, due to their massive number of parameters, directly adopting full-parameter fine-tuning leads to pronounced training difficulties, such as excessive GPU memory consumption and high computational costs, which result in extremely limited exploration of large-scale models in existing works. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic wavelet expert-guided fine-tuning paradigm with fewer trainable parameters, dubbed WEFT, which efficiently adapts large-scale foundation models to ORSIs segmentation tasks by leveraging the guidance of wavelet experts. Specifically, we introduce a task-specific wavelet expert extractor to model wavelet experts from different perspectives and dynamically regulate their outputs, thereby generating trainable features enriched with task-specific information for subsequent fine-tuning. Furthermore, we construct an expert-guided conditional adapter that first enhances the fine-grained perception of frozen features for specific tasks by injecting trainable features, and then iteratively updates the information of both types of feature, allowing for efficient fine-tuning. Extensive experiments show that our WEFT not only outperforms 21 state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on three ORSIs datasets, but also achieves optimal results in camouflage, natural, and medical scenarios. The source code is available at: https://github.com/CSYSI/WEFT.
Abstract: Multi-constraint planning involves identifying, evaluating, and refining candidate plans while satisfying multiple, potentially conflicting constraints. Existing large language model (LLM) approaches face fundamental limitations in this domain. Pure reasoning paradigms, which rely on long natural language chains, are prone to inconsistency, error accumulation, and prohibitive cost as constraints compound. Conversely, LLMs combined with coding- or solver-based strategies lack flexibility: they often generate problem-specific code from scratch or depend on fixed solvers, failing to capture generalizable logic across diverse problems. To address these challenges, we introduce the Scalable COde Planning Engine (SCOPE), a framework that disentangles query-specific reasoning from generic code execution. By separating reasoning from execution, SCOPE produces solver functions that are consistent, deterministic, and reusable across queries while requiring only minimal changes to input parameters. SCOPE achieves state-of-the-art performance while lowering cost and latency. For example, with GPT-4o, it reaches 93.1% success on TravelPlanner, a 61.6% gain over the best baseline (CoT) while cutting inference cost by 1.4x and time by ~4.67x. Code is available at https://github.com/DerrickGXD/SCOPE.
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance reasoning capabilities through test-time scaling by generating multiple traces. However, the combination of lengthy reasoning traces with multiple sampling introduces substantial computation and high end-to-end latency. Prior work on accelerating this process has relied on similarity-based or confidence-based pruning, but these signals do not reliably indicate trace quality. To address these limitations, we propose STEP: Step-level Trace Evaluation and Pruning, a novel pruning framework that evaluates reasoning steps using hidden states and dynamically prunes unpromising traces during generation. We train a lightweight step scorer to estimate trace quality, and design a GPU memory-aware pruning strategy that triggers pruning as the GPU memory is saturated by KV cache to reduce end-to-end latency. Experiments across challenging reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that STEP reduces end-to-end inference latency by 45%-70% on average compared to self-consistency while also improving reasoning accuracy. Our code is released at: https://github.com/Supercomputing-System-AI-Lab/STEP
Abstract: In this report, we introduce DASD-4B-Thinking, a lightweight yet highly capable, fully open-source reasoning model. It achieves SOTA performance among open-source models of comparable scale across challenging benchmarks in mathematics, scientific reasoning, and code generation -- even outperforming several larger models. We begin by critically reexamining a widely adopted distillation paradigm in the community: SFT on teacher-generated responses, also known as sequence-level distillation. Although a series of recent works following this scheme have demonstrated remarkable efficiency and strong empirical performance, they are primarily grounded in the SFT perspective. Consequently, these approaches focus predominantly on designing heuristic rules for SFT data filtering, while largely overlooking the core principle of distillation itself -- enabling the student model to learn the teacher's full output distribution so as to inherit its generalization capability. Specifically, we identify three critical limitations in current practice: i) Inadequate representation of the teacher's sequence-level distribution; ii) Misalignment between the teacher's output distribution and the student's learning capacity; and iii) Exposure bias arising from teacher-forced training versus autoregressive inference. In summary, these shortcomings reflect a systemic absence of explicit teacher-student interaction throughout the distillation process, leaving the essence of distillation underexploited. To address these issues, we propose several methodological innovations that collectively form an enhanced sequence-level distillation training pipeline. Remarkably, DASD-4B-Thinking obtains competitive results using only 448K training samples -- an order of magnitude fewer than those employed by most existing open-source efforts. To support community research, we publicly release our models and the training dataset.
Abstract: Humanoid robot manipulation is a crucial research area for executing diverse human-level tasks, involving high-level semantic reasoning and low-level action generation. However, precise scene understanding and sample-efficient learning from human demonstrations remain critical challenges, severely hindering the applicability and generalizability of existing frameworks. This paper presents a novel RGMP-S, Recurrent Geometric-prior Multimodal Policy with Spiking features, facilitating both high-level skill reasoning and data-efficient motion synthesis. To ground high-level reasoning in physical reality, we leverage lightweight 2D geometric inductive biases to enable precise 3D scene understanding within the vision-language model. Specifically, we construct a Long-horizon Geometric Prior Skill Selector that effectively aligns the semantic instructions with spatial constraints, ultimately achieving robust generalization in unseen environments. For the data efficiency issue in robotic action generation, we introduce a Recursive Adaptive Spiking Network. We parameterize robot-object interactions via recursive spiking for spatiotemporal consistency, fully distilling long-horizon dynamic features while mitigating the overfitting issue in sparse demonstration scenarios. Extensive experiments are conducted across the Maniskill simulation benchmark and three heterogeneous real-world robotic systems, encompassing a custom-developed humanoid, a desktop manipulator, and a commercial robotic platform. Empirical results substantiate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art baselines and validate the efficacy of the proposed modules in diverse generalization scenarios. To facilitate reproducibility, the source code and video demonstrations are publicly available at https://github.com/xtli12/RGMP-S.git.
Abstract: Segment Anything (SAM) provides an unprecedented foundation for human segmentation, but may struggle under occlusion, where keypoints may be partially or fully invisible. We adapt SAM 2.1 for pose-guided segmentation with minimal encoder modifications, retaining its strong generalization. Using a fine-tuning strategy called PoseMaskRefine, we incorporate pose keypoints with high visibility into the iterative correction process originally employed by SAM, yielding improved robustness and accuracy across multiple datasets. During inference, we simplify prompting by selecting only the three keypoints with the highest visibility. This strategy reduces sensitivity to common errors, such as missing body parts or misclassified clothing, and allows accurate mask prediction from as few as a single keypoint. Our results demonstrate that pose-guided fine-tuning of SAM enables effective, occlusion-aware human segmentation while preserving the generalization capabilities of the original model. The code and pretrained models will be available at https://mirapurkrabek.github.io/BBox-Mask-Pose/.
Abstract: Unified image generation and editing models suffer from severe task interference in dense diffusion transformers architectures, where a shared parameter space must compromise between conflicting objectives (e.g., local editing v.s. subject-driven generation). While the sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) paradigm is a promising solution, its gating networks remain task-agnostic, operating based on local features, unaware of global task intent. This task-agnostic nature prevents meaningful specialization and fails to resolve the underlying task interference. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to inject semantic intent into MoE routing. We introduce a Hierarchical Task Semantic Annotation scheme to create structured task descriptors (e.g., scope, type, preservation). We then design Predictive Alignment Regularization to align internal routing decisions with the task's high-level semantics. This regularization evolves the gating network from a task-agnostic executor to a dispatch center. Our model effectively mitigates task interference, outperforming dense baselines in fidelity and quality, and our analysis shows that experts naturally develop clear and semantically correlated specializations.
Abstract: Image registration under domain shift remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision and medical imaging: when source and target images exhibit systematic intensity differences, the brightness constancy assumption underlying conventional registration methods is violated, rendering correspondence estimation ill-posed. We propose SAR-Net, a unified framework that addresses this challenge through principled scene-appearance disentanglement. Our key insight is that observed images can be decomposed into domain-invariant scene representations and domain-specific appearance codes, enabling registration via re-rendering rather than direct intensity matching. We establish theoretical conditions under which this decomposition enables consistent cross-domain alignment (Proposition 1) and prove that our scene consistency loss provides a sufficient condition for geometric correspondence in the shared latent space (Proposition 2). Empirically, we validate SAR-Net on the ANHIR (Automatic Non-rigid Histological Image Registration) challenge benchmark, where multi-stain histopathology images exhibit coupled domain shift from different staining protocols and geometric distortion from tissue preparation. Our method achieves a median relative Target Registration Error (rTRE) of 0.25%, outperforming the state-of-the-art MEVIS method (0.27% rTRE) by 7.4%, with robustness of 99.1%. Code is available at https://github.com/D-ST-Sword/SAR-NET .
Abstract: Recently, reconstruction-based methods have gained attention for AIGC image detection. These methods leverage pre-trained diffusion models to reconstruct inputs and measure residuals for distinguishing real from fake images. Their key advantage lies in reducing reliance on dataset-specific artifacts and improving generalization under distribution shifts. However, they are limited by significant inefficiency due to multi-step inversion and reconstruction, and their reliance on diffusion backbones further limits generalization to other generative paradigms such as GANs. In this paper, we propose a novel fake image detection framework, called R$^2$BD, built upon two key designs: (1) G-LDM, a unified reconstruction model that simulates the generation behaviors of VAEs, GANs, and diffusion models, thereby broadening the detection scope beyond prior diffusion-only approaches; and (2) a residual bias calculation module that distinguishes real and fake images in a single inference step, which is a significant efficiency improvement over existing methods that typically require 20$+$ steps. Extensive experiments on the benchmark from 10 public datasets demonstrate that R$^2$BD is over 22$\times$ faster than existing reconstruction-based methods while achieving superior detection accuracy. In cross-dataset evaluations, it outperforms state-of-the-art methods by an average of 13.87\%, showing strong efficiency and generalization across diverse generative methods. The code and dataset used for evaluation are available at https://github.com/QingyuLiu/RRBD.
Abstract: Video object segmentation methods like SAM2 achieve strong performance through memory-based architectures but struggle under large viewpoint changes due to reliance on appearance features. Traditional 3D instance segmentation methods address viewpoint consistency but require camera poses, depth maps, and expensive preprocessing. We introduce 3AM, a training-time enhancement that integrates 3D-aware features from MUSt3R into SAM2. Our lightweight Feature Merger fuses multi-level MUSt3R features that encode implicit geometric correspondence. Combined with SAM2's appearance features, the model achieves geometry-consistent recognition grounded in both spatial position and visual similarity. We propose a field-of-view aware sampling strategy ensuring frames observe spatially consistent object regions for reliable 3D correspondence learning. Critically, our method requires only RGB input at inference, with no camera poses or preprocessing. On challenging datasets with wide-baseline motion (ScanNet++, Replica), 3AM substantially outperforms SAM2 and extensions, achieving 90.6% IoU and 71.7% Positive IoU on ScanNet++'s Selected Subset, improving over state-of-the-art VOS methods by +15.9 and +30.4 points. Project page: https://jayisaking.github.io/3AM-Page/
Abstract: In this work, we explore the Large Language Model (LLM) agent reviewer dynamics in an Elo-ranked review system using real-world conference paper submissions. Multiple LLM agent reviewers with different personas are engage in multi round review interactions moderated by an Area Chair. We compare a baseline setting with conditions that incorporate Elo ratings and reviewer memory. Our simulation results showcase several interesting findings, including how incorporating Elo improves Area Chair decision accuracy, as well as reviewers' adaptive review strategy that exploits our Elo system without improving review effort. Our code is available at https://github.com/hsiangwei0903/EloReview.
Abstract: The evolution of recommender systems has shifted preference storage from rating matrices and dense embeddings to semantic memory in the agentic era. Yet existing agents rely on isolated memory, overlooking crucial collaborative signals. Bridging this gap is hindered by the dual challenges of distilling vast graph contexts without overwhelming reasoning agents with cognitive load, and evolving the collaborative memory efficiently without incurring prohibitive computational costs. To address this, we propose MemRec, a framework that architecturally decouples reasoning from memory management to enable efficient collaborative augmentation. MemRec introduces a dedicated, cost-effective LM_Mem to manage a dynamic collaborative memory graph, serving synthesized, high-signal context to a downstream LLM_Rec. The framework operates via a practical pipeline featuring efficient retrieval and cost-effective asynchronous graph propagation that evolves memory in the background. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that MemRec achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, architectural analysis confirms its flexibility, establishing a new Pareto frontier that balances reasoning quality, cost, and privacy through support for diverse deployments, including local open-source models. Code:https://github.com/rutgerswiselab/memrec and Homepage: https://memrec.weixinchen.com
Abstract: Large language models often solve complex reasoning tasks more effectively with Chain-of-Thought (CoT), but at the cost of long, low-bandwidth token sequences. Humans, by contrast, often reason softly by maintaining a distribution over plausible next steps. Motivated by this, we propose Multiplex Thinking, a stochastic soft reasoning mechanism that, at each thinking step, samples K candidate tokens and aggregates their embeddings into a single continuous multiplex token. This preserves the vocabulary embedding prior and the sampling dynamics of standard discrete generation, while inducing a tractable probability distribution over multiplex rollouts. Consequently, multiplex trajectories can be directly optimized with on-policy reinforcement learning (RL). Importantly, Multiplex Thinking is self-adaptive: when the model is confident, the multiplex token is nearly discrete and behaves like standard CoT; when it is uncertain, it compactly represents multiple plausible next steps without increasing sequence length. Across challenging math reasoning benchmarks, Multiplex Thinking consistently outperforms strong discrete CoT and RL baselines from Pass@1 through Pass@1024, while producing shorter sequences. The code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/GMLR-Penn/Multiplex-Thinking.
Abstract: Diagnosing dental diseases from radiographs is time-consuming and challenging due to the subtle nature of diagnostic evidence. Existing methods, which rely on object detection models designed for natural images with more distinct target patterns, struggle to detect dental diseases that present with far less visual support. To address this challenge, we propose {\bf DentalX}, a novel context-aware dental disease detection approach that leverages oral structure information to mitigate the visual ambiguity inherent in radiographs. Specifically, we introduce a structural context extraction module that learns an auxiliary task: semantic segmentation of dental anatomy. The module extracts meaningful structural context and integrates it into the primary disease detection task to enhance the detection of subtle dental diseases. Extensive experiments on a dedicated benchmark demonstrate that DentalX significantly outperforms prior methods in both tasks. This mutual benefit arises naturally during model optimization, as the correlation between the two tasks is effectively captured. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhiqin1998/DentYOLOX.
Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has proven effective in enhancing large language models by encouraging step-by-step intermediate reasoning, and recent advances have extended this paradigm to Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). In the medical domain, where diagnostic decisions depend on nuanced visual cues and sequential reasoning, CoT aligns naturally with clinical thinking processes. However, Current benchmarks for medical image understanding generally focus on the final answer while ignoring the reasoning path. An opaque process lacks reliable bases for judgment, making it difficult to assist doctors in diagnosis. To address this gap, we introduce a new M3CoTBench benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the correctness, efficiency, impact, and consistency of CoT reasoning in medical image understanding. M3CoTBench features 1) a diverse, multi-level difficulty dataset covering 24 examination types, 2) 13 varying-difficulty tasks, 3) a suite of CoT-specific evaluation metrics (correctness, efficiency, impact, and consistency) tailored to clinical reasoning, and 4) a performance analysis of multiple MLLMs. M3CoTBench systematically evaluates CoT reasoning across diverse medical imaging tasks, revealing current limitations of MLLMs in generating reliable and clinically interpretable reasoning, and aims to foster the development of transparent, trustworthy, and diagnostically accurate AI systems for healthcare. Project page at https://juntaojianggavin.github.io/projects/M3CoTBench/.
Abstract: Physics-informed machine learning holds great promise for solving differential equations, yet existing methods struggle with highly oscillatory, multiscale, or singularly perturbed PDEs due to spectral bias, costly backpropagation, and manually tuned kernel or Fourier frequencies. This work introduces a soft partition--based Kernel-Adaptive Physics-Informed Extreme Learning Machine (KAPI-ELM), a deterministic low-dimensional parameterization in which smooth partition lengths jointly control collocation centers and Gaussian kernel widths, enabling continuous coarse-to-fine resolution without Fourier features, random sampling, or hard domain interfaces. A signed-distance-based weighting further stabilizes least-squares learning on irregular geometries. Across eight benchmarks--including oscillatory ODEs, high-frequency Poisson equations, irregular-shaped domains, and stiff singularly perturbed convection-diffusion problems-the proposed method matches or exceeds the accuracy of state-of-the-art Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) and Theory of Functional Connections (TFC) variants while using only a single linear solve. Although demonstrated on steady linear PDEs, the results show that soft-partition kernel adaptation provides a fast, architecture-free approach for multiscale PDEs with broad potential for future physics-informed modeling. For reproducibility, the reference codes are available at https://github.com/vikas-dwivedi-2022/soft_kapi
Abstract: Localization is a fundamental capability for autonomous robots, enabling them to operate effectively in dynamic environments. In Robocon 2025, accurate and reliable localization is crucial for improving shooting precision, avoiding collisions with other robots, and navigating the competition field efficiently. In this paper, we propose a hybrid localization algorithm that integrates classical techniques with learning based methods that rely solely on visual data from the court's floor to achieve self-localization on the basketball field.
Abstract: Multi-behavior recommendation faces a critical challenge in practice: auxiliary behaviors (e.g., clicks, carts) are often noisy, weakly correlated, or semantically misaligned with the target behavior (e.g., purchase), which leads to biased preference learning and suboptimal performance. While existing methods attempt to fuse these heterogeneous signals, they inherently lack a principled mechanism to ensure robustness against such behavioral inconsistency. In this work, we propose Robust Multi-Behavior Recommendation towards Target Behaviors (RMBRec), a robust multi-behavior recommendation framework grounded in an information-theoretic robustness principle. We interpret robustness as a joint process of maximizing predictive information while minimizing its variance across heterogeneous behavioral environments. Under this perspective, the Representation Robustness Module (RRM) enhances local semantic consistency by maximizing the mutual information between users' auxiliary and target representations, whereas the Optimization Robustness Module (ORM) enforces global stability by minimizing the variance of predictive risks across behaviors, which is an efficient approximation to invariant risk minimization. This local-global collaboration bridges representation purification and optimization invariance in a theoretically coherent way. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that RMBRec not only outperforms state-of-the-art methods in accuracy but also maintains remarkable stability under various noise perturbations. For reproducibility, our code is available at https://github.com/miaomiao-cai2/RMBRec/.
Abstract: VLA models have shown promising potential in embodied navigation by unifying perception and planning while inheriting the strong generalization abilities of large VLMs. However, most existing VLA models rely on reactive mappings directly from observations to actions, lacking the explicit reasoning capabilities and persistent memory required for complex, long-horizon navigation tasks. To address these challenges, we propose VLingNav, a VLA model for embodied navigation grounded in linguistic-driven cognition. First, inspired by the dual-process theory of human cognition, we introduce an adaptive chain-of-thought mechanism, which dynamically triggers explicit reasoning only when necessary, enabling the agent to fluidly switch between fast, intuitive execution and slow, deliberate planning. Second, to handle long-horizon spatial dependencies, we develop a visual-assisted linguistic memory module that constructs a persistent, cross-modal semantic memory, enabling the agent to recall past observations to prevent repetitive exploration and infer movement trends for dynamic environments. For the training recipe, we construct Nav-AdaCoT-2.9M, the largest embodied navigation dataset with reasoning annotations to date, enriched with adaptive CoT annotations that induce a reasoning paradigm capable of adjusting both when to think and what to think about. Moreover, we incorporate an online expert-guided reinforcement learning stage, enabling the model to surpass pure imitation learning and to acquire more robust, self-explored navigation behaviors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VLingNav achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of embodied navigation benchmarks. Notably, VLingNav transfers to real-world robotic platforms in a zero-shot manner, executing various navigation tasks and demonstrating strong cross-domain and cross-task generalization.
Abstract: The LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm promises scalable rubric-based evaluation, yet aligning frozen black-box models with human standards remains a challenge due to inherent generation stochasticity. We reframe judge alignment as a criteria transfer problem and isolate three recurrent failure modes: rubric instability caused by prompt sensitivity, unverifiable reasoning that lacks auditable evidence, and scale misalignment with human grading boundaries. To address these issues, we introduce RULERS (Rubric Unification, Locking, and Evidence-anchored Robust Scoring), a compiler-executor framework that transforms natural language rubrics into executable specifications. RULERS operates by compiling criteria into versioned immutable bundles, enforcing structured decoding with deterministic evidence verification, and applying lightweight Wasserstein-based post-hoc calibration, all without updating model parameters. Extensive experiments on essay and summarization benchmarks demonstrate that RULERS significantly outperforms representative baselines in human agreement, maintains strong stability against adversarial rubric perturbations, and enables smaller models to rival larger proprietary judges. Overall, our results suggest that reliable LLM judging requires executable rubrics, verifiable evidence, and calibrated scales rather than prompt phrasing alone. Code is available at https://github.com/LabRAI/Rulers.git.
Abstract: Image generation models (IGMs), while capable of producing impressive and creative content, often memorize a wide range of undesirable concepts from their training data, leading to the reproduction of unsafe content such as NSFW imagery and copyrighted artistic styles. Such behaviors pose persistent safety and compliance risks in real-world deployments and cannot be reliably mitigated by post-hoc filtering, owing to the limited robustness of such mechanisms and a lack of fine-grained semantic control. Recent unlearning methods seek to erase harmful concepts at the model level, which exhibit the limitations of requiring costly retraining, degrading the quality of benign generations, or failing to withstand prompt paraphrasing and adversarial attacks. To address these challenges, we introduce SafeRedir, a lightweight inference-time framework for robust unlearning via prompt embedding redirection. Without modifying the underlying IGMs, SafeRedir adaptively routes unsafe prompts toward safe semantic regions through token-level interventions in the embedding space. The framework comprises two core components: a latent-aware multi-modal safety classifier for identifying unsafe generation trajectories, and a token-level delta generator for precise semantic redirection, equipped with auxiliary predictors for token masking and adaptive scaling to localize and regulate the intervention. Empirical results across multiple representative unlearning tasks demonstrate that SafeRedir achieves effective unlearning capability, high semantic and perceptual preservation, robust image quality, and enhanced resistance to adversarial attacks. Furthermore, SafeRedir generalizes effectively across a variety of diffusion backbones and existing unlearned models, validating its plug-and-play compatibility and broad applicability. Code and data are available at https://github.com/ryliu68/SafeRedir.
Abstract: Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) tackles the critical challenge of adapting source-pretrained models to unlabeled target domains without access to source data, overcoming data privacy and storage limitations in real-world applications. However, existing SFDA approaches struggle with the trade-off between perception field and computational efficiency in domain-invariant feature learning. Recently, Mamba has offered a promising solution through its selective scan mechanism, which enables long-range dependency modeling with linear complexity. However, the Visual Mamba (i.e., VMamba) remains limited in capturing channel-wise frequency characteristics critical for domain alignment and maintaining spatial robustness under significant domain shifts. To address these, we propose a framework called SfMamba to fully explore the stable dependency in source-free model transfer. SfMamba introduces Channel-wise Visual State-Space block that enables channel-sequence scanning for domain-invariant feature extraction. In addition, SfMamba involves a Semantic-Consistent Shuffle strategy that disrupts background patch sequences in 2D selective scan while preserving prediction consistency to mitigate error accumulation. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks show that SfMamba achieves consistently stronger performance than existing methods while maintaining favorable parameter efficiency, offering a practical solution for SFDA. Our code is available at https://github.com/chenxi52/SfMamba.
Abstract: Vision modeling has advanced rapidly with Transformers, whose attention mechanisms capture visual dependencies but lack a principled account of how semantic information propagates spatially. We revisit this problem from a wave-based perspective: feature maps are treated as spatial signals whose evolution over an internal propagation time (aligned with network depth) is governed by an underdamped wave equation. In this formulation, spatial frequency-from low-frequency global layout to high-frequency edges and textures-is modeled explicitly, and its interaction with propagation time is controlled rather than implicitly fixed. We derive a closed-form, frequency-time decoupled solution and implement it as the Wave Propagation Operator (WPO), a lightweight module that models global interactions in O(N log N) time-far lower than attention. Building on WPO, we propose a family of WaveFormer models as drop-in replacements for standard ViTs and CNNs, achieving competitive accuracy across image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, while delivering up to 1.6x higher throughput and 30% fewer FLOPs than attention-based alternatives. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that wave propagation introduces a complementary modeling bias to heat-based methods, effectively capturing both global coherence and high-frequency details essential for rich visual semantics. Codes are available at: https://github.com/ZishanShu/WaveFormer.
Abstract: Incomplete point clouds captured by 3D sensors often result in the loss of both geometric and semantic information. Most existing point cloud completion methods are built on rotation-variant frameworks trained with data in canonical poses, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. While data augmentation with random rotations can partially mitigate this issue, it significantly increases the learning burden and still fails to guarantee robust performance under arbitrary poses. To address this challenge, we propose the Rotation-Equivariant Anchor Transformer (REVNET), a novel framework built upon the Vector Neuron (VN) network for robust point cloud completion under arbitrary rotations. To preserve local details, we represent partial point clouds as sets of equivariant anchors and design a VN Missing Anchor Transformer to predict the positions and features of missing anchors. Furthermore, we extend VN networks with a rotation-equivariant bias formulation and a ZCA-based layer normalization to improve feature expressiveness. Leveraging the flexible conversion between equivariant and invariant VN features, our model can generate point coordinates with greater stability. Experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on the synthetic MVP dataset in the equivariant setting. On the real-world KITTI dataset, REVNET delivers competitive results compared to non-equivariant networks, without requiring input pose alignment. The source code will be released on GitHub under URL: https://github.com/nizhf/REVNET.
Abstract: Hallucinations in video-capable vision-language models (Video-VLMs) remain frequent and high-confidence, while existing uncertainty metrics often fail to align with correctness. We introduce VideoHEDGE, a modular framework for hallucination detection in video question answering that extends entropy-based reliability estimation from images to temporally structured inputs. Given a video-question pair, VideoHEDGE draws a baseline answer and multiple high-temperature generations from both clean clips and photometrically and spatiotemporally perturbed variants, then clusters the resulting textual outputs into semantic hypotheses using either Natural Language Inference (NLI)-based or embedding-based methods. Cluster-level probability masses yield three reliability scores: Semantic Entropy (SE), RadFlag, and Vision-Amplified Semantic Entropy (VASE). We evaluate VideoHEDGE on the SoccerChat benchmark using an LLM-as-a-judge to obtain binary hallucination labels. Across three 7B Video-VLMs (Qwen2-VL, Qwen2.5-VL, and a SoccerChat-finetuned model), VASE consistently achieves the highest ROC-AUC, especially at larger distortion budgets, while SE and RadFlag often operate near chance. We further show that embedding-based clustering matches NLI-based clustering in detection performance at substantially lower computational cost, and that domain fine-tuning reduces hallucination frequency but yields only modest improvements in calibration. The hedge-bench PyPI library enables reproducible and extensible benchmarking, with full code and experimental resources available at https://github.com/Simula/HEDGE#videohedge .
Abstract: Destination-passing style programming introduces destinations, which represent the address of a write-once memory cell. These destinations can be passed as function parameters, allowing the caller to control memory management: the callee simply fills the cell instead of allocating space for a return value. While typically used in systems programming, destination passing also has applications in pure functional programming, where it enables programs that were previously unexpressible using usual immutable data structures. In this thesis, we develop a core λ-calculus with destinations, {λ_d}. Our new calculus is more expressive than similar existing systems, with destination passing designed to be as flexible as possible. This is achieved through a modal type system combining linear types with a system of ages to manage scopes, in order to make destination-passing safe. Type safety of our core calculus was proved formally with the Coq proof assistant. Then, we see how this core calculus can be adapted into an existing pure functional language, Haskell, whose type system is less powerful than our custom theoretical one. Retaining safety comes at the cost of removing some flexibility in the handling of destinations. We later refine the implementation to recover much of this flexibility, at the cost of increased user complexity. The prototype implementation in Haskell shows encouraging results for adopting destination-passing style programming when traversing or mapping over large data structures such as lists or data trees.
Abstract: Time series forecasting is critical to real-world decision making, yet most existing approaches remain unimodal and rely on extrapolating historical patterns. While recent progress in large language models (LLMs) highlights the potential for multimodal forecasting, existing benchmarks largely provide retrospective or misaligned raw context, making it unclear whether such models meaningfully leverage textual inputs. In practice, human experts incorporate what-if scenarios with historical evidence, often producing distinct forecasts from the same observations under different scenarios. Inspired by this, we introduce What If TSF (WIT), a multimodal forecasting benchmark designed to evaluate whether models can condition their forecasts on contextual text, especially future scenarios. By providing expert-crafted plausible or counterfactual scenarios, WIT offers a rigorous testbed for scenario-guided multimodal forecasting. The benchmark is available at https://github.com/jinkwan1115/WhatIfTSF.
Abstract: Session-based recommendation systems must capture implicit user intents from sessions. However, existing models suffer from issues such as item interaction dominance and noisy sessions. We propose a multi-channel recommendation model, including a knowledge graph channel, a session hypergraph channel, and a session line graph channel, to capture information from multiple sources. Our model adaptively removes redundant edges in the knowledge graph channel to reduce noise. Knowledge graph representations cooperate with hypergraph representations for prediction to alleviate item dominance. We also generate in-session attention for denoising. Finally, we maximize mutual information between the hypergraph and line graph channels as an auxiliary task. Experiments demonstrate that our method enhances the accuracy of various recommendations, including e-commerce and multimedia recommendations. We release the code on GitHub for reproducibility.\footnote{https://github.com/hohehohe0509/DSR-HK}
Abstract: Steering Large Language Models (LLMs) through activation interventions has emerged as a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning for alignment and personalization. Recent work on Bi-directional Preference Optimization (BiPO) shows that dense steering vectors can be learned directly from preference data in a Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) fashion, enabling control over truthfulness, hallucinations, and safety behaviors. However, dense steering vectors often entangle multiple latent factors due to neuron multi-semanticity, limiting their effectiveness and stability in fine-grained settings such as cultural alignment, where closely related values and behaviors (e.g., among Middle Eastern cultures) must be distinguished. In this paper, we propose Yet another Policy Optimization (YaPO), a \textit{reference-free} method that learns \textit{sparse steering vectors} in the latent space of a Sparse Autoencoder (SAE). By optimizing sparse codes, YaPO produces disentangled, interpretable, and efficient steering directions. Empirically, we show that YaPO converges faster, achieves stronger performance, and exhibits improved training stability compared to dense steering baselines. Beyond cultural alignment, YaPO generalizes to a range of alignment-related behaviors, including hallucination, wealth-seeking, jailbreak, and power-seeking. Importantly, YaPO preserves general knowledge, with no measurable degradation on MMLU. Overall, our results show that YaPO provides a general recipe for efficient, stable, and fine-grained alignment of LLMs, with broad applications to controllability and domain adaptation. The associated code and data are publicly available\footnote{https://github.com/MBZUAI-Paris/YaPO}.
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has driven substantial progress in reasoning-intensive domains like mathematics. However, optimizing open-ended generation remains challenging due to the lack of ground truth. While rubric-based evaluation offers a structured proxy for verification, existing methods suffer from scalability bottlenecks and coarse criteria, resulting in a supervision ceiling effect. To address this, we propose an automated Coarse-to-Fine Rubric Generation framework. By synergizing principle-guided synthesis, multi-model aggregation, and difficulty evolution, our approach produces comprehensive and highly discriminative criteria capable of capturing the subtle nuances. Based on this framework, we introduce RubricHub, a large-scale ($\sim$110k) and multi-domain dataset. We validate its utility through a two-stage post-training pipeline comprising Rubric-based Rejection Sampling Fine-Tuning (RuFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RuRL). Experimental results demonstrate that RubricHub unlocks significant performance gains: our post-trained Qwen3-14B achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on HealthBench (69.3), surpassing proprietary frontier models such as GPT-5. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/teqkilla/RubricHub}{ this URL}.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal framework, Multimodal Language-Guided Network (MMLGNet), to align heterogeneous remote sensing modalities like Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) and LiDAR with natural language semantics using vision-language models such as CLIP. With the increasing availability of multimodal Earth observation data, there is a growing need for methods that effectively fuse spectral, spatial, and geometric information while enabling semantic-level understanding. MMLGNet employs modality-specific encoders and aligns visual features with handcrafted textual embeddings in a shared latent space via bi-directional contrastive learning. Inspired by CLIP's training paradigm, our approach bridges the gap between high-dimensional remote sensing data and language-guided interpretation. Notably, MMLGNet achieves strong performance with simple CNN-based encoders, outperforming several established multimodal visual-only methods on two benchmark datasets, demonstrating the significant benefit of language supervision. Codes are available at https://github.com/AdityaChaudhary2913/CLIP_HSI.
Abstract: The problem of finding a minimal circuit to implement a given function is one of the oldest in electronics. It is known to be NP-hard. Still, many tools exist to find sub-optimal circuits to implement a function. In electronics, such tools are known as synthesisers. However, these synthesisers aim to implement very large functions (a whole electronic chip). In cryptography, the focus is on small functions, hence the necessity for new dedicated tools for small functions. Several tools exist to implement small functions. They differ by their algorithmic approach (some are based on Depth-First-Search as introduced by Ullrich in 2011, some are based on SAT-solvers like the tool desgined by Stoffelen in 2016, some non-generic tools use subfield decomposition) and by their optimisation criteria (some optimise for circuit size, others for circuit depth, and some for side-channel-protected implementations). However, these tools are limited to functions operating on less than 5 bits, sometimes 6 bits for quadratic functions, or to very simple functions. The limitation lies in a high computing time. We propose a new tool (The tool is provided alongside the IEEE article with CodeOcean and at https://github.com/seduval/implem-quad-sbox) to implement quadratic functions up to 9 bits within AND-depth 1, minimising the number of AND gates. This tool is more time-efficient than previous ones, allowing to explore larger implementations than others on 6 bits or less and allows to reach larger sizes, up to 9 bits.
Abstract: Movable antenna (MA) introduces a new degree of freedom for future wireless communication systems by enabling the adaptive adjustment of antenna positions. Its large-range movement renders wireless channels transmission into the near-field region, which brings new performance enhancement for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC). This paper proposes a novel multi-stage design framework for broadband near-field ISAC assisted by MA. The framework first divides the MA movement area into multiple subregions, and employs the Newtonized orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm (NOMP) to achieve high-precision angle estimation in each subregion. Subsequently, a method called near-field localization via subregion ray clustering (LSRC) is proposed for identifying the positions of scatterers. This method finds the coordinates of each scatterer by jointly processing the angle estimates across all subregions. Finally, according to the estimated locations of the scatterers, the near-field channel estimation (CE) is refined for improving communication performance. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can significantly enhance MA sensing accuracy and CE, providing an efficient solution for MA-aided near-field ISAC.
Abstract: This work introduces a novel technique, named structural dimension reduction, to collapse a Bayesian network onto a minimum and localized one while ensuring that probabilistic inferences between the original and reduced networks remain consistent. To this end, we propose a new combinatorial structure in directed acyclic graphs called the directed convex hull, which has turned out to be equivalent to their minimum localized Bayesian networks. An efficient polynomial-time algorithm is devised to identify them by determining the unique directed convex hulls containing the variables of interest from the original networks. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed technique has high dimension reduction capability in real networks, and the efficiency of probabilistic inference based on directed convex hulls can be significantly improved compared with traditional methods such as variable elimination and belief propagation algorithms. The code of this study is open at \href{https://github.com/Balance-H/Algorithms}{https://github.com/Balance-H/Algorithms} and the proofs of the results in the main body are postponed to the appendix.
Abstract: In domains such as biomedicine, materials, and finance, high-stakes deployment of large language models (LLMs) requires injecting private, domain-specific knowledge that is proprietary, fast-evolving, and under-represented in public pretraining. However, the two dominant paradigms for private knowledge injection each have pronounced drawbacks: fine-tuning is expensive to iterate, and continual updates risk catastrophic forgetting and general-capability regression; retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) keeps the base model intact but is brittle in specialized private corpora due to chunk-induced evidence fragmentation, retrieval drift, and long-context pressure that yields query-dependent prompt inflation. Inspired by how multimodal LLMs align heterogeneous modalities into a shared semantic space, we propose Generation-Augmented Generation (GAG), which treats private expertise as an additional expert modality and injects it via a compact, representation-level interface aligned to the frozen base model, avoiding prompt-time evidence serialization while enabling plug-and-play specialization and scalable multi-domain composition with reliable selective activation. Across two private scientific QA benchmarks (immunology adjuvant and catalytic materials) and mixed-domain evaluations, GAG improves specialist performance over strong RAG baselines by 15.34% and 14.86% on the two benchmarks, respectively, while maintaining performance on six open general benchmarks and enabling near-oracle selective activation for scalable multi-domain deployment. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/360CVGroup/GAG.
Abstract: Ruminal acidosis is a prevalent metabolic disorder in dairy cattle causing significant economic losses and animal welfare concerns. Current diagnostic methods rely on invasive pH measurement, limiting scalability for continuous monitoring. We present FUME (Fused Unified Multi-gas Emission Network), the first deep learning approach for rumen acidosis detection from dual-gas optical imaging under in vitro conditions. Our method leverages complementary carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) emission patterns captured by infrared cameras to classify rumen health into Healthy, Transitional, and Acidotic states. FUME employs a lightweight dual-stream architecture with weight-shared encoders, modality-specific self-attention, and channel attention fusion, jointly optimizing gas plume segmentation and classification of dairy cattle health. We introduce the first dual-gas OGI dataset comprising 8,967 annotated frames across six pH levels with pixel-level segmentation masks. Experiments demonstrate that FUME achieves 80.99% mIoU and 98.82% classification accuracy while using only 1.28M parameters and 1.97G MACs--outperforming state-of-the-art methods in segmentation quality with 10x lower computational cost. Ablation studies reveal that CO2 provides the primary discriminative signal and dual-task learning is essential for optimal performance. Our work establishes the feasibility of gas emission-based livestock health monitoring, paving the way for practical, in vitro acidosis detection systems. Codes are available at https://github.com/taminulislam/fume.
Abstract: Medical image analysis increasingly relies on large vision-language models (VLMs), yet most systems remain single-pass black boxes that offer limited control over reasoning, safety, and spatial grounding. We propose R^4, an agentic framework that decomposes medical imaging workflows into four coordinated agents: a Router that configures task- and specialization-aware prompts from the image, patient history, and metadata; a Retriever that uses exemplar memory and pass@k sampling to jointly generate free-text reports and bounding boxes; a Reflector that critiques each draft-box pair for key clinical error modes (negation, laterality, unsupported claims, contradictions, missing findings, and localization errors); and a Repairer that iteratively revises both narrative and spatial outputs under targeted constraints while curating high-quality exemplars for future cases. Instantiated on chest X-ray analysis with multiple modern VLM backbones and evaluated on report generation and weakly supervised detection, R^4 consistently boosts LLM-as-a-Judge scores by roughly +1.7-+2.5 points and mAP50 by +2.5-+3.5 absolute points over strong single-VLM baselines, without any gradient-based fine-tuning. These results show that agentic routing, reflection, and repair can turn strong but brittle VLMs into more reliable and better grounded tools for clinical image interpretation. Our code can be found at: https://github.com/faiyazabdullah/MultimodalMedAgent
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show promise in gastroenterology, yet their performance against comprehensive clinical workflows and human benchmarks remains unverified. To systematically evaluate state-of-the-art MLLMs across a panoramic gastrointestinal endoscopy workflow and determine their clinical utility compared with human endoscopists. We constructed GI-Bench, a benchmark encompassing 20 fine-grained lesion categories. Twelve MLLMs were evaluated across a five-stage clinical workflow: anatomical localization, lesion identification, diagnosis, findings description, and management. Model performance was benchmarked against three junior endoscopists and three residency trainees using Macro-F1, mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU), and multi-dimensional Likert scale. Gemini-3-Pro achieved state-of-the-art performance. In diagnostic reasoning, top-tier models (Macro-F1 0.641) outperformed trainees (0.492) and rivaled junior endoscopists (0.727; p>0.05). However, a critical "spatial grounding bottleneck" persisted; human lesion localization (mIoU >0.506) significantly outperformed the best model (0.345; p<0.05). Furthermore, qualitative analysis revealed a "fluency-accuracy paradox": models generated reports with superior linguistic readability compared with humans (p<0.05) but exhibited significantly lower factual correctness (p<0.05) due to "over-interpretation" and hallucination of visual features. GI-Bench maintains a dynamic leaderboard that tracks the evolving performance of MLLMs in clinical endoscopy. The current rankings and benchmark results are available at https://roterdl.github.io/GIBench/.
Abstract: A 3D avatar typically has one of six cardinal facial expressions. To simulate realistic emotional variation, we should be able to render a facial transition between two arbitrary expressions. This study presents a new framework for instruction-driven facial expression generation that produces a 3D face and, starting from an image of the face, transforms the facial expression from one designated facial expression to another. The Instruction-driven Facial Expression Decomposer (IFED) module is introduced to facilitate multimodal data learning and capture the correlation between textual descriptions and facial expression features. Subsequently, we propose the Instruction to Facial Expression Transition (I2FET) method, which leverages IFED and a vertex reconstruction loss function to refine the semantic comprehension of latent vectors, thus generating a facial expression sequence according to the given instruction. Lastly, we present the Facial Expression Transition model to generate smooth transitions between facial expressions. Extensive evaluation suggests that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the CK+ and CelebV-HQ datasets. The results show that our framework can generate facial expression trajectories according to text instruction. Considering that text prompts allow us to make diverse descriptions of human emotional states, the repertoire of facial expressions and the transitions between them can be expanded greatly. We expect our framework to find various practical applications More information about our project can be found at https://vohoanganh.github.io/tg3dfet/
Abstract: We present CogniMap3D, a bioinspired framework for dynamic 3D scene understanding and reconstruction that emulates human cognitive processes. Our approach maintains a persistent memory bank of static scenes, enabling efficient spatial knowledge storage and rapid retrieval. CogniMap3D integrates three core capabilities: a multi-stage motion cue framework for identifying dynamic objects, a cognitive mapping system for storing, recalling, and updating static scenes across multiple visits, and a factor graph optimization strategy for refining camera poses. Given an image stream, our model identifies dynamic regions through motion cues with depth and camera pose priors, then matches static elements against its memory bank. When revisiting familiar locations, CogniMap3D retrieves stored scenes, relocates cameras, and updates memory with new observations. Evaluations on video depth estimation, camera pose reconstruction, and 3D mapping tasks demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance, while effectively supporting continuous scene understanding across extended sequences and multiple visits.
Abstract: The rapid evolution of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has advanced workflow automation; however, existing research mainly targets performance upper bounds in static environments, overlooking robustness for stochastic real-world deployment. We identify three key challenges: dynamic task scheduling, active exploration under uncertainty, and continuous learning from experience. To bridge this gap, we introduce \method{}, a dynamic evaluation environment that simulates a "trainee" agent continuously exploring a novel setting. Unlike traditional benchmarks, \method{} evaluates agents along three dimensions: (1) context-aware scheduling for streaming tasks with varying priorities; (2) prudent information acquisition to reduce hallucination via active exploration; and (3) continuous evolution by distilling generalized strategies from rule-based, dynamically generated tasks. Experiments show that cutting-edge agents have significant deficiencies in dynamic environments, especially in active exploration and continual learning. Our work establishes a framework for assessing agent reliability, shifting evaluation from static tests to realistic, production-oriented scenarios. Our codes are available at https://github.com/KnowledgeXLab/EvoEnv
Abstract: Current multi-agent LLM frameworks rely on explicit orchestration patterns borrowed from human organizational structures: planners delegate to executors, managers coordinate workers, and hierarchical control flow governs agent interactions. These approaches suffer from coordination overhead that scales poorly with agent count and task complexity. We propose a fundamentally different paradigm inspired by natural coordination mechanisms: agents operate locally on a shared artifact, guided only by pressure gradients derived from measurable quality signals, with temporal decay preventing premature convergence. We formalize this as optimization over a pressure landscape and prove convergence guarantees under mild conditions. Empirically, on meeting room scheduling across 1,350 trials, pressure-field coordination outperforms all baselines: 48.5% aggregate solve rate versus 12.6% for conversation-based coordination, 1.5% for hierarchical control, and 0.4% for sequential and random baselines (all pairwise comparisons p < 0.001). Temporal decay is essential: disabling it reduces solve rate by 10 percentage points. On easy problems, pressure-field achieves 86.7% solve rate. The approach maintains consistent performance from 1 to 4 agents. Implicit coordination through shared pressure gradients outperforms explicit hierarchical control, suggesting that constraint-driven emergence offers a simpler and more effective foundation for multi-agent AI.
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as human simulators, both for evaluating conversational systems and for generating fine-tuning data. However, naive "act-as-a-user" prompting often yields verbose, unrealistic utterances, underscoring the need for principled evaluation of so-called user proxy agents. We present MIRRORBENCH, a reproducible, extensible benchmarking framework that evaluates user proxies solely on their ability to produce human-like user utterances across diverse conversational tasks, explicitly decoupled from downstream task success. MIRRORBENCH features a modular execution engine with typed interfaces, metadata-driven registries, multi-backend support, caching, and robust observability. The system supports pluggable user proxies, datasets, tasks, and metrics, enabling researchers to evaluate arbitrary simulators under a uniform, variance-aware harness. We include three lexical-diversity metrics (MATTR, YULE'S K, and HD-D) and three LLM-judge-based metrics (GTEval, Pairwise Indistinguishability, and Rubric-and-Reason). Across four open datasets, MIRRORBENCH yields variance-aware results and reveals systematic gaps between user proxies and real human users. The framework is open source and includes a simple command-line interface for running experiments, managing configurations and caching, and generating reports. The framework can be accessed at https://github.com/SAP/mirrorbench.
Abstract: Subject-independent EEG emotion recognition is challenged by pronounced inter-subject variability and the difficulty of learning robust representations from short, noisy recordings. To address this, we propose a fusion framework that integrates (i) local, channel-wise descriptors and (ii) global, trial-level descriptors, improving cross-subject generalization on the SEED-VII dataset. Local representations are formed per channel by concatenating differential entropy with graph-theoretic features, while global representations summarize time-domain, spectral, and complexity characteristics at the trial level. These representations are fused in a dual-branch transformer with attention-based fusion and domain-adversarial regularization, with samples filtered by an intensity threshold. Experiments under a leave-one-subject-out protocol demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms single-view and classical baselines, achieving approximately 40% mean accuracy in 7-class subject-independent emotion recognition. The code has been released at https://github.com/Danielz-z/LGF-EEG-Emotion.
Abstract: Complex reasoning in tool-augmented agent frameworks is inherently long-horizon, causing reasoning traces and transient tool artifacts to accumulate and strain the bounded working context of large language models. Without explicit memory mechanisms, such accumulation disrupts logical continuity and undermines task alignment. This positions memory not as an auxiliary efficiency concern, but as a core component for sustaining coherent, goal-directed reasoning over long horizons. We propose MemoBrain, an executive memory model for tool-augmented agents that constructs a dependency-aware memory over reasoning steps, capturing salient intermediate states and their logical relations. Operating as a co-pilot alongside the reasoning agent, MemoBrain organizes reasoning progress without blocking execution and actively manages the working context. Specifically, it prunes invalid steps, folds completed sub-trajectories, and preserves a compact, high-salience reasoning backbone under a fixed context budget. Together, these mechanisms enable explicit cognitive control over reasoning trajectories rather than passive context accumulation. We evaluate MemoBrain on challenging long-horizon benchmarks, including GAIA, WebWalker, and BrowseComp-Plus, demonstrating consistent improvements over strong baselines.
Abstract: Deep learning-based automatic medical image segmentation plays a critical role in clinical diagnosis and treatment planning but remains challenging in few-shot scenarios due to the scarcity of annotated training data. Recently, self-supervised foundation models such as DINOv3, which were trained on large natural image datasets, have shown strong potential for dense feature extraction that can help with the few-shot learning challenge. Yet, their direct application to medical images is hindered by domain differences. In this work, we propose DINO-AugSeg, a novel framework that leverages DINOv3 features to address the few-shot medical image segmentation challenge. Specifically, we introduce WT-Aug, a wavelet-based feature-level augmentation module that enriches the diversity of DINOv3-extracted features by perturbing frequency components, and CG-Fuse, a contextual information-guided fusion module that exploits cross-attention to integrate semantic-rich low-resolution features with spatially detailed high-resolution features. Extensive experiments on six public benchmarks spanning five imaging modalities, including MRI, CT, ultrasound, endoscopy, and dermoscopy, demonstrate that DINO-AugSeg consistently outperforms existing methods under limited-sample conditions. The results highlight the effectiveness of incorporating wavelet-domain augmentation and contextual fusion for robust feature representation, suggesting DINO-AugSeg as a promising direction for advancing few-shot medical image segmentation. Code and data will be made available on https://github.com/apple1986/DINO-AugSeg.
Abstract: Negative constraints (instructions of the form "do not use word X") represent a fundamental test of instruction-following capability in large language models. Despite their apparent simplicity, these constraints fail with striking regularity, and the conditions governing failure have remained poorly understood. This paper presents the first comprehensive mechanistic investigation of negative instruction failure. We introduce semantic pressure, a quantitative measure of the model's intrinsic probability of generating the forbidden token, and demonstrate that violation probability follows a tight logistic relationship with pressure ($p=σ(-2.40+2.27\cdot P_0)$; $n=40{,}000$ samples; bootstrap $95%$ CI for slope: $[2.21,,2.33]$). Through layer-wise analysis using the logit lens technique, we establish that the suppression signal induced by negative instructions is present but systematically weaker in failures: the instruction reduces target probability by only 5.2 percentage points in failures versus 22.8 points in successes -- a $4.4\times$ asymmetry. We trace this asymmetry to two mechanistically distinct failure modes. In priming failure (87.5% of violations), the instruction's explicit mention of the forbidden word paradoxically activates rather than suppresses the target representation. In override failure (12.5%), late-layer feed-forward networks generate contributions of $+0.39$ toward the target probability -- nearly $4\times$ larger than in successes -- overwhelming earlier suppression signals. Activation patching confirms that layers 23--27 are causally responsible: replacing these layers' activations flips the sign of constraint effects. These findings reveal a fundamental tension in negative constraint design: the very act of naming a forbidden word primes the model to produce it.
Abstract: Zero-Shot image Anomaly Detection (ZSAD) aims to detect and localise anomalies without access to any normal training samples of the target data. While recent ZSAD approaches leverage additional modalities such as language to generate fine-grained prompts for localisation, vision-only methods remain limited to image-level classification, lacking spatial precision. In this work, we introduce a simple yet effective training-free vision-only ZSAD framework that circumvents the need for fine-grained prompts by leveraging the inversion of a pretrained Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM). Specifically, given an input image and a generic text description (e.g., "an image of an [object class]"), we invert the image to obtain latent representations and initiate the denoising process from a fixed intermediate timestep to reconstruct the image. Since the underlying diffusion model is trained solely on normal data, this process yields a normal-looking reconstruction. The discrepancy between the input image and the reconstructed one highlights potential anomalies. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on VISA dataset, demonstrating strong localisation capabilities without auxiliary modalities and facilitating a shift away from prompt dependence for zero-shot anomaly detection research. Code is available at https://github.com/giddyyupp/DIVAD.
Abstract: Masked diffusion models (MDMs), which leverage bidirectional attention and a denoising process, are narrowing the performance gap with autoregressive models (ARMs). However, their internal attention mechanisms remain under-explored. This paper investigates the attention behaviors in MDMs, revealing the phenomenon of Attention Floating. Unlike ARMs, where attention converges to a fixed sink, MDMs exhibit dynamic, dispersed attention anchors that shift across denoising steps and layers. Further analysis reveals its Shallow Structure-Aware, Deep Content-Focused attention mechanism: shallow layers utilize floating tokens to build a global structural framework, while deeper layers allocate more capability toward capturing semantic content. Empirically, this distinctive attention pattern provides a mechanistic explanation for the strong in-context learning capabilities of MDMs, allowing them to double the performance compared to ARMs in knowledge-intensive tasks. All codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/NEUIR/Attention-Floating.
Abstract: The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) on resource-constrained edge devices is increasingly hindered by prohibitive memory and computational requirements. While ternary quantization offers a compelling solution by reducing weights to {-1, 0, +1}, current implementations suffer from a fundamental misalignment with commodity hardware. Most existing methods must choose between 2-bit aligned packing, which incurs significant bit wastage, or 1.67-bit irregular packing, which degrades inference speed. To resolve this tension, we propose Sherry, a hardware-efficient ternary quantization framework. Sherry introduces a 3:4 fine-grained sparsity that achieves a regularized 1.25-bit width by packing blocks of four weights into five bits, restoring power-of-two alignment. Furthermore, we identify weight trapping issue in sparse ternary training, which leads to representational collapse. To address this, Sherry introduces Arenas, an annealing residual synapse mechanism that maintains representational diversity during training. Empirical evaluations on LLaMA-3.2 across five benchmarks demonstrate that Sherry matches state-of-the-art ternary performance while significantly reducing model size. Notably, on an Intel i7-14700HX CPU, our 1B model achieves zero accuracy loss compared to SOTA baselines while providing 25% bit savings and 10% speed up. The code is available at https://github.com/Tencent/AngelSlim .
Abstract: Growing context lengths in transformer-based language models have made the key-value (KV) cache a critical inference bottleneck. While many KV cache pruning methods have been proposed, they have not yet been adopted in major inference engines due to speed--accuracy trade-offs. We introduce KVzap, a fast, input-adaptive approximation of KVzip that works in both prefilling and decoding. On Qwen3-8B, Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, and Qwen3-32B across long-context and reasoning tasks, KVzap achieves $2$--$4\times$ KV cache compression with negligible accuracy loss and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the KVpress leaderboard. Code and models are available at https://github.com/NVIDIA/kvpress.
Abstract: Knowledge editing aims to efficiently modify the internal knowledge of large language models (LLMs) without compromising their other capabilities. The prevailing editing paradigm, which appends an update matrix to the original parameter matrix, has been shown by some studies to damage key numerical stability indicators (such as condition number and norm), thereby reducing editing performance and general abilities, especially in sequential editing scenario. Although subsequent methods have made some improvements, they remain within the additive framework and have not fundamentally addressed this limitation. To solve this problem, we analyze it from both statistical and mathematical perspectives and conclude that multiplying the original matrix by an orthogonal matrix does not change the numerical stability of the matrix. Inspired by this, different from the previous additive editing paradigm, a multiplicative editing paradigm termed Multiplicative Orthogonal Sequential Editing (MOSE) is proposed. Specifically, we first derive the matrix update in the multiplicative form, the new knowledge is then incorporated into an orthogonal matrix, which is multiplied by the original parameter matrix. In this way, the numerical stability of the edited matrix is unchanged, thereby maintaining editing performance and general abilities. We compared MOSE with several current knowledge editing methods, systematically evaluating their impact on both editing performance and the general abilities across three different LLMs. Experimental results show that MOSE effectively limits deviations in the edited parameter matrix and maintains its numerical stability. Compared to current methods, MOSE achieves a 12.08% improvement in sequential editing performance, while retaining 95.73% of general abilities across downstream tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/famoustourist/MOSE.
Abstract: Current Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems typically employ a traditional two-stage pipeline: an embedding model for initial retrieval followed by a reranker for refinement. However, this paradigm suffers from significant inefficiency due to the lack of shared information between stages, leading to substantial redundant computation. To address this limitation, we propose \textbf{State-Centric Retrieval}, a unified retrieval paradigm that utilizes "states" as a bridge to connect embedding models and rerankers. First, we perform state representation learning by fine-tuning an RWKV-based LLM, transforming it into \textbf{EmbeddingRWKV}, a unified model that serves as both an embedding model and a state backbone for extracting compact, reusable states. Building upon these reusable states, we further design a state-based reranker to fully leverage precomputed information. During reranking, the model processes only query tokens, decoupling inference cost from document length and yielding a 5.4$\times$--44.8$\times$ speedup. Furthermore, we observe that retaining all intermediate layer states is unnecessary; with a uniform layer selection strategy, our model maintains 98.62\% of full-model performance using only 25\% of the layers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that State-Centric Retrieval achieves high-quality retrieval and reranking results while significantly enhancing overall system efficiency. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/howard-hou/EmbeddingRWKV}{our GitHub repository}.
Abstract: Generalisation to unseen subjects in EEG-based emotion classification remains a challenge due to high inter-and intra-subject variability. Continual learning (CL) poses a promising solution by learning from a sequence of tasks while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Regularisation-based CL approaches, such as Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC), Synaptic Intelligence (SI), and Memory Aware Synapses (MAS), are commonly used as baselines in EEG-based CL studies, yet their suitability for this problem remains underexplored. This study theoretically and empirically finds that regularisation-based CL methods show limited performance for EEG-based emotion classification on the DREAMER and SEED datasets. We identify a fundamental misalignment in the stability-plasticity trade-off, where regularisation-based methods prioritise mitigating catastrophic forgetting (backward transfer) over adapting to new subjects (forward transfer). We investigate this limitation under subject-incremental sequences and observe that: (1) the heuristics for estimating parameter importance become less reliable under noisy data and covariate shift, (2) gradients on parameters deemed important by these heuristics often interfere with gradient updates required for new subjects, moving optimisation away from the minimum, (3) importance values accumulated across tasks over-constrain the model, and (4) performance is sensitive to subject order. Forward transfer showed no statistically significant improvement over sequential fine-tuning (p > 0.05 across approaches and datasets). The high variability of EEG signals means past subjects provide limited value to future subjects. Regularisation-based continual learning approaches are therefore limited for robust generalisation to unseen subjects in EEG-based emotion classification.
Abstract: Financial agents powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for investment analysis, risk assessment, and automated decision-making, where their abilities to plan, invoke tools, and manipulate mutable state introduce new security risks in high-stakes and highly regulated financial environments. However, existing safety evaluations largely focus on language-model-level content compliance or abstract agent settings, failing to capture execution-grounded risks arising from real operational workflows and state-changing actions. To bridge this gap, we propose FinVault, the first execution-grounded security benchmark for financial agents, comprising 31 regulatory case-driven sandbox scenarios with state-writable databases and explicit compliance constraints, together with 107 real-world vulnerabilities and 963 test cases that systematically cover prompt injection, jailbreaking, financially adapted attacks, as well as benign inputs for false-positive evaluation. Experimental results reveal that existing defense mechanisms remain ineffective in realistic financial agent settings, with average attack success rates (ASR) still reaching up to 50.0\% on state-of-the-art models and remaining non-negligible even for the most robust systems (ASR 6.7\%), highlighting the limited transferability of current safety designs and the need for stronger financial-specific defenses. Our code can be found at https://github.com/aifinlab/FinVault.
Abstract: We present RefVFX, a new framework that transfers complex temporal effects from a reference video onto a target video or image in a feed-forward manner. While existing methods excel at prompt-based or keyframe-conditioned editing, they struggle with dynamic temporal effects such as dynamic lighting changes or character transformations, which are difficult to describe via text or static conditions. Transferring a video effect is challenging, as the model must integrate the new temporal dynamics with the input video's existing motion and appearance. % To address this, we introduce a large-scale dataset of triplets, where each triplet consists of a reference effect video, an input image or video, and a corresponding output video depicting the transferred effect. Creating this data is non-trivial, especially the video-to-video effect triplets, which do not exist naturally. To generate these, we propose a scalable automated pipeline that creates high-quality paired videos designed to preserve the input's motion and structure while transforming it based on some fixed, repeatable effect. We then augment this data with image-to-video effects derived from LoRA adapters and code-based temporal effects generated through programmatic composition. Building on our new dataset, we train our reference-conditioned model using recent text-to-video backbones. Experimental results demonstrate that RefVFX produces visually consistent and temporally coherent edits, generalizes across unseen effect categories, and outperforms prompt-only baselines in both quantitative metrics and human preference. See our website at https://tuningfreevisualeffects-maker.github.io/Tuning-free-Visual-Effect-Transfer-across-Videos-Project-Page/
Abstract: While the Transformer architecture dominates many fields, its quadratic self-attention complexity hinders its use in large-scale applications. Linear attention offers an efficient alternative, but its direct application often degrades performance, with existing fixes typically re-introducing computational overhead through extra modules (e.g., depthwise separable convolution) that defeat the original purpose. In this work, we identify a key failure mode in these methods: global context collapse, where the model loses representational diversity. To address this, we propose Multi-Head Linear Attention (MHLA), which preserves this diversity by computing attention within divided heads along the token dimension. We prove that MHLA maintains linear complexity while recovering much of the expressive power of softmax attention, and verify its effectiveness across multiple domains, achieving a 3.6\% improvement on ImageNet classification, a 6.3\% gain on NLP, a 12.6\% improvement on image generation, and a 41\% enhancement on video generation under the same time complexity.
Abstract: Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, yet their proficiency in understanding and reasoning over multiple images remains largely unexplored. While existing benchmarks have initiated the evaluation of multi-image models, a comprehensive analysis of their core weaknesses and their causes is still lacking. In this work, we introduce MIMIC (Multi-Image Model Insights and Challenges), a new benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate the multi-image capabilities of LVLMs. Using MIMIC, we conduct a series of diagnostic experiments that reveal pervasive issues: LVLMs often fail to aggregate information across images and struggle to track or attend to multiple concepts simultaneously. To address these failures, we propose two novel complementary remedies. On the data side, we present a procedural data-generation strategy that composes single-image annotations into rich, targeted multi-image training examples. On the optimization side, we analyze layer-wise attention patterns and derive an attention-masking scheme tailored for multi-image inputs. Experiments substantially improved cross-image aggregation, while also enhancing performance on existing multi-image benchmarks, outperforming prior state of the art across tasks. Data and code will be made available at https://github.com/anurag-198/MIMIC.
Abstract: Remote sensing change detection fundamentally relies on the effective fusion and discrimination of bi-temporal features. Prevailing paradigms typically utilize Siamese encoders bridged by explicit difference computation modules, such as subtraction or concatenation, to identify changes. In this work, we challenge this complexity with SEED (Siamese Encoder-Exchange-Decoder), a streamlined paradigm that replaces explicit differencing with parameter-free feature exchange. By sharing weights across both Siamese encoders and decoders, SEED effectively operates as a single parameter set model. Theoretically, we formalize feature exchange as an orthogonal permutation operator and prove that, under pixel consistency, this mechanism preserves mutual information and Bayes optimal risk, whereas common arithmetic fusion methods often introduce information loss. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks, including SYSU-CD, LEVIR-CD, PX-CLCD, WaterCD, and CDD, and three backbones, namely SwinT, EfficientNet, and ResNet, demonstrate that SEED matches or surpasses state of the art methods despite its simplicity. Furthermore, we reveal that standard semantic segmentation models can be transformed into competitive change detectors solely by inserting this exchange mechanism, referred to as SEG2CD. The proposed paradigm offers a robust, unified, and interpretable framework for change detection, demonstrating that simple feature exchange is sufficient for high performance information fusion. Code and full training and evaluation protocols will be released at https://github.com/dyzy41/open-rscd.
Abstract: We introduce DT-ICU, a multimodal digital twin framework for continuous risk estimation in intensive care. DT-ICU integrates variable-length clinical time series with static patient information in a unified multitask architecture, enabling predictions to be updated as new observations accumulate over the ICU stay. We evaluate DT-ICU on the large, publicly available MIMIC-IV dataset, where it consistently outperforms established baseline models under different evaluation settings. Our test-length analysis shows that meaningful discrimination is achieved shortly after admission, while longer observation windows further improve the ranking of high-risk patients in highly imbalanced cohorts. To examine how the model leverages heterogeneous data sources, we perform systematic modality ablations, revealing that the model learnt a reasonable structured reliance on interventions, physiological response observations, and contextual information. These analyses provide interpretable insights into how multimodal signals are combined and how trade-offs between sensitivity and precision emerge. Together, these results demonstrate that DT-ICU delivers accurate, temporally robust, and interpretable predictions, supporting its potential as a practical digital twin framework for continuous patient monitoring in critical care. The source code and trained model weights for DT-ICU are publicly available at https://github.com/GUO-W/DT-ICU-release.
Abstract: Recent works such as REPA have shown that guiding diffusion models with external semantic features (e.g., DINO) can significantly accelerate the training of diffusion transformers (DiTs). However, this requires the use of pretrained external networks, introducing additional dependencies and reducing flexibility. In this work, we argue that DiTs actually have the power to guide the training of themselves, and propose \textbf{Self-Transcendence}, a simple yet effective method that achieves fast convergence using internal feature supervision only. It is found that the slow convergence in DiT training primarily stems from the difficulty of representation learning in shallow layers. To address this, we initially train the DiT model by aligning its shallow features with the latent representations from the pretrained VAE for a short phase (e.g., 40 epochs), then apply classifier-free guidance to the intermediate features, enhancing their discriminative capability and semantic expressiveness. These enriched internal features, learned entirely within the model, are used as supervision signals to guide a new DiT training. Compared to existing self-contained methods, our approach brings a significant performance boost. It can even surpass REPA in terms of generation quality and convergence speed, but without the need for any external pretrained models. Our method is not only more flexible for different backbones but also has the potential to be adopted for a wider range of diffusion-based generative tasks. The source code of our method can be found at https://github.com/csslc/Self-Transcendence.
Abstract: Estimating the Riesz representer is central to debiased machine learning for causal and structural parameter estimation. We propose generalized Riesz regression, a unified framework that estimates the Riesz representer by fitting a representer model via Bregman divergence minimization. This framework includes the squared loss and the Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence as special cases: the former recovers Riesz regression, while the latter recovers tailored loss minimization. Under suitable model specifications, the dual problems correspond to covariate balancing, which we call automatic covariate balancing. Moreover, under the same specifications, outcome averages weighted by the estimated Riesz representer satisfy Neyman orthogonality even without estimating the regression function, a property we call automatic Neyman orthogonalization. This property not only reduces the estimation error of Neyman orthogonal scores but also clarifies a key distinction between debiased machine learning and targeted maximum likelihood estimation. Our framework can also be viewed as a generalization of density ratio fitting under Bregman divergences to Riesz representer estimation, and it applies beyond density ratio estimation. We provide convergence analyses for both reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) and neural network model classes. A Python package for generalized Riesz regression is available at https://github.com/MasaKat0/grr.
Abstract: This paper presents a practical and scalable grid-based state estimation method for high-dimensional models with invertible linear dynamics and with highly non-linear measurements, such as the nearly constant velocity model with measurements of e.g. altitude, bearing, and/or range. Unlike previous tensor decomposition-based approaches, which have largely remained at the proof-of-concept stage, the proposed method delivers an efficient and practical solution by exploiting decomposable model structure-specifically, block-diagonal dynamics and sparsely coupled measurement dimensions. The algorithm integrates a Lagrangian formulation for the time update and leverages low-rank tensor decompositions to compactly represent and effectively propagate state densities. This enables real-time estimation for models with large state dimension, significantly extending the practical reach of grid-based filters beyond their traditional low-dimensional use. Although demonstrated in the context of terrain-aided navigation, the method is applicable to a wide range of models with decomposable structure. The computational complexity and estimation accuracy depend on the specific structure of the model. All experiments are fully reproducible, with source code provided alongside this paper (GitHub link: https://github.com/pesslovany/Matlab-LagrangianPMF).
Abstract: This paper deals with the state estimation of non-linear and non-Gaussian systems with an emphasis on the numerical solution to the Bayesian recursive relations. In particular, this paper builds upon the Lagrangian grid-based filter (GbF) recently-developed for linear systems and extends it for systems with nonlinear dynamics that are invertible. The proposed nonlinear Lagrangian GbF reduces the computational complexity of the standard GbFs from quadratic to log-linear, while preserving all the strengths of the original GbF such as robustness, accuracy, and deterministic behaviour. The proposed filter is compared with the particle filter in several numerical studies using the publicly available MATLAB\textregistered\ implementation\footnote{https://github.com/pesslovany/Matlab-LagrangianPMF}.
Abstract: Achieving robust humanoid hiking in complex, unstructured environments requires transitioning from reactive proprioception to proactive perception. However, integrating exteroception remains a significant challenge: mapping-based methods suffer from state estimation drift; for instance, LiDAR-based methods do not handle torso jitter well. Existing end-to-end approaches often struggle with scalability and training complexity; specifically, some previous works using virtual obstacles are implemented case-by-case. In this work, we present \textit{Hiking in the Wild}, a scalable, end-to-end parkour perceptive framework designed for robust humanoid hiking. To ensure safety and training stability, we introduce two key mechanisms: a foothold safety mechanism combining scalable \textit{Terrain Edge Detection} with \textit{Foot Volume Points} to prevent catastrophic slippage on edges, and a \textit{Flat Patch Sampling} strategy that mitigates reward hacking by generating feasible navigation targets. Our approach utilizes a single-stage reinforcement learning scheme, mapping raw depth inputs and proprioception directly to joint actions, without relying on external state estimation. Extensive field experiments on a full-size humanoid demonstrate that our policy enables robust traversal of complex terrains at speeds up to 2.5 m/s. The training and deployment code is open-sourced to facilitate reproducible research and deployment on real robots with minimal hardware modifications.
Abstract: Current approaches to humanoid control generally fall into two paradigms: perceptive locomotion, which handles terrain well but is limited to pedal gaits, and general motion tracking, which reproduces complex skills but ignores environmental capabilities. This work unites these paradigms to achieve perceptive general motion control. We present a framework where exteroceptive sensing is integrated into whole-body motion tracking, permitting a humanoid to perform highly dynamic, non-locomotion tasks on uneven terrain. By training a single policy to perform multiple distinct motions across varied terrestrial features, we demonstrate the non-trivial benefit of integrating perception into the control loop. Our results show that this framework enables robust, highly dynamic multi-contact motions, such as vaulting and dive-rolling, on unstructured terrain, significantly expanding the robot's traversability beyond simple walking or running. https://project-instinct.github.io/deep-whole-body-parkour
Abstract: LiDAR scene synthesis is an emerging solution to scarcity in 3D data for robotic tasks such as autonomous driving. Recent approaches employ diffusion or flow matching models to generate realistic scenes, but 3D data remains limited compared to RGB datasets with millions of samples. We introduce R3DPA, the first LiDAR scene generation method to unlock image-pretrained priors for LiDAR point clouds, and leverage self-supervised 3D representations for state-of-the-art results. Specifically, we (i) align intermediate features of our generative model with self-supervised 3D features, which substantially improves generation quality; (ii) transfer knowledge from large-scale image-pretrained generative models to LiDAR generation, mitigating limited LiDAR datasets; and (iii) enable point cloud control at inference for object inpainting and scene mixing with solely an unconditional model. On the KITTI-360 benchmark R3DPA achieves state of the art performance. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/valeoai/R3DPA.
Abstract: Aptamer researchers face a literature landscape scattered across publications, supplements, and databases, with each search consuming hours that could be spent at the bench. AptaFind transforms this navigation problem through a three-tier intelligence architecture that recognizes research mining is a spectrum, not a binary success or failure. The system delivers direct sequence extraction when possible, curated research leads when extraction fails, and exhaustive literature discovery for additional confidence. By combining local language models for semantic understanding with deterministic algorithms for reliability, AptaFind operates without cloud dependencies or subscription barriers. Validation across 300 University of Texas Aptamer Database targets demonstrates 84 % with some literature found, 84 % with curated research leads, and 79 % with a direct sequence extraction, at a laptop-compute rate of over 900 targets an hour. The platform proves that even when direct sequence extraction fails, automation can still deliver the actionable intelligence researchers need by rapidly narrowing the search to high quality references.
Abstract: Due to the prevalence of large language models (LLMs), key-value (KV) cache reduction for LLM inference has received remarkable attention. Among numerous works that have been proposed in recent years, layer-wise token pruning approaches, which select a subset of tokens at particular layers to retain in KV cache and prune others, are one of the most popular schemes. They primarily adopt a set of pre-defined layers, at which tokens are selected. Such design is inflexible in the sense that the accuracy significantly varies across tasks and deteriorates in harder tasks such as KV retrieval. In this paper, we propose ASL, a training-free method that adaptively chooses the selection layer for KV cache reduction, exploiting the variance of token ranks ordered by attention score. The proposed method balances the performance across different tasks while meeting the user-specified KV budget requirement. ASL operates during the prefilling stage and can be jointly used with existing KV cache reduction methods such as SnapKV to optimize the decoding stage. By evaluations on the InfiniteBench, RULER, and NIAH benchmarks, we show that equipped with one-shot token selection, where tokens are selected at a layer and propagated to deeper layers, ASL outperforms state-of-the-art layer-wise token selection methods in accuracy while maintaining decoding speed and KV cache reduction.
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) rely on strong linguistic reasoning inherited from their base language models. However, multimodal instruction fine-tuning paradoxically degrades this text's reasoning capability, undermining multimodal performance. To address this issue, we propose a training-free framework to mitigate this degradation. Through layer-wise vision token masking, we reveal a common three-stage pattern in multimodal large language models: early-modal separation, mid-modal alignment, and late-modal degradation. By analyzing the behavior of MLLMs at different stages, we propose a plateau-guided model merging method that selectively injects base language model parameters into MLLMs. Experimental results based on five MLLMs on nine benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Attention-based analysis further reveals that merging shifts attention from diffuse, scattered patterns to focused localization on task-relevant visual regions. Our repository is on https://github.com/wzj1718/PlaM.
Abstract: The central challenge of AI for Science is not reasoning alone, but the ability to create computational methods in an open-ended scientific world. Existing LLM-based agents rely on static, pre-defined tool libraries, a paradigm that fundamentally fails in scientific domains where tools are sparse, heterogeneous, and intrinsically incomplete. In this paper, we propose Test-Time Tool Evolution (TTE), a new paradigm that enables agents to synthesize, verify, and evolve executable tools during inference. By transforming tools from fixed resources into problem-driven artifacts, TTE overcomes the rigidity and long-tail limitations of static tool libraries. To facilitate rigorous evaluation, we introduce SciEvo, a benchmark comprising 1,590 scientific reasoning tasks supported by 925 automatically evolved tools. Extensive experiments show that TTE achieves state-of-the-art performance in both accuracy and tool efficiency, while enabling effective cross-domain adaptation of computational tools. The code and benchmark have been released at https://github.com/lujiaxuan0520/Test-Time-Tool-Evol.
Abstract: We present UIKA, a feed-forward animatable Gaussian head model from an arbitrary number of unposed inputs, including a single image, multi-view captures, and smartphone-captured videos. Unlike the traditional avatar method, which requires a studio-level multi-view capture system and reconstructs a human-specific model through a long-time optimization process, we rethink the task through the lenses of model representation, network design, and data preparation. First, we introduce a UV-guided avatar modeling strategy, in which each input image is associated with a pixel-wise facial correspondence estimation. Such correspondence estimation allows us to reproject each valid pixel color from screen space to UV space, which is independent of camera pose and character expression. Furthermore, we design learnable UV tokens on which the attention mechanism can be applied at both the screen and UV levels. The learned UV tokens can be decoded into canonical Gaussian attributes using aggregated UV information from all input views. To train our large avatar model, we additionally prepare a large-scale, identity-rich synthetic training dataset. Our method significantly outperforms existing approaches in both monocular and multi-view settings. See more details in our project page: https://zijian-wu.github.io/uika-page/
Abstract: Food image segmentation is a critical task for dietary analysis, enabling accurate estimation of food volume and nutrients. However, current methods suffer from limited multi-view data and poor generalization to new viewpoints. We introduce BenchSeg, a novel multi-view food video segmentation dataset and benchmark. BenchSeg aggregates 55 dish scenes (from Nutrition5k, Vegetables & Fruits, MetaFood3D, and FoodKit) with 25,284 meticulously annotated frames, capturing each dish under free 360° camera motion. We evaluate a diverse set of 20 state-of-the-art segmentation models (e.g., SAM-based, transformer, CNN, and large multimodal) on the existing FoodSeg103 dataset and evaluate them (alone and combined with video-memory modules) on BenchSeg. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that while standard image segmenters degrade sharply under novel viewpoints, memory-augmented methods maintain temporal consistency across frames. Our best model based on a combination of SeTR-MLA+XMem2 outperforms prior work (e.g., improving over FoodMem by ~2.63% mAP), offering new insights into food segmentation and tracking for dietary analysis. In addition to frame-wise spatial accuracy, we introduce a dedicated temporal evaluation protocol that explicitly quantifies segmentation stability over time through continuity, flicker rate, and IoU drift metrics. This allows us to reveal failure modes that remain invisible under standard per-frame evaluations. We release BenchSeg to foster future research. The project page including the dataset annotations and the food segmentation models can be found at https://amughrabi.github.io/benchseg.
Abstract: Oral presentation skills are a critical component of higher education, yet comprehensive datasets capturing real-world student performance across multiple modalities remain scarce. To address this gap, we present SOPHIAS (Student Oral Presentation monitoring for Holistic Insights & Analytics using Sensors), a 12-hour multimodal dataset containing recordings of 50 oral presentations (10-15-minute presentation followed by 5-15-minute Q&A) delivered by 65 undergraduate and master's students at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. SOPHIAS integrates eight synchronized sensor streams from high-definition webcams, ambient and webcam audio, eye-tracking glasses, smartwatch physiological sensors, and clicker, keyboard, and mouse interactions. In addition, the dataset includes slides and rubric-based evaluations from teachers, peers, and self-assessments, along with timestamped contextual annotations. The dataset captures presentations conducted in real classroom settings, preserving authentic student behaviors, interactions, and physiological responses. SOPHIAS enables the exploration of relationships between multimodal behavioral and physiological signals and presentation performance, supports the study of peer assessment, and provides a benchmark for developing automated feedback and Multimodal Learning Analytics tools. The dataset is publicly available for research through GitHub and Science Data Bank.
Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer capabilities beyond those of autoregressive (AR) LLMs, such as parallel decoding and random-order generation. However, realizing these benefits in practice is non-trivial, as dLLMs inherently face an accuracy-parallelism trade-off. Despite increasing interest, existing methods typically focus on only one-side of the coin, targeting either efficiency or performance. To address this limitation, we propose d3LLM (Pseudo-Distilled Diffusion Large Language Model), striking a balance between accuracy and parallelism: (i) during training, we introduce pseudo-trajectory distillation to teach the model which tokens can be decoded confidently at early steps, thereby improving parallelism; (ii) during inference, we employ entropy-based multi-block decoding with a KV-cache refresh mechanism to achieve high parallelism while maintaining accuracy. To better evaluate dLLMs, we also introduce AUP (Accuracy Under Parallelism), a new metric that jointly measures accuracy and parallelism. Experiments demonstrate that our d3LLM achieves up to 10$\times$ speedup over vanilla LLaDA/Dream and 5$\times$ speedup over AR models without much accuracy drop. Our code is available at https://github.com/hao-ai-lab/d3LLM.
Abstract: Multivariate Time-Series (MTS) clustering is crucial for signal processing and data analysis. Although deep learning approaches, particularly those leveraging Contrastive Learning (CL), are prominent for MTS representation, existing CL-based models face two key limitations: 1) neglecting clustering information during positive/negative sample pair construction, and 2) introducing unreasonable inductive biases, e.g., destroying time dependence and periodicity through augmentation strategies, compromising representation quality. This paper, therefore, proposes a Temporal-Frequency Enhanced Contrastive (TFEC) learning framework. To preserve temporal structure while generating low-distortion representations, a temporal-frequency Co-EnHancement (CoEH) mechanism is introduced. Accordingly, a synergistic dual-path representation and cluster distribution learning framework is designed to jointly optimize cluster structure and representation fidelity. Experiments on six real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate TFEC's superiority, achieving 4.48% average NMI gains over SOTA methods, with ablation studies validating the design. The code of the paper is available at: https://github.com/yueliangy/TFEC.
Abstract: Accurate three-dimensional (3D) tooth segmentation from Cone-Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) is a prerequisite for digital dental workflows. However, achieving high-fidelity segmentation remains challenging due to adhesion artifacts in naturally occluded scans, which are caused by low contrast and indistinct inter-arch boundaries. To address these limitations, we propose the Anatomy Aware Cascade Network (AACNet), a coarse-to-fine framework designed to resolve boundary ambiguity while maintaining global structural consistency. Specifically, we introduce two mechanisms: the Ambiguity Gated Boundary Refiner (AGBR) and the Signed Distance Map guided Anatomical Attention (SDMAA). The AGBR employs an entropy based gating mechanism to perform targeted feature rectification in high uncertainty transition zones. Meanwhile, the SDMAA integrates implicit geometric constraints via signed distance map to enforce topological consistency, preventing the loss of spatial details associated with standard pooling. Experimental results on a dataset of 125 CBCT volumes demonstrate that AACNet achieves a Dice Similarity Coefficient of 90.17 \% and a 95\% Hausdorff Distance of 3.63 mm, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, the model exhibits strong generalization on an external dataset with an HD95 of 2.19 mm, validating its reliability for downstream clinical applications such as surgical planning. Code for AACNet is available at https://github.com/shiliu0114/AACNet.
Abstract: Optimizing LLM-based agentic workflows is challenging for scaling AI capabilities. Current methods rely on coarse, end-to-end evaluation signals and lack fine-grained signals on where to refine, often resulting in inefficient or low-impact modifications. To address these limitations, we propose {\our{}}, an Evaluation-Judge-Optimization-Update pipeline. We incorporate reusable, configurable logic blocks into agentic workflows to capture fundamental forms of logic. On top of this abstraction, we design a dedicated Judge module that inspects execution traces -- particularly failed runs -- and assigns rank-based responsibility scores to problematic blocks. These fine-grained diagnostic signals are then leveraged by an LLM-based optimizer, which focuses modifications on the most problematic block in the workflow. Our approach improves sample efficiency, enhances interpretability through block-level diagnostics, and provides a scalable foundation for automating increasingly complex agentic workflows. We evaluate {\our{}} on mathematical reasoning and code generation benchmarks, where {\our{}} achieves superior performance and efficiency compared to existing methods. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/ma-zihan/JudgeFlow.
Abstract: Autonomous nano-drones, powered by vision-based tiny machine learning (TinyML) models, are a novel technology gaining momentum thanks to their broad applicability and pushing scientific advancement on resource-limited embedded systems. Their small form factor, i.e., a few 10s grams, severely limits their onboard computational resources to sub-\SI{100}{\milli\watt} microcontroller units (MCUs). The Bitcraze Crazyflie nano-drone is the \textit{de facto} standard, offering a rich set of programmable MCUs for low-level control, multi-core processing, and radio transmission. However, roboticists very often underutilize these onboard precious resources due to the absence of a simple yet efficient software layer capable of time-optimal pipelining of multi-buffer image acquisition, multi-core computation, intra-MCUs data exchange, and Wi-Fi streaming, leading to sub-optimal control performances. Our \textit{NanoCockpit} framework aims to fill this gap, increasing the throughput and minimizing the system's latency, while simplifying the developer experience through coroutine-based multi-tasking. In-field experiments on three real-world TinyML nanorobotics applications show our framework achieves ideal end-to-end latency, i.e. zero overhead due to serialized tasks, delivering quantifiable improvements in closed-loop control performance ($-$30\% mean position error, mission success rate increased from 40\% to 100\%).
Abstract: The emergence of fine-grained numerical formats like NVFP4 presents new opportunities for efficient Large Language Model (LLM) inference. However, it is difficult to adapt existing Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) strategies to these formats: rotation-based methods compromise fine-grained block isolation; smoothing techniques struggle with significant 4-bit quantization errors; and mixed-precision approaches often conflict with hardware constraints on unified-precision computation. To address these challenges, we propose ARCQuant, a framework that boosts NVFP4 performance via Augmented Residual Channels. Distinct from methods that compromise block isolation or hardware uniformity, ARCQuant maintains a strictly unified NVFP4 format by augmenting the activation matrix with quantized residual channels. This design integrates the error compensation process directly into the matrix reduction dimension, enabling the use of standard, highly optimized GEMM kernels with minimal overhead. Theoretical analysis confirms that the worst-case error bound of our dual-stage NVFP4 quantization is comparable to that of standard 8-bit formats such as MXFP8. Extensive experiments on LLaMA and Qwen models demonstrate that ARCQuant achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, comparable to full-precision baselines in perplexity and downstream tasks. Furthermore, deployment on RTX 5090 and RTX PRO 6000 GPUs confirms practical benefits, achieving up to 3x speedup over FP16. Our code is available at https://github.com/actypedef/ARCQuant .
Abstract: As models grow more capable, human supervision breaks down: labels don't scale, outputs can be gamed, and training doesn't generalize. Scalable oversight requires steering methods that are internal, self-supervised, and transfer out-of-distribution; existing methods satisfy some but not all three. We introduce AntiPaSTO, which separates representations along an anti-parallel axis ($α=\pm1$ produce opposite shifts), with coherence constraints preventing collapse. Human input is minimal: two contrasting words inserted into template sentences, no preference labels. Using 800 such pairs on Gemma-3-1B, AntiPaSTO beats prompting baselines by 6.9 times on DailyDilemmas and maintains bidirectional control where prompting triggers refusal.
Abstract: Existing image foundation models are not optimized for spherical images having been trained primarily on perspective images. PanoSAMic integrates the pre-trained Segment Anything (SAM) encoder to make use of its extensive training and integrate it into a semantic segmentation model for panoramic images using multiple modalities. We modify the SAM encoder to output multi-stage features and introduce a novel spatio-modal fusion module that allows the model to select the relevant modalities and best features from each modality for different areas of the input. Furthermore, our semantic decoder uses spherical attention and dual view fusion to overcome the distortions and edge discontinuity often associated with panoramic images. PanoSAMic achieves state-of-the-art (SotA) results on Stanford2D3DS for RGB, RGB-D, and RGB-D-N modalities and on Matterport3D for RGB and RGB-D modalities. https://github.com/dfki-av/PanoSAMic
Abstract: Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification presents unique challenges due to its high spectral dimensionality and limited labeled data. Traditional deep learning models often suffer from overfitting and high computational costs. Self-distillation (SD), a variant of knowledge distillation where a network learns from its own predictions, has recently emerged as a promising strategy to enhance model performance without requiring external teacher networks. In this work, we explore the application of SD to HSI by treating earlier outputs as soft targets, thereby enforcing consistency between intermediate and final predictions. This process improves intra-class compactness and inter-class separability in the learned feature space. Our approach is validated on two benchmark HSI datasets and demonstrates significant improvements in classification accuracy and robustness, highlighting the effectiveness of SD for spectral-spatial learning. Codes are available at https://github.com/Prachet-Dev-Singh/SDHSI.
Abstract: In this paper, we present a new dynamic collaborative network for semi-supervised 3D vessel segmentation, termed DiCo. Conventional mean teacher (MT) methods typically employ a static approach, where the roles of the teacher and student models are fixed. However, due to the complexity of 3D vessel data, the teacher model may not always outperform the student model, leading to cognitive biases that can limit performance. To address this issue, we propose a dynamic collaborative network that allows the two models to dynamically switch their teacher-student roles. Additionally, we introduce a multi-view integration module to capture various perspectives of the inputs, mirroring the way doctors conduct medical analysis. We also incorporate adversarial supervision to constrain the shape of the segmented vessels in unlabeled data. In this process, the 3D volume is projected into 2D views to mitigate the impact of label inconsistencies. Experiments demonstrate that our DiCo method sets new state-of-the-art performance on three 3D vessel segmentation benchmarks. The code repository address is https://github.com/xujiaommcome/DiCo
Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) offer a promising alternative for language modeling by enabling parallel decoding through iterative refinement. However, most DLMs rely on hard binary masking and discrete token assignments, which hinder the revision of early decisions and underutilize intermediate probabilistic representations. In this paper, we propose EvoToken-DLM, a novel diffusion-based language modeling approach that replaces hard binary masks with evolving soft token distributions. EvoToken-DLM enables a progressive transition from masked states to discrete outputs, supporting revisable decoding. To effectively support this evolution, we introduce continuous trajectory supervision, which aligns training objectives with iterative probabilistic updates. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that EvoToken-DLM consistently achieves superior performance, outperforming strong diffusion-based and masked DLM baselines. Project webpage: https://aim-uofa.github.io/EvoTokenDLM.
Abstract: Self-evolution methods enhance code generation through iterative "generate-verify-refine" cycles, yet existing approaches suffer from low exploration efficiency, failing to discover solutions with superior complexity within limited budgets. This inefficiency stems from initialization bias trapping evolution in poor solution regions, uncontrolled stochastic operations lacking feedback guidance, and insufficient experience utilization across tasks. To address these bottlenecks, we propose Controlled Self-Evolution (CSE), which consists of three key components. Diversified Planning Initialization generates structurally distinct algorithmic strategies for broad solution space coverage. Genetic Evolution replaces stochastic operations with feedback-guided mechanisms, enabling targeted mutation and compositional crossover. Hierarchical Evolution Memory captures both successful and failed experiences at inter-task and intra-task levels. Experiments on EffiBench-X demonstrate that CSE consistently outperforms all baselines across various LLM backbones. Furthermore, CSE achieves higher efficiency from early generations and maintains continuous improvement throughout evolution. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/QuantaAlpha/EvoControl.
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced Machine Translation (MT), applying them to linguistically complex domains-such as Social Network Services, literature etc. In these scenarios, translations often require handling non-literal expressions, leading to the inaccuracy of MT metrics. To systematically investigate the reliability of MT metrics, we first curate a meta-evaluation dataset focused on non-literal translations, namely MENT. MENT encompasses four non-literal translation domains and features source sentences paired with translations from diverse MT systems, with 7,530 human-annotated scores on translation quality. Experimental results reveal the inaccuracies of traditional MT metrics and the limitations of LLM-as-a-Judge, particularly the knowledge cutoff and score inconsistency problem. To mitigate these limitations, we propose RATE, a novel agentic translation evaluation framework, centered by a reflective Core Agent that dynamically invokes specialized sub-agents. Experimental results indicate the efficacy of RATE, achieving an improvement of at least 3.2 meta score compared with current metrics. Further experiments demonstrate the robustness of RATE to general-domain MT evaluation. Code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/BITHLP/RATE.
Abstract: Few-shot remote sensing image classification is challenging due to limited labeled samples and high variability in land-cover types. We propose a reconstruction-guided few-shot network (RGFS-Net) that enhances generalization to unseen classes while preserving consistency for seen categories. Our method incorporates a masked image reconstruction task, where parts of the input are occluded and reconstructed to encourage semantically rich feature learning. This auxiliary task strengthens spatial understanding and improves class discrimination under low-data settings. We evaluated the efficacy of EuroSAT and PatternNet datasets under 1-shot and 5-shot protocols, our approach consistently outperforms existing baselines. The proposed method is simple, effective, and compatible with standard backbones, offering a robust solution for few-shot remote sensing classification. Codes are available at https://github.com/stark0908/RGFS.
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a pivotal paradigm for Large Language Models (LLMs), yet current approaches struggle with visually rich documents by treating text and images as isolated retrieval targets. Existing methods relying solely on cosine similarity often fail to capture the semantic reinforcement provided by cross-modal alignment and layout-induced coherence. To address these limitations, we propose BayesRAG, a novel multimodal retrieval framework grounded in Bayesian inference and Dempster-Shafer evidence theory. Unlike traditional approaches that rank candidates strictly by similarity, BayesRAG models the intrinsic consistency of retrieved candidates across modalities as probabilistic evidence to refine retrieval confidence. Specifically, our method computes the posterior association probability for combinations of multimodal retrieval results, prioritizing text-image pairs that mutually corroborate each other in terms of both semantics and layout. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BayesRAG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on challenging multimodal benchmarks. This study establishes a new paradigm for multimodal retrieval fusion that effectively resolves the isolation of heterogeneous modalities through an evidence fusion mechanism and enhances the robustness of retrieval outcomes. Our code is available at https://github.com/TioeAre/BayesRAG.
Abstract: Attention mechanisms have become a core component of deep learning models, with Channel Attention and Spatial Attention being the two most representative architectures. Current research on their fusion strategies primarily bifurcates into sequential and parallel paradigms, yet the selection process remains largely empirical, lacking systematic analysis and unified principles. We systematically compare channel-spatial attention combinations under a unified framework, building an evaluation suite of 18 topologies across four classes: sequential, parallel, multi-scale, and residual. Across two vision and nine medical datasets, we uncover a "data scale-method-performance" coupling law: (1) in few-shot tasks, the "Channel-Multi-scale Spatial" cascaded structure achieves optimal performance; (2) in medium-scale tasks, parallel learnable fusion architectures demonstrate superior results; (3) in large-scale tasks, parallel structures with dynamic gating yield the best performance. Additionally, experiments indicate that the "Spatial-Channel" order is more stable and effective for fine-grained classification, while residual connections mitigate vanishing gradient problems across varying data scales. We thus propose scenario-based guidelines for building future attention modules. Code is open-sourced at https://github.com/DWlzm.
Abstract: Interactive large language model agents have advanced rapidly, but most remain specialized to a single environment and fail to adapt robustly to other environments. Model merging offers a training-free alternative by integrating multiple experts into a single model. In this paper, we propose Agent-Role Merging (ARM), an activation-guided, role-conditioned neuron transplantation method for model merging in LLM agents. ARM improves existing merging methods from static natural language tasks to multi-turn agent scenarios, and over the generalization ability across various interactive environments. This is achieved with a well designed 3-step framework: 1) constructing merged backbones, 2) selection based on its role-conditioned activation analysis, and 3) neuron transplantation for fine-grained refinements. Without gradient-based optimization, ARM improves cross-benchmark generalization while enjoying efficiency. Across diverse domains, the model obtained via ARM merging outperforms prior model merging methods and domain-specific expert models, while demonstrating strong out-of-domain generalization.
Abstract: While inference-time scaling has significantly enhanced generative quality in large language and diffusion models, its application to vector-quantized (VQ) visual autoregressive modeling (VAR) remains unexplored. We introduce VAR-Scaling, the first general framework for inference-time scaling in VAR, addressing the critical challenge of discrete latent spaces that prohibit continuous path search. We find that VAR scales exhibit two distinct pattern types: general patterns and specific patterns, where later-stage specific patterns conditionally optimize early-stage general patterns. To overcome the discrete latent space barrier in VQ models, we map sampling spaces to quasi-continuous feature spaces via kernel density estimation (KDE), where high-density samples approximate stable, high-quality solutions. This transformation enables effective navigation of sampling distributions. We propose a density-adaptive hybrid sampling strategy: Top-k sampling focuses on high-density regions to preserve quality near distribution modes, while Random-k sampling explores low-density areas to maintain diversity and prevent premature convergence. Consequently, VAR-Scaling optimizes sample fidelity at critical scales to enhance output quality. Experiments in class-conditional and text-to-image evaluations demonstrate significant improvements in inference process. The code is available at https://github.com/WD7ang/VAR-Scaling.
Abstract: Despite having hundreds of millions of speakers, Chinese dialects lag behind Mandarin in speech and language technologies. Most varieties are primarily spoken, making dialect-to-Mandarin speech-LLMs (large language models) more practical than dialect LLMs. Building dialect-to-Mandarin speech-LLMs requires speech representations with cross-dialect semantic alignment between Chinese dialects and Mandarin. In this paper, we achieve such a cross-dialect semantic alignment by training a speech encoder with ASR (automatic speech recognition)-only data, as demonstrated by speech-to-speech retrieval on a new benchmark of spoken Chinese varieties that we contribute. Our speech encoder further demonstrates state-of-the-art ASR performance on Chinese dialects. Together, our Chinese dialect benchmark, semantically aligned speech representations, and speech-to-speech retrieval evaluation lay the groundwork for future Chinese dialect speech-LLMs. We release the benchmark at https://github.com/kalvinchang/yubao.
Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) exhibit diverse high-level reasoning patterns (e.g., direct solution, reflection-and-verification, and exploring multiple solutions), yet prevailing training recipes implicitly bias models toward a limited set of dominant patterns. Through a systematic analysis, we identify substantial accuracy variance across these patterns on mathematics and science benchmarks, revealing that a model's default reasoning pattern is often sub-optimal for a given problem. To address this, we introduce Group Pattern Selection Optimization (GPSO), a reinforcement learning framework that extends GRPO by incorporating multi-pattern rollouts, verifier-guided optimal pattern selection per problem, and attention masking during optimization to prevent the leakage of explicit pattern suffixes into the learned policy. By exploring a portfolio of diverse reasoning strategies and optimizing the policy on the most effective ones, GPSO enables the model to internalize the mapping from problem characteristics to optimal reasoning patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GPSO delivers consistent and substantial performance gains across various model backbones and benchmarks, effectively mitigating pattern sub-optimality and fostering more robust, adaptable reasoning. All data and codes are available at https://github.com/wanghanbinpanda/GPSO.
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) routing assigns each query to the most suitable model from an ensemble. We introduce LLMRouterBench, a large-scale benchmark and unified framework for LLM routing. It comprises over 400K instances from 21 datasets and 33 models. Moreover, it provides comprehensive metrics for both performance-oriented routing and performance-cost trade-off routing, and integrates 10 representative routing baselines. Using LLMRouterBench, we systematically re-evaluate the field. While confirming strong model complementarity-the central premise of LLM routing-we find that many routing methods exhibit similar performance under unified evaluation, and several recent approaches, including commercial routers, fail to reliably outperform a simple baseline. Meanwhile, a substantial gap remains to the Oracle, driven primarily by persistent model-recall failures. We further show that backbone embedding models have limited impact, that larger ensembles exhibit diminishing returns compared to careful model curation, and that the benchmark also enables latency-aware analysis. All code and data are available at https://github.com/ynulihao/LLMRouterBench.
Abstract: Robots need task planning methods to generate action sequences for complex tasks. Recent work on adversarial attacks has revealed significant vulnerabilities in existing robot task planners, especially those built on foundation models. In this paper, we aim to address these security challenges by introducing PROTEA, an LLM-as-a-Judge defense mechanism, to evaluate the security of task plans. PROTEA is developed to address the dimensionality and history challenges in plan safety assessment. We used different LLMs to implement multiple versions of PROTEA for comparison purposes. For systemic evaluations, we created a dataset containing both benign and malicious task plans, where the harmful behaviors were injected at varying levels of stealthiness. Our results provide actionable insights for robotic system practitioners seeking to enhance robustness and security of their task planning systems. Details, dataset and demos are provided: https://protea-secure.github.io/PROTEA/
Abstract: Policy optimization for large language models often suffers from sparse reward signals in multi-step reasoning tasks. Critic-free methods like GRPO assign a single normalized outcome reward to all tokens, providing limited guidance for intermediate reasoning . While Process Reward Models (PRMs) offer dense feedback, they risk premature collapse when used alone, as early low-reward tokens can drive policies toward truncated outputs. We introduce Process Relative Policy Optimization (PRPO), which combines outcome reliability with process-level guidance in a critic-free framework. PRPO segments reasoning sequences based on semantic clues, normalizes PRM scores into token-level advantages, and aligns their distribution with outcome advantages through location-parameter shift. On MATH500, PRPO improves Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B accuracy from 61.2% to 64.4% over GRPO using only eight rollouts and no value network, demonstrating efficient fine-grained credit assignment within critic-free optimization. Code is available at: https://github.com/SchumiDing/srpocode
Abstract: Federated learning (FL) addresses data privacy and silo issues in large language models (LLMs). Most prior work focuses on improving the training efficiency of federated LLMs. However, security in open environments is overlooked, particularly defenses against malicious clients. To investigate the safety of LLMs during FL, we conduct preliminary experiments to analyze potential attack surfaces and defensible characteristics from the perspective of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) weights. We find two key properties of FL: 1) LLMs are vulnerable to attacks from malicious clients in FL, and 2) LoRA weights exhibit distinct behavioral patterns that can be filtered through simple classifiers. Based on these properties, we propose Safe-FedLLM, a probe-based defense framework for federated LLMs, constructing defenses across three dimensions: Step-Level, Client-Level, and Shadow-Level. The core concept of Safe-FedLLM is to perform probe-based discrimination on the LoRA weights locally trained by each client during FL, treating them as high-dimensional behavioral features and using lightweight classification models to determine whether they possess malicious attributes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Safe-FedLLM effectively enhances the defense capability of federated LLMs without compromising performance on benign data. Notably, our method effectively suppresses malicious data impact without significant impact on training speed, and remains effective even with many malicious clients. Our code is available at: https://github.com/dmqx/Safe-FedLLM.
Abstract: Emerging memory technologies have gained significant attention as a promising pathway to overcome the limitations of conventional computing architectures in deep learning applications. By enabling computation directly within memory, these technologies - built on nanoscale devices with tunable and nonvolatile conductance - offer the potential to drastically reduce energy consumption and latency compared to traditional von Neumann systems. This paper introduces XBTorch (short for CrossBarTorch), a novel simulation framework that integrates seamlessly with PyTorch and provides specialized tools for accurately and efficiently modeling crossbar-based systems based on emerging memory technologies. Through detailed comparisons and case studies involving hardware-aware training and inference, we demonstrate how XBTorch offers a unified interface for key research areas such as device-level modeling, cross-layer co-design, and inference-time fault tolerance. While exemplar studies utilize ferroelectric field-effect transistor (FeFET) models, the framework remains technology-agnostic - supporting other emerging memories such as resistive RAM (ReRAM), as well as enabling user-defined custom device models. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/ADAM-Lab-GW/xbtorch
Abstract: Simulation is crucial in real-world robotics, offering safe, scalable, and efficient environments for developing applications, ranging from humanoid robots to autonomous vehicles and drones. While the Robot Operating System (ROS) has been widely adopted as the backbone of these robotic applications in both academia and industry, its asynchronous, multiprocess design complicates reproducibility, especially across varying hardware platforms. Deterministic callback execution cannot be guaranteed when computation times and communication delays vary. This lack of reproducibility complicates scientific benchmarking and continuous integration, where consistent results are essential. To address this, we present a methodology to create deterministic simulations using ROS 2 nodes. Our ROS Simulation Library for C++ (RSLCPP) implements this approach, enabling existing nodes to be combined into a simulation routine that yields reproducible results without requiring any code changes. We demonstrate that our approach yields identical results across various CPUs and architectures when testing both a synthetic benchmark and a real-world robotics system. RSLCPP is open-sourced at https://github.com/TUMFTM/rslcpp.
Abstract: AI Clones aim to simulate an individual's thoughts and behaviors to enable long-term, personalized interaction, placing stringent demands on memory systems to model experiences, emotions, and opinions over time. Existing memory benchmarks primarily rely on user-agent conversational histories, which are temporally fragmented and insufficient for capturing continuous life trajectories. We introduce CloneMem, a benchmark for evaluating longterm memory in AI Clone scenarios grounded in non-conversational digital traces, including diaries, social media posts, and emails, spanning one to three years. CloneMem adopts a hierarchical data construction framework to ensure longitudinal coherence and defines tasks that assess an agent's ability to track evolving personal states. Experiments show that current memory mechanisms struggle in this setting, highlighting open challenges for life-grounded personalized AI. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/AvatarMemory/CloneMemBench
Abstract: Autonomous high-fidelity object reconstruction is fundamental for creating digital assets and bridging the simulation-to-reality gap in robotics. We present ObjSplat, an active reconstruction framework that leverages Gaussian surfels as a unified representation to progressively reconstruct unknown objects with both photorealistic appearance and accurate geometry. Addressing the limitations of conventional opacity or depth-based cues, we introduce a geometry-aware viewpoint evaluation pipeline that explicitly models back-face visibility and occlusion-aware multi-view covisibility, reliably identifying under-reconstructed regions even on geometrically complex objects. Furthermore, to overcome the limitations of greedy planning strategies, ObjSplat employs a next-best-path (NBP) planner that performs multi-step lookahead on a dynamically constructed spatial graph. By jointly optimizing information gain and movement cost, this planner generates globally efficient trajectories. Extensive experiments in simulation and on real-world cultural artifacts demonstrate that ObjSplat produces physically consistent models within minutes, achieving superior reconstruction fidelity and surface completeness while significantly reducing scan time and path length compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Project page: https://li-yuetao.github.io/ObjSplat-page/ .
Abstract: Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit strong general-purpose capabilities, yet still struggle on Fine-Grained Visual Classification (FGVC), a core perception task that requires subtle visual discrimination and is crucial for many real-world applications. A widely adopted strategy for boosting performance on challenging tasks such as math and coding is Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, several prior works have reported that CoT can actually harm performance on visual perception tasks. These studies, though, examine the issue from relatively narrow angles and leave open why CoT degrades perception-heavy performance. We systematically re-examine the role of CoT in FGVC through the lenses of zero-shot evaluation and multiple training paradigms. Across these settings, we uncover a central paradox: the degradation induced by CoT is largely driven by the reasoning length, in which longer textual reasoning consistently lowers classification accuracy. We term this phenomenon the ``Cost of Thinking''. Building on this finding, we make two key contributions: (1) \alg, a simple and general plug-and-play normalization method for multi-reward optimization that balances heterogeneous reward signals, and (2) ReFine-RFT, a framework that combines ensemble rewards with \alg to constrain reasoning length while providing dense accuracy-oriented feedback. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our findings and the proposed ReFine-RFT, achieving state-of-the-art performance across FGVC benchmarks. Code and models are available at \href{https://github.com/jiezhu23/ReFine-RFT}{Project Link}.
Abstract: Financial question answering (QA) over long corporate filings requires evidence to satisfy strict constraints on entities, financial metrics, fiscal periods, and numeric values. However, existing LLM-based rerankers primarily optimize semantic relevance, leading to unstable rankings and opaque decisions on long documents. We propose FinCards, a structured reranking framework that reframes financial evidence selection as constraint satisfaction under a finance-aware schema. FinCards represents filing chunks and questions using aligned schema fields (entities, metrics, periods, and numeric spans), enabling deterministic field-level matching. Evidence is selected via a multi-stage tournament reranking with stability-aware aggregation, producing auditable decision traces. Across two corporate filing QA benchmarks, FinCards substantially improves early-rank retrieval over both lexical and LLM-based reranking baselines, while reducing ranking variance, without requiring model fine-tuning or unpredictable inference budgets. Our code is available at https://github.com/XanderZhou2022/FINCARDS.
Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve from static dialogue interfaces to autonomous general agents, effective memory is paramount to ensuring long-term consistency. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on casual conversation or task-oriented dialogue, failing to capture **"long-term project-oriented"** interactions where agents must track evolving goals. To bridge this gap, we introduce **RealMem**, the first benchmark grounded in realistic project scenarios. RealMem comprises over 2,000 cross-session dialogues across eleven scenarios, utilizing natural user queries for evaluation. We propose a synthesis pipeline that integrates Project Foundation Construction, Multi-Agent Dialogue Generation, and Memory and Schedule Management to simulate the dynamic evolution of memory. Experiments reveal that current memory systems face significant challenges in managing the long-term project states and dynamic context dependencies inherent in real-world projects. Our code and datasets are available at [https://github.com/AvatarMemory/RealMemBench](https://github.com/AvatarMemory/RealMemBench).
Abstract: Post-training quantization is essential for deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on resource-constrained devices. However, standard integer quantization (e.g., INT4) fundamentally degrades performance by imposing a uniform grid on the heavy-tailed distribution of weight parameters, particularly in smaller-scale models (e.g., <2B parameters). We introduce HAS-VQ (Hessian-Adaptive Sparse Vector Quantization), a compression framework that strictly decouples high-sensitivity outliers from the bulk weight distribution using second-order sensitivity analysis. HAS-VQ employs a Hessian-Masked Decoupling strategy to isolate sensitive parameters, followed by robust Vector Quantization (VQ) of the remaining dense body. Crucially, we introduce a residual sparse feedback mechanism that corrects quantization errors in the most sensitive dimensions, ensuring exact reconstruction of outliers. We evaluate HAS-VQ on SmolLM2-1.7B, demonstrating two distinct regimes of superiority: (1) Pareto Dominance over Integer Baselines: At 4.23 effective bits-per-parameter (BPP), we achieve a perplexity of 14.23, significantly outperforming the standard INT4 baseline (20.03 PPL at 4.71 BPP). (2) High-Fidelity Compression: Relative to the FP16 baseline, HAS-VQ achieves a 2.3x reduction in model size (7.03 BPP) while maintaining statistically indistinguishable perplexity (10.12 vs. 10.04), effectively offering a lossless compression alternative for bandwidth-constrained environments. The code is available at https://github.com/VladimerKhasia/HASVQ
Abstract: Competitive programming presents great challenges for Code LLMs due to its intensive reasoning demands and high logical complexity. However, current Code LLMs still rely heavily on real-world data, which limits their scalability. In this paper, we explore a fully synthetic approach: training Code LLMs with entirely generated tasks, solutions, and test cases, to empower code reasoning models without relying on real-world data. To support this, we leverage feature-based synthesis to propose a novel data synthesis pipeline called SynthSmith. SynthSmith shows strong potential in producing diverse and challenging tasks, along with verified solutions and tests, supporting both supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. Based on the proposed synthetic SFT and RL datasets, we introduce the X-Coder model series, which achieves a notable pass rate of 62.9 avg@8 on LiveCodeBench v5 and 55.8 on v6, outperforming DeepCoder-14B-Preview and AReal-boba2-14B despite having only 7B parameters. In-depth analysis reveals that scaling laws hold on our synthetic dataset, and we explore which dimensions are more effective to scale. We further provide insights into code-centric reinforcement learning and highlight the key factors that shape performance through detailed ablations and analysis. Our findings demonstrate that scaling high-quality synthetic data and adopting staged training can greatly advance code reasoning, while mitigating reliance on real-world coding data.
Abstract: While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in visual understanding, they often struggle when faced with the unstructured and ambiguous nature of human-generated sketches. This limitation is particularly pronounced in the underexplored task of visual grading, where models should not only solve a problem but also diagnose errors in hand-drawn diagrams. Such diagnostic capabilities depend on complex structural, semantic, and metacognitive reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce SketchJudge, a novel benchmark tailored for evaluating MLLMs as graders of hand-drawn STEM diagrams. SketchJudge encompasses 1,015 hand-drawn student responses across four domains: geometry, physics, charts, and flowcharts, featuring diverse stylistic variations and distinct error types. Evaluations on SketchJudge demonstrate that even advanced MLLMs lag significantly behind humans, validating the benchmark's effectiveness in exposing the fragility of current vision-language alignment in symbolic and noisy contexts. All data, code, and evaluation scripts are publicly available at https://github.com/yuhangsu82/SketchJudge.
Abstract: The Automatic Identification System provides critical information for maritime navigation and safety, yet its trajectories are often incomplete due to signal loss or deliberate tampering. Existing imputation methods emphasize trajectory recovery, paying limited attention to interpretability and failing to provide underlying knowledge that benefits downstream tasks such as anomaly detection and route planning. We propose knowledge-driven interpretable vessel trajectory imputation (VISTA), the first trajectory imputation framework that offers interpretability while simultaneously providing underlying knowledge to support downstream analysis. Specifically, we first define underlying knowledge as a combination of Structured Data-derived Knowledge (SDK) distilled from AIS data and Implicit LLM Knowledge acquired from large-scale Internet corpora. Second, to manage and leverage the SDK effectively at scale, we develop a data-knowledge-data loop that employs a Structured Data-derived Knowledge Graph for SDK extraction and knowledge-driven trajectory imputation. Third, to efficiently process large-scale AIS data, we introduce a workflow management layer that coordinates the end-to-end pipeline, enabling parallel knowledge extraction and trajectory imputation with anomaly handling and redundancy elimination. Experiments on two large AIS datasets show that VISTA is capable of state-of-the-art imputation accuracy and computational efficiency, improving over state-of-the-art baselines by 5%-94% and reducing time cost by 51%-93%, while producing interpretable knowledge cues that benefit downstream tasks. The source code and implementation details of VISTA are publicly available.
Abstract: Image dehazing has witnessed significant advancements with the development of deep learning models. However, most existing methods focus solely on single-modal RGB features, neglecting the inherent correlation between scene depth and haze distribution. Even those that jointly optimize depth estimation and image dehazing often suffer from suboptimal performance due to inadequate utilization of accurate depth information. In this paper, we present UDPNet, a general framework that leverages depth-based priors from a large-scale pretrained depth estimation model DepthAnything V2 to boost existing image dehazing models. Specifically, our architecture comprises two key components: the Depth-Guided Attention Module (DGAM) adaptively modulates features via lightweight depth-guided channel attention, and the Depth Prior Fusion Module (DPFM) enables hierarchical fusion of multi-scale depth map features by dual sliding-window multi-head cross-attention mechanism. These modules ensure both computational efficiency and effective integration of depth priors. Moreover, the depth priors empower the network to dynamically adapt to varying haze densities, illumination conditions, and domain gaps across synthetic and real-world data. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our UDPNet, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods on popular dehazing datasets, with PSNR improvements of 0.85 dB on SOTS-indoor, 1.19 dB on Haze4K, and 1.79 dB on NHR. Our proposed solution establishes a new benchmark for depth-aware dehazing across various scenarios. Pretrained models and codes are released at our project https://github.com/Harbinzzy/UDPNet.
Abstract: Most existing 3D referring expression segmentation (3DRES) methods rely on dense, high-quality point clouds, while real-world agents such as robots and mobile phones operate with only a few sparse RGB views and strict latency constraints. We introduce Multi-view 3D Referring Expression Segmentation (MV-3DRES), where the model must recover scene structure and segment the referred object directly from sparse multi-view images. Traditional two-stage pipelines, which first reconstruct a point cloud and then perform segmentation, often yield low-quality geometry, produce coarse or degraded target regions, and run slowly. We propose the Multimodal Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (MVGGT), an efficient end-to-end framework that integrates language information into sparse-view geometric reasoning through a dual-branch design. Training in this setting exposes a critical optimization barrier, termed Foreground Gradient Dilution (FGD), where sparse 3D signals lead to weak supervision. To resolve this, we introduce Per-view No-target Suppression Optimization (PVSO), which provides stronger and more balanced gradients across views, enabling stable and efficient learning. To support consistent evaluation, we build MVRefer, a benchmark that defines standardized settings and metrics for MV-3DRES. Experiments show that MVGGT establishes the first strong baseline and achieves both high accuracy and fast inference, outperforming existing alternatives. Code and models are publicly available at https://mvggt.github.io.
Abstract: Personalized mobile artificial intelligence applications are widely deployed, yet they are expected to infer user behavior from sparse and irregular histories under a continuously evolving spatio-temporal context. This setting induces a fundamental tension among three requirements, i.e., immediacy to adapt to recent behavior, stability to resist transient noise, and generalization to support long-horizon prediction and cold-start users. Most existing approaches satisfy at most two of these requirements, resulting in an inherent impossibility triangle in data-scarce, non-stationary personalization. To address this challenge, we model mobile behavior as a partially observed spatio-temporal tensor and unify short-term adaptation, long-horizon forecasting, and cold-start recommendation as a conditional completion problem, where a user- and task-specific mask specifies which coordinates are treated as evidence. We propose U-MASK, a user-adaptive spatio-temporal masking method that allocates evidence budgets based on user reliability and task sensitivity. To enable mask generation under sparse observations, U-MASK learns a compact, task-agnostic user representation from app and location histories via U-SCOPE, which serves as the sole semantic conditioning signal. A shared diffusion transformer then performs mask-guided generative completion while preserving observed evidence, so personalization and task differentiation are governed entirely by the mask and the user representation. Experiments on real-world mobile datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods across short-term prediction, long-horizon forecasting, and cold-start settings, with the largest gains under severe data sparsity. The code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/NICE-HKU/U-MASK.
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) can extend their parameter knowledge limits by adopting the Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) paradigm. However, existing LLM-based agent training framework often focuses on answers' accuracy, overlooking specific alignment for behavior patterns. Consequently, agent often exhibits ineffective actions during TIR tasks, such as redundant and insufficient tool calls. How to calibrate erroneous behavioral patterns when executing TIR tasks, thereby exploring effective trajectories, remains an open-ended problem. In this paper, we propose ET-Agent, a training framework for calibrating agent's tool-use behavior through two synergistic perspectives: Self-evolving Data Flywheel and Behavior Calibration Training. Specifically, we introduce a self-evolutionary data flywheel to generate enhanced data, used to fine-tune LLM to improve its exploration ability. Based on this, we implement an two-phases behavior-calibration training framework. It is designed to progressively calibrate erroneous behavioral patterns to optimal behaviors. Further in-depth experiments confirm the superiority of \ourmodel{} across multiple dimensions, including correctness, efficiency, reasoning conciseness, and tool execution accuracy. Our ET-Agent framework provides practical insights for research in the TIR field. Codes can be found in https://github.com/asilverlight/ET-Agent
Abstract: Designing effective control policies for autonomous systems remains a fundamental challenge, traditionally addressed through reinforcement learning or manual engineering. While reinforcement learning has achieved remarkable success, it often suffers from high sample complexity, reward shaping difficulties, and produces opaque neural network policies that are hard to interpret or verify. Manual design, on the other hand, requires substantial domain expertise and struggles to scale across diverse tasks. In this work, we demonstrate that LLM-driven evolutionary search can effectively synthesize interpretable control policies in the form of executable code. By treating policy synthesis as a code evolution problem, we harness the LLM's prior knowledge of programming patterns and control heuristics while employing evolutionary search to explore the solution space systematically. We implement our approach using EvoToolkit, a framework that seamlessly integrates LLM-driven evolution with customizable fitness evaluation. Our method iteratively evolves populations of candidate policy programs, evaluating them against task-specific objectives and selecting superior individuals for reproduction. This process yields compact, human-readable control policies that can be directly inspected, modified, and formally verified. This work highlights the potential of combining foundation models with evolutionary computation for synthesizing trustworthy control policies in autonomous systems. Code is available at https://github.com/pgg3/EvoControl.
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved strong performance across many tasks, yet most systems remain limited to offline inference, requiring complete inputs before generating outputs. Recent streaming methods reduce latency by interleaving perception and generation, but still enforce a sequential perception-generation cycle, limiting real-time interaction. In this work, we target a fundamental bottleneck that arises when extending MLLMs to real-time video understanding: the global positional continuity constraint imposed by standard positional encoding schemes. While natural in offline inference, this constraint tightly couples perception and generation, preventing effective input-output parallelism. To address this limitation, we propose a parallel streaming framework that relaxes positional continuity through three designs: Overlapped, Group-Decoupled, and Gap-Isolated. These designs enable simultaneous perception and generation, allowing the model to process incoming inputs while producing responses in real time. Extensive experiments reveal that Group-Decoupled achieves the best efficiency-performance balance, maintaining high fluency and accuracy while significantly reducing latency. We further show that the proposed framework yields up to 2x acceleration under balanced perception-generation workloads, establishing a principled pathway toward speak-while-watching real-time systems. We make all our code publicly available: https://github.com/EIT-NLP/Speak-While-Watching.
Abstract: Modern software package registries like PyPI have become critical infrastructure for software development, but are increasingly exploited by threat actors distributing malicious packages with sophisticated multi-stage attack chains. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising capabilities for automated code analysis, their application to security-critical malware detection faces fundamental challenges, including hallucination and context confusion, which can lead to missed detections or false alarms. We present CHASE (Collaborative Hierarchical Agents for Security Exploration), a high-reliability multi-agent architecture that addresses these limitations through a Plan-and-Execute coordination model, specialized Worker Agents focused on specific analysis aspects, and integration with deterministic security tools for critical operations. Our key insight is that reliability in LLM-based security analysis emerges not from improving individual model capabilities but from architecting systems that compensate for LLM weaknesses while leveraging their semantic understanding strengths. Evaluation on a dataset of 3,000 packages (500 malicious, 2,500 benign) demonstrates that CHASE achieves 98.4% recall with only 0.08% false positive rate, while maintaining a practical median analysis time of 4.5 minutes per package, making it suitable for operational deployment in automated package screening. Furthermore, we conducted a survey with cybersecurity professionals to evaluate the generated analysis reports, identifying their key strengths and areas for improvement. This work provides a blueprint for building reliable AI-powered security tools that can scale with the growing complexity of modern software supply chains. Our project page is available at https://t0d4.github.io/CHASE-AIware25/
Abstract: Recent advances in generative models have enabled modern Text-to-Audio (TTA) systems to synthesize audio with high perceptual quality. However, TTA systems often struggle to maintain semantic consistency with the input text, leading to mismatches in sound events, temporal tructures, or contextual relationships. Evaluating semantic fidelity in TTA remains a significant challenge. Traditional methods primarily rely on subjective human listening tests, which is time-consuming. To solve this, we propose an objective evaluator based on a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture with Sequential Cross-Attention (SeqCoAttn). Our model achieves the first rank in the XACLE Challenge, with an SRCC of 0.6402 (an improvement of 30.6% over the challenge baseline) on the test dataset. Code is available at: https://github.com/S-Orion/MOESCORE.
Abstract: As LLM-based agents operate over sequential multi-step reasoning, hallucinations arising at intermediate steps risk propagating along the trajectory, thus degrading overall reliability. Unlike hallucination detection in single-turn responses, diagnosing hallucinations in multi-step workflows requires identifying which step causes the initial divergence. To fill this gap, we propose a new research task, automated hallucination attribution of LLM-based agents, aiming to identify the step responsible for the hallucination and explain why. To support this task, we introduce AgentHallu, a comprehensive benchmark with: (1) 693 high-quality trajectories spanning 7 agent frameworks and 5 domains, (2) a hallucination taxonomy organized into 5 categories (Planning, Retrieval, Reasoning, Human-Interaction, and Tool-Use) and 14 sub-categories, and (3) multi-level annotations curated by humans, covering binary labels, hallucination-responsible steps, and causal explanations. We evaluate 13 leading models, and results show the task is challenging even for top-tier models (like GPT-5, Gemini-2.5-Pro). The best-performing model achieves only 41.1\% step localization accuracy, where tool-use hallucinations are the most challenging at just 11.6\%. We believe AgentHallu will catalyze future research into developing robust, transparent, and reliable agentic systems.
Abstract: Modern computer vision architectures, from CNNs to Transformers, predominantly rely on the stacking of heuristic modules: spatial mixers (Attention/Conv) followed by channel mixers (FFNs). In this work, we challenge this paradigm by returning to mathematical first principles. We propose the \textbf{Clifford Algebra Network (CAN)}, also referred to as CliffordNet, a vision backbone grounded purely in Geometric Algebra. Instead of engineering separate modules for mixing and memory, we derive a unified interaction mechanism based on the \textbf{Clifford Geometric Product} ($uv = u \cdot v + u \wedge v$). This operation ensures algebraic completeness regarding the Geometric Product by simultaneously capturing feature coherence (via the generalized inner product) and structural variation (via the exterior wedge product). Implemented via an efficient sparse rolling mechanism with \textbf{strict linear complexity $\mathcal{O}(N)$}, our model reveals a surprising emergent property: the geometric interaction is so representationally dense that standard Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs) become redundant. Empirically, CliffordNet establishes a new Pareto frontier: our \textbf{Nano} variant achieves \textbf{76.41\%} accuracy on CIFAR-100 with only \textbf{1.4M} parameters, effectively matching the heavy-weight ResNet-18 (11.2M) with \textbf{$8\times$ fewer parameters}, while our \textbf{Base} variant sets a new SOTA for tiny models at \textbf{78.05\%}. Our results suggest that global understanding can emerge solely from rigorous, algebraically complete local interactions, potentially signaling a shift where \textit{geometry is all you need}. Code is available at https://github.com/ParaMind2025/CAN.
Abstract: The electroencephalogram (EEG) has been the gold standard for quantifying mental workload; however, due to its complexity and non-portability, it can be constraining. ECG signals, which are feasible on wearable equipment pieces such as headbands, present a promising method for cognitive state monitoring. This research explores whether electrocardiogram (ECG) signals are able to indicate mental workload consistently and act as surrogates for EEG-based cognitive indicators. This study investigates whether ECG-derived features can serve as surrogate indicators of cognitive load, a concept traditionally quantified using EEG. Using a publicly available multimodal dataset (OpenNeuro) of EEG and ECG recorded during working-memory and listening tasks, features of HRV and Catch22 descriptors are extracted from ECG, and spectral band-power with Catch22 features from EEG. A cross-modal regression framework based on XGBoost was trained to map ECG-derived HRV representations to EEG-derived cognitive features. In order to address data sparsity and model brain-heart interactions, we integrated the PSV-SDG to produce EEG-conditioned synthetic HRV time series.This addresses the challenge of inferring cognitive load solely from ECG-derived features using a combination of multimodal learning, signal processing, and synthetic data generation. These outcomes form a basis for light, interpretable machine learning models that are implemented through wearable biosensors in non-lab environments. Synthetic HRV inclusion enhances robustness, particularly in sparse data situations. Overall, this work is an initiation for building low-cost, explainable, and real-time cognitive monitoring systems for mental health, education, and human-computer interaction, with a focus on ageing and clinical populations.
Abstract: Graph database query languages cannot express algorithms like PageRank, forcing costly data wrangling, while existing solutions such as algorithm libraries, vertex-centric APIs, and recursive CTEs lack the necessary combination of expressiveness, performance, and usability. We present GraphAlg: a domain-specific language for graph algorithms that compiles to relational algebra, enabling seamless integration with query processing pipelines. Built on linear algebra foundations, GraphAlg provides intuitive matrix operations that are amenable to aggressive optimization including sparsity analysis, loop-invariant code motion, and in-place aggregation. Our implementation in AvantGraph demonstrates significant code complexity reduction compared to SQL/Python and Pregel while achieving excellent performance on LDBC Graphalytics benchmarks. GraphAlg establishes that graph databases can serve as unified platforms for both queries and analytics.
Abstract: Multi-agent systems face a fundamental coordination problem: agents must coordinate despite heterogeneous preferences, asymmetric stakes, and imperfect information. When coordination fails, friction emerges: measurable resistance manifesting as deadlock, thrashing, communication overhead, or outright conflict. This paper derives a formal framework for analyzing coordination friction from a single axiom: actions affecting agents require authorization from those agents in proportion to stakes. From this axiom of consent, we establish the kernel triple $(α, σ, ε)$ (alignment, stake, and entropy) characterizing any resource allocation configuration. The friction equation $F = σ (1 + ε)/(1 + α)$ predicts coordination difficulty as a function of preference alignment $α$, stake magnitude $σ$, and communication entropy $ε$. The Replicator-Optimization Mechanism (ROM) governs evolutionary selection over coordination strategies: configurations generating less friction persist longer, establishing consent-respecting arrangements as dynamical attractors rather than normative ideals. We develop formal definitions for resource consent, coordination legitimacy, and friction-aware allocation in multi-agent systems. The framework yields testable predictions: MARL systems with higher reward alignment exhibit faster convergence; distributed allocations accounting for stake asymmetry generate lower coordination failure; AI systems with interpretability deficits produce friction proportional to the human-AI alignment gap. Applications to cryptocurrency governance and political systems demonstrate that the same equations govern friction dynamics across domains, providing a complexity science perspective on coordination under preference heterogeneity.
Abstract: Tracking skiers in RGB broadcast footage is challenging due to motion blur, static overlays, and clutter that obscure the fast-moving athlete. Event cameras, with their asynchronous contrast sensing, offer natural robustness to such artifacts, yet a controlled benchmark for winter-sport tracking has been missing. We introduce event SkiTB (eSkiTB), a synthetic event-based ski tracking dataset generated from SkiTB using direct video-to-event conversion without neural interpolation, enabling an iso-informational comparison between RGB and event modalities. Benchmarking SDTrack (spiking transformer) against STARK (RGB transformer), we find that event-based tracking is substantially resilient to broadcast clutter in scenes dominated by static overlays, achieving 0.685 IoU, outperforming RGB by +20.0 points. Across the dataset, SDTrack attains a mean IoU of 0.711, demonstrating that temporal contrast is a reliable cue for tracking ballistic motion in visually congested environments. eSkiTB establishes the first controlled setting for event-based tracking in winter sports and highlights the promise of event cameras for ski tracking. The dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/eventbasedvision/eSkiTB.
Abstract: Artificial intelligence holds strong potential to support clinical decision making in intensive care units where timely and accurate risk assessment is critical. However, many existing models focus on isolated outcomes or limited data types, while clinicians integrate longitudinal history, real time physiology, and heterogeneous clinical information. To address this gap, we developed MDS ICU, a unified multimodal machine learning framework that fuses routinely collected data including demographics, biometrics, vital signs, laboratory values, ECG waveforms, surgical procedures, and medical device usage to provide continuous predictive support during ICU stays. Using 63001 samples from 27062 patients in MIMIC IV, we trained a deep learning architecture that combines structured state space S4 encoders for ECG waveforms with multilayer perceptron RealMLP encoders for tabular data to jointly predict 33 clinically relevant outcomes spanning mortality, organ dysfunction, medication needs, and acute deterioration. The model achieved strong discrimination with AUROCs of 0.90 for 24 hour mortality, 0.92 for sedative administration, 0.97 for invasive mechanical ventilation, and 0.93 for coagulation dysfunction. Calibration analysis showed close agreement between predicted and observed risks, with consistent gains from ECG waveform integration. Comparisons with clinicians and large language models showed that model predictions alone outperformed both, and that providing model outputs as decision support further improved their performance. These results demonstrate that multimodal AI can deliver clinically meaningful risk stratification across diverse ICU outcomes while augmenting rather than replacing clinical expertise, establishing a scalable foundation for precision critical care decision support.
Abstract: Protecting the copyright of user-generated AI images is an emerging challenge as AIGC becomes pervasive in creative workflows. Existing watermarking methods (1) remain vulnerable to real-world adversarial threats, often forced to trade off between defenses against spoofing and removal attacks; and (2) cannot support semantic-level tamper localization. We introduce PAI, a training-free inherent watermarking framework for AIGC copyright protection, plug-and-play with diffusion-based AIGC services. PAI simultaneously provides three key functionalities: robust ownership verification, attack detection, and semantic-level tampering localization. Unlike existing inherent watermark methods that only embed watermarks at noise initialization of diffusion models, we design a novel key-conditioned deflection mechanism that subtly steers the denoising trajectory according to the user key. Such trajectory-level coupling further strengthens the semantic entanglement of identity and content, thereby further enhancing robustness against real-world threats. Moreover, we also provide a theoretical analysis proving that only the valid key can pass verification. Experiments across 12 attack methods show that PAI achieves 98.43\% verification accuracy, improving over SOTA methods by 37.25\% on average, and retains strong tampering localization performance even against advanced AIGC edits. Our code is available at https://github.com/QingyuLiu/PAI.
Abstract: Image deblurring has advanced rapidly with deep learning, yet most methods exhibit poor generalization beyond their training datasets, with performance dropping significantly in real-world scenarios. Our analysis shows this limitation stems from two factors: datasets face an inherent trade-off between realism and coverage of diverse blur patterns, and algorithmic designs remain restrictive, as pixel-wise losses drive models toward local detail recovery while overlooking structural and semantic consistency, whereas diffusion-based approaches, though perceptually strong, still fail to generalize when trained on narrow datasets with simplistic strategies. Through systematic investigation, we identify blur pattern diversity as the decisive factor for robust generalization and propose Blur Pattern Pretraining (BPP), which acquires blur priors from simulation datasets and transfers them through joint fine-tuning on real data. We further introduce Motion and Semantic Guidance (MoSeG) to strengthen blur priors under severe degradation, and integrate it into GLOWDeblur, a Generalizable reaL-wOrld lightWeight Deblur model that combines convolution-based pre-reconstruction & domain alignment module with a lightweight diffusion backbone. Extensive experiments on six widely-used benchmarks and two real-world datasets validate our approach, confirming the importance of blur priors for robust generalization and demonstrating that the lightweight design of GLOWDeblur ensures practicality in real-world applications. The project page is available at https://vegdog007.github.io/GLOWDeblur_Website/.
Abstract: While humans develop core visual skills long before acquiring language, contemporary Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) still rely heavily on linguistic priors to compensate for their fragile visual understanding. We uncovered a crucial fact: state-of-the-art MLLMs consistently fail on basic visual tasks that humans, even 3-year-olds, can solve effortlessly. To systematically investigate this gap, we introduce BabyVision, a benchmark designed to assess core visual abilities independent of linguistic knowledge for MLLMs. BabyVision spans a wide range of tasks, with 388 items divided into 22 subclasses across four key categories. Empirical results and human evaluation reveal that leading MLLMs perform significantly below human baselines. Gemini3-Pro-Preview scores 49.7, lagging behind 6-year-old humans and falling well behind the average adult score of 94.1. These results show despite excelling in knowledge-heavy evaluations, current MLLMs still lack fundamental visual primitives. Progress in BabyVision represents a step toward human-level visual perception and reasoning capabilities. We also explore solving visual reasoning with generation models by proposing BabyVision-Gen and automatic evaluation toolkit. Our code and benchmark data are released at https://github.com/UniPat-AI/BabyVision for reproduction.
Abstract: Consumer-grade biosensors offer a cost-effective alternative to medical-grade electromyography (EMG) systems, reducing hardware costs from thousands of dollars to approximately $13. However, these low-cost sensors introduce significant signal instability and motion artifacts. Deploying machine learning models on resource-constrained edge devices like the ESP32 presents a challenge: balancing classification accuracy with strict latency (<100ms) and memory (<320KB) constraints. Using a single-subject dataset comprising 1,540 seconds of raw data (1.54M data points, segmented into ~1,300 one-second windows), I evaluate 18 model architectures, ranging from statistical heuristics to deep transfer learning (ResNet50) and custom hybrid networks (MaxCRNN). While my custom "MaxCRNN" (Inception + Bi-LSTM + Attention) achieved the highest safety (99% Precision) and robustness, I identify Random Forest (74% accuracy) as the Pareto-optimal solution for embedded control on legacy microcontrollers. I demonstrate that reliable, low-latency EMG control is feasible on commodity hardware, with Deep Learning offering a path to near-perfect reliability on modern Edge AI accelerators.
Abstract: Bayesian optimization (BO) is a common framework for optimizing black-box functions, yet most existing methods assume static query costs and rely on myopic acquisition strategies. We introduce LookaHES, a nonmyopic BO framework designed for dynamic, history-dependent cost environments, where evaluation costs vary with prior actions, such as travel distance in spatial tasks or edit distance in sequence design. LookaHES combines a multi-step variant of $H$-Entropy Search with pathwise sampling and neural policy optimization, enabling long-horizon planning beyond twenty steps without the exponential complexity of existing nonmyopic methods. The key innovation is the integration of neural policies, including large language models, to effectively navigate structured, combinatorial action spaces such as protein sequences. These policies amortize lookahead planning and can be integrated with domain-specific constraints during rollout. Empirically, LookaHES outperforms strong myopic and nonmyopic baselines across nine synthetic benchmarks from two to eight dimensions and two real-world tasks: geospatial optimization using NASA night-light imagery and protein sequence design with constrained token-level edits. In short, LookaHES provides a general, scalable, and cost-aware solution for robust long-horizon optimization in complex decision spaces, which makes it a useful tool for researchers in machine learning, statistics, and applied domains. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/sangttruong/nonmyopia.
Abstract: Due to the limited generalization and interpretability of deep learning classifiers, The final vetting of rare celestial object candidates still relies on expert visual inspection--a manually intensive process. In this process, astronomers leverage specialized tools to analyze spectra and construct reliable catalogs. However, this practice has become the primary bottleneck, as it is fundamentally incapable of scaling with the data deluge from modern spectroscopic surveys. To bridge this gap, we propose Spec-o3, a tool-augmented vision-language agent that performs astronomer-aligned spectral inspection via interleaved multimodal chain-of-thought reasoning. Spec-o3 is trained with a two-stage post-training recipe: cold-start supervised fine-tuning on expert inspection trajectories followed by outcome-based reinforcement learning on rare-type verification tasks. Evaluated on five rare-object identification tasks from LAMOST, Spec-o3 establishes a new State-of-the-Art, boosting the macro-F1 score from 28.3 to 76.5 with a 7B parameter base model and outperforming both proprietary VLMs and specialized deep models. Crucially, the agent demonstrates strong generalization to unseen inspection tasks across survey shifts (from LAMOST to SDSS/DESI). Expert evaluations confirm that its reasoning traces are coherent and physically consistent, supporting transparent and trustworthy decision-making. Code, data, and models are available at \href{https://github.com/Maxwell-Jia/spec-o3}{Project HomePage}.
Abstract: Spatial intelligence refers to the ability to perceive, reason about, and describe objects and their relationships within three-dimensional environments, forming a foundation for embodied perception and scene understanding. 3D captioning aims to describe 3D scenes in natural language; however, it remains challenging due to the sparsity and irregularity of point clouds and, more critically, the weak grounding and limited out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization of existing captioners across drastically different environments, including indoor and outdoor 3D scenes. To address this challenge, we propose 3D CoCa v2, a generalizable 3D captioning framework that unifies contrastive vision-language learning with 3D caption generation and further improves robustness via test-time search (TTS) without updating the captioner parameters. 3D CoCa v2 builds on a frozen CLIP-based semantic prior, a spatially-aware 3D scene encoder for geometry, and a multimodal decoder jointly optimized with contrastive and captioning objectives, avoiding external detectors or handcrafted proposals. At inference, TTS produces diverse caption candidates and performs reward-guided selection using a compact scene summary. Experiments show improvements over 3D CoCa of +1.50 CIDEr@0.5IoU on ScanRefer and +1.61 CIDEr@0.5IoU on Nr3D, and +3.8 CIDEr@0.25 in zero-shot OOD evaluation on TOD3Cap. Code will be released at https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/3DCoCav2.
Abstract: Designing a unified neural network to efficiently and inherently process sequential data with arbitrary lengths is a central and challenging problem in sequence modeling. The design choices in Transformer, including quadratic complexity and weak length extrapolation, have limited their ability to scale to long sequences. In this work, we propose Gecko, a neural architecture that inherits the design of Mega and Megalodon (exponential moving average with gated attention), and further introduces multiple technical components to improve its capability to capture long range dependencies, including timestep decay normalization, sliding chunk attention mechanism, and adaptive working memory. In a controlled pretraining comparison with Llama2 and Megalodon in the scale of 7 billion parameters and 2 trillion training tokens, Gecko achieves better efficiency and long-context scalability. Gecko reaches a training loss of 1.68, significantly outperforming Llama2-7B (1.75) and Megalodon-7B (1.70), and landing close to Llama2-13B (1.67). Notably, without relying on any context-extension techniques, Gecko exhibits inherent long-context processing and retrieval capabilities, stably handling sequences of up to 4 million tokens and retrieving information from contexts up to $4\times$ longer than its attention window. Code: https://github.com/XuezheMax/gecko-llm
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly used in safety-critical applications that require reliable visual grounding. However, these models often hallucinate details that are not present in the image to satisfy user prompts. While recent datasets and benchmarks have been introduced to evaluate systematic hallucinations in VLMs, many hallucination behaviors remain insufficiently characterized. In particular, prior work primarily focuses on object presence or absence, leaving it unclear how prompt phrasing and structural constraints can systematically induce hallucinations. In this paper, we investigate how different forms of prompt pressure influence hallucination behavior. We introduce Ghost-100, a procedurally generated dataset of synthetic scenes in which key visual details are deliberately removed, enabling controlled analysis of absence-based hallucinations. Using a structured 5-Level Prompt Intensity Framework, we vary prompts from neutral queries to toxic demands and rigid formatting constraints. We evaluate three representative open-weight VLMs: MiniCPM-V 2.6-8B, Qwen2-VL-7B, and Qwen3-VL-8B. Across all three models, hallucination rates do not increase monotonically with prompt intensity. All models exhibit reductions at higher intensity levels at different thresholds, though not all show sustained reduction under maximum coercion. These results suggest that current safety alignment is more effective at detecting semantic hostility than structural coercion, revealing model-specific limitations in handling compliance pressure. Our dataset is available at: https://github.com/bli1/tone-matters
Abstract: Point Cloud-based Place Recognition (PCPR) demonstrates considerable potential in applications such as autonomous driving, robot localization and navigation, and map update. In practical applications, point clouds used for place recognition are often acquired from different platforms and LiDARs across varying scene. However, existing PCPR datasets lack diversity in scenes, platforms, and sensors, which limits the effective development of related research. To address this gap, we establish WHU-PCPR, a cross-platform heterogeneous point cloud dataset designed for place recognition. The dataset differentiates itself from existing datasets through its distinctive characteristics: 1) cross-platform heterogeneous point clouds: collected from survey-grade vehicle-mounted Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) systems and low-cost Portable helmet-mounted Laser Scanning (PLS) systems, each equipped with distinct mechanical and solid-state LiDAR sensors. 2) Complex localization scenes: encompassing real-time and long-term changes in both urban and campus road scenes. 3) Large-scale spatial coverage: featuring 82.3 km of trajectory over a 60-month period and an unrepeated route of approximately 30 km. Based on WHU-PCPR, we conduct extensive evaluation and in-depth analysis of several representative PCPR methods, and provide a concise discussion of key challenges and future research directions. The dataset and benchmark code are available at https://github.com/zouxianghong/WHU-PCPR.
Abstract: Video outpainting extends a video beyond its original boundaries by synthesizing missing border content. Compared with image outpainting, it requires not only per-frame spatial plausibility but also long-range temporal coherence, especially when outpainted content becomes visible across time under camera or object motion. We propose GlobalPaint, a diffusion-based framework for spatiotemporal coherent video outpainting. Our approach adopts a hierarchical pipeline that first outpaints key frames and then completes intermediate frames via an interpolation model conditioned on the completed boundaries, reducing error accumulation in sequential processing. At the model level, we augment a pretrained image inpainting backbone with (i) an Enhanced Spatial-Temporal module featuring 3D windowed attention for stronger spatiotemporal interaction, and (ii) global feature guidance that distills OpenCLIP features from observed regions across all frames into compact global tokens using a dedicated extractor. Comprehensive evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate improved reconstruction quality and more natural motion compared to prior methods. Our demo page is https://yuemingpan.github.io/GlobalPaint/
Abstract: Although Coordinate-MLP-based implicit neural representations have excelled in representing radiance fields, 3D shapes, and images, their application to audio signals remains underexplored. To fill this gap, we investigate existing implicit neural representations, from which we extract 3 types of positional encoding and 16 commonly used activation functions. Through combinatorial design, we establish the first benchmark for Coordinate-MLPs in audio signal representations. Our benchmark reveals that Coordinate-MLPs require complex hyperparameter tuning and frequency-dependent initialization, limiting their robustness. To address these issues, we propose Fourier-ASR, a novel framework based on the Fourier series theorem and the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem. Fourier-ASR introduces Fourier Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (Fourier-KAN), which leverage periodicity and strong nonlinearity to represent audio signals, eliminating the need for additional positional encoding. Furthermore, a Frequency-adaptive Learning Strategy (FaLS) is proposed to enhance the convergence of Fourier-KAN by capturing high-frequency components and preventing overfitting of low-frequency signals. Extensive experiments conducted on natural speech and music datasets reveal that: (1) well-designed positional encoding and activation functions in Coordinate-MLPs can effectively improve audio representation quality; and (2) Fourier-ASR can robustly represent complex audio signals without extensive hyperparameter tuning. Looking ahead, the continuity and infinite resolution of implicit audio representations make our research highly promising for tasks such as audio compression, synthesis, and generation. The source code will be released publicly to ensure reproducibility. The code is available at https://github.com/lif314/Fourier-ASR.
Abstract: Large language models have undergone rapid evolution, emerging as a pivotal technology for intelligence in financial operations. However, existing benchmarks are often constrained by pitfalls such as reliance on simulated or general-purpose samples and a focus on singular, offline static scenarios. Consequently, they fail to align with the requirements for authenticity and real-time responsiveness in financial services, leading to a significant discrepancy between benchmark performance and actual operational efficacy. To address this, we introduce BizFinBench.v2, the first large-scale evaluation benchmark grounded in authentic business data from both Chinese and U.S. equity markets, integrating online assessment. We performed clustering analysis on authentic user queries from financial platforms, resulting in eight fundamental tasks and two online tasks across four core business scenarios, totaling 29,578 expert-level Q&A pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that ChatGPT-5 achieves a prominent 61.5% accuracy in main tasks, though a substantial gap relative to financial experts persists; in online tasks, DeepSeek-R1 outperforms all other commercial LLMs. Error analysis further identifies the specific capability deficiencies of existing models within practical financial business contexts. BizFinBench.v2 transcends the limitations of current benchmarks, achieving a business-level deconstruction of LLM financial capabilities and providing a precise basis for evaluating efficacy in the widespread deployment of LLMs within the financial domain. The data and code are available at https://github.com/HiThink-Research/BizFinBench.v2.
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce Object-WIPER, a training-free framework for removing dynamic objects and their associated visual effects from videos, and inpainting them with semantically consistent and temporally coherent content. Our approach leverages a pre-trained text-to-video diffusion transformer (DiT). Given an input video, a user-provided object mask, and query tokens describing the target object and its effects, we localize relevant visual tokens via visual-text cross-attention and visual self-attention. This produces an intermediate effect mask that we fuse with the user mask to obtain a final foreground token mask to replace. We first invert the video through the DiT to obtain structured noise, then reinitialize the masked tokens with Gaussian noise while preserving background tokens. During denoising, we copy values for the background tokens saved during inversion to maintain scene fidelity. To address the lack of suitable evaluation, we introduce a new object removal metric that rewards temporal consistency among foreground tokens across consecutive frames, coherence between foreground and background tokens within each frame, and dissimilarity between the input and output foreground tokens. Experiments on DAVIS and a newly curated real-world associated effect benchmark (WIPER-Bench) show that Object-WIPER surpasses both training-based and training-free baselines in terms of the metric, achieving clean removal and temporally stable reconstruction without any retraining. Our new benchmark, source code, and pre-trained models will be publicly available.
Abstract: Few-for-many (F4M) optimization, recently introduced as a novel paradigm in multi-objective optimization, aims to find a small set of solutions that effectively handle a large number of conflicting objectives. Unlike traditional many-objective optimization methods, which typically attempt comprehensive coverage of the Pareto front, F4M optimization emphasizes finding a small representative solution set to efficiently address high-dimensional objective spaces. Motivated by the computational complexity and practical relevance of F4M optimization, this paper proposes a new evolutionary algorithm explicitly tailored for efficiently solving F4M optimization problems. Inspired by SMS-EMOA, our proposed approach employs a $(μ+1)$-evolution strategy guided by the objective of F4M optimization. Furthermore, to facilitate rigorous performance assessment, we propose a novel benchmark test suite specifically designed for F4M optimization by leveraging the similarity between the R2 indicator and F4M formulations. Our test suite is highly flexible, allowing any existing multi-objective optimization problem to be transformed into a corresponding F4M instance via scalarization using the weighted Tchebycheff function. Comprehensive experimental evaluations on benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of our algorithm compared to existing state-of-the-art algorithms, especially on instances involving a large number of objectives. The source code of the proposed algorithm will be released publicly. Source code is available at https://github.com/MOL-SZU/SoM-EMOA.
Abstract: Although long-term memory systems have made substantial progress in recent years, they still exhibit clear limitations in adaptability, scalability, and self-evolution under continuous interaction settings. Inspired by cognitive theories, we propose HiMem, a hierarchical long-term memory framework for long-horizon dialogues, designed to support memory construction, retrieval, and dynamic updating during sustained interactions. HiMem constructs cognitively consistent Episode Memory via a Topic-Aware Event--Surprise Dual-Channel Segmentation strategy, and builds Note Memory that captures stable knowledge through a multi-stage information extraction pipeline. These two memory types are semantically linked to form a hierarchical structure that bridges concrete interaction events and abstract knowledge, enabling efficient retrieval without sacrificing information fidelity. HiMem supports both hybrid and best-effort retrieval strategies to balance accuracy and efficiency, and incorporates conflict-aware Memory Reconsolidation to revise and supplement stored knowledge based on retrieval feedback. This design enables continual memory self-evolution over long-term use. Experimental results on long-horizon dialogue benchmarks demonstrate that HiMem consistently outperforms representative baselines in accuracy, consistency, and long-term reasoning, while maintaining favorable efficiency. Overall, HiMem provides a principled and scalable design paradigm for building adaptive and self-evolving LLM-based conversational agents. The code is available at https://github.com/jojopdq/HiMem.
Abstract: To improve the quality of Differentially private (DP) synthetic images, most studies have focused on improving the core optimization techniques (e.g., DP-SGD). Recently, we have witnessed a paradigm shift that takes these techniques off the shelf and studies how to use them together to achieve the best results. One notable work is DP-FETA, which proposes using `central images' for `warming up' the DP training and then using traditional DP-SGD. Inspired by DP-FETA, we are curious whether there are other such tools we can use together with DP-SGD. We first observe that using `central images' mainly works for datasets where there are many samples that look similar. To handle scenarios where images could vary significantly, we propose FETA-Pro, which introduces frequency features as `training shortcuts.' The complexity of frequency features lies between that of spatial features (captured by `central images') and full images, allowing for a finer-grained curriculum for DP training. To incorporate these two types of shortcuts together, one challenge is to handle the training discrepancy between spatial and frequency features. To address it, we leverage the pipeline generation property of generative models (instead of having one model trained with multiple features/objectives, we can have multiple models working on different features, then feed the generated results from one model into another) and use a more flexible design. Specifically, FETA-Pro introduces an auxiliary generator to produce images aligned with noisy frequency features. Then, another model is trained with these images, together with spatial features and DP-SGD. Evaluated across five sensitive image datasets, FETA-Pro shows an average of 25.7% higher fidelity and 4.1% greater utility than the best-performing baseline, under a privacy budget $ε= 1$.
Abstract: We introduce EyeTheia, a lightweight and open deep learning pipeline for webcam-based gaze estimation, designed for browser-based experimental platforms and real-world cognitive and clinical research. EyeTheia enables real-time gaze tracking using only a standard laptop webcam, combining MediaPipe-based landmark extraction with a convolutional neural network inspired by iTracker and optional user-specific fine-tuning. We investigate two complementary strategies: adapting a model pretrained on mobile data and training the same architecture from scratch on a desktop-oriented dataset. Validation results on MPIIFaceGaze show comparable performance between both approaches prior to calibration, while lightweight user-specific fine-tuning consistently reduces gaze prediction error. We further evaluate EyeTheia in a realistic Dot-Probe task and compare it to the commercial webcam-based tracker SeeSo SDK. Results indicate strong agreement in left-right gaze allocation during stimulus presentation, despite higher temporal variability. Overall, EyeTheia provides a transparent and extensible solution for low-cost gaze tracking, suitable for scalable and reproducible experimental and clinical studies. The code, trained models, and experimental materials are publicly available.
Abstract: Community detection is a fundamental task in data analysis. Block models form a standard approach to partition nodes according to a graph model, facilitating the analysis and interpretation of the network structure. By grouping nodes with similar connection patterns, they enable the identification of a wide variety of underlying structures. The degree-corrected block model (DCBM) is an established model that accounts for the heterogeneity of node degrees. However, existing inference methods for the DCBM are heuristics that are highly sensitive to initialization, typically done randomly. In this work, we show that DCBM inference can be reformulated as a constrained nonnegative matrix factorization problem. Leveraging this insight, we propose a novel method for community detection and a theoretically well-grounded initialization strategy that provides an initial estimate of communities for inference algorithms. Our approach is agnostic to any specific network structure and applies to graphs with any structure representable by a DCBM, not only assortative ones. Experiments on synthetic and real benchmark networks show that our method detects communities comparable to those found by DCBM inference, while scaling linearly with the number of edges and communities; for instance, it processes a graph with 100,000 nodes and 2,000,000 edges in approximately 4 minutes. Moreover, the proposed initialization strategy significantly improves solution quality and reduces the number of iterations required by all tested inference algorithms. Overall, this work provides a scalable and robust framework for community detection and highlights the benefits of a matrix-factorization perspective for the DCBM.
Abstract: We present a cost-effective two-step authentication system that integrates face identification and speaker verification using only a camera and microphone available on common devices. The pipeline first performs face recognition to identify a candidate user from a small enrolled group, then performs voice recognition only against the matched identity to reduce computation and improve robustness. For face recognition, a pruned VGG-16 based classifier is trained on an augmented dataset of 924 images from five subjects, with faces localized by MTCNN; it achieves 95.1% accuracy. For voice recognition, a CNN speaker-verification model trained on LibriSpeech (train-other-360) attains 98.9% accuracy and 3.456% EER on test-clean. Source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/NCUE-EE-AIAL/Two-step-Authentication-Multi-biometric-System.
Abstract: Content-Preserving Style transfer, given content and style references, remains challenging for Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) due to its internal entangled content and style features. In this technical report, we propose the first content-preserving style transfer model trained on Qwen-Image-Edit, which activates Qwen-Image-Edit's strong content preservation and style customization capability. We collected and filtered high quality data of limited specific styles and synthesized triplets with thousands categories of style images in-the-wild. We introduce the Curriculum Continual Learning framework to train QwenStyle with such mixture of clean and noisy triplets, which enables QwenStyle to generalize to unseen styles without degradation of the precise content preservation capability. Our QwenStyle V1 achieves state-of-the-art performance in three core metrics: style similarity, content consistency, and aesthetic quality.
Abstract: Biryani, one of India's most celebrated dishes, exhibits remarkable regional diversity in its preparation, ingredients, and presentation. With the growing availability of online cooking videos, there is unprecedented potential to study such culinary variations using computational tools systematically. However, existing video understanding methods fail to capture the fine-grained, multimodal, and culturally grounded differences in procedural cooking videos. This work presents the first large-scale, curated dataset of biryani preparation videos, comprising 120 high-quality YouTube recordings across 12 distinct regional styles. We propose a multi-stage framework leveraging recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) to segment videos into fine-grained procedural units and align them with audio transcripts and canonical recipe text. Building on these aligned representations, we introduce a video comparison pipeline that automatically identifies and explains procedural differences between regional variants. We construct a comprehensive question-answer (QA) benchmark spanning multiple reasoning levels to evaluate procedural understanding in VLMs. Our approach employs multiple VLMs in complementary roles, incorporates human-in-the-loop verification for high-precision tasks, and benchmarks several state-of-the-art models under zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. The resulting dataset, comparison methodology, and QA benchmark provide a new testbed for evaluating VLMs on structured, multimodal reasoning tasks and open new directions for computational analysis of cultural heritage through cooking videos. We release all data, code, and the project website at https://farzanashaju.github.io/how-does-india-cook-biryani/.
Abstract: Tokens are the basic units of Large Language Models (LLMs). LLMs rely on tokenizers to segment text into these tokens, and tokenization is the primary determinant of computational and inference cost. Sanskrit, one of the oldest languages, is hypothesized to express more meaning per token due to its morphology and grammar rules; however, no prior work has quantified this. We use a dataset of 701 parallel verses of the Bhagavad Gita, which comprises three languages-Sanskrit, English, and Hindi along with transliteration of Sanskrit into English. We test tokenizers including SentencePiece (SPM), older GPT models, and the latest generation tokenizers from Gemini and GPT. We use metrics of token count, characters per token (token efficiency), and tokens per character (token cost). Results show a ~2x difference in token counts between Sanskrit and English/Hindi under the unbiased SPM baseline. English/Hindi translations of Sanskrit commentary resulted in an approximately 20x increase in token count. GPT o200k base (latest, used by GPT-4o) and Gemini (latest) reduce bias by a significant degree compared to GPT cl100k base (used until GPT-4), but still fail to fully capture Sanskrit's compactness. This matters because there might be a penalty bias for non-English users, which inflates the token count. This research provides a foundation for improving future tokenizer design and shows the potential of Sanskrit for highly compact encoding, saving on cost while speeding up training and inference. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/anshulkr713/sanskrit-token-efficiency
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often encode cognitive behaviors unpredictably across prompts, layers, and contexts, making them difficult to diagnose and control. We present CBMAS, a diagnostic framework for continuous activation steering, which extends cognitive bias analysis from discrete before/after interventions to interpretable trajectories. By combining steering vector construction with dense α-sweeps, logit lens-based bias curves, and layer-site sensitivity analysis, our approach can reveal tipping points where small intervention strengths flip model behavior and show how steering effects evolve across layer depth. We argue that these continuous diagnostics offer a bridge between high-level behavioral evaluation and low-level representational dynamics, contributing to the cognitive interpretability of LLMs. Lastly, we provide a CLI and datasets for various cognitive behaviors at the project repository, https://github.com/shimamooo/CBMAS.
Abstract: Stock prediction, a subject closely related to people's investment activities in fully dynamic and live environments, has been widely studied. Current large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable potential in various domains, exhibiting expert-level performance through advanced reasoning and contextual understanding. In this paper, we introduce PriceSeer, a live, dynamic, and data-uncontaminated benchmark specifically designed for LLMs performing stock prediction tasks. Specifically, PriceSeer includes 110 U.S. stocks from 11 industrial sectors, with each containing 249 historical data points. Our benchmark implements both internal and external information expansion, where LLMs receive extra financial indicators, news, and fake news to perform stock price prediction. We evaluate six cutting-edge LLMs under different prediction horizons, demonstrating their potential in generating investment strategies after obtaining accurate price predictions for different sectors. Additionally, we provide analyses of LLMs' suboptimal performance in long-term predictions, including the vulnerability to fake news and specific industries. The code and evaluation data will be open-sourced at https://github.com/BobLiang2113/PriceSeer.
Abstract: We present JAX-PF, an open-source, GPU-accelerated, and differentiable Phase Field (PF) software package, supporting both explicit and implicit time stepping schemes. Leveraging the modern computing architecture JAX, JAX-PF achieves high performance through array programming and GPU acceleration, delivering ~5x speedup over PRISMS-PF with MPI (24 CPU cores) for systems with ~4.19 million degrees of freedom using explicit schemes, and scaling efficiently with implicit schemes for large-size problems. Furthermore, a key feature of JAX-PF is automatic differentiation (AD), eliminating manual derivations of free-energy functionals and Jacobians. Beyond forward simulations, JAX-PF demonstrates its potential in inverse design by providing sensitivities for gradient-based optimization. We demonstrate, for the first time, the calibration of PF material parameters using AD-based sensitivities, highlighting its capability for high-dimensional inverse problems. By combining efficiency, flexibility, and full differentiability, JAX-PF offers a fast, practical, and integrated tool for forward simulation and inverse design, advancing co-designing of material and manufacturing processes and supporting the goals of the Materials Genome Initiative.
Abstract: Leaf-lesion segmentation is topology-sensitive: small merges, splits, or false holes can be biologically meaningful descriptors of biochemical pathways, yet they are weakly penalized by standard pixel-wise losses in Euclidean latents. I explore HyperTopo-Adapters, a lightweight, parameter-efficient head trained on top of a frozen vision encoder, which embeds features on a product manifold -- hyperbolic + Euclidean + spherical (H + E + S) -- to encourage hierarchical separation (H), local linear detail (E), and global closure (S). A topology prior complements Dice/BCE in two forms: (i) persistent-homology (PH) distance for evaluation and selection, and (ii) a differentiable surrogate that combines a soft Euler-characteristic match with total variation regularization for stable training. I introduce warm-ups for both the hyperbolic contrastive term and the topology prior, per-sample evaluation of structure-aware metrics (Boundary-F1, Betti errors, PD distance), and a min-PD within top-K Dice rule for checkpoint selection. On a Kaggle leaf-lesion dataset (N=2,940), early results show consistent gains in boundary and topology metrics (reducing Delta beta_1 hole error by 9%) while Dice/IoU remain competitive. The study is diagnostic by design: I report controlled ablations (curvature learning, latent dimensions, contrastive temperature, surrogate settings), and ongoing tests varying encoder strength (ResNet-50, DeepLabV3, DINOv2/v3), input resolution, PH weight, and partial unfreezing of late blocks. The contribution is an open, reproducible train/eval suite (available at https://github.com/ChimdiWalter/HyperTopo-Adapters) that isolates geometric/topological priors and surfaces failure modes to guide stronger, topology-preserving architectures.
Abstract: The evolution of semantic communications has profoundly impacted wireless video transmission, whose applications dominate driver of modern bandwidth consumption. However, most existing schemes are predominantly optimized for simple additive white Gaussian noise or Rayleigh fading channels, neglecting the ubiquitous multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) environments that critically hinder practical deployment. To bridge this gap, we propose the context video semantic transmission (CVST) framework under MIMO channels. Building upon an efficient contextual video transmission backbone, CVST effectively learns a context-channel correlation map to explicitly formulate the relationships between feature groups and MIMO subchannels. Leveraging these channel-aware features, we design a multi-reference entropy coding mechanism, enabling channel state-aware variable length coding. Furthermore, CVST incorporates a checkerboard-based feature modulation strategy to achieve multiple rate points within a single trained model, thereby enhancing deployment flexibility. These innovations constitute our multi-reference variable length and rate coding (MR-VLRC) scheme. By integrating contextual transmission with MR-VLRC, CVST demonstrates substantial performance gains over various standardized separated coding methods and recent wireless video semantic communication approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/xie233333/CVST.
Abstract: Modern roleplaying models are increasingly sophisticated, yet they consistently struggle to capture the essence of believable, engaging characters. We argue this failure stems from training paradigms that overlook the dynamic interplay of a character's internal world. Current approaches, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), fact-based priming, literature-based learning, and synthetic data generation, exhibit recurring limitations in modeling the deliberative, value-conflicted reasoning that defines human interaction. In this paper, we identify four core concepts essential for character authenticity: Values, Experiences, Judgments, and Abilities (VEJA). We propose the VEJA framework as a new paradigm for data curation that addresses these systemic limitations. To illustrate the qualitative ceiling enabled by our framework, we present a pilot study comparing a manually curated, VEJA-grounded dataset against a state-of-the-art synthetic baseline. Using an LLM-as-judge evaluation, our findings demonstrate a significant quality gap, suggesting that a shift toward conceptually grounded data curation, as embodied by VEJA, is necessary for creating roleplaying agents with genuine depth and narrative continuity. The full dataset is available at https://github.com/HyouinKyoumaIRL/Operation-Veja
Abstract: Graphical user interface (GUI) grounding, the process of mapping human instructions to GUI actions, serves as a fundamental basis to autonomous GUI agents. While existing grounding models achieve promising performance to simulate the mouse click action on various click-based benchmarks, another essential mode of mouse interaction, namely dragging, remains largely underexplored. Yet, dragging the mouse to select and manipulate textual content represents a prevalent and important usage in practical GUI scenarios. To narrow this gap, we first introduce GUI-Drag, a diverse dataset of 161K text dragging examples synthesized through a scalable pipeline. To support systematic and robust evaluation, we further construct ScreenDrag, a benchmark with 5,333 examples spanning three levels of interface context, together with three dedicated metrics designed for assessing text dragging capability. Models trained on GUI-Drag with an efficient continual training strategy achieve substantial improvements on ScreenDrag, while preserving the original click-based performance on ScreenSpot, ScreenSpot-v2, and OSWorld-G. Our work encourages further research on broader GUI grounding beyond just clicking and paves way toward a truly generalist GUI grounding model. All benchmark, data, checkpoints, and code are open-sourced and available at https://osu-nlp-group.github.io/GUI-Drag.
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit complementary strengths arising from differences in pretraining data, model architectures, and decoding behaviors. Inference-time ensembling provides a practical way to combine these capabilities without retraining. However, existing ensemble approaches suffer from fundamental limitations. Most rely on fixed fusion granularity, which lacks the flexibility required for mid-generation adaptation and fails to adapt to different generation characteristics across tasks. To address these challenges, we propose AdaFuse, an adaptive ensemble decoding framework that dynamically selects semantically appropriate fusion units during generation. Rather than committing to a fixed granularity, AdaFuse adjusts fusion behavior on the fly based on the decoding context, with words serving as basic building blocks for alignment. To be specific, we introduce an uncertainty-based criterion to decide whether to apply ensembling at each decoding step. Under confident decoding states, the model continues generation directly. In less certain states, AdaFuse invokes a diversity-aware scaling strategy to explore alternative candidate continuations and inform ensemble decisions. This design establishes a synergistic interaction between adaptive ensembling and test-time scaling, where ensemble decisions guide targeted exploration, and the resulting diversity in turn strengthens ensemble quality. Experiments on open-domain question answering, arithmetic reasoning, and machine translation demonstrate that AdaFuse consistently outperforms strong ensemble baselines, achieving an average relative improvement of 6.88%. The code is available at https://github.com/CCM0111/AdaFuse.
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a critical technique for enhancing LLM-based deep search agents. However, existing approaches primarily rely on binary outcome rewards, which fail to capture the comprehensiveness and factuality of agents' reasoning process, and often lead to undesirable behaviors such as shortcut exploitation and hallucinations. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{Citation-aware Rubric Rewards (CaRR)}, a fine-grained reward framework for deep search agents that emphasizes reasoning comprehensiveness, factual grounding, and evidence connectivity. CaRR decomposes complex questions into verifiable single-hop rubrics and requires agents to satisfy these rubrics by explicitly identifying hidden entities, supporting them with correct citations, and constructing complete evidence chains that link to the predicted answer. We further introduce \textbf{Citation-aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (C-GRPO)}, which combines CaRR and outcome rewards for training robust deep search agents. Experiments show that C-GRPO consistently outperforms standard outcome-based RL baselines across multiple deep search benchmarks. Our analysis also validates that C-GRPO effectively discourages shortcut exploitation, promotes comprehensive, evidence-grounded reasoning, and exhibits strong generalization to open-ended deep research tasks. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/THUDM/CaRR.
Abstract: In safety-critical domains, linguistic ambiguity can have severe consequences; a vague command like "Pass me the vial" in a surgical setting could lead to catastrophic errors. Yet, most embodied AI research overlooks this, assuming instructions are clear and focusing on execution rather than confirmation. To address this critical safety gap, we are the first to define Open-Vocabulary 3D Instruction Ambiguity Detection, a fundamental new task where a model must determine if a command has a single, unambiguous meaning within a given 3D scene. To support this research, we build Ambi3D, the large-scale benchmark for this task, featuring over 700 diverse 3D scenes and around 22k instructions. Our analysis reveals a surprising limitation: state-of-the-art 3D Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to reliably determine if an instruction is ambiguous. To address this challenge, we propose AmbiVer, a two-stage framework that collects explicit visual evidence from multiple views and uses it to guide an vision-language model (VLM) in judging instruction ambiguity. Extensive experiments demonstrate the challenge of our task and the effectiveness of AmbiVer, paving the way for safer and more trustworthy embodied AI. Code and dataset available at https://jiayuding031020.github.io/ambi3d/.
Abstract: Deformable multi-contrast image registration is a challenging yet crucial task due to the complex, non-linear intensity relationships across different imaging contrasts. Conventional registration methods typically rely on iterative optimization of the deformation field, which is time-consuming. Although recent learning-based approaches enable fast and accurate registration during inference, their generalizability remains limited to the specific contrasts observed during training. In this work, we propose an adaptive conditional contrast-agnostic deformable image registration framework (AC-CAR) based on a random convolution-based contrast augmentation scheme. AC-CAR can generalize to arbitrary imaging contrasts without observing them during training. To encourage contrast-invariant feature learning, we propose an adaptive conditional feature modulator (ACFM) that adaptively modulates the features and the contrast-invariant latent regularization to enforce the consistency of the learned feature across different imaging contrasts. Additionally, we enable our framework to provide contrast-agnostic registration uncertainty by integrating a variance network that leverages the contrast-agnostic registration encoder to improve the trustworthiness and reliability of AC-CAR. Experimental results demonstrate that AC-CAR outperforms baseline methods in registration accuracy and exhibits superior generalization to unseen imaging contrasts. Code is available at https://github.com/Yinsong0510/AC-CAR.
Abstract: NVIDIA's CUTLASS library provides a robust and expressive set of methods for describing and manipulating multi-dimensional tensor data on the GPU. These methods are conceptually grounded in the abstract notion of a CuTe layout and a rich algebra of such layouts, including operations such as composition, logical product, and logical division. In this paper, we present a categorical framework for understanding this layout algebra by focusing on a naturally occurring class of tractable layouts. To this end, we define two categories Tuple and Nest whose morphisms give rise to layouts. We define a suite of operations on morphisms in these categories and prove their compatibility with the corresponding layout operations. Moreover, we give a complete characterization of the layouts which arise from our construction. Finally, we provide a Python implementation of our categorical constructions, along with tests that demonstrate alignment with CUTLASS behavior. This implementation can be found at our git repository https://github.com/ColfaxResearch/layout-categories.
Abstract: Recent advances in video generation have been dominated by diffusion and flow-matching models, which produce high-quality results but remain computationally intensive and difficult to scale. In this work, we introduce VideoAR, the first large-scale Visual Autoregressive (VAR) framework for video generation that combines multi-scale next-frame prediction with autoregressive modeling. VideoAR disentangles spatial and temporal dependencies by integrating intra-frame VAR modeling with causal next-frame prediction, supported by a 3D multi-scale tokenizer that efficiently encodes spatio-temporal dynamics. To improve long-term consistency, we propose Multi-scale Temporal RoPE, Cross-Frame Error Correction, and Random Frame Mask, which collectively mitigate error propagation and stabilize temporal coherence. Our multi-stage pretraining pipeline progressively aligns spatial and temporal learning across increasing resolutions and durations. Empirically, VideoAR achieves new state-of-the-art results among autoregressive models, improving FVD on UCF-101 from 99.5 to 88.6 while reducing inference steps by over 10x, and reaching a VBench score of 81.74-competitive with diffusion-based models an order of magnitude larger. These results demonstrate that VideoAR narrows the performance gap between autoregressive and diffusion paradigms, offering a scalable, efficient, and temporally consistent foundation for future video generation research.
Abstract: We propose a framework that amortizes the cost of inference-time reasoning by converting transient critiques into retrievable guidelines, through a file-based memory system and agent-controlled tool calls. We evaluate this method on the Rubric Feedback Bench, a novel dataset for rubric-based learning. Experiments demonstrate that our augmented LLMs rapidly match the performance of test-time refinement pipelines while drastically reducing inference cost.
Abstract: Domain-generalized retinal vessel segmentation is critical for automated ophthalmic diagnosis, yet faces significant challenges from domain shift induced by non-uniform illumination and varying contrast, compounded by the difficulty of preserving fine vessel structures. While the Segment Anything Model (SAM) exhibits remarkable zero-shot capabilities, existing SAM-based methods rely on simple adapter fine-tuning while overlooking frequency-domain information that encodes domain-invariant features, resulting in degraded generalization under illumination and contrast variations. Furthermore, SAM's direct upsampling inevitably loses fine vessel details. To address these limitations, we propose WaveRNet, a wavelet-guided frequency learning framework for robust multi-source domain-generalized retinal vessel segmentation. Specifically, we devise a Spectral-guided Domain Modulator (SDM) that integrates wavelet decomposition with learnable domain tokens, enabling the separation of illumination-robust low-frequency structures from high-frequency vessel boundaries while facilitating domain-specific feature generation. Furthermore, we introduce a Frequency-Adaptive Domain Fusion (FADF) module that performs intelligent test-time domain selection through wavelet-based frequency similarity and soft-weighted fusion. Finally, we present a Hierarchical Mask-Prompt Refiner (HMPR) that overcomes SAM's upsampling limitation through coarse-to-fine refinement with long-range dependency modeling. Extensive experiments under the Leave-One-Domain-Out protocol on four public retinal datasets demonstrate that WaveRNet achieves state-of-the-art generalization performance. The source code is available at https://github.com/Chanchan-Wang/WaveRNet.
Abstract: Autonomous machine learning agents have revolutionized scientific discovery, yet they remain constrained by a Generate-Execute-Feedback paradigm. Previous approaches suffer from a severe Execution Bottleneck, as hypothesis evaluation relies strictly on expensive physical execution. To bypass these physical constraints, we internalize execution priors to substitute costly runtime checks with instantaneous predictive reasoning, drawing inspiration from World Models. In this work, we formalize the task of Data-centric Solution Preference and construct a comprehensive corpus of 18,438 pairwise comparisons. We demonstrate that LLMs exhibit significant predictive capabilities when primed with a Verified Data Analysis Report, achieving 61.5% accuracy and robust confidence calibration. Finally, we instantiate this framework in FOREAGENT, an agent that employs a Predict-then-Verify loop, achieving a 6x acceleration in convergence while surpassing execution-based baselines by +6%. Our code and dataset will be publicly available soon at https://github.com/zjunlp/predict-before-execute.
Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world settings, correctness alone is insufficient. Reliable deployment requires maintaining truthful beliefs under contextual perturbations. Existing evaluations largely rely on point-wise confidence like Self-Consistency, which can mask brittle belief. We show that even facts answered with perfect self-consistency can rapidly collapse under mild contextual interference. To address this gap, we propose Neighbor-Consistency Belief (NCB), a structural measure of belief robustness that evaluates response coherence across a conceptual neighborhood. To validate the efficiency of NCB, we introduce a new cognitive stress-testing protocol that probes outputs stability under contextual interference. Experiments across multiple LLMs show that the performance of high-NCB data is relatively more resistant to interference. Finally, we present Structure-Aware Training (SAT), which optimizes context-invariant belief structure and reduces long-tail knowledge brittleness by approximately 30%. Code will be available at https://github.com/zjunlp/belief.
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) routing aims to exploit the specialized strengths of different LLMs for diverse tasks. However, existing approaches typically focus on selecting LLM architectures while overlooking parameter settings, which are critical for task performance. In this paper, we introduce HAPS, a hierarchical LLM routing framework that jointly searches over model architectures and parameters. Specifically, we use a high-level router to select among candidate LLM architectures, and then search for the optimal parameters for the selected architectures based on a low-level router. We design a parameter generation network to share parameters between the two routers to mutually enhance their capabilities. In the training process, we design a reward-augmented objective to effectively optimize our framework. Experiments on two commonly used benchmarks show that HAPS consistently outperforms strong routing baselines. We have released our code at https://github.com/zihangtian/HAPS.
Abstract: Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have positioned them as a promising paradigm for agents, with long-term planning and decision-making emerging as core general-purpose capabilities for adapting to diverse scenarios and tasks. Real-time strategy (RTS) games serve as an ideal testbed for evaluating these two capabilities, as their inherent gameplay requires both macro-level strategic planning and micro-level tactical adaptation and action execution. Existing RTS game-based environments either suffer from relatively high computational demands or lack support for textual observations, which has constrained the use of RTS games for LLM evaluation. Motivated by this, we present TowerMind, a novel environment grounded in the tower defense (TD) subgenre of RTS games. TowerMind preserves the key evaluation strengths of RTS games for assessing LLMs, while featuring low computational demands and a multimodal observation space, including pixel-based, textual, and structured game-state representations. In addition, TowerMind supports the evaluation of model hallucination and provides a high degree of customizability. We design five benchmark levels to evaluate several widely used LLMs under different multimodal input settings. The results reveal a clear performance gap between LLMs and human experts across both capability and hallucination dimensions. The experiments further highlight key limitations in LLM behavior, such as inadequate planning validation, a lack of multifinality in decision-making, and inefficient action use. We also evaluate two classic reinforcement learning algorithms: Ape-X DQN and PPO. By offering a lightweight and multimodal design, TowerMind complements the existing RTS game-based environment landscape and introduces a new benchmark for the AI agent field. The source code is publicly available on GitHub(https://github.com/tb6147877/TowerMind).
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated competitive performance in zero-shot multilingual machine translation (MT). Some follow-up works further improved MT performance via preference optimization, but they leave a key aspect largely underexplored: the order in which data samples are given during training. We address this topic by integrating curriculum learning into various state-of-the-art preference optimization algorithms to boost MT performance. We introduce a novel curriculum learning strategy with restarts (CLewR), which reiterates easy-to-hard curriculum multiple times during training to effectively mitigate the catastrophic forgetting of easy examples. We demonstrate consistent gains across several model families (Gemma2, Qwen2.5, Llama3.1) and preference optimization techniques. We publicly release our code at https://github.com/alexandra-dragomir/CLewR.
Abstract: Semi-supervised medical image segmentation is an effective method for addressing scenarios with limited labeled data. Existing methods mainly rely on frameworks such as mean teacher and dual-stream consistency learning. These approaches often face issues like error accumulation and model structural complexity, while also neglecting the interaction between labeled and unlabeled data streams. To overcome these challenges, we propose a Bidirectional Channel-selective Semantic Interaction~(BCSI) framework for semi-supervised medical image segmentation. First, we propose a Semantic-Spatial Perturbation~(SSP) mechanism, which disturbs the data using two strong augmentation operations and leverages unsupervised learning with pseudo-labels from weak augmentations. Additionally, we employ consistency on the predictions from the two strong augmentations to further improve model stability and robustness. Second, to reduce noise during the interaction between labeled and unlabeled data, we propose a Channel-selective Router~(CR) component, which dynamically selects the most relevant channels for information exchange. This mechanism ensures that only highly relevant features are activated, minimizing unnecessary interference. Finally, the Bidirectional Channel-wise Interaction~(BCI) strategy is employed to supplement additional semantic information and enhance the representation of important channels. Experimental results on multiple benchmarking 3D medical datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing semi-supervised approaches.
Abstract: We propose a novel framework for decomposing arbitrarily posed humans into animatable multi-layered 3D human avatars, separating the body and garments. Conventional single-layer reconstruction methods lock clothing to one identity, while prior multi-layer approaches struggle with occluded regions. We overcome both limitations by encoding each layer as a set of 2D Gaussians for accurate geometry and photorealistic rendering, and inpainting hidden regions with a pretrained 2D diffusion model via score-distillation sampling (SDS). Our three-stage training strategy first reconstructs the coarse canonical garment via single-layer reconstruction, followed by multi-layer training to jointly recover the inner-layer body and outer-layer garment details. Experiments on two 3D human benchmark datasets (4D-Dress, Thuman2.0) show that our approach achieves better rendering quality and layer decomposition and recomposition than the previous state-of-the-art, enabling realistic virtual try-on under novel viewpoints and poses, and advancing practical creation of high-fidelity 3D human assets for immersive applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/RockyXu66/LayerGS
Abstract: Pretokenization is a crucial, sequential pass in Byte-level BPE tokenizers. Our proposed new implementation, Peek2, serves as a drop-in replacement for cl100k-like pretokenizers used in GPT-3, LLaMa-3, and Qwen-2.5. Designed with performance and safety in mind, Peek2 is Regex-free and delivers a $ 1.11\times $ improvement in overall throughput across the entire Byte-level BPE encoding process. This algorithm runs entirely on the CPU, has stable linear complexity $ O(n) $, and provides presegmentation results identical to those of the original Regex-based pretokenizer.
Abstract: We employ the summation-by-parts (SBP) framework to extend the recent domain-of-dependence (DoD) stabilization for cut cells to linear kinetic models in diffusion scaling. Numerical methods for these models are challenged by increased stiffness for small scaling parameters and the necessity of asymptotics preservation regarding a parabolic limit equation. As a prototype model, we consider the telegraph equation in one spatial dimension subject to periodic boundary conditions with an asymptotic limit given by the linear heat equation. We provide a general semidiscrete stability result for this model when spatially discretized by arbitrary periodic (upwind) SBP operators and formally prove that the fully discrete scheme is asymptotic preserving. Moreover, we prove that DoD with central numerical fluxes leads to periodic SBP operators. Furthermore, we show that adapting the upwind DoD scheme yields periodic upwind SBP operators. Consequently, the DoD stabilization possesses the desired properties considered in the first part of this work and thus leads to a stable and asymptotic preserving scheme for the telegraph equation. We back our theoretical results with numerical simulations and demonstrate the applicability of this cut-cell stabilization for implicit time integration in the heat equation limit.
Abstract: The ability to automatically generate large-scale, interactive, and physically realistic 3D environments is crucial for advancing robotic learning and embodied intelligence. However, existing generative approaches often fail to capture the functional complexity of real-world interiors, particularly those containing articulated objects with movable parts essential for manipulation and navigation. This paper presents SceneFoundry, a language-guided diffusion framework that generates apartment-scale 3D worlds with functionally articulated furniture and semantically diverse layouts for robotic training. From natural language prompts, an LLM module controls floor layout generation, while diffusion-based posterior sampling efficiently populates the scene with articulated assets from large-scale 3D repositories. To ensure physical usability, SceneFoundry employs differentiable guidance functions to regulate object quantity, prevent articulation collisions, and maintain sufficient walkable space for robotic navigation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework generates structurally valid, semantically coherent, and functionally interactive environments across diverse scene types and conditions, enabling scalable embodied AI research. project page: https://anc891203.github.io/SceneFoundry-Demo/
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are expected to be trained to act as agents in various real-world environments, but this process relies on rich and varied tool-interaction sandboxes. However, access to real systems is often restricted; LLM-simulated environments are prone to hallucinations and inconsistencies; and manually built sandboxes are hard to scale. In this paper, we propose EnvScaler, an automated framework for scalable tool-interaction environments via programmatic synthesis. EnvScaler comprises two components. First, SkelBuilder constructs diverse environment skeletons through topic mining, logic modeling, and quality evaluation. Then, ScenGenerator generates multiple task scenarios and rule-based trajectory validation functions for each environment. With EnvScaler, we synthesize 191 environments and about 7K scenarios, and apply them to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) for Qwen3 series models. Results on three benchmarks show that EnvScaler significantly improves LLMs' ability to solve tasks in complex environments involving multi-turn, multi-tool interactions. We release our code and data at https://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/EnvScaler.
Abstract: Vision-language models are increasingly deployed as computer-use agents (CUAs) that operate desktops and browsers. Top-performing CUAs are framework-based systems that decompose planning and execution, while end-to-end screenshot-to-action policies are easier to deploy but lag behind on benchmarks such as OSWorld-Verified. GUI datasets like OSWorld pose two bottlenecks: they expose only a few hundred interactive, verifiable tasks and environments, and expert trajectories must be gathered by interacting with these environments, making such data hard to scale. We therefore ask how reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) can best exploit a small pool of exist expert trajectories to train end-to-end policies. Naively mixing these off-policy traces into on-policy RLVR is brittle: even after format conversion, expert trajectories exhibit structural mismatch and distribution shift from the learner. We propose BEPA (Bi-Level Expert-to-Policy Assimilation), which turns static expert traces into policy-aligned guidance via self-rolled reachable trajectories under the base policy (LEVEL-1) and a per-task, dynamically updated cache used in RLVR (LEVEL-2). On OSWorld-Verified, BEPA improves UITARS1.5-7B success from 22.87% to 32.13% and raises a held-out split from 5.74% to 10.30%, with consistent gains on MMBench-GUI and Online-Mind2Web. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/LEON-gittech/Verl_GUI.git
Abstract: Software engineering (SE) agents powered by large language models are increasingly adopted in practice, yet they often incur substantial monetary cost. We introduce EET, an experience-driven early termination approach that reduces the cost of SE agents while preserving task performance. EET extracts structured experience from prior issue-resolution executions and leverages it to guide early termination during patch generation and selection, reducing unproductive iterations. We evaluate EET on the SWE-bench Verified benchmark across three representative SE agents. EET consistently reduces total cost by 19%-55% (32% on average), with negligible loss in resolution rate (at most 0.2%). These efficiency gains are achieved, on average, by identifying early-termination opportunities for 11% of issues and reducing API calls, input tokens, and output tokens by 21%, 30%, and 25%, respectively. We release the code, prompts, and data at https://github.com/EffiSEAgent/EET.
Abstract: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in close proximity to humans for applications such as parcel delivery, traffic monitoring, disaster response and infrastructure inspections. Ensuring safe and reliable operation in these human-populated environments demands accurate perception of human poses and actions from an aerial viewpoint. This perspective challenges existing methods with low resolution, steep viewing angles and (self-)occlusion, especially if the application demands realtime feasibile models. We train and deploy FlyPose, a lightweight top-down human pose estimation pipeline for aerial imagery. Through multi-dataset training, we achieve an average improvement of 6.8 mAP in person detection across the test-sets of Manipal-UAV, VisDrone, HIT-UAV as well as our custom dataset. For 2D human pose estimation we report an improvement of 16.3 mAP on the challenging UAV-Human dataset. FlyPose runs with an inference latency of ~20 milliseconds including preprocessing on a Jetson Orin AGX Developer Kit and is deployed onboard a quadrotor UAV during flight experiments. We also publish FlyPose-104, a small but challenging aerial human pose estimation dataset, that includes manual annotations from difficult aerial perspectives: https://github.com/farooqhassaan/FlyPose.
Abstract: Hyper-Connections (HC) generalizes residual connections by introducing dynamic residual matrices that mix information across multiple residual streams, accelerating convergence in deep neural networks. However, unconstrained residual matrices can compromise training stability. To address this, DeepSeek's Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC) approximately projects these matrices onto the Birkhoff polytope via iterative Sinkhorn--Knopp (SK) normalization. We identify two limitations of this approach: (i) finite SK iterations do not guarantee exact doubly stochasticity, leaving an approximation gap that can accumulate through network depth and undermine stability; (ii) efficient SK implementation requires highly specialized CUDA kernels, raising engineering barriers and reducing portability. Motivated by the Birkhoff--von Neumann theorem, we propose mHC-lite, a simple reparameterization that explicitly constructs doubly stochastic matrices as convex combinations of permutation matrices. This approach guarantees exact doubly stochasticity by construction and can be implemented using only native matrix operations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that mHC-lite matches or exceeds mHC in performance while achieving higher training throughput with a naive implementation and eliminating the residual instabilities observed in both HC and mHC. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/FFTYYY/mhc-lite.
Abstract: Verification is a key bottleneck in improving inference speed while maintaining distribution fidelity in Speculative Decoding. Recent work has shown that sequence-level verification leads to a higher number of accepted tokens compared to token-wise verification. However, existing solutions often rely on surrogate approximations or are constrained by partial information, struggling with joint intractability. In this work, we propose Hierarchical Speculative Decoding (HSD), a provably lossless verification method that significantly boosts the expected number of accepted tokens and overcomes joint intractability by balancing excess and deficient probability mass across accessible branches. Our extensive large-scale experiments demonstrate that HSD yields consistent improvements in acceptance rates across diverse model families and benchmarks. Moreover, its strong explainability and generality make it readily integrable into a wide range of speculative decoding frameworks. Notably, integrating HSD into EAGLE-3 yields over a 12% performance gain, establishing state-of-the-art decoding efficiency without compromising distribution fidelity. Code is available at https://github.com/ZhouYuxuanYX/Hierarchical-Speculative-Decoding.
Abstract: A movable antennas (MAs)-enabled secure multiuser transmission framework is developed to enhance physical-layer security. Novel expressions are derived to characterize the achievable sum secrecy rate based on the secure channel coding theorem. On this basis, a joint optimization algorithm for digital beamforming and MA placement is proposed to maximize the sum secrecy rate via fractional programming and block coordinate descent. In each iteration, every variable admits either a closed-form update or a low-complexity one-dimensional or bisection search, which yields an efficient implementation. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and show that the MA-enabled design achieves higher secrecy rates than conventional fixed-position antenna arrays.
Abstract: Search-based testing is critical for evaluating the safety and reliability of autonomous driving systems (ADSs). However, existing approaches are often built on heterogeneous frameworks (e.g., distinct scenario spaces, simulators, and ADSs), which require considerable effort to reuse and adapt across different settings. To address these challenges, we present Drivora, a unified and extensible infrastructure for search-based ADS testing built on the widely used CARLA simulator. Drivora introduces a unified scenario definition, OpenScenario, that specifies scenarios using low-level, actionable parameters to ensure compatibility with existing methods while supporting extensibility to new testing designs (e.g., multi-autonomous-vehicle testing). On top of this, Drivora decouples the testing engine, scenario execution, and ADS integration. The testing engine leverages evolutionary computation to explore new scenarios and supports flexible customization of core components. The scenario execution can run arbitrary scenarios using a parallel execution mechanism that maximizes hardware utilization for large-scale batch simulation. For ADS integration, Drivora provides access to 12 ADSs through a unified interface, streamlining configuration and simplifying the incorporation of new ADSs. Our tools are publicly available at https://github.com/MingfeiCheng/Drivora.
Abstract: We study how reliably sparse autoencoders (SAEs) support claims about reasoning-related internal features in large language models. We first give a stylized analysis showing that sparsity-regularized decoding can preferentially retain stable low-dimensional correlates while suppressing high-dimensional within-behavior variation, motivating the possibility that contrastively selected "reasoning" features may concentrate on cue-like structure when such cues are coupled with reasoning traces. Building on this perspective, we propose a falsification-based evaluation framework that combines causal token injection with LLM-guided counterexample construction. Across 22 configurations spanning multiple model families, layers, and reasoning datasets, we find that many contrastively selected candidates are highly sensitive to token-level interventions, with 45%-90% activating after injecting only a few associated tokens into non-reasoning text. For the remaining context-dependent candidates, LLM-guided falsification produces targeted non-reasoning inputs that trigger activation and meaning-preserving paraphrases of top-activating reasoning traces that suppress it. A small steering study yields minimal changes on the evaluated benchmarks. Overall, our results suggest that, in the settings we study, sparse decompositions can favor low-dimensional correlates that co-occur with reasoning, underscoring the need for falsification when attributing high-level behaviors to individual SAE features. Code is available at https://github.com/GeorgeMLP/reasoning-probing.
Abstract: Preserving privacy in sensitive data while pretraining large language models on small, domain-specific corpora presents a significant challenge. In this work, we take an exploratory step toward privacy-preserving continual pretraining by proposing an entity-based framework that synthesizes encrypted training data to protect personally identifiable information (PII). Our approach constructs a weighted entity graph to guide data synthesis and applies deterministic encryption to PII entities, enabling LLMs to encode new knowledge through continual pretraining while granting authorized access to sensitive data through decryption keys. Our results on limited-scale datasets demonstrate that our pretrained models outperform base models and ensure PII security, while exhibiting a modest performance gap compared to models trained on unencrypted synthetic data. We further show that increasing the number of entities and leveraging graph-based synthesis improves model performance, and that encrypted models retain instruction-following capabilities with long retrieved contexts. We discuss the security implications and limitations of deterministic encryption, positioning this work as an initial investigation into the design space of encrypted data pretraining for privacy-preserving LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/DataArcTech/SoE.
Abstract: Neural networks have shown state-of-the-art performances in various classification and regression tasks. Rectified linear units (ReLU) are often used as activation functions for the hidden layers in a neural network model. In this article, we establish the connection between the Poisson hyperplane processes (PHP) and two-layer ReLU neural networks. We show that the PHP with a Gaussian prior is an alternative probabilistic representation to a two-layer ReLU neural network. In addition, we show that a two-layer neural network constructed by PHP is scalable to large-scale problems via the decomposition propositions. Finally, we propose an annealed sequential Monte Carlo algorithm for Bayesian inference. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the classic two-layer ReLU neural network. The implementation of our proposed model is available at https://github.com/ShufeiGe/Pois_Relu.git.
Abstract: This work presents Orient Anything V2, an enhanced foundation model for unified understanding of object 3D orientation and rotation from single or paired images. Building upon Orient Anything V1, which defines orientation via a single unique front face, V2 extends this capability to handle objects with diverse rotational symmetries and directly estimate relative rotations. These improvements are enabled by four key innovations: 1) Scalable 3D assets synthesized by generative models, ensuring broad category coverage and balanced data distribution; 2) An efficient, model-in-the-loop annotation system that robustly identifies 0 to N valid front faces for each object; 3) A symmetry-aware, periodic distribution fitting objective that captures all plausible front-facing orientations, effectively modeling object rotational symmetry; 4) A multi-frame architecture that directly predicts relative object rotations. Extensive experiments show that Orient Anything V2 achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on orientation estimation, 6DoF pose estimation, and object symmetry recognition across 11 widely used benchmarks. The model demonstrates strong generalization, significantly broadening the applicability of orientation estimation in diverse downstream tasks.
Abstract: Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) integrate multimodal understanding and generation, yet they are limited to maintaining visual consistency and disambiguating visual cues when referencing details across multiple input images. In this work, we propose a scalable multi-image editing framework for UMMs that explicitly distinguishes image identities and generalizes to variable input counts. Algorithmically, we introduce two innovations: 1) The learnable latent separators explicitly differentiate each reference image in the latent space, enabling accurate and disentangled conditioning. 2) The sinusoidal index encoding assigns visual tokens from the same image a continuous sinusoidal index embedding, which provides explicit image identity while allowing generalization and extrapolation on a variable number of inputs. To facilitate training and evaluation, we establish a high-fidelity benchmark using an inverse dataset construction methodology to guarantee artifact-free, achievable outputs. Experiments show clear improvements in semantic consistency, visual fidelity, and cross-image integration over prior baselines on diverse multi-image editing tasks, validating our advantages on consistency and generalization ability.
Abstract: Universal visual anomaly detection (AD) aims to identify anomaly images and segment anomaly regions towards open and dynamic scenarios, following zero- and few-shot paradigms without any dataset-specific fine-tuning. We have witnessed significant progress in widely use of visual-language foundational models in recent approaches. However, current methods often struggle with complex prompt engineering, elaborate adaptation modules, and challenging training strategies, ultimately limiting their flexibility and generality. To address these issues, this paper rethinks the fundamental mechanism behind visual-language models for AD and presents an embarrassingly simple, general, and effective framework for Universal vision Anomaly Detection (UniADet). Specifically, we first find language encoder is used to derive decision weights for anomaly classification and segmentation, and then demonstrate that it is unnecessary for universal AD. Second, we propose an embarrassingly simple method to completely decouple classification and segmentation, and decouple cross-level features, i.e., learning independent weights for different tasks and hierarchical features. UniADet is highly simple (learning only decoupled weights), parameter-efficient (only 0.002M learnable parameters), general (adapting a variety of foundation models), and effective (surpassing state-of-the-art zero-/few-shot by a large margin and even full-shot AD methods for the first time) on 14 real-world AD benchmarks covering both industrial and medical domains. We will make the code and model of UniADet available at https://github.com/gaobb/UniADet.
Abstract: Existing multi-object image generation methods face difficulties in achieving precise alignment between localized image generation regions and their corresponding semantics based on language descriptions, frequently resulting in inconsistent object quantities and attribute aliasing. To mitigate this limitation, mainstream approaches typically rely on external control signals to explicitly constrain the spatial layout, local semantic and visual attributes of images. However, this strong dependency makes the input format rigid, rendering it incompatible with the heterogeneous resource conditions of users and diverse constraint requirements. To address these challenges, we propose MoGen, a user-friendly multi-object image generation method. First, we design a Regional Semantic Anchor (RSA) module that precisely anchors phrase units in language descriptions to their corresponding image regions during the generation process, enabling text-to-image generation that follows quantity specifications for multiple objects. Building upon this foundation, we further introduce an Adaptive Multi-modal Guidance (AMG) module, which adaptively parses and integrates various combinations of multi-source control signals to formulate corresponding structured intent. This intent subsequently guides selective constraints on scene layouts and object attributes, achieving dynamic fine-grained control. Experimental results demonstrate that MoGen significantly outperforms existing methods in generation quality, quantity consistency, and fine-grained control, while exhibiting superior accessibility and control flexibility. Code is available at: https://github.com/Tear-kitty/MoGen/tree/master.
Abstract: Video-based Person Re-IDentification (VPReID) aims to retrieve the same person from videos captured by non-overlapping cameras. At extreme far distances, VPReID is highly challenging due to severe resolution degradation, drastic viewpoint variation and inevitable appearance noise. To address these issues, we propose a Scale-Adaptive framework with Shape Priors for VPReID, named SAS-VPReID. The framework is built upon three complementary modules. First, we deploy a Memory-Enhanced Visual Backbone (MEVB) to extract discriminative feature representations, which leverages the CLIP vision encoder and multi-proxy memory. Second, we propose a Multi-Granularity Temporal Modeling (MGTM) to construct sequences at multiple temporal granularities and adaptively emphasize motion cues across scales. Third, we incorporate Prior-Regularized Shape Dynamics (PRSD) to capture body structure dynamics. With these modules, our framework can obtain more discriminative feature representations. Experiments on the VReID-XFD benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of each module and our final framework ranks the first on the VReID-XFD challenge leaderboard. The source code is available at https://github.com/YangQiWei3/SAS-VPReID.
Abstract: Hieroglyphs, as logographic writing systems, encode rich semantic and cultural information within their internal structural composition. Yet, current advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) usually remain structurally blind to this information. LLMs process characters as textual tokens, while MLLMs additionally view them as raw pixel grids. Both fall short to model the underlying logic of character strokes. Furthermore, existing structural analysis methods are often script-specific and labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose Hieroglyphic Stroke Analyzer (HieroSA), a novel and generalizable framework that enables MLLMs to automatically derive stroke-level structures from character bitmaps without handcrafted data. It transforms modern logographic and ancient hieroglyphs character images into explicit, interpretable line-segment representations in a normalized coordinate space, allowing for cross-lingual generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HieroSA effectively captures character-internal structures and semantics, bypassing the need for language-specific priors. Experimental results highlight the potential of our work as a graphematics analysis tool for a deeper understanding of hieroglyphic scripts. View our code at https://github.com/THUNLP-MT/HieroSA.
Abstract: Code summarization has emerged as a fundamental technique in the field of program comprehension. While code language models have shown significant advancements, the current models and benchmarks are confined to high-readability code, which contains sufficient semantic cues such as function and variable names. In the real world, however, code is often poorly structured or obfuscated, significantly degrading model performance. In this paper, we first empirically evaluate the robustness of state-of-the-art language models on poor-readability code for the task of code summarization, focusing on (1) their effectiveness, (2) the impact of prompt engineering, and (3) the robustness of different variants. Experimental results reveal that state-of-the-art models-including GPT-4o and DeepSeek-V3 experience a substantial performance drop when faced with poorly readable code, and that prompt engineering and reasoning-enhanced models offer limited improvements. Motivated by these findings, we propose RoFTCodeSum, a novel fine-tuning method that enhances the robustness of code summarization against poorly readable code. RoFTCodeSum marries the concepts of curriculum learning and meta-learning: based on the original dataset for fine-tuning, it creates curricular training sets, e.g., obfuscating function names and identifiers from the code, respectively, that have progressive difficulty in code comprehension. In each training step, the approach meta-updates the gradients using these progressively challenging datasets, thereby optimizing both accuracy and readability robustness simultaneously. Experimental results demonstrate that RoFTCodeSum exhibits increased robustness against semantic perturbation while enhancing performance on the original code.
Abstract: The efficacy of Multimodal Transformers in visually-rich document understanding (VrDU) is critically constrained by two inherent limitations: the lack of explicit modeling for logical reading order and the interference of visual tokens that dilutes attention on textual semantics. To address these challenges, this paper presents ROAP, a lightweight and architecture-agnostic pipeline designed to optimize attention distributions in Layout Transformers without altering their pre-trained backbones. The proposed pipeline first employs an Adaptive-XY-Gap (AXG-Tree) to robustly extract hierarchical reading sequences from complex layouts. These sequences are then integrated into the attention mechanism via a Reading-Order-Aware Relative Position Bias (RO-RPB). Furthermore, a Textual-Token Sub-block Attention Prior (TT-Prior) is introduced to adaptively suppress visual noise and enhance fine-grained text-text interactions. Extensive experiments on the FUNSD and CORD benchmarks demonstrate that ROAP consistently improves the performance of representative backbones, including LayoutLMv3 and GeoLayoutLM. These findings confirm that explicitly modeling reading logic and regulating modality interference are critical for robust document understanding, offering a scalable solution for complex layout analysis. The implementation code will be released at https://github.com/KevinYuLei/ROAP.
Abstract: Recent advances in text-to-SQL systems have been driven by larger models and improved datasets, yet progress is still limited by the scarcity of high-quality training data. Manual data creation is expensive, and existing synthetic methods trade off reliability and scalability. Template-based approaches ensure correct SQL but require schema-specific templates, while LLM-based generation scales easily but lacks quality and correctness guarantees. We introduce RingSQL, a hybrid data generation framework that combines schema-independent query templates with LLM-based paraphrasing of natural language questions. This approach preserves SQL correctness across diverse schemas while providing broad linguistic variety. In our experiments, we find that models trained using data produced by RingSQL achieve an average gain in accuracy of +2.3% across six text-to-SQL benchmarks when compared to models trained on other synthetic data. We make our code available at https://github.com/nu-c3lab/RingSQL.
Abstract: In many multi-agent systems, agents interact repeatedly and are expected to settle into equilibrium behavior over time. Yet in practice, behavior often drifts, and detecting such deviations in real time remains an open challenge. We introduce a sequential testing framework that monitors whether observed play in repeated games is consistent with equilibrium, without assuming a fixed sample size. Our approach builds on the e-value framework for safe anytime-valid inference: by "betting" against equilibrium, we construct a test supermartingale that accumulates evidence whenever observed payoffs systematically violate equilibrium conditions. This yields a statistically sound, interpretable measure of departure from equilibrium that can be monitored online. We also leverage Benjamini-Hochberg-type procedures to increase detection power in large games while rigorously controlling the false discovery rate. Our framework unifies the treatment of Nash, correlated, and coarse correlated equilibria, offering finite-time guarantees and a detailed analysis of detection times. Moreover, we extend our method to stochastic games, broadening its applicability beyond repeated-play settings.
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as automatic evaluators of generative AI outputs, a paradigm often referred to as "LLM-as-a-judge." In practice, LLM judges are imperfect predictions for the underlying truth and can exhibit systematic, non-random errors. Two main approaches have recently been proposed to address this issue: (i) direct measurementerror correction based on misclassification models such as Rogan-Gladen-style estimators, and (ii) surrogate-outcome approaches such as prediction-powered inference (PPI), which correct bias by calibrating prediction residuals on a small set of gold-standard human labels. In this paper, we systematically study the performance of these two approaches for estimating mean parameters (e.g., average benchmark scores or pairwise win rates). Leveraging tools from semiparametric efficiency theory, we unify the two classes of estimators by deriving explicit forms of efficient influence function (EIF)-based efficient estimators and characterize conditions under which PPI-style estimators attain strictly smaller asymptotic variance than measurement-error corrections. We verify our theoretical results in simulations and demonstrate the methods on real-data examples. We provide an implementation of the benchmarked methods and comparison utilities at https://github.com/yiqunchen/debias-llm-as-a-judge.
Abstract: This work investigates how measuring information entropy of text can be used to estimate its readability. We propose a visualization framework that can be used to approximate information entropy of text using multiple language models and visualize the result. The end goal is to use this method to estimate and improve readability and clarity of administrative or bureaucratic texts. Our toolset is available as a libre software on https://github.com/ufal/Glitter.
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have been widely applied across various domains of finance. Since their training data are largely derived from human-authored corpora, LLMs may inherit a range of human biases. Behavioral biases can lead to instability and uncertainty in decision-making, particularly when processing financial information. However, existing research on LLM bias has mainly focused on direct questioning or simplified, general-purpose settings, with limited consideration of the complex real-world financial environments and high-risk, context-sensitive, multilingual financial misinformation detection tasks (\mfmd). In this work, we propose \mfmdscen, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating behavioral biases of LLMs in \mfmd across diverse economic scenarios. In collaboration with financial experts, we construct three types of complex financial scenarios: (i) role- and personality-based, (ii) role- and region-based, and (iii) role-based scenarios incorporating ethnicity and religious beliefs. We further develop a multilingual financial misinformation dataset covering English, Chinese, Greek, and Bengali. By integrating these scenarios with misinformation claims, \mfmdscen enables a systematic evaluation of 22 mainstream LLMs. Our findings reveal that pronounced behavioral biases persist across both commercial and open-source models. This project will be available at https://github.com/lzw108/FMD.
Abstract: Persona conditioning can be viewed as a behavioral prior for large language models (LLMs) and is often assumed to confer expertise and improve safety in a monotonic manner. However, its effects on high-stakes clinical decision-making remain poorly characterized. We systematically evaluate persona-based control in clinical LLMs, examining how professional roles (e.g., Emergency Department physician, nurse) and interaction styles (bold vs.\ cautious) influence behavior across models and medical tasks. We assess performance on clinical triage and patient-safety tasks using multidimensional evaluations that capture task accuracy, calibration, and safety-relevant risk behavior. We find systematic, context-dependent, and non-monotonic effects: Medical personas improve performance in critical care tasks, yielding gains of up to $\sim+20\%$ in accuracy and calibration, but degrade performance in primary-care settings by comparable margins. Interaction style modulates risk propensity and sensitivity, but it's highly model-dependent. While aggregated LLM-judge rankings favor medical over non-medical personas in safety-critical cases, we found that human clinicians show moderate agreement on safety compliance (average Cohen's $κ= 0.43$) but indicate a low confidence in 95.9\% of their responses on reasoning quality. Our work shows that personas function as behavioral priors that introduce context-dependent trade-offs rather than guarantees of safety or expertise. The code is available at https://github.com/rsinghlab/Persona\_Paradox.
Abstract: Modern data analysis increasingly requires flexible conditional inference P(X_B | X_A) where (X_A, X_B) is an arbitrary partition of observed variable X. Existing conditional inference methods lack this flexibility as they are tied to a fixed conditioning structure and cannot perform new conditional inference once trained. To solve this, we propose a Bayesian generative modeling (BGM) approach for arbitrary conditional inference without retraining. BGM learns a generative model of X through an iterative Bayesian updating algorithm where model parameters and latent variables are updated until convergence. Once trained, any conditional distribution can be obtained without retraining. Empirically, BGM achieves superior prediction performance with well calibrated predictive intervals, demonstrating that a single learned model can serve as a universal engine for conditional prediction with uncertainty quantification. We provide theoretical guarantees for the convergence of the stochastic iterative algorithm, statistical consistency and conditional-risk bounds. The proposed BGM framework leverages the power of AI to capture complex relationships among variables while adhering to Bayesian principles, emerging as a promising framework for advancing various applications in modern data science. The code for BGM is freely available at https://github.com/liuq-lab/bayesgm.
Abstract: Reasoning oriented large language models often expose explicit "thinking" as long, turn-global traces at the start of every response, either always on or toggled externally at inference time. While useful for arithmetic, programming, and problem solving, this design is costly, blurs claim level auditability, and cannot re-trigger explicit reasoning once the model begins presenting. Dialogue models are also largely blind to temporal structure, treating replies after seconds and replies after weeks as equivalent unless time is stated in text. We introduce TIME, the Temporally Intelligent Meta-reasoning Engine, a behavioral alignment framework that treats explicit reasoning as a context sensitive resource driven by discourse and temporal cues. TIME augments dialogue with optional ISO 8601
Authors:Yingzhuo Liu, Shuodi Liu, Weijun Luo, Liuyu Xiang, Zhaofeng He
Abstract: Policy Space Response Oracles (PSRO) combines game-theoretic equilibrium computation with learning and is effective in approximating Nash Equilibrium in zero-sum games. However, the computational cost of PSRO has become a significant limitation to its practical application. Our analysis shows that game simulation is the primary bottleneck in PSRO's runtime. To address this issue, we conclude the concept of Simulation-Free PSRO and summarize existing methods that instantiate this concept. Additionally, we propose a novel Dynamic Window-based Simulation-Free PSRO, which introduces the concept of a strategy window to replace the original strategy set maintained in PSRO. The number of strategies in the strategy window is limited, thereby simplifying opponent strategy selection and improving the robustness of the best response. Moreover, we use Nash Clustering to select the strategy to be eliminated, ensuring that the number of strategies within the strategy window is effectively limited. Our experiments across various environments demonstrate that the Dynamic Window mechanism significantly reduces exploitability compared to existing methods, while also exhibiting excellent compatibility. Our code is available at https://github.com/enochliu98/SF-PSRO.
Abstract: Modern Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems struggle with a fundamental architectural tension: vector indices are optimized for query latency but poorly handle continuous knowledge updates, while data lakes excel at versioning but introduce query latency penalties. We introduce LiveVectorLake, a dual-tier temporal knowledge base architecture that enables real-time semantic search on current knowledge while maintaining complete version history for compliance, auditability, and point-in-time retrieval. The system introduces three core architectural contributions: (1) Content-addressable chunk-level synchronization using SHA-256 hashing for deterministic change detection without external state tracking; (2) Dual-tier storage separating hot-tier vector indices (Milvus with HNSW) from cold-tier columnar versioning (Delta Lake with Parquet), optimizing query latency and storage cost independently; (3) Temporal query routing enabling point-in-time knowledge retrieval via delta-versioning with ACID consistency across tiers. Evaluation on a 100-document corpus versioned across five time points demonstrates: (i) 10-15% re-processing of content during updates compared to 100% for full re-indexing; (ii) sub-100ms retrieval latency on current knowledge; (iii) sub-2s latency for temporal queries across version history; and (iv) storage cost optimization through hot/cold tier separation (only current chunks in expensive vector indices). The approach enables production RAG deployments requiring simultaneous optimization for query performance, update efficiency, and regulatory compliance. Code and resources: [https://github.com/praj-tarun/LiveVectorLake]
Abstract: We introduce $\mathbf{SP-Rank}$, the first large-scale, publicly available dataset for benchmarking algorithms that leverage both first-order preferences and second-order predictions in ranking tasks. Each datapoint includes a personal vote (first-order signal) and a meta-prediction of how others will vote (second-order signal), allowing richer modeling than traditional datasets that capture only individual preferences. SP-Rank contains over 12,000 human-generated datapoints across three domains -- geography, movies, and paintings, and spans nine elicitation formats with varying subset sizes. This structure enables empirical analysis of preference aggregation when expert identities are unknown but presumed to exist, and individual votes represent noisy estimates of a shared ground-truth ranking. We benchmark SP-Rank by comparing traditional aggregation methods that use only first-order votes against SP-Voting, a second-order method that jointly reasons over both signals to infer ground-truth rankings. While SP-Rank also supports models that rely solely on second-order predictions, our benchmarks emphasize the gains from combining both signals. We evaluate performance across three core tasks: (1) full ground-truth rank recovery, (2) subset-level rank recovery, and (3) probabilistic modeling of voter behavior. Results show that incorporating second-order signals substantially improves accuracy over vote-only methods. Beyond social choice, SP-Rank supports downstream applications in learning-to-rank, extracting expert knowledge from noisy crowds, and training reward models in preference-based fine-tuning pipelines. We release the dataset, code, and baseline evaluations (available at https://github.com/amrit19/SP-Rank-Dataset ) to foster research in human preference modeling, aggregation theory, and human-AI alignment.
Abstract: Nighttime color constancy remains a challenging problem in computational photography due to low-light noise and complex illumination conditions. We present RL-AWB, a novel framework combining statistical methods with deep reinforcement learning for nighttime white balance. Our method begins with a statistical algorithm tailored for nighttime scenes, integrating salient gray pixel detection with novel illumination estimation. Building on this foundation, we develop the first deep reinforcement learning approach for color constancy that leverages the statistical algorithm as its core, mimicking professional AWB tuning experts by dynamically optimizing parameters for each image. To facilitate cross-sensor evaluation, we introduce the first multi-sensor nighttime dataset. Experiment results demonstrate that our method achieves superior generalization capability across low-light and well-illuminated images. Project page: https://ntuneillee.github.io/research/rl-awb/
Abstract: Recovering clean and accurate geometry from images is essential for robotics and augmented reality. However, existing geometry foundation models still suffer severely from flying pixels and the loss of fine details. In this paper, we present pixel-perfect visual geometry models that can predict high-quality, flying-pixel-free point clouds by leveraging generative modeling in the pixel space. We first introduce Pixel-Perfect Depth (PPD), a monocular depth foundation model built upon pixel-space diffusion transformers (DiT). To address the high computational complexity associated with pixel-space diffusion, we propose two key designs: 1) Semantics-Prompted DiT, which incorporates semantic representations from vision foundation models to prompt the diffusion process, preserving global semantics while enhancing fine-grained visual details; and 2) Cascade DiT architecture that progressively increases the number of image tokens, improving both efficiency and accuracy. To further extend PPD to video (PPVD), we introduce a new Semantics-Consistent DiT, which extracts temporally consistent semantics from a multi-view geometry foundation model. We then perform reference-guided token propagation within the DiT to maintain temporal coherence with minimal computational and memory overhead. Our models achieve the best performance among all generative monocular and video depth estimation models and produce significantly cleaner point clouds than all other models.
Abstract: Referring Expression Segmentation (RES) and Comprehension (REC) respectively segment and detect the object described by an expression, while Referring Expression Generation (REG) generates an expression for the selected object. Existing datasets and methods commonly support single-target expressions only, i.e., one expression refers to one object, not considering multi-target and no-target expressions. This greatly limits the real applications of REx (RES/REC/REG). This paper introduces three new benchmarks called Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation (GRES), Comprehension (GREC), and Generation (GREG), collectively denoted as GREx, which extend the classic REx to allow expressions to identify an arbitrary number of objects. We construct the first large-scale GREx dataset gRefCOCO that contains multi-target, no-target, and single-target expressions and their corresponding images with labeled targets. GREx and gRefCOCO are designed to be backward-compatible with REx, facilitating extensive experiments to study the performance gap of the existing REx methods on GREx tasks. One of the challenges of GRES/GREC is complex relationship modeling, for which we propose a baseline ReLA that adaptively divides the image into regions with sub-instance clues and explicitly models the region-region and region-language dependencies. The proposed ReLA achieves the state-of-the-art results on the both GRES and GREC tasks. The proposed gRefCOCO dataset and method are available at https://henghuiding.github.io/GREx.
Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a powerful tool for multimodal large language models on video understanding tasks. However, its necessity and advantages over direct answering remain underexplored. In this paper, we first demonstrate that for RL-trained video models, direct answering often matches or even surpasses CoT performance, despite CoT producing step-by-step analyses at a higher computational cost. Motivated by this, we propose VideoAuto-R1, a video understanding framework that adopts a reason-when-necessary strategy. During training, our approach follows a Thinking Once, Answering Twice paradigm: the model first generates an initial answer, then performs reasoning, and finally outputs a reviewed answer. Both answers are supervised via verifiable rewards. During inference, the model uses the confidence score of the initial answer to determine whether to proceed with reasoning. Across video QA and grounding benchmarks, VideoAuto-R1 achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with significantly improved efficiency, reducing the average response length by ~3.3x, e.g., from 149 to just 44 tokens. Moreover, we observe a low rate of thinking-mode activation on perception-oriented tasks, but a higher rate on reasoning-intensive tasks. This suggests that explicit language-based reasoning is generally beneficial but not always necessary.
Abstract: Spatial-Temporal Graph (STG) forecasting on large-scale networks has garnered significant attention. However, existing models predominantly focus on short-horizon predictions and suffer from notorious computational costs and memory consumption when scaling to long-horizon predictions and large graphs. Targeting the above challenges, we present FaST, an effective and efficient framework based on heterogeneity-aware Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) for long-horizon and large-scale STG forecasting, which unlocks one-week-ahead (672 steps at a 15-minute granularity) prediction with thousands of nodes. FaST is underpinned by two key innovations. First, an adaptive graph agent attention mechanism is proposed to alleviate the computational burden inherent in conventional graph convolution and self-attention modules when applied to large-scale graphs. Second, we propose a new parallel MoE module that replaces traditional feed-forward networks with Gated Linear Units (GLUs), enabling an efficient and scalable parallel structure. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that FaST not only delivers superior long-horizon predictive accuracy but also achieves remarkable computational efficiency compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/yijizhao/FaST.
Abstract: Embodied question answering (EQA) in 3D environments often requires collecting context that is distributed across multiple viewpoints and partially occluded. However, most recent vision--language models (VLMs) are constrained to a fixed and finite set of input views, which limits their ability to acquire question-relevant context at inference time and hinders complex spatial reasoning. We propose Chain-of-View (CoV) prompting, a training-free, test-time reasoning framework that transforms a VLM into an active viewpoint reasoner through a coarse-to-fine exploration process. CoV first employs a View Selection agent to filter redundant frames and identify question-aligned anchor views. It then performs fine-grained view adjustment by interleaving iterative reasoning with discrete camera actions, obtaining new observations from the underlying 3D scene representation until sufficient context is gathered or a step budget is reached. We evaluate CoV on OpenEQA across four mainstream VLMs and obtain an average +11.56% improvement in LLM-Match, with a maximum gain of +13.62% on Qwen3-VL-Flash. CoV further exhibits test-time scaling: increasing the minimum action budget yields an additional +2.51% average improvement, peaking at +3.73% on Gemini-2.5-Flash. On ScanQA and SQA3D, CoV delivers strong performance (e.g., 116 CIDEr / 31.9 EM@1 on ScanQA and 51.1 EM@1 on SQA3D). Overall, these results suggest that question-aligned view selection coupled with open-view search is an effective, model-agnostic strategy for improving spatial reasoning in 3D EQA without additional training. Code is available on https://github.com/ziplab/CoV .
Abstract: Autoregressive (AR) models have achieved remarkable success in image synthesis, yet their sequential nature imposes significant latency constraints. Speculative Decoding offers a promising avenue for acceleration, but existing approaches are limited by token-level ambiguity and lack of spatial awareness. In this work, we introduce Multi-Scale Local Speculative Decoding (MuLo-SD), a novel framework that combines multi-resolution drafting with spatially informed verification to accelerate AR image generation. Our method leverages a low-resolution drafter paired with learned up-samplers to propose candidate image tokens, which are then verified in parallel by a high-resolution target model. Crucially, we incorporate a local rejection and resampling mechanism, enabling efficient correction of draft errors by focusing on spatial neighborhoods rather than raster-scan resampling after the first rejection. We demonstrate that MuLo-SD achieves substantial speedups - up to $\mathbf{1.7\times}$ - outperforming strong speculative decoding baselines such as EAGLE-2 and LANTERN in terms of acceleration, while maintaining comparable semantic alignment and perceptual quality. These results are validated using GenEval, DPG-Bench, and FID/HPSv2 on the MS-COCO 5k validation split. Extensive ablations highlight the impact of up-sampling design, probability pooling, and local rejection and resampling with neighborhood expansion. Our approach sets a new state-of-the-art in speculative decoding for image synthesis, bridging the gap between efficiency and fidelity.
Abstract: Video world models aim to simulate dynamic, real-world environments, yet existing methods struggle to provide unified and precise control over camera and multi-object motion, as videos inherently operate dynamics in the projected 2D image plane. To bridge this gap, we introduce VerseCrafter, a 4D-aware video world model that enables explicit and coherent control over both camera and object dynamics within a unified 4D geometric world state. Our approach is centered on a novel 4D Geometric Control representation, which encodes the world state through a static background point cloud and per-object 3D Gaussian trajectories. This representation captures not only an object's path but also its probabilistic 3D occupancy over time, offering a flexible, category-agnostic alternative to rigid bounding boxes or parametric models. These 4D controls are rendered into conditioning signals for a pretrained video diffusion model, enabling the generation of high-fidelity, view-consistent videos that precisely adhere to the specified dynamics. Unfortunately, another major challenge lies in the scarcity of large-scale training data with explicit 4D annotations. We address this by developing an automatic data engine that extracts the required 4D controls from in-the-wild videos, allowing us to train our model on a massive and diverse dataset.
Abstract: Recent diffusion-based image editing methods commonly rely on text or high-level instructions to guide the generation process, offering intuitive but coarse control. In contrast, we focus on explicit, prompt-free editing, where the user directly specifies the modification by cropping and pasting an object or sub-object into a chosen location within an image. This operation affords precise spatial and visual control, yet it introduces a fundamental challenge: preserving the identity of the pasted object while harmonizing it with its new context. We observe that attention maps in diffusion-based editing models inherently govern whether image regions are preserved or adapted for coherence. Building on this insight, we introduce LooseRoPE, a saliency-guided modulation of rotational positional encoding (RoPE) that loosens the positional constraints to continuously control the attention field of view. By relaxing RoPE in this manner, our method smoothly steers the model's focus between faithful preservation of the input image and coherent harmonization of the inserted object, enabling a balanced trade-off between identity retention and contextual blending. Our approach provides a flexible and intuitive framework for image editing, achieving seamless compositional results without textual descriptions or complex user input.
Abstract: In-context image generation and editing (ICGE) enables users to specify visual concepts through interleaved image-text prompts, demanding precise understanding and faithful execution of user intent. Although recent unified multimodal models exhibit promising understanding capabilities, these strengths often fail to transfer effectively to image generation. We introduce Re-Align, a unified framework that bridges the gap between understanding and generation through structured reasoning-guided alignment. At its core lies the In-Context Chain-of-Thought (IC-CoT), a structured reasoning paradigm that decouples semantic guidance and reference association, providing clear textual target and mitigating confusion among reference images. Furthermore, Re-Align introduces an effective RL training scheme that leverages a surrogate reward to measure the alignment between structured reasoning text and the generated image, thereby improving the model's overall performance on ICGE tasks. Extensive experiments verify that Re-Align outperforms competitive methods of comparable model scale and resources on both in-context image generation and editing tasks.
Abstract: Feed-forward view synthesis models predict a novel view in a single pass with minimal 3D inductive bias. Existing works encode cameras as Plücker ray maps, which tie predictions to the arbitrary world coordinate gauge and make them sensitive to small camera transformations, thereby undermining geometric consistency. In this paper, we ask what inputs best condition a model for robust and consistent view synthesis. We propose projective conditioning, which replaces raw camera parameters with a target-view projective cue that provides a stable 2D input. This reframes the task from a brittle geometric regression problem in ray space to a well-conditioned target-view image-to-image translation problem. Additionally, we introduce a masked autoencoding pretraining strategy tailored to this cue, enabling the use of large-scale uncalibrated data for pretraining. Our method shows improved fidelity and stronger cross-view consistency compared to ray-conditioned baselines on our view-consistency benchmark. It also achieves state-of-the-art quality on standard novel view synthesis benchmarks.
Abstract: LLM-as-judge systems promise scalable, consistent evaluation. We find the opposite: judges are consistent, but not with each other; they are consistent with themselves. Across 3,240 evaluations (9 judges x 120 unique video x pack items x 3 independent runs), inter-judge agreement is near-zero (Krippendorff's α = 0.042). On two dimensions, judges disagree more than random noise would predict (α < 0). Yet this disagreement isn't chaos; it's structured. A classifier identifies which judge produced an evaluation with 77.1% accuracy from rubric scores alone, rising to 89.9% with disposition features. Within model families, the signal is even stronger: GPT-4.1 and GPT-5.2 are distinguishable with 99.6% accuracy. We call this the reliability paradox: judges cannot agree on what constitutes quality, yet their disagreement patterns are so stable they function as fingerprints. Each judge implements a distinct, stable theory of quality: an "evaluative disposition" that shapes how it interprets any rubric. We characterize these dispositions along multiple axes: harshness/leniency, dimension emphasis, within-judge stability (ICC), and evidence behavior (receipt validity, semantic linkage via NLI, and shotgun index). The implication is stark: LLM judges are not interchangeable instruments measuring a shared construct. They are distinct measurement devices, each encoding its own implicit theory of quality. Averaging their scores produces a synthetic verdict that corresponds to no judge's actual values.
Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve remarkable performance by explicitly generating multi-step chains of thought, but this capability incurs substantial inference latency and computational cost. Collaborative inference offers a promising solution by selectively allocating work between lightweight and large models, yet a fundamental challenge remains: determining when a reasoning step requires the capacity of a large model or the efficiency of a small model. Existing routing strategies either rely on local token probabilities or post-hoc verification, introducing significant inference overhead. In this work, we propose a novel perspective on step-wise collaboration: the difficulty of a reasoning step can be inferred from its very first token. Inspired by the "Aha Moment" phenomenon in LRMs, we show that the entropy of the initial token serves as a strong predictor of step difficulty. Building on this insight, we introduce GlimpRouter, a training-free step-wise collaboration framework. GlimpRouter employs a lightweight model to generate only the first token of each reasoning step and routes the step to a larger model only when the initial token entropy exceeds a threshold. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces inference latency while preserving accuracy. For instance, GlimpRouter attains a substantial 10.7% improvement in accuracy while reducing inference latency by 25.9% compared to a standalone large model on AIME25. These results suggest a simple yet effective mechanism for reasoning: allocating computation based on a glimpse of thought rather than full-step evaluation.
Abstract: Understanding the role of citations is essential for research assessment and citation-aware digital libraries. However, existing citation classification frameworks often conflate citation intent (why a work is cited) with cited content type (what part is cited), limiting their effectiveness in auto classification due to a dilemma between fine-grained type distinctions and practical classification reliability. We introduce SOFT, a Semantically Orthogonal Framework with Two dimensions that explicitly separates citation intent from cited content type, drawing inspiration from semantic role theory. We systematically re-annotate the ACL-ARC dataset using SOFT and release a cross-disciplinary test set sampled from ACT2. Evaluation with both zero-shot and fine-tuned Large Language Models demonstrates that SOFT enables higher agreement between human annotators and LLMs, and supports stronger classification performance and robust cross-domain generalization compared to ACL-ARC and SciCite annotation frameworks. These results confirm SOFT's value as a clear, reusable annotation standard, improving clarity, consistency, and generalizability for digital libraries and scholarly communication infrastructures. All code and data are publicly available on GitHub https://github.com/zhiyintan/SOFT.
Abstract: Identifying suitable datasets for a research question remains challenging because existing dataset search engines rely heavily on metadata quality and keyword overlap, which often fail to capture the semantic intent of scientific investigation. We introduce a literature-driven framework that discovers datasets from citation contexts in scientific papers, enabling retrieval grounded in actual research use rather than metadata availability. Our approach combines large-scale citation-context extraction, schema-guided dataset recognition with Large Language Models, and provenance-preserving entity resolution. We evaluate the system on eight survey-derived computer science queries and find that it achieves substantially higher recall than Google Dataset Search and DataCite Commons, with normalized recall ranging from an average of 47.47% to a highest value of 81.82%. Beyond recovering gold-standard datasets, the method also surfaces additional datasets not documented in the surveys. Expert assessments across five top-level Fields of Science indicate that a substantial portion of the additional datasets are considered high utility, and some are regarded as novel for the specific topics chosen by the experts. These findings establish citation-context mining as an effective and generalizable paradigm for dataset discovery, particularly in settings where datasets lack sufficient or reliable metadata. To support reproducibility and future extensions, we release our code, evaluation datasets, and results on GitHub (https://github.com/Fireblossom/citation-context-dataset-discovery).
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has proven effective in enhancing the reasoning of large language models (LLMs). Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-based extensions improve upon vanilla RLVR (e.g., GRPO) by providing tree-based reasoning rollouts that enable fine-grained and segment-level credit assignment. However, existing methods still suffer from limited exploration diversity and inefficient reasoning. To address the above challenges, we propose reinforced efficient reasoning via semantically diverse explorations, i.e., ROSE, for LLMs. To encourage more diverse reasoning exploration, our method incorporates a semantic-entropy-based branching strategy and an $\varepsilon$-exploration mechanism. The former operates on already sampled reasoning rollouts to capture semantic uncertainty and select branching points with high semantic divergence to generate new successive reasoning paths, whereas the latter stochastically initiates reasoning rollouts from the root, preventing the search process from becoming overly local. To improve efficiency, we design a length-aware segment-level advantage estimator that rewards concise and correct reasoning while penalizing unnecessarily long reasoning chains. Extensive experiments on various mathematical reasoning benchmarks with Qwen and Llama models validate the effectiveness and efficiency of ROSE. Codes are available at https://github.com/ZiqiZhao1/ROSE-rl.
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) helps LLMs stay accurate, but feeding long documents into a prompt makes the model slow and expensive. This has motivated context compression, ranging from token pruning and summarization to embedding-based compression. While researchers have tried ''compressing'' these documents into smaller summaries or mathematical embeddings, there is a catch: the more you compress the data, the more the LLM struggles to understand it. To address this challenge, we propose ArcAligner (Adaptive recursive context *Aligner*), a lightweight module integrated into the language model layers to help the model better utilize highly compressed context representations for downstream generation. It uses an adaptive ''gating'' system that only adds extra processing power when the information is complex, keeping the system fast. Across knowledge-intensive QA benchmarks, ArcAligner consistently beats compression baselines at comparable compression rates, especially on multi-hop and long-tail settings. The source code is publicly available.
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves generation quality by incorporating evidence retrieved from large external corpora. However, most existing methods rely on statically selecting top-k passages based on individual relevance, which fails to exploit combinatorial gains among passages and often introduces substantial redundancy. To address this limitation, we propose OptiSet, a set-centric framework that unifies set selection and set-level ranking for RAG. OptiSet adopts an "Expand-then-Refine" paradigm: it first expands a query into multiple perspectives to enable a diverse candidate pool and then refines the candidate pool via re-selection to form a compact evidence set. We then devise a self-synthesis strategy without strong LLM supervision to derive preference labels from the set conditional utility changes of the generator, thereby identifying complementary and redundant evidence. Finally, we introduce a set-list wise training strategy that jointly optimizes set selection and set-level ranking, enabling the model to favor compact, high-gain evidence sets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OptiSet improves performance on complex combinatorial problems and makes generation more efficient. The source code is publicly available.
Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on chain-of-thought (CoT) trajectories demonstrations is a common approach for enabling reasoning in large language models. Standard practices typically only retain trajectories with correct final answers (positives) while ignoring the rest (negatives). We argue that this paradigm discards substantial supervision and exacerbates overfitting, limiting out-of-domain (OOD) generalization. Specifically, we surprisingly find that incorporating negative trajectories into SFT yields substantial OOD generalization gains over positive-only training, as these trajectories often retain valid intermediate reasoning despite incorrect final answers. To understand this effect in depth, we systematically analyze data, training dynamics, and inference behavior, identifying 22 recurring patterns in negative chains that serve a dual role: they moderate loss descent to mitigate overfitting during training and boost policy entropy by 35.67% during inference to facilitate exploration. Motivated by these observations, we further propose Gain-based LOss Weighting (GLOW), an adaptive, sample-aware scheme that exploits such distinctive training dynamics by rescaling per-sample loss based on inter-epoch progress. Empirically, GLOW efficiently leverages unfiltered trajectories, yielding a 5.51% OOD gain over positive-only SFT on Qwen2.5-7B and boosting MMLU from 72.82% to 76.47% as an RL initialization.
Abstract: Higher-order adversarial attacks can directly be considered the result of a cat-and-mouse game -- an elaborate action involving constant pursuit, near captures, and repeated escapes. This idiom describes the enduring circular training of adversarial attack patterns and adversarial training the best. The following work investigates the impact of higher-order adversarial attacks on object detectors by successively training attack patterns and hardening object detectors with adversarial training. The YOLOv10 object detector is chosen as a representative, and adversarial patches are used in an evasion attack manner. Our results indicate that higher-order adversarial patches are not only affecting the object detector directly trained on but rather provide a stronger generalization capacity compared to lower-order adversarial patches. Moreover, the results highlight that solely adversarial training is not sufficient to harden an object detector efficiently against this kind of adversarial attack. Code: https://github.com/JensBayer/HigherOrder
Abstract: Crop mapping based on satellite images time-series (SITS) holds substantial economic value in agricultural production settings, in which parcel segmentation is an essential step. Existing approaches have achieved notable advancements in SITS segmentation with predetermined sequence lengths. However, we found that these approaches overlooked the generalization capability of models across scenarios with varying temporal length, leading to markedly poor segmentation results in such cases. To address this issue, we propose TEA, a TEmporal Adaptive SITS semantic segmentation method to enhance the model's resilience under varying sequence lengths. We introduce a teacher model that encapsulates the global sequence knowledge to guide a student model with adaptive temporal input lengths. Specifically, teacher shapes the student's feature space via intermediate embedding, prototypes and soft label perspectives to realize knowledge transfer, while dynamically aggregating student model to mitigate knowledge forgetting. Finally, we introduce full-sequence reconstruction as an auxiliary task to further enhance the quality of representations across inputs of varying temporal lengths. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method brings remarkable improvements across inputs of different temporal lengths on common benchmarks. Our code will be publicly available.
Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based search agents have proven promising for addressing knowledge-intensive problems by incorporating information retrieval capabilities. Existing works largely focus on optimizing the reasoning paradigms of search agents, yet the quality of intermediate search queries during reasoning remains overlooked. As a result, the generated queries often remain inaccurate, leading to unexpected retrieval results and ultimately limiting search agents' overall effectiveness. To mitigate this issue, we introduce SmartSearch, a framework built upon two key mechanisms: (1) Process rewards, which provide fine-grained supervision for the quality of each intermediate search query through Dual-Level Credit Assessment. (2) Query refinement, which promotes the optimization of query generation by selectively refining low-quality search queries and regenerating subsequent search rounds based on these refinements. To enable the search agent to progressively internalize the ability to improve query quality under the guidance of process rewards, we design a three-stage curriculum learning framework. This framework guides the agent through a progression from imitation, to alignment, and ultimately to generalization. Experimental results show that SmartSearch consistently surpasses existing baselines, and additional quantitative analyses further confirm its significant gains in both search efficiency and query quality. The code is available at https://github.com/MYVAE/SmartSearch.
Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) serve a global audience, alignment must transition from enforcing universal consensus to respecting cultural pluralism. We demonstrate that dense models, when forced to fit conflicting value distributions, suffer from \textbf{Mean Collapse}, converging to a generic average that fails to represent diverse groups. We attribute this to \textbf{Cultural Sparsity}, where gradient interference prevents dense parameters from spanning distinct cultural modes. To resolve this, we propose \textbf{\textsc{CuMA}} (\textbf{Cu}ltural \textbf{M}ixture of \textbf{A}dapters), a framework that frames alignment as a \textbf{conditional capacity separation} problem. By incorporating demographic-aware routing, \textsc{CuMA} internalizes a \textit{Latent Cultural Topology} to explicitly disentangle conflicting gradients into specialized expert subspaces. Extensive evaluations on WorldValuesBench, Community Alignment, and PRISM demonstrate that \textsc{CuMA} achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming both dense baselines and semantic-only MoEs. Crucially, our analysis confirms that \textsc{CuMA} effectively mitigates mean collapse, preserving cultural diversity. Our code is available at https://github.com/Throll/CuMA.
Abstract: Synthesizing informative commercial reports from massive and noisy web sources is critical for high-stakes business decisions. Although current deep research agents achieve notable progress, their reports still remain limited in terms of quality, reliability, and coverage. In this work, we propose Mind2Report, a cognitive deep research agent that emulates the commercial analyst to synthesize expert-level reports. Specifically, it first probes fine-grained intent, then searches web sources and records distilled information on the fly, and subsequently iteratively synthesizes the report. We design Mind2Report as a training-free agentic workflow that augments general large language models (LLMs) with dynamic memory to support these long-form cognitive processes. To rigorously evaluate Mind2Report, we further construct QRC-Eval comprising 200 real-world commercial tasks and establish a holistic evaluation strategy to assess report quality, reliability, and coverage. Experiments demonstrate that Mind2Report outperforms leading baselines, including OpenAI and Gemini deep research agents. Although this is a preliminary study, we expect it to serve as a foundation for advancing the future design of commercial deep research agents. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Melmaphother/Mind2Report.
Abstract: Standard RAG pipelines based on chunking excel at simple factual retrieval but fail on complex multi-hop queries due to a lack of structural connectivity. Conversely, initial strategies that interleave retrieval with reasoning often lack global corpus awareness, while Knowledge Graph (KG)-based RAG performs strongly on complex multi-hop tasks but suffers on fact-oriented single-hop queries. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel RAG framework: ToPG (Traversal over Proposition Graphs). ToPG models its knowledge base as a heterogeneous graph of propositions, entities, and passages, effectively combining the granular fact density of propositions with graph connectivity. We leverage this structure using iterative Suggestion-Selection cycles, where the Suggestion phase enables a query-aware traversal of the graph, and the Selection phase provides LLM feedback to prune irrelevant propositions and seed the next iteration. Evaluated on three distinct QA tasks (Simple, Complex, and Abstract QA), ToPG demonstrates strong performance across both accuracy- and quality-based metrics. Overall, ToPG shows that query-aware graph traversal combined with factual granularity is a critical component for efficient structured RAG systems. ToPG is available at https://github.com/idiap/ToPG.
Abstract: Online misinformation is increasingly pervasive, yet most existing benchmarks and methods evaluate veracity at the level of whole claims or paragraphs using coarse binary labels, obscuring how true and false details often co-exist within single sentences. These simplifications also limit interpretability: global explanations cannot identify which specific segments are misleading or differentiate how a detail is false (e.g., distorted vs. fabricated). To address these gaps, we introduce MisSpans, the first multi-domain, human-annotated benchmark for span-level misinformation detection and analysis, consisting of paired real and fake news stories. MisSpans defines three complementary tasks: MisSpansIdentity for pinpointing false spans within sentences, MisSpansType for categorising false spans by misinformation type, and MisSpansExplanation for providing rationales grounded in identified spans. Together, these tasks enable fine-grained localisation, nuanced characterisation beyond true/false and actionable explanations. Expert annotators were guided by standardised guidelines and consistency checks, leading to high inter-annotator agreement. We evaluate 15 representative LLMs, including reasoning-enhanced and non-reasoning variants, under zero-shot and one-shot settings. Results reveal the challenging nature of fine-grained misinformation identification and analysis, and highlight the need for a deeper understanding of how performance may be influenced by multiple interacting factors, including model size and reasoning capabilities, along with domain-specific textual features. This project will be available at https://github.com/lzw108/MisSpans.
Abstract: Cross-domain misinformation detection is challenging, as misinformation arises across domains with substantial differences in knowledge and discourse. Existing methods often rely on single-perspective cues and struggle to generalize to challenging or underrepresented domains, while reasoning large language models (LLMs), though effective on complex tasks, are limited to same-distribution data. To address these gaps, we introduce RAAR, the first retrieval-augmented agentic reasoning framework for cross-domain misinformation detection. To enable cross-domain transfer beyond same-distribution assumptions, RAAR retrieves multi-perspective source-domain evidence aligned with each target sample's semantics, sentiment, and writing style. To overcome single-perspective modeling and missing systematic reasoning, RAAR constructs verifiable multi-step reasoning paths through specialized multi-agent collaboration, where perspective-specific agents produce complementary analyses and a summary agent integrates them under verifier guidance. RAAR further applies supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to train a single multi-task verifier to enhance verification and reasoning capabilities. Based on RAAR, we trained the RAAR-8b and RAAR-14b models. Evaluation on three cross-domain misinformation detection tasks shows that RAAR substantially enhances the capabilities of the base models and outperforms other cross-domain methods, advanced LLMs, and LLM-based adaptation approaches. The project will be released at https://github.com/lzw108/RAAR.
Abstract: Diffractive neural networks have recently emerged as a promising framework for all-optical computing. However, these networks are typically trained for a single task, limiting their potential adoption in systems requiring multiple functionalities. Existing approaches to achieving multi-task functionality either modify the mechanical configuration of the network per task or use a different illumination wavelength or polarization state for each task. In this work, we propose a new control mechanism, which is based on the illumination's angular spectrum. Specifically, we shape the illumination using an amplitude mask that selectively controls its angular spectrum. We employ different illumination masks for achieving different network functionalities, so that the mask serves as a unique task encoder. Interestingly, we show that effective control can be achieved over a very narrow angular range, within the paraxial regime. We numerically illustrate the proposed approach by training a single diffractive network to perform multiple image-to-image translation tasks. In particular, we demonstrate translating handwritten digits into typeset digits of different values, and translating handwritten English letters into typeset numbers and typeset Greek letters, where the type of the output is determined by the illumination's angular components. As we show, the proposed framework can work under different coherence conditions, and can be combined with existing control strategies, such as different wavelengths. Our results establish the illumination angular spectrum as a powerful degree of freedom for controlling diffractive networks, enabling a scalable and versatile framework for multi-task all-optical computing.
Abstract: High-Level Synthesis (HLS) design space exploration (DSE) seeks Pareto-optimal designs within expansive pragma configuration spaces. To accelerate HLS DSE, graph neural networks (GNNs) are commonly employed as surrogates for HLS tools to predict quality of results (QoR) metrics, while multi-objective optimization algorithms expedite the exploration. However, GNN-based prediction methods may not fully capture the rich semantic features inherent in behavioral descriptions, and conventional multi-objective optimization algorithms often do not explicitly account for the domain-specific knowledge regarding how pragma directives influence QoR. To address these limitations, this paper proposes the MPM-LLM4DSE framework, which incorporates a multimodal prediction model (MPM) that simultaneously fuses features from behavioral descriptions and control and data flow graphs. Furthermore, the framework employs a large language model (LLM) as an optimizer, accompanied by a tailored prompt engineering methodology. This methodology incorporates pragma impact analysis on QoR to guide the LLM in generating high-quality configurations (LLM4DSE). Experimental results demonstrate that our multimodal predictive model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art work ProgSG by up to 10.25$\times$. Furthermore, in DSE tasks, the proposed LLM4DSE achieves an average performance gain of 39.90\% over prior methods, validating the effectiveness of our prompting methodology. Code and models are available at https://github.com/wslcccc/MPM-LLM4DSE.
Abstract: Neural-Symbolic (NeSy) Artificial Intelligence has emerged as a promising approach for combining the learning capabilities of neural networks with the interpretable reasoning of symbolic systems. However, existing NeSy frameworks typically require either predefined symbolic policies or policies that are differentiable, limiting their applicability when domain expertise is unavailable or when policies are inherently non-differentiable. We propose a framework that addresses this limitation by enabling the concurrent learning of both non-differentiable symbolic policies and neural network weights through an evolutionary process. Our approach casts NeSy systems as organisms in a population that evolve through mutations (both symbolic rule additions and neural weight changes), with fitness-based selection guiding convergence toward hidden target policies. The framework extends the NEUROLOG architecture to make symbolic policies trainable, adapts Valiant's Evolvability framework to the NeSy context, and employs Machine Coaching semantics for mutable symbolic representations. Neural networks are trained through abductive reasoning from the symbolic component, eliminating differentiability requirements. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that NeSy systems starting with empty policies and random neural weights can successfully approximate hidden non-differentiable target policies, achieving median correct performance approaching 100%. This work represents a step toward enabling NeSy research in domains where the acquisition of symbolic knowledge from experts is challenging or infeasible.
Abstract: Designing academic posters is a labor-intensive process requiring the precise balance of high-density content and sophisticated layout. While existing paper-to-poster generation methods automate initial drafting, they are typically single-pass and non-interactive, often fail to align with complex, subjective user intent. To bridge this gap, we propose APEX (Academic Poster Editing agentic eXpert), the first agentic framework for interactive academic poster editing, supporting fine-grained control with robust multi-level API-based editing and a review-and-adjustment Mechanism. In addition, we introduce APEX-Bench, the first systematic benchmark comprising 514 academic poster editing instructions, categorized by a multi-dimensional taxonomy including operation type, difficulty, and abstraction level, constructed via reference-guided and reference-free strategies to ensure realism and diversity. We further establish a multi-dimensional VLM-as-a-judge evaluation protocol to assess instruction fulfillment, modification scope, and visual consistency & harmony. Experimental results demonstrate that APEX significantly outperforms baseline methods. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/Breesiu/APEX.
Abstract: Recently proposed pyramidal models decompose the conventional forward and backward diffusion processes into multiple stages operating at varying resolutions. These models handle inputs with higher noise levels at lower resolutions, while less noisy inputs are processed at higher resolutions. This hierarchical approach significantly reduces the computational cost of inference in multi-step denoising models. However, existing open-source pyramidal video models have been trained from scratch and tend to underperform compared to state-of-the-art systems in terms of visual plausibility. In this work, we present a pipeline that converts a pretrained diffusion model into a pyramidal one through low-cost finetuning, achieving this transformation without degradation in quality of output videos. Furthermore, we investigate and compare various strategies for step distillation within pyramidal models, aiming to further enhance the inference efficiency. Our results are available at https://qualcomm-ai-research.github.io/PyramidalWan.
Abstract: LLM agents have emerged as powerful systems for tackling multi-turn tasks by interleaving internal reasoning and external tool interactions. Agentic Reinforcement Learning has recently drawn significant research attention as a critical post-training paradigm to further refine these capabilities. In this paper, we present AT$^2$PO (Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization via Tree Search), a unified framework for multi-turn agentic RL that addresses three core challenges: limited exploration diversity, sparse credit assignment, and misaligned policy optimization. AT$^2$PO introduces a turn-level tree structure that jointly enables Entropy-Guided Tree Expansion for strategic exploration and Turn-wise Credit Assignment for fine-grained reward propagation from sparse outcomes. Complementing this, we propose Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization, a turn-level learning objective that aligns policy updates with the natural decision granularity of agentic interactions. ATPO is orthogonal to tree search and can be readily integrated into any multi-turn RL pipeline. Experiments across seven benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art baseline by up to 1.84 percentage points in average, with ablation studies validating the effectiveness of each component. Our code is available at https://github.com/zzfoutofspace/ATPO.
Abstract: The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) of the USPTO adjudicates thousands of ex parte appeals each year, requiring the integration of technical understanding and legal reasoning. While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in patent and legal practice, their use has remained limited to lightweight tasks, with no established means of systematically evaluating their capacity for structured legal reasoning in the patent domain. In this work, we introduce PILOT-Bench, the first PTAB-centric benchmark that aligns PTAB decisions with USPTO patent data at the case-level and formalizes three IRAC-aligned classification tasks: Issue Type, Board Authorities, and Subdecision. We evaluate a diverse set of closed-source (commercial) and open-source LLMs and conduct analyses across multiple perspectives, including input-variation settings, model families, and error tendencies. Notably, on the Issue Type task, closed-source models consistently exceed 0.75 in Micro-F1 score, whereas the strongest open-source model (Qwen-8B) achieves performance around 0.56, highlighting a substantial gap in reasoning capabilities. PILOT-Bench establishes a foundation for the systematic evaluation of patent-domain legal reasoning and points toward future directions for improving LLMs through dataset design and model alignment. All data, code, and benchmark resources are available at https://github.com/TeamLab/pilot-bench.
Abstract: We present ProFuse, an efficient context-aware framework for open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). The pipeline enhances cross-view consistency and intra-mask cohesion within a direct registration setup, adding minimal overhead and requiring no render-supervised fine-tuning. Instead of relying on a pretrained 3DGS scene, we introduce a dense correspondence-guided pre-registration phase that initializes Gaussians with accurate geometry while jointly constructing 3D Context Proposals via cross-view clustering. Each proposal carries a global feature obtained through weighted aggregation of member embeddings, and this feature is fused onto Gaussians during direct registration to maintain per-primitive language coherence across views. With associations established in advance, semantic fusion requires no additional optimization beyond standard reconstruction, and the model retains geometric refinement without densification. ProFuse achieves strong open-vocabulary 3DGS understanding while completing semantic attachment in about five minutes per scene, which is two times faster than SOTA. Additional details are available at our project page https://chiou1203.github.io/ProFuse/.
Abstract: Existing long-horizon memory benchmarks mostly use multi-turn dialogues or synthetic user histories, which makes retrieval performance an imperfect proxy for person understanding. We present \BenchName, a publicly releasable benchmark built from long-form autobiographical narratives, where actions, context, and inner thoughts provide dense evidence for inferring stable motivations and decision principles. \BenchName~reconstructs each narrative into a flashback-aware, time-anchored stream and evaluates models with evidence-linked questions spanning factual recall, subjective state attribution, and principle-level reasoning. Across diverse narrative sources, retrieval-augmented systems mainly improve factual accuracy, while errors persist on temporally grounded explanations and higher-level inferences, highlighting the need for memory mechanisms beyond retrieval. Our data is in \href{KnowMeBench}{https://github.com/QuantaAlpha/KnowMeBench}.
Abstract: Integrating image generation and understanding into a single framework has become a pivotal goal in the multimodal domain. However, how understanding can effectively assist generation has not been fully explored. Unlike previous works that focus on leveraging reasoning abilities and world knowledge from understanding models, this paper introduces a novel perspective: leveraging understanding to enhance the fidelity and detail richness of generated images. To this end, we propose Forge-and-Quench, a new unified framework that puts this principle into practice. In the generation process of our framework, an MLLM first reasons over the entire conversational context, including text instructions, to produce an enhanced text instruction. This refined instruction is then mapped to a virtual visual representation, termed the Bridge Feature, via a novel Bridge Adapter. This feature acts as a crucial link, forging insights from the understanding model to quench and refine the generation process. It is subsequently injected into the T2I backbone as a visual guidance signal, alongside the enhanced text instruction that replaces the original input. To validate this paradigm, we conduct comprehensive studies on the design of the Bridge Feature and Bridge Adapter. Our framework demonstrates exceptional extensibility and flexibility, enabling efficient migration across different MLLM and T2I models with significant savings in training overhead, all without compromising the MLLM's inherent multimodal understanding capabilities. Experiments show that Forge-and-Quench significantly improves image fidelity and detail across multiple models, while also maintaining instruction-following accuracy and enhancing world knowledge application. Models and codes are available at https://github.com/YanbingZeng/Forge-and-Quench.
Abstract: Agentic search has emerged as a promising paradigm for complex information seeking by enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to interleave reasoning with tool use. However, prevailing systems rely on monolithic agents that suffer from structural bottlenecks, including unconstrained reasoning outputs that inflate trajectories, sparse outcome-level rewards that complicate credit assignment, and stochastic search noise that destabilizes learning. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{M-ASK} (Multi-Agent Search and Knowledge), a framework that explicitly decouples agentic search into two complementary roles: Search Behavior Agents, which plan and execute search actions, and Knowledge Management Agents, which aggregate, filter, and maintain a compact internal context. This decomposition allows each agent to focus on a well-defined subtask and reduces interference between search and context construction. Furthermore, to enable stable coordination, M-ASK employs turn-level rewards to provide granular supervision for both search decisions and knowledge updates. Experiments on multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that M-ASK outperforms strong baselines, achieving not only superior answer accuracy but also significantly more stable training dynamics.\footnote{The source code for M-ASK is available at https://github.com/chenyiqun/M-ASK.}
Abstract: Cryptocurrency trading increasingly depends on timely integration of heterogeneous web information and market microstructure signals to support short-horizon decision making under extreme volatility. However, existing trading systems struggle to jointly reason over noisy multi-source web evidence while maintaining robustness to rapid price shocks at sub-second timescales. The first challenge lies in synthesizing unstructured web content, social sentiment, and structured OHLCV signals into coherent and interpretable trading decisions without amplifying spurious correlations, while the second challenge concerns risk control, as slow deliberative reasoning pipelines are ill-suited for handling abrupt market shocks that require immediate defensive responses. To address these challenges, we propose WebCryptoAgent, an agentic trading framework that decomposes web-informed decision making into modality-specific agents and consolidates their outputs into a unified evidence document for confidence-calibrated reasoning. We further introduce a decoupled control architecture that separates strategic hourly reasoning from a real-time second-level risk model, enabling fast shock detection and protective intervention independent of the trading loop. Extensive experiments on real-world cryptocurrency markets demonstrate that WebCryptoAgent improves trading stability, reduces spurious activity, and enhances tail-risk handling compared to existing baselines. Code will be available at https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/WebCryptoAgent.
Abstract: Infrared video has been of great interest in visual tasks under challenging environments, but often suffers from severe atmospheric turbulence and compression degradation. Existing video super-resolution (VSR) methods either neglect the inherent modality gap between infrared and visible images or fail to restore turbulence-induced distortions. Directly cascading turbulence mitigation (TM) algorithms with VSR methods leads to error propagation and accumulation due to the decoupled modeling of degradation between turbulence and resolution. We introduce HATIR, a Heat-Aware Diffusion for Turbulent InfraRed Video Super-Resolution, which injects heat-aware deformation priors into the diffusion sampling path to jointly model the inverse process of turbulent degradation and structural detail loss. Specifically, HATIR constructs a Phasor-Guided Flow Estimator, rooted in the physical principle that thermally active regions exhibit consistent phasor responses over time, enabling reliable turbulence-aware flow to guide the reverse diffusion process. To ensure the fidelity of structural recovery under nonuniform distortions, a Turbulence-Aware Decoder is proposed to selectively suppress unstable temporal cues and enhance edge-aware feature aggregation via turbulence gating and structure-aware attention. We built FLIR-IVSR, the first dataset for turbulent infrared VSR, comprising paired LR-HR sequences from a FLIR T1050sc camera (1024 X 768) spanning 640 diverse scenes with varying camera and object motion conditions. This encourages future research in infrared VSR. Project page: https://github.com/JZ0606/HATIR
Abstract: We present Isabellm, an LLM-powered theorem prover for Isabelle/HOL that performs fully automatic proof synthesis. Isabellm works with any local LLM on Ollama and APIs such as Gemini CLI, and it is designed to run on consumer grade computers. The system combines a stepwise prover, which uses large language models to propose proof commands validated by Isabelle in a bounded search loop, with a higher-level proof planner that generates structured Isar outlines and attempts to fill and repair remaining gaps. The framework includes beam search for tactics, tactics reranker ML and RL models, premise selection with small transformer models, micro-RAG for Isar proofs built from AFP, and counter-example guided proof repair. All the code is implemented by GPT 4.1 - 5.2, Gemini 3 Pro, and Claude 4.5. Empirically, Isabellm can prove certain lemmas that defeat Isabelle's standard automation, including Sledgehammer, demonstrating the practical value of LLM-guided proof search. At the same time, we find that even state-of-the-art LLMs, such as GPT 5.2 Extended Thinking and Gemini 3 Pro struggle to reliably implement the intended fill-and-repair mechanisms with complex algorithmic designs, highlighting fundamental challenges in LLM code generation and reasoning. The code of Isabellm is available at https://github.com/zhehou/llm-isabelle
Abstract: This paper introduces FedKDX, a federated learning framework that addresses limitations in healthcare AI through Negative Knowledge Distillation (NKD). Unlike existing approaches that focus solely on positive knowledge transfer, FedKDX captures both target and non-target information to improve model generalization in healthcare applications. The framework integrates multiple knowledge transfer techniques--including traditional knowledge distillation, contrastive learning, and NKD--within a unified architecture that maintains privacy while reducing communication costs. Through experiments on healthcare datasets (SLEEP, UCI-HAR, and PAMAP2), FedKDX demonstrates improved accuracy (up to 2.53% over state-of-the-art methods), faster convergence, and better performance on non-IID data distributions. Theoretical analysis supports NKD's contribution to addressing statistical heterogeneity in distributed healthcare data. The approach shows promise for privacy-sensitive medical applications under regulatory frameworks like HIPAA and GDPR, offering a balanced solution between performance and practical implementation requirements in decentralized healthcare settings. The code and model are available at https://github.com/phamdinhdat-ai/Fed_2024.
Abstract: Text-to-Visualization (Text2Vis) systems translate natural language queries over tabular data into concise answers and executable visualizations. While closed-source LLMs generate functional code, the resulting charts often lack semantic alignment and clarity, qualities that can only be assessed post-execution. Open-source models struggle even more, frequently producing non-executable or visually poor outputs. Although supervised fine-tuning can improve code executability, it fails to enhance overall visualization quality, as traditional SFT loss cannot capture post-execution feedback. To address this gap, we propose RL-Text2Vis, the first reinforcement learning framework for Text2Vis generation. Built on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), our method uses a novel multi-objective reward that jointly optimizes textual accuracy, code validity, and visualization quality using post-execution feedback. By training Qwen2.5 models (7B and 14B), RL-Text2Vis achieves a 22% relative improvement in chart quality over GPT-4o on the Text2Vis benchmark and boosts code execution success from 78% to 97% relative to its zero-shot baseline. Our models significantly outperform strong zero-shot and supervised baselines and also demonstrate robust generalization to out-of-domain datasets like VIS-Eval and NVBench. These results establish GRPO as an effective strategy for structured, multimodal reasoning in visualization generation. We release our code at https://github.com/vis-nlp/RL-Text2Vis.
Abstract: Multimodal retrieval has emerged as a promising yet challenging research direction in recent years. Most existing studies in multimodal retrieval focus on capturing information in multimodal data that is similar to their paired texts, but often ignores the complementary information contained in multimodal data. In this study, we propose CIEA, a novel multimodal retrieval approach that employs Complementary Information Extraction and Alignment, which transforms both text and images in documents into a unified latent space and features a complementary information extractor designed to identify and preserve differences in the image representations. We optimize CIEA using two complementary contrastive losses to ensure semantic integrity and effectively capture the complementary information contained in images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CIEA, which achieves significant improvements over both divide-and-conquer models and universal dense retrieval models. We provide an ablation study, further discussions, and case studies to highlight the advancements achieved by CIEA. To promote further research in the community, we have released the source code at https://github.com/zengdlong/CIEA.
Abstract: Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) systems often assume congruence between vocal emotion and lexical semantics. However, in real-world interactions, acoustic-semantic conflict is common yet overlooked, where the emotion conveyed by tone contradicts the literal meaning of spoken words. We show that state-of-the-art SER models, including ASR-based, self-supervised learning (SSL) approaches and Audio Language Models (ALMs), suffer performance degradation under such conflicts due to semantic bias or entangled acoustic-semantic representations. To address this, we propose the Fusion Acoustic-Semantic (FAS) framework, which explicitly disentangles acoustic and semantic pathways and bridges them through a lightweight, query-based attention module. To enable systematic evaluation, we introduce the Conflict in Acoustic-Semantic Emotion (CASE), the first dataset dominated by clear and interpretable acoustic-semantic conflicts in varied scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FAS consistently outperforms existing methods in both in-domain and zero-shot settings. Notably, on the CASE benchmark, conventional SER models fail dramatically, while FAS sets a new SOTA with 59.38% accuracy. Our code and datasets is available at https://github.com/24DavidHuang/FAS.
Abstract: Our experience of the world is multisensory, spanning a synthesis of language, sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. Yet, artificial intelligence has primarily advanced in digital modalities like text, vision, and audio. This paper outlines a research vision for multisensory artificial intelligence over the next decade. This new set of technologies can change how humans and AI experience and interact with one another, by connecting AI to the human senses and a rich spectrum of signals from physiological and tactile cues on the body, to physical and social signals in homes, cities, and the environment. We outline how this field must advance through three interrelated themes of sensing, science, and synergy. Firstly, research in sensing should extend how AI captures the world in richer ways beyond the digital medium. Secondly, developing a principled science for quantifying multimodal heterogeneity and interactions, developing unified modeling architectures and representations, and understanding cross-modal transfer. Finally, we present new technical challenges to learn synergy between modalities and between humans and AI, covering multisensory integration, alignment, reasoning, generation, generalization, and experience. Accompanying this vision paper are a series of projects, resources, and demos of latest advances from the Multisensory Intelligence group at the MIT Media Lab, see https://mit-mi.github.io/.
Abstract: In recommender systems, online A/B testing is a crucial method for evaluating the performance of different models. However, conducting online A/B testing often presents significant challenges, including substantial economic costs, user experience degradation, and considerable time requirements. With the Large Language Models' powerful capacity, LLM-based agent shows great potential to replace traditional online A/B testing. Nonetheless, current agents fail to simulate the perception process and interaction patterns, due to the lack of real environments and visual perception capability. To address these challenges, we introduce a multi-modal user agent for A/B testing (A/B Agent). Specifically, we construct a recommendation sandbox environment for A/B testing, enabling multimodal and multi-page interactions that align with real user behavior on online platforms. The designed agent leverages multimodal information perception, fine-grained user preferences, and integrates profiles, action memory retrieval, and a fatigue system to simulate complex human decision-making. We validated the potential of the agent as an alternative to traditional A/B testing from three perspectives: model, data, and features. Furthermore, we found that the data generated by A/B Agent can effectively enhance the capabilities of recommendation models. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/ABAgent.
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a central component of large language model (LLM) post-training. Unlike supervised fine-tuning (SFT), RLVR lets an LLM generate multiple candidate solutions and reinforces those that lead to a verifiably correct final answer. However, in practice, RLVR often requires thousands of training steps to reach strong performance, incurring substantial computation largely attributed to prolonged exploration. In this work, we make a surprising observation: during RLVR, LLMs evolve in a strongly linear manner. Specifically, both model weights and model output log-probabilities exhibit strong linear correlations with RL training steps. This suggests that RLVR predominantly amplifies trends that emerge early in training, rather than continuously discovering new behaviors throughout the entire optimization trajectory. Motivated by this linearity, we investigate whether future model states can be predicted from intermediate checkpoints via extrapolation, avoiding continued expensive training. We show that Weight Extrapolation produces models with performance comparable to standard RL training while requiring significantly less computation. Moreover, Logits Extrapolation consistently outperforms continued RL training on mathematics and code benchmarks by extrapolating beyond the step range where RL training remains stable. Our code is available at https://github.com/Miaow-Lab/RLVR-Linearity
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) integrates external knowledge to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs), yet systems remain susceptible to two critical flaws: providing correct answers without explicit grounded evidence and producing fabricated responses when the retrieved context is insufficient. While prior research has addressed these issues independently, a unified framework that integrates evidence-based grounding and reliable abstention is currently lacking. In this paper, we propose GRACE, a reinforcement-learning framework that simultaneously mitigates both types of flaws. GRACE employs a data construction method that utilizes heterogeneous retrievers to generate diverse training samples without manual annotation. A multi-stage gated reward function is then employed to train the model to assess evidence sufficiency, extract key supporting evidence, and provide answers or explicitly abstain. Experimental results on two benchmarks demonstrate that GRACE achieves state-of-the-art overall accuracy and strikes a favorable balance between accurate response and rejection, while requiring only 10% of the annotation costs of prior methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/YiboZhao624/Grace..
Abstract: Exploratory GUI testing is essential for software quality but suffers from high manual costs. While Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM) agents excel in navigation, they fail to autonomously discover defects due to two core challenges: \textit{Goal-Oriented Masking}, where agents prioritize task completion over reporting anomalies, and \textit{Execution-Bias Attribution}, where system defects are misidentified as agent errors. To address these, we first introduce \textbf{GUITestBench}, the first interactive benchmark for this task, featuring 143 tasks across 26 defects. We then propose \textbf{GUITester}, a multi-agent framework that decouples navigation from verification via two modules: (i) a \textit{Planning-Execution Module (PEM)} that proactively probes for defects via embedded testing intents, and (ii) a \textit{Hierarchical Reflection Module (HRM)} that resolves attribution ambiguity through interaction history analysis. GUITester achieves an F1-score of 48.90\% (Pass@3) on GUITestBench, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines (33.35\%). Our work demonstrates the feasibility of autonomous exploratory testing and provides a robust foundation for future GUI quality assurance~\footnote{Our code is now available in~\href{https://github.com/ADaM-BJTU/GUITestBench}{https://github.com/ADaM-BJTU/GUITestBench}}.
Abstract: Modern forest monitoring workflows increasingly benefit from the growing availability of high-resolution satellite imagery and advances in deep learning. Two persistent challenges in this context are accurate pixel-level change detection and meaningful semantic change captioning for complex forest dynamics. While large language models (LLMs) are being adapted for interactive data exploration, their integration with vision-language models (VLMs) for remote sensing image change interpretation (RSICI) remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce an LLM-driven agent for integrated forest change analysis that supports natural language querying across multiple RSICI tasks. The proposed system builds upon a multi-level change interpretation (MCI) vision-language backbone with LLM-based orchestration. To facilitate adaptation and evaluation in forest environments, we further introduce the Forest-Change dataset, which comprises bi-temporal satellite imagery, pixel-level change masks, and multi-granularity semantic change captions generated using a combination of human annotation and rule-based methods. Experimental results show that the proposed system achieves mIoU and BLEU-4 scores of 67.10% and 40.17% on the Forest-Change dataset, and 88.13% and 34.41% on LEVIR-MCI-Trees, a tree-focused subset of LEVIR-MCI benchmark for joint change detection and captioning. These results highlight the potential of interactive, LLM-driven RSICI systems to improve accessibility, interpretability, and efficiency of forest change analysis. All data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/JamesBrockUoB/ForestChat.
Abstract: The quality of subword tokenization is critical for Large Language Models, yet evaluating tokenizers for morphologically rich Uralic languages is hampered by the lack of clean morpheme lexicons. We introduce SampoNLP, a corpus-free toolkit for morphological lexicon creation using MDL-inspired Self-Referential Atomicity Scoring, which filters composite forms through internal structural cues - suited for low-resource settings. Using the high-purity lexicons generated by SampoNLP for Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian, we conduct a systematic evaluation of BPE tokenizers across a range of vocabulary sizes (8k-256k). We propose a unified metric, the Integrated Performance Score (IPS), to navigate the trade-off between morpheme coverage and over-splitting. By analyzing the IPS curves, we identify the "elbow points" of diminishing returns and provide the first empirically grounded recommendations for optimal vocabulary sizes (k) in these languages. Our study not only offers practical guidance but also quantitatively demonstrates the limitations of standard BPE for highly agglutinative languages. The SampoNLP library and all generated resources are made publicly available: https://github.com/AragonerUA/SampoNLP
Abstract: World models have become central to autonomous driving, where accurate scene understanding and future prediction are crucial for safe control. Recent work has explored using vision-language models (VLMs) for planning, yet existing approaches typically treat perception, prediction, and planning as separate modules. We propose UniDrive-WM, a unified VLM-based world model that jointly performs driving-scene understanding, trajectory planning, and trajectory-conditioned future image generation within a single architecture. UniDrive-WM's trajectory planner predicts a future trajectory, which conditions a VLM-based image generator to produce plausible future frames. These predictions provide additional supervisory signals that enhance scene understanding and iteratively refine trajectory generation. We further compare discrete and continuous output representations for future image prediction, analyzing their influence on downstream driving performance. Experiments on the challenging Bench2Drive benchmark show that UniDrive-WM produces high-fidelity future images and improves planning performance by 5.9% in L2 trajectory error and 9.2% in collision rate over the previous best method. These results demonstrate the advantages of tightly integrating VLM-driven reasoning, planning, and generative world modeling for autonomous driving. The project page is available at https://unidrive-wm.github.io/UniDrive-WM .
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) now support contexts of up to 1M tokens, but their effectiveness on complex long-context tasks remains unclear. In this paper, we study multi-document legal case summarization, where a single case often spans many documents totaling 100K-500K tokens. We introduce Gavel-Ref, a reference-based evaluation framework with multi-value checklist evaluation over 26 items, as well as residual fact and writing-style evaluations. Using Gavel-Ref, we go beyond the single aggregate scores reported in prior work and systematically evaluate 12 frontier LLMs on 100 legal cases ranging from 32K to 512K tokens, primarily from 2025. Our results show that even the strongest model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, achieves only around 50 of $S_{\text{Gavel-Ref}}$, highlighting the difficulty of the task. Models perform well on simple checklist items (e.g., filing date) but struggle on multi-value or rare ones such as settlements and monitor reports. As LLMs continue to improve and may surpass human-written summaries -- making human references less reliable -- we develop Gavel-Agent, an efficient and autonomous agent scaffold that equips LLMs with six tools to navigate and extract checklists directly from case documents. With Qwen3, Gavel-Agent reduces token usage by 36% while resulting in only a 7% drop in $S_{\text{checklist}}$ compared to end-to-end extraction with GPT-4.1.
Abstract: Human cognition, driven by complex neurochemical processes, oscillates between imagination and reality and learns to self-correct whenever such subtle drifts lead to hallucinations or unsafe associations. In recent years, LLMs have demonstrated remarkable performance in a wide range of tasks. However, they still lack human cognition to balance factuality and safety. Bearing the resemblance, we argue that both factual and safety failures in LLMs arise from a representational misalignment in their latent activation space, rather than addressing those as entirely separate alignment issues. We hypothesize that an external network, trained to understand the fluctuations, can selectively intervene in the model to regulate falsehood into truthfulness and unsafe output into safe output without fine-tuning the model parameters themselves. Reflecting the hypothesis, we propose ARREST (Adversarial Resilient Regulation Enhancing Safety and Truth), a unified framework that identifies and corrects drifted features, engaging both soft and hard refusals in addition to factual corrections. Our empirical results show that ARREST not only regulates misalignment but is also more versatile compared to the RLHF-aligned models in generating soft refusals due to adversarial training. We make our codebase available at https://github.com/sharanya-dasgupta001/ARREST.
Abstract: Recent advances in video diffusion models have shifted towards transformer-based architectures, achieving state-of-the-art video generation but at the cost of quadratic attention complexity, which severely limits scalability for longer sequences. We introduce ReHyAt, a Recurrent Hybrid Attention mechanism that combines the fidelity of softmax attention with the efficiency of linear attention, enabling chunk-wise recurrent reformulation and constant memory usage. Unlike the concurrent linear-only SANA Video, ReHyAt's hybrid design allows efficient distillation from existing softmax-based models, reducing the training cost by two orders of magnitude to ~160 GPU hours, while being competitive in the quality. Our light-weight distillation and finetuning pipeline provides a recipe that can be applied to future state-of-the-art bidirectional softmax-based models. Experiments on VBench and VBench-2.0, as well as a human preference study, demonstrate that ReHyAt achieves state-of-the-art video quality while reducing attention cost from quadratic to linear, unlocking practical scalability for long-duration and on-device video generation. Project page is available at https://qualcomm-ai-research.github.io/rehyat.
Abstract: Anonymizing sensitive information in user text is essential for privacy, yet existing methods often apply uniform treatment across attributes, which can conflict with communicative intent and obscure necessary information. This is particularly problematic when personal attributes are integral to expressive or pragmatic goals. The central challenge lies in determining which attributes to protect, and to what extent, while preserving semantic and pragmatic functions. We propose IntentAnony, a utility-preserving anonymization approach that performs intent-conditioned exposure control. IntentAnony models pragmatic intent and constructs privacy inference evidence chains to capture how distributed cues support attribute inference. Conditioned on intent, it assigns each attribute an exposure budget and selectively suppresses non-intent inference pathways while preserving intent-relevant content, semantic structure, affective nuance, and interactional function. We evaluate IntentAnony using privacy inference success rates, text utility metrics, and human evaluation. The results show an approximately 30% improvement in the overall privacy--utility trade-off, with notably stronger usability of anonymized text compared to prior state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/Nevaeh7/IntentAnony.
Abstract: Energy efficiency is a first-order concern in AI deployment, as long-running inference can exceed training in cumulative carbon impact. We propose a bio-inspired framework that maps protein-folding energy basins to inference cost landscapes and controls execution via a decaying, closed-loop threshold. A request is admitted only when the expected utility-to-energy trade-off is favorable (high confidence/utility at low marginal energy and congestion), biasing operation toward the first acceptable local basin rather than pursuing costly global minima. We evaluate DistilBERT and ResNet-18 served through FastAPI with ONNX Runtime and NVIDIA Triton on an RTX 4000 Ada GPU. Our ablation study reveals that the bio-controller reduces processing time by 42% compared to standard open-loop execution (0.50s vs 0.29s on A100 test set), with a minimal accuracy degradation (<0.5%). Furthermore, we establish the efficiency boundaries between lightweight local serving (ORT) and managed batching (Triton). The results connect biophysical energy models to Green MLOps and offer a practical, auditable basis for closed-loop energy-aware inference in production.
Abstract: We present the LEMAS-Dataset, which, to our knowledge, is currently the largest open-source multilingual speech corpus with word-level timestamps. Covering over 150,000 hours across 10 major languages, LEMAS-Dataset is constructed via a efficient data processing pipeline that ensures high-quality data and annotations. To validate the effectiveness of LEMAS-Dataset across diverse generative paradigms, we train two benchmark models with distinct architectures and task specializations on this dataset. LEMAS-TTS, built upon a non-autoregressive flow-matching framework, leverages the dataset's massive scale and linguistic diversity to achieve robust zero-shot multilingual synthesis. Our proposed accent-adversarial training and CTC loss mitigate cross-lingual accent issues, enhancing synthesis stability. Complementarily, LEMAS-Edit employs an autoregressive decoder-only architecture that formulates speech editing as a masked token infilling task. By exploiting precise word-level alignments to construct training masks and adopting adaptive decoding strategies, it achieves seamless, smooth-boundary speech editing with natural transitions. Experimental results demonstrate that models trained on LEMAS-Dataset deliver high-quality synthesis and editing performance, confirming the dataset's quality. We envision that this richly timestamp-annotated, fine-grained multilingual corpus will drive future advances in prompt-based speech generation systems.
Abstract: We present Qwerty AI, an end-to-end system for automated age-rating and content-safety assessment of Russian-language screenplays according to Federal Law No. 436-FZ. The system processes full-length scripts (up to 700 pages in under 2 minutes), segments them into narrative units, detects content violations across five categories (violence, sexual content, profanity, substances, frightening elements), and assigns age ratings (0+, 6+, 12+, 16+, 18+) with explainable justifications. Our implementation leverages a fine-tuned Phi-3-mini model with 4-bit quantization, achieving 80% rating accuracy and 80-95% segmentation precision (format-dependent). The system was developed under strict constraints: no external API calls, 80GB VRAM limit, and <5 minute processing time for average scripts. Deployed on Yandex Cloud with CUDA acceleration, Qwerty AI demonstrates practical applicability for production workflows. We achieved these results during the Wink hackathon (November 2025), where our solution addressed real editorial challenges in the Russian media industry.
Abstract: We present FronTalk, a benchmark for front-end code generation that pioneers the study of a unique interaction dynamic: conversational code generation with multi-modal feedback. In front-end development, visual artifacts such as sketches, mockups and annotated creenshots are essential for conveying design intent, yet their role in multi-turn code generation remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we focus on the front-end development task and curate FronTalk, a collection of 100 multi-turn dialogues derived from real-world websites across diverse domains such as news, finance, and art. Each turn features both a textual instruction and an equivalent visual instruction, each representing the same user intent. To comprehensively evaluate model performance, we propose a novel agent-based evaluation framework leveraging a web agent to simulate users and explore the website, and thus measuring both functional correctness and user experience. Evaluation of 20 models reveals two key challenges that are under-explored systematically in the literature: (1) a significant forgetting issue where models overwrite previously implemented features, resulting in task failures, and (2) a persistent challenge in interpreting visual feedback, especially for open-source vision-language models (VLMs). We propose a strong baseline to tackle the forgetting issue with AceCoder, a method that critiques the implementation of every past instruction using an autonomous web agent. This approach significantly reduces forgetting to nearly zero and improves the performance by up to 9.3% (56.0% to 65.3%). Overall, we aim to provide a solid foundation for future research in front-end development and the general interaction dynamics of multi-turn, multi-modal code generation. Code and data are released at https://github.com/shirley-wu/frontalk
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) question-answering systems often fail on community-specific queries, creating "knowledge blind spots" that marginalize local voices and reinforce epistemic injustice. We present Collective Narrative Grounding, a participatory protocol that transforms community stories into structured narrative units and integrates them into AI systems under community governance. Learning from three participatory mapping workshops with N=24 community members, we designed elicitation methods and a schema that retain narrative richness while enabling entity, time, and place extraction, validation, and provenance control. To scope the problem, we audit a county-level benchmark of 14,782 local information QA pairs, where factual gaps, cultural misunderstandings, geographic confusions, and temporal misalignments account for 76.7% of errors. On a participatory QA set derived from our workshops, a state-of-the-art LLM answered fewer than 21% of questions correctly without added context, underscoring the need for local grounding. The missing facts often appear in the collected narratives, suggesting a direct path to closing the dominant error modes for narrative items. Beyond the protocol and pilot, we articulate key design tensions, such as representation and power, governance and control, and privacy and consent, providing concrete requirements for retrieval-first, provenance-visible, locally governed QA systems. Together, our taxonomy, protocol, and participatory evaluation offer a rigorous foundation for building community-grounded AI that better answers local questions.
Abstract: Dynamic objects in our physical 4D (3D + time) world are constantly evolving, deforming, and interacting with other objects, leading to diverse 4D scene dynamics. In this paper, we present a universal generative pipeline, CHORD, for CHOReographing Dynamic objects and scenes and synthesizing this type of phenomena. Traditional rule-based graphics pipelines to create these dynamics are based on category-specific heuristics, yet are labor-intensive and not scalable. Recent learning-based methods typically demand large-scale datasets, which may not cover all object categories in interest. Our approach instead inherits the universality from the video generative models by proposing a distillation-based pipeline to extract the rich Lagrangian motion information hidden in the Eulerian representations of 2D videos. Our method is universal, versatile, and category-agnostic. We demonstrate its effectiveness by conducting experiments to generate a diverse range of multi-body 4D dynamics, show its advantage compared to existing methods, and demonstrate its applicability in generating robotics manipulation policies. Project page: https://yanzhelyu.github.io/chord
Abstract: Existing visual localization methods are typically either 2D image-based, which are easy to build and maintain but limited in effective geometric reasoning, or 3D structure-based, which achieve high accuracy but require a centralized reconstruction and are difficult to update. In this work, we revisit visual localization with a 2D image-based representation and propose to augment each image with estimated depth maps to capture the geometric structure. Supported by the effective use of dense matchers, this representation is not only easy to build and maintain, but achieves highest accuracy in challenging conditions. With compact compression and a GPU-accelerated LO-RANSAC implementation, the whole pipeline is efficient in both storage and computation and allows for a flexible trade-off between accuracy and highest memory efficiency. Our method achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy on various standard benchmarks and outperforms existing memory-efficient methods at comparable map sizes. Code will be available at https://github.com/cvg/Hierarchical-Localization.
Abstract: We demonstrate a deep learning framework capable of recovering physical parameters from the Nonlinear Schrodinger Equation (NLSE) under severe noise conditions. By integrating Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) with automatic differentiation, we achieve reconstruction of the nonlinear coefficient beta with less than 0.2 percent relative error using only 500 sparse, randomly sampled data points corrupted by 20 percent additive Gaussian noise, a regime where traditional finite difference methods typically fail due to noise amplification in numerical derivatives. We validate the method's generalization capabilities across different physical regimes (beta between 0.5 and 2.0) and varying data availability (between 100 and 1000 training points), demonstrating consistent sub-1 percent accuracy. Statistical analysis over multiple independent runs confirms robustness (standard deviation less than 0.15 percent for beta equals 1.0). The complete pipeline executes in approximately 80 minutes on modest cloud GPU resources (NVIDIA Tesla T4), making the approach accessible for widespread adoption. Our results indicate that physics-based regularization acts as an effective filter against high measurement uncertainty, positioning PINNs as a viable alternative to traditional optimization methods for inverse problems in spatiotemporal dynamics where experimental data is scarce and noisy. All code is made publicly available to facilitate reproducibility.
Abstract: We present Gen3R, a method that bridges the strong priors of foundational reconstruction models and video diffusion models for scene-level 3D generation. We repurpose the VGGT reconstruction model to produce geometric latents by training an adapter on its tokens, which are regularized to align with the appearance latents of pre-trained video diffusion models. By jointly generating these disentangled yet aligned latents, Gen3R produces both RGB videos and corresponding 3D geometry, including camera poses, depth maps, and global point clouds. Experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results in single- and multi-image conditioned 3D scene generation. Additionally, our method can enhance the robustness of reconstruction by leveraging generative priors, demonstrating the mutual benefit of tightly coupling reconstruction and generative models.
Abstract: As Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) become an indispensable assistant in human life, the unsafe content generated by MLLMs poses a danger to human behavior, perpetually overhanging human society like a sword of Damocles. To investigate and evaluate the safety impact of MLLMs responses on human behavior in daily life, we introduce SaLAD, a multimodal safety benchmark which contains 2,013 real-world image-text samples across 10 common categories, with a balanced design covering both unsafe scenarios and cases of oversensitivity. It emphasizes realistic risk exposure, authentic visual inputs, and fine-grained cross-modal reasoning, ensuring that safety risks cannot be inferred from text alone. We further propose a safety-warning-based evaluation framework that encourages models to provide clear and informative safety warnings, rather than generic refusals. Results on 18 MLLMs demonstrate that the top-performing models achieve a safe response rate of only 57.2% on unsafe queries. Moreover, even popular safety alignment methods limit effectiveness of the models in our scenario, revealing the vulnerabilities of current MLLMs in identifying dangerous behaviors in daily life. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/xinyuelou/SaLAD.
Abstract: Neural networks commonly employ the McCulloch-Pitts neuron model, which is a linear model followed by a point-wise non-linear activation. Various researchers have already advanced inherently non-linear neuron models, such as quadratic neurons, generalized operational neurons, generative neurons, and super neurons, which offer stronger non-linearity compared to point-wise activation functions. In this paper, we introduce a novel and better non-linear neuron model called Padé neurons (Paons), inspired by Padé approximants. Paons offer several advantages, such as diversity of non-linearity, since each Paon learns a different non-linear function of its inputs, and layer efficiency, since Paons provide stronger non-linearity in much fewer layers compared to piecewise linear approximation. Furthermore, Paons include all previously proposed neuron models as special cases, thus any neuron model in any network can be replaced by Paons. We note that there has been a proposal to employ the Padé approximation as a generalized point-wise activation function, which is fundamentally different from our model. To validate the efficacy of Paons, in our experiments, we replace classic neurons in some well-known neural image super-resolution, compression, and classification models based on the ResNet architecture with Paons. Our comprehensive experimental results and analyses demonstrate that neural models built by Paons provide better or equal performance than their classic counterparts with a smaller number of layers. The PyTorch implementation code for Paon is open-sourced at https://github.com/onur-keles/Paon.
Abstract: Commercial-grade poster design demands the seamless integration of aesthetic appeal with precise, informative content delivery. Current automated poster generation systems face significant limitations, including incomplete design workflows, poor text rendering accuracy, and insufficient flexibility for commercial applications. To address these challenges, we propose PosterVerse, a full-workflow, commercial-grade poster generation method that seamlessly automates the entire design process while delivering high-density and scalable text rendering. PosterVerse replicates professional design through three key stages: (1) blueprint creation using fine-tuned LLMs to extract key design elements from user requirements, (2) graphical background generation via customized diffusion models to create visually appealing imagery, and (3) unified layout-text rendering with an MLLM-powered HTML engine to guarantee high text accuracy and flexible customization. In addition, we introduce PosterDNA, a commercial-grade, HTML-based dataset tailored for training and validating poster design models. To the best of our knowledge, PosterDNA is the first Chinese poster generation dataset to introduce HTML typography files, enabling scalable text rendering and fundamentally solving the challenges of rendering small and high-density text. Experimental results demonstrate that PosterVerse consistently produces commercial-grade posters with appealing visuals, accurate text alignment, and customizable layouts, making it a promising solution for automating commercial poster design. The code and model are available at https://github.com/wuhaer/PosterVerse.
Abstract: Recent commercial systems such as Suno demonstrate strong capabilities in long-form song generation, while academic research remains largely non-reproducible due to the lack of publicly available training data, hindering fair comparison and progress. To this end, we release a fully open-source system for long-form song generation with fine-grained style conditioning, including a licensed synthetic dataset, training and evaluation pipelines, and Muse, an easy-to-deploy song generation model. The dataset consists of 116k fully licensed synthetic songs with automatically generated lyrics and style descriptions paired with audio synthesized by SunoV5. We train Muse via single-stage supervised finetuning of a Qwen-based language model extended with discrete audio tokens using MuCodec, without task-specific losses, auxiliary objectives, or additional architectural components. Our evaluations find that although Muse is trained with a modest data scale and model size, it achieves competitive performance on phoneme error rate, text--music style similarity, and audio aesthetic quality, while enabling controllable segment-level generation across different musical structures. All data, model weights, and training and evaluation pipelines will be publicly released, paving the way for continued progress in controllable long-form song generation research. The project repository is available at https://github.com/yuhui1038/Muse.
Abstract: Existing 1D visual tokenizers for autoregressive (AR) generation largely follow the design principles of language modeling, as they are built directly upon transformers whose priors originate in language, yielding single-hierarchy latent tokens and treating visual data as flat sequential token streams. However, this language-like formulation overlooks key properties of vision, particularly the hierarchical and residual network designs that have long been essential for convergence and efficiency in visual models. To bring "vision" back to vision, we propose the Residual Tokenizer (ResTok), a 1D visual tokenizer that builds hierarchical residuals for both image tokens and latent tokens. The hierarchical representations obtained through progressively merging enable cross-level feature fusion at each layer, substantially enhancing representational capacity. Meanwhile, the semantic residuals between hierarchies prevent information overlap, yielding more concentrated latent distributions that are easier for AR modeling. Cross-level bindings consequently emerge without any explicit constraints. To accelerate the generation process, we further introduce a hierarchical AR generator that substantially reduces sampling steps by predicting an entire level of latent tokens at once rather than generating them strictly token-by-token. Extensive experiments demonstrate that restoring hierarchical residual priors in visual tokenization significantly improves AR image generation, achieving a gFID of 2.34 on ImageNet-256 with only 9 sampling steps. Code is available at https://github.com/Kwai-Kolors/ResTok.
Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge, but existing approaches indiscriminately trigger retrieval and rely on single-path evidence construction, often introducing noise and limiting performance gains. In this work, we propose Decide Then Retrieve (DTR), a training-free framework that adaptively determines when retrieval is necessary and how external information should be selected. DTR leverages generation uncertainty to guide retrieval triggering and introduces a dual-path retrieval mechanism with adaptive information selection to better handle sparse and ambiguous queries. Extensive experiments across five open-domain QA benchmarks, multiple model scales, and different retrievers demonstrate that DTR consistently improves EM and F1 over standard RAG and strong retrieval-enhanced baselines, while reducing unnecessary retrievals. The code and data used in this paper are available at https://github.com/ChenWangHKU/DTR.
Abstract: Ensuring the functional safety of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) requires motion planning modules that not only operate within strict real-time constraints but also maintain controllability in case of system faults. Existing safeguarding concepts, such as Online Verification (OV), provide safety layers that detect infeasible planning outputs. However, they lack an active mechanism to ensure safe operation in the event that the main planner fails. This paper presents a first step toward an active safety extension for fail-operational Autonomous Driving (AD). We deploy a lightweight sampling-based trajectory planner on an automotive-grade, embedded platform running a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS). The planner continuously computes trajectories under constrained computational resources, forming the foundation for future emergency planning architectures. Experimental results demonstrate deterministic timing behavior with bounded latency and minimal jitter, validating the feasibility of trajectory planning on safety-certifiable hardware. The study highlights both the potential and the remaining challenges of integrating active fallback mechanisms as an integral part of next-generation safeguarding frameworks. The code is available at: https://github.com/TUM-AVS/real-time-motion-planning
Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as a popular algorithm for reinforcement learning with large language models (LLMs). However, upon analyzing its clipping mechanism, we argue that it is suboptimal in certain scenarios. With appropriate modifications, GRPO can be significantly enhanced to improve both flexibility and generalization. To this end, we propose Adaptive-Boundary-Clipping GRPO (ABC-GRPO), an asymmetric and adaptive refinement of the original GRPO framework. We demonstrate that ABC-GRPO achieves superior performance over standard GRPO on mathematical reasoning tasks using the Qwen3 LLMs. Moreover, ABC-GRPO maintains substantially higher entropy throughout training, thereby preserving the model's exploration capacity and mitigating premature convergence. The implementation code is available online to ease reproducibility https://github.com/chi2liu/ABC-GRPO.
Abstract: Electro-laryngeal (EL) speech is characterized by constant pitch, limited prosody, and mechanical noise, reducing naturalness and intelligibility. We propose a lightweight adaptation of the state-of-the-art StreamVC framework to this setting by removing pitch and energy modules and combining self-supervised pretraining with supervised fine-tuning on parallel EL and healthy (HE) speech data, guided by perceptual and intelligibility losses. Objective and subjective evaluations across different loss configurations confirm their influence: the best model variant, based on WavLM features and human-feedback predictions (+WavLM+HF), drastically reduces character error rate (CER) of EL inputs, raises naturalness mean opinion score (nMOS) from 1.1 to 3.3, and consistently narrows the gap to HE ground-truth speech in all evaluated metrics. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of adapting lightweight voice conversion architectures to EL voice rehabilitation while also identifying prosody generation and intelligibility improvements as the main remaining bottlenecks.
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) elicits long chain-of-thought reasoning in large language models (LLMs), but outcome-based rewards lead to coarse-grained advantage estimation. While existing approaches improve RLVR via token-level entropy or sequence-level length control, they lack a semantically grounded, step-level measure of reasoning progress. As a result, LLMs fail to distinguish necessary deduction from redundant verification: they may continue checking after reaching a correct solution and, in extreme cases, overturn a correct trajectory into an incorrect final answer. To remedy the lack of process supervision, we introduce a training-free probing mechanism that extracts intermediate confidence and correctness and combines them into a Step Potential signal that explicitly estimates the reasoning state at each step. Building on this signal, we propose Step Potential Advantage Estimation (SPAE), a fine-grained credit assignment method that amplifies potential gains, penalizes potential drops, and applies penalty after potential saturates to encourage timely termination. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show SPAE consistently improves accuracy while substantially reducing response length, outperforming strong RL baselines and recent efficient reasoning and token-level advantage estimation methods. The code is available at https://github.com/cii030/SPAE-RL.
Authors:Jan Tagscherer, Sarah de Boer, Lena Philipp, Fennie van der Graaf, Dré Peeters, Joeran Bosma, Lars Leijten, Bogdan Obreja, Ewoud Smit, Alessa Hering
Abstract: Developing foundation models in medical imaging requires continuous monitoring of downstream performance. Researchers are burdened with tracking numerous experiments, design choices, and their effects on performance, often relying on ad-hoc, manual workflows that are inherently slow and error-prone. We introduce EvalBlocks, a modular, plug-and-play framework for efficient evaluation of foundation models during development. Built on Snakemake, EvalBlocks supports seamless integration of new datasets, foundation models, aggregation methods, and evaluation strategies. All experiments and results are tracked centrally and are reproducible with a single command, while efficient caching and parallel execution enable scalable use on shared compute infrastructure. Demonstrated on five state-of-the-art foundation models and three medical imaging classification tasks, EvalBlocks streamlines model evaluation, enabling researchers to iterate faster and focus on model innovation rather than evaluation logistics. The framework is released as open source software at https://github.com/DIAGNijmegen/eval-blocks.
Abstract: Detecting semantic backdoors in classification models--where some classes can be activated by certain natural, but out-of-distribution inputs--is an important problem that has received relatively little attention. Semantic backdoors are significantly harder to detect than backdoors that are based on trigger patterns due to the lack of such clearly identifiable patterns. We tackle this problem under the assumption that the clean training dataset and the training recipe of the model are both known. These assumptions are motivated by a consumer protection scenario, in which the responsible authority performs mystery shopping to test a machine learning service provider. In this scenario, the authority uses the provider's resources and tools to train a model on a given dataset and tests whether the provider included a backdoor. In our proposed approach, the authority creates a reference model pool by training a small number of clean and poisoned models using trusted infrastructure, and calibrates a model distance threshold to identify clean models. We propose and experimentally analyze a number of approaches to compute model distances and we also test a scenario where the provider performs an adaptive attack to avoid detection. The most reliable method is based on requesting adversarial training from the provider. The model distance is best measured using a set of input samples generated by inverting the models in such a way as to maximize the distance from clean samples. With these settings, our method can often completely separate clean and poisoned models, and it proves to be superior to state-of-the-art backdoor detectors as well.
Abstract: Node classification is a fundamental problem in information retrieval with many real-world applications, such as community detection in social networks, grouping articles published online and product categorization in e-commerce. Zero-shot node classification in text-attributed graphs (TAGs) presents a significant challenge, particularly due to the absence of labeled data. In this paper, we propose a novel Zero-shot Prompt Tuning (ZPT) framework to address this problem by leveraging a Universal Bimodal Conditional Generator (UBCG). Our approach begins with pre-training a graph-language model to capture both the graph structure and the associated textual descriptions of each node. Following this, a conditional generative model is trained to learn the joint distribution of nodes in both graph and text modalities, enabling the generation of synthetic samples for each class based solely on the class name. These synthetic node and text embeddings are subsequently used to perform continuous prompt tuning, facilitating effective node classification in a zero-shot setting. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets, demonstrating that our framework performs better than existing state-of-the-art baselines. We also provide ablation studies to validate the contribution of the bimodal generator. The code is provided at: https://github.com/Sethup123/ZPT.
Abstract: While Audio Large Language Models (ALLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in understanding and generation, their potential privacy implications remain largely unexplored. This paper takes the first step to investigate whether ALLMs inadvertently leak user privacy solely through acoustic voiceprints and introduces $\textit{HearSay}$, a comprehensive benchmark constructed from over 22,000 real-world audio clips. To ensure data quality, the benchmark is meticulously curated through a rigorous pipeline involving automated profiling and human verification, guaranteeing that all privacy labels are grounded in factual records. Extensive experiments on $\textit{HearSay}$ yield three critical findings: $\textbf{Significant Privacy Leakage}$: ALLMs inherently extract private attributes from voiceprints, reaching 92.89% accuracy on gender and effectively profiling social attributes. $\textbf{Insufficient Safety Mechanisms}$: Alarmingly, existing safeguards are severely inadequate; most models fail to refuse privacy-intruding requests, exhibiting near-zero refusal rates for physiological traits. $\textbf{Reasoning Amplifies Risk}$: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning exacerbates privacy risks in capable models by uncovering deeper acoustic correlations. These findings expose critical vulnerabilities in ALLMs, underscoring the urgent need for targeted privacy alignment. The codes and dataset are available at https://github.com/JinWang79/HearSay_Benchmark
Abstract: Humans anticipate, from a glance and a contemplated action of their bodies, how the 3D world will respond, a capability that is equally vital for robotic manipulation. We introduce PointWorld, a large pre-trained 3D world model that unifies state and action in a shared 3D space as 3D point flows: given one or few RGB-D images and a sequence of low-level robot action commands, PointWorld forecasts per-pixel displacements in 3D that respond to the given actions. By representing actions as 3D point flows instead of embodiment-specific action spaces (e.g., joint positions), this formulation directly conditions on physical geometries of robots while seamlessly integrating learning across embodiments. To train our 3D world model, we curate a large-scale dataset spanning real and simulated robotic manipulation in open-world environments, enabled by recent advances in 3D vision and simulated environments, totaling about 2M trajectories and 500 hours across a single-arm Franka and a bimanual humanoid. Through rigorous, large-scale empirical studies of backbones, action representations, learning objectives, partial observability, data mixtures, domain transfers, and scaling, we distill design principles for large-scale 3D world modeling. With a real-time (0.1s) inference speed, PointWorld can be efficiently integrated in the model-predictive control (MPC) framework for manipulation. We demonstrate that a single pre-trained checkpoint enables a real-world Franka robot to perform rigid-body pushing, deformable and articulated object manipulation, and tool use, without requiring any demonstrations or post-training and all from a single image captured in-the-wild. Project website at https://point-world.github.io/.
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are more frequently used in retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, it is increasingly relevant to study their behavior under knowledge conflicts. Thus far, the role of the source of the retrieved information has gone unexamined. We address this gap with a novel framework to investigate how source preferences affect LLM resolution of inter-context knowledge conflicts in English, motivated by interdisciplinary research on credibility. With a comprehensive, tightly-controlled evaluation of 13 open-weight LLMs, we find that LLMs prefer institutionally-corroborated information (e.g., government or newspaper sources) over information from people and social media. However, these source preferences can be reversed by simply repeating information from less credible sources. To mitigate repetition effects and maintain consistent preferences, we propose a novel method that reduces repetition bias by up to 99.8%, while also maintaining at least 88.8% of original preferences. We release all data and code to encourage future work on credibility and source preferences in knowledge-intensive NLP.
Abstract: Fine-grained classification of marine animals supports ecology, biodiversity and habitat conservation, and evidence-based policy-making. However, existing methods often overlook contextual interactions from the surrounding environment and insufficiently incorporate the hierarchical structure of marine biological taxonomy. To address these challenges, we propose MATANet (Multi-context Attention and Taxonomy-Aware Network), a novel model designed for fine-grained marine species classification. MATANet mimics expert strategies by using taxonomy and environmental context to interpret ambiguous features of underwater animals. It consists of two key components: a Multi-Context Environmental Attention Module (MCEAM), which learns relationships between regions of interest (ROIs) and their surrounding environments, and a Hierarchical Separation-Induced Learning Module (HSLM), which encodes taxonomic hierarchy into the feature space. MATANet combines instance and environmental features with taxonomic structure to enhance fine-grained classification. Experiments on the FathomNet2025, FAIR1M, and LifeCLEF2015-Fish datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. The source code is available at: https://github.com/dhlee-work/fathomnet-cvpr2025-ssl
Abstract: Reinforcement learning drives recent advances in LLM reasoning and agentic capabilities, yet current approaches struggle with both exploration and exploitation. Exploration suffers from low success rates on difficult tasks and high costs of repeated rollouts from scratch. Exploitation suffers from coarse credit assignment and training instability: Trajectory-level rewards penalize valid prefixes for later errors, and failure-dominated groups overwhelm the few positive signals, leaving optimization without constructive direction. To this end, we propose R$^3$L, Reflect-then-Retry Reinforcement Learning with Language-Guided Exploration, Pivotal Credit, and Positive Amplification. To synthesize high-quality trajectories, R$^3$L shifts from stochastic sampling to active synthesis via reflect-then-retry, leveraging language feedback to diagnose errors, transform failed attempts into successful ones, and reduce rollout costs by restarting from identified failure points. With errors diagnosed and localized, Pivotal Credit Assignment updates only the diverging suffix where contrastive signals exist, excluding the shared prefix from gradient update. Since failures dominate on difficult tasks and reflect-then-retry produces off-policy data, risking training instability, Positive Amplification upweights successful trajectories to ensure positive signals guide the optimization process. Experiments on agentic and reasoning tasks demonstrate 5\% to 52\% relative improvements over baselines while maintaining training stability. Our code is released at https://github.com/shiweijiezero/R3L.
Abstract: DeepSeek-OCR utilizes an optical 2D mapping approach to achieve high-ratio vision-text compression, claiming to decode text tokens exceeding ten times the input visual tokens. While this suggests a promising solution for the LLM long-context bottleneck, we investigate a critical question: "Visual merit or linguistic crutch - which drives DeepSeek-OCR's performance?" By employing sentence-level and word-level semantic corruption, we isolate the model's intrinsic OCR capabilities from its language priors. Results demonstrate that without linguistic support, DeepSeek-OCR's performance plummets from approximately 90% to 20%. Comparative benchmarking against 13 baseline models reveals that traditional pipeline OCR methods exhibit significantly higher robustness to such semantic perturbations than end-to-end methods. Furthermore, we find that lower visual token counts correlate with increased reliance on priors, exacerbating hallucination risks. Context stress testing also reveals a total model collapse around 10,000 text tokens, suggesting that current optical compression techniques may paradoxically aggravate the long-context bottleneck. This study empirically defines DeepSeek-OCR's capability boundaries and offers essential insights for future optimizations of the vision-text compression paradigm. We release all data, results and scripts used in this study at https://github.com/dududuck00/DeepSeekOCR.
Abstract: The trade-off between predictive accuracy and data availability makes it difficult to predict protein--protein binding affinity accurately. The lack of experimentally resolved protein structures limits the performance of structure-based machine learning models, which generally outperform sequence-based methods. In order to overcome this constraint, we suggest a regression framework based on knowledge distillation that uses protein structural data during training and only needs sequence data during inference. The suggested method uses binding affinity labels and intermediate feature representations to jointly supervise the training of a sequence-based student network under the guidance of a structure-informed teacher network. Leave-One-Complex-Out (LOCO) cross-validation was used to assess the framework on a non-redundant protein--protein binding affinity benchmark dataset. A maximum Pearson correlation coefficient (P_r) of 0.375 and an RMSE of 2.712 kcal/mol were obtained by sequence-only baseline models, whereas a P_r of 0.512 and an RMSE of 2.445 kcal/mol were obtained by structure-based models. With a P_r of 0.481 and an RMSE of 2.488 kcal/mol, the distillation-based student model greatly enhanced sequence-only performance. Improved agreement and decreased bias were further confirmed by thorough error analyses. With the potential to close the performance gap between sequence-based and structure-based models as larger datasets become available, these findings show that knowledge distillation is an efficient method for transferring structural knowledge to sequence-based predictors. The source code for running inference with the proposed distillation-based binding affinity predictor can be accessed at https://github.com/wajidarshad/ProteinAffinityKD.
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) become integral to safety-critical applications, ensuring their robustness against adversarial prompts is paramount. However, existing red teaming datasets suffer from inconsistent risk categorizations, limited domain coverage, and outdated evaluations, hindering systematic vulnerability assessments. To address these challenges, we introduce RedBench, a universal dataset aggregating 37 benchmark datasets from leading conferences and repositories, comprising 29,362 samples across attack and refusal prompts. RedBench employs a standardized taxonomy with 22 risk categories and 19 domains, enabling consistent and comprehensive evaluations of LLM vulnerabilities. We provide a detailed analysis of existing datasets, establish baselines for modern LLMs, and open-source the dataset and evaluation code. Our contributions facilitate robust comparisons, foster future research, and promote the development of secure and reliable LLMs for real-world deployment. Code: https://github.com/knoveleng/redeval
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) and agent-based systems often struggle with compositional generalization due to a data bottleneck in which complex skill combinations follow a long-tailed, power-law distribution, limiting both instruction-following performance and generalization in agent-centric tasks. To address this challenge, we propose STEPS, a Skill Taxonomy guided Entropy-based Post-training data Synthesis framework for generating compositionally challenging data. STEPS explicitly targets compositional generalization by uncovering latent relationships among skills and organizing them into an interpretable, hierarchical skill taxonomy using structural information theory. Building on this taxonomy, we formulate data synthesis as a constrained information maximization problem, selecting skill combinations that maximize marginal structural information within the hierarchy while preserving semantic coherence. Experiments on challenging instruction-following benchmarks show that STEPS outperforms existing data synthesis baselines, while also yielding improved compositional generalization in downstream agent-based evaluations.
Abstract: Accurate question answering (QA) in disaster management requires reasoning over uncertain and conflicting information, a setting poorly captured by existing benchmarks built on clean evidence. We introduce DisastQA, a large-scale benchmark of 3,000 rigorously verified questions (2,000 multiple-choice and 1,000 open-ended) spanning eight disaster types. The benchmark is constructed via a human-LLM collaboration pipeline with stratified sampling to ensure balanced coverage. Models are evaluated under varying evidence conditions, from closed-book to noisy evidence integration, enabling separation of internal knowledge from reasoning under imperfect information. For open-ended QA, we propose a human-verified keypoint-based evaluation protocol emphasizing factual completeness over verbosity. Experiments with 20 models reveal substantial divergences from general-purpose leaderboards such as MMLU-Pro. While recent open-weight models approach proprietary systems in clean settings, performance degrades sharply under realistic noise, exposing critical reliability gaps for disaster response. All code, data, and evaluation resources are available at https://github.com/TamuChen18/DisastQA_open.
Abstract: How can system-generated responses be efficiently verified, especially in the high-stakes biomedical domain? To address this challenge, we introduce eTracer, a plug-and-play framework that enables traceable text generation by grounding claims against contextual evidence. Through post-hoc grounding, each response claim is aligned with contextual evidence that either supports or contradicts it. Building on claim-level grounding results, eTracer not only enables users to precisely trace responses back to their contextual source but also quantifies response faithfulness, thereby enabling the verifiability and trustworthiness of generated responses. Experiments show that our claim-level grounding approach alleviates the limitations of conventional grounding methods in aligning generated statements with contextual sentence-level evidence, resulting in substantial improvements in overall grounding quality and user verification efficiency. The code and data are available at https://github.com/chubohao/eTracer.
Abstract: Current video generation models produce high-quality aesthetic videos but often struggle to learn representations of real-world physics dynamics, resulting in artifacts such as unnatural object collisions, inconsistent gravity, and temporal flickering. In this work, we propose PhysVideoGenerator, a proof-of-concept framework that explicitly embeds a learnable physics prior into the video generation process. We introduce a lightweight predictor network, PredictorP, which regresses high-level physical features extracted from a pre-trained Video Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (V-JEPA 2) directly from noisy diffusion latents. These predicted physics tokens are injected into the temporal attention layers of a DiT-based generator (Latte) via a dedicated cross-attention mechanism. Our primary contribution is demonstrating the technical feasibility of this joint training paradigm: we show that diffusion latents contain sufficient information to recover V-JEPA 2 physical representations, and that multi-task optimization remains stable over training. This report documents the architectural design, technical challenges, and validation of training stability, establishing a foundation for future large-scale evaluation of physics-aware generative models.
Abstract: Point cloud completion aims to recover complete 3D geometry from partial observations caused by limited viewpoints and occlusions. Existing learning-based works, including 3D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based, point-based, and Transformer-based methods, have achieved strong performance on synthetic benchmarks. However, due to the limitations of modality, scalability, and generative capacity, their generalization to novel objects and real-world scenarios remains challenging. In this paper, we propose MGPC, a generalizable multimodal point cloud completion framework that integrates point clouds, RGB images, and text within a unified architecture. MGPC introduces an innovative modality dropout strategy, a Transformer-based fusion module, and a novel progressive generator to improve robustness, scalability, and geometric modeling capability. We further develop an automatic data generation pipeline and construct MGPC-1M, a large-scale benchmark with over 1,000 categories and one million training pairs. Extensive experiments on MGPC-1M and in-the-wild data demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms prior baselines and exhibits strong generalization under real-world conditions.
Abstract: Maintaining consistent characters, props, and environments across multiple shots is a central challenge in narrative video generation. Existing models can produce high-quality short clips but often fail to preserve entity identity and appearance when scenes change or when entities reappear after long temporal gaps. We present VideoMemory, an entity-centric framework that integrates narrative planning with visual generation through a Dynamic Memory Bank. Given a structured script, a multi-agent system decomposes the narrative into shots, retrieves entity representations from memory, and synthesizes keyframes and videos conditioned on these retrieved states. The Dynamic Memory Bank stores explicit visual and semantic descriptors for characters, props, and backgrounds, and is updated after each shot to reflect story-driven changes while preserving identity. This retrieval-update mechanism enables consistent portrayal of entities across distant shots and supports coherent long-form generation. To evaluate this setting, we construct a 54-case multi-shot consistency benchmark covering character-, prop-, and background-persistent scenarios. Extensive experiments show that VideoMemory achieves strong entity-level coherence and high perceptual quality across diverse narrative sequences.
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents significantly extend the utility of LLMs by interacting with dynamic environments. However, enabling agents to continually learn new tasks without catastrophic forgetting remains a critical challenge, known as the stability-plasticity dilemma. In this work, we argue that this dilemma fundamentally arises from the failure to explicitly distinguish between common knowledge shared across tasks and conflicting knowledge introduced by task-specific interference. To address this, we propose Agent-Dice, a parameter fusion framework based on directional consensus evaluation. Concretely, Agent-Dice disentangles knowledge updates through a two-stage process: geometric consensus filtering to prune conflicting gradients, and curvature-based importance weighting to amplify shared semantics. We provide a rigorous theoretical analysis that establishes the validity of the proposed fusion scheme and offers insight into the origins of the stability-plasticity dilemma. Extensive experiments on GUI agents and tool-use agent domains demonstrate that Agent-Dice exhibits outstanding continual learning performance with minimal computational overhead and parameter updates. The codes are available at https://github.com/Wuzheng02/Agent-Dice.
Abstract: We introduce EPAG, a benchmark dataset and framework designed for Evaluating the Pre-consultation Ability of LLMs using diagnostic Guidelines. LLMs are evaluated directly through HPI-diagnostic guideline comparison and indirectly through disease diagnosis. In our experiments, we observe that small open-source models fine-tuned with a well-curated, task-specific dataset can outperform frontier LLMs in pre-consultation. Additionally, we find that increased amount of HPI (History of Present Illness) does not necessarily lead to improved diagnostic performance. Further experiments reveal that the language of pre-consultation influences the characteristics of the dialogue. By open-sourcing our dataset and evaluation pipeline on https://github.com/seemdog/EPAG, we aim to contribute to the evaluation and further development of LLM applications in real-world clinical settings.
Abstract: Few-shot segmentation (FSS) aims to rapidly learn novel class concepts from limited examples to segment specific targets in unseen images, and has been widely applied in areas such as medical diagnosis and industrial inspection. However, existing studies largely overlook the complex environmental factors encountered in real world scenarios-such as illumination, background, and camera viewpoint-which can substantially increase the difficulty of test images. As a result, models trained under laboratory conditions often fall short of practical deployment requirements. To bridge this gap, in this paper, an environment-robust FSS setting is introduced that explicitly incorporates challenging test cases arising from complex environments-such as motion blur, small objects, and camouflaged targets-to enhance model's robustness under realistic, dynamic conditions. An environment robust FSS benchmark (ER-FSS) is established, covering eight datasets across multiple real world scenarios. In addition, an Adaptive Attention Distillation (AAD) method is proposed, which repeatedly contrasts and distills key shared semantics between known (support) and unknown (query) images to derive class-specific attention for novel categories. This strengthens the model's ability to focus on the correct targets in complex environments, thereby improving environmental robustness. Comparative experiments show that AAD improves mIoU by 3.3% - 8.5% across all datasets and settings, demonstrating superior performance and strong generalization. The source code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/guoqianyu-alberta/Adaptive-Attention-Distillation-for-FSS.
Abstract: Recent advancements in Spatial Intelligence (SI) have predominantly relied on Vision-Language Models (VLMs), yet a critical question remains: does spatial understanding originate from visual encoders or the fundamental reasoning backbone? Inspired by this question, we introduce SiT-Bench, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the SI performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) without pixel-level input, comprises over 3,800 expert-annotated items across five primary categories and 17 subtasks, ranging from egocentric navigation and perspective transformation to fine-grained robotic manipulation. By converting single/multi-view scenes into high-fidelity, coordinate-aware textual descriptions, we challenge LLMs to perform symbolic textual reasoning rather than visual pattern matching. Evaluation results of state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs reveals that while models achieve proficiency in localized semantic tasks, a significant "spatial gap" remains in global consistency. Notably, we find that explicit spatial reasoning significantly boosts performance, suggesting that LLMs possess latent world-modeling potential. Our proposed dataset SiT-Bench serves as a foundational resource to foster the development of spatially-grounded LLM backbones for future VLMs and embodied agents. Our code and benchmark will be released at https://github.com/binisalegend/SiT-Bench .
Abstract: Sign Language Translation (SLT) is a complex cross-modal task requiring the integration of Manual Signals (MS) and Non-Manual Signals (NMS). While recent gloss-free SLT methods have made strides in translating manual gestures, they frequently overlook the semantic criticality of facial expressions, resulting in ambiguity when distinct concepts share identical manual articulations. To address this, we present **EASLT** (**E**motion-**A**ware **S**ign **L**anguage **T**ranslation), a framework that treats facial affect not as auxiliary information, but as a robust semantic anchor. Unlike methods that relegate facial expressions to a secondary role, EASLT incorporates a dedicated emotional encoder to capture continuous affective dynamics. These representations are integrated via a novel *Emotion-Aware Fusion* (EAF) module, which adaptively recalibrates spatio-temporal sign features based on affective context to resolve semantic ambiguities. Extensive evaluations on the PHOENIX14T and CSL-Daily benchmarks demonstrate that EASLT establishes advanced performance among gloss-free methods, achieving BLEU-4 scores of 26.15 and 22.80, and BLEURT scores of 61.0 and 57.8, respectively. Ablation studies confirm that explicitly modeling emotion effectively decouples affective semantics from manual dynamics, significantly enhancing translation fidelity. Code is available at https://github.com/TuGuobin/EASLT.
Abstract: Despite recent advances in understanding and leveraging long-range conversational memory, existing benchmarks still lack systematic evaluation of large language models(LLMs) across diverse memory dimensions, particularly in multi-session settings. In this work, we propose EvolMem, a new benchmark for assessing multi-session memory capabilities of LLMs and agent systems. EvolMem is grounded in cognitive psychology and encompasses both declarative and non-declarative memory, further decomposed into multiple fine-grained abilities. To construct the benchmark, we introduce a hybrid data synthesis framework that consists of topic-initiated generation and narrative-inspired transformations. This framework enables scalable generation of multi-session conversations with controllable complexity, accompanied by sample-specific evaluation guidelines. Extensive evaluation reveals that no LLM consistently outperforms others across all memory dimensions. Moreover, agent memory mechanisms do not necessarily enhance LLMs' capabilities and often exhibit notable efficiency limitations. Data and code will be released at https://github.com/shenye7436/EvolMem.
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) perform well on multi-hop reasoning, yet how they internally compose multiple facts remains unclear. Recent work proposes \emph{hop-aligned circuit hypothesis}, suggesting that bridge entities are computed sequentially across layers before later-hop answers. Through systematic analyses on real-world multi-hop queries, we show that this hop-aligned assumption does not generalize: later-hop answer entities can become decodable earlier than bridge entities, a phenomenon we call \emph{layer-order inversion}, which strengthens with total hops. To explain this behavior, we propose a \emph{probabilistic recall-and-extract} framework that models multi-hop reasoning as broad probabilistic recall in shallow MLP layers followed by selective extraction in deeper attention layers. This framework is empirically validated through systematic probing analyses, reinterpreting prior layer-wise decoding evidence, explaining chain-of-thought gains, and providing a mechanistic diagnosis of multi-hop failures despite correct single-hop knowledge. Code is available at https://github.com/laquabe/Layer-Order-Inversion.
Abstract: Defending against jailbreak attacks is crucial for the safe deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent research has attempted to improve safety by training models to reason over safety rules before responding. However, a key issue lies in determining what form of safety reasoning effectively defends against jailbreak attacks, which is difficult to explicitly design or directly obtain. To address this, we propose \textbf{STAR-S} (\textbf{S}elf-\textbf{TA}ught \textbf{R}easoning based on \textbf{S}afety rules), a framework that integrates the learning of safety rule reasoning into a self-taught loop. The core of STAR-S involves eliciting reasoning and reflection guided by safety rules, then leveraging fine-tuning to enhance safety reasoning. Repeating this process creates a synergistic cycle. Improvements in the model's reasoning and interpretation of safety rules allow it to produce better reasoning data under safety rule prompts, which is then utilized for further training. Experiments show that STAR-S effectively defends against jailbreak attacks, outperforming baselines. Code is available at: https://github.com/pikepokenew/STAR_S.git.
Abstract: Recent years have witnessed success of sequential modeling, generative recommender, and large language model for recommendation. Though the scaling law has been validated for sequential models, it showed inefficiency in computational capacity when considering real-world applications like recommendation, due to the non-linear(quadratic) increasing nature of the transformer model. To improve the efficiency of the sequential model, we introduced a novel approach to sequential recommendation that leverages personalization techniques to enhance efficiency and performance. Our method compresses long user interaction histories into learnable tokens, which are then combined with recent interactions to generate recommendations. This approach significantly reduces computational costs while maintaining high recommendation accuracy. Our method could be applied to existing transformer based recommendation models, e.g., HSTU and HLLM. Extensive experiments on multiple sequential models demonstrate its versatility and effectiveness. Source code is available at \href{https://github.com/facebookresearch/PerSRec}{https://github.com/facebookresearch/PerSRec}.
Abstract: Scalability and data sparsity remain critical bottlenecks for collaborative filtering on massive interaction datasets. This work investigates the latent geometry of user preferences using the MovieLens 32M dataset, implementing a high-performance, parallelized Alternating Least Squares (ALS) framework. Through extensive hyperparameter optimization, we demonstrate that constrained low-rank models significantly outperform higher dimensional counterparts in generalization, achieving an optimal balance between Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and ranking precision. We visualize the learned embedding space to reveal the unsupervised emergence of semantic genre clusters, confirming that the model captures deep structural relationships solely from interaction data. Finally, we validate the system's practical utility in a cold-start scenario, introducing a tunable scoring parameter to manage the trade-off between popularity bias and personalized affinity effectively. The codebase for this research can be found here: https://github.com/joshsalako/recommender.git
Abstract: Verifying system-generated summaries remains challenging, as effective verification requires precise attribution to the source context, which is especially crucial in high-stakes medical domains. To address this challenge, we introduce PCoA, an expert-annotated benchmark for medical aspect-based summarization with phrase-level context attribution. PCoA aligns each aspect-based summary with its supporting contextual sentences and contributory phrases within them. We further propose a fine-grained, decoupled evaluation framework that independently assesses the quality of generated summaries, citations, and contributory phrases. Through extensive experiments, we validate the quality and consistency of the PCoA dataset and benchmark several large language models on the proposed task. Experimental results demonstrate that PCoA provides a reliable benchmark for evaluating system-generated summaries with phrase-level context attribution. Furthermore, comparative experiments show that explicitly identifying relevant sentences and contributory phrases before summarization can improve overall quality. The data and code are available at https://github.com/chubohao/PCoA.
Abstract: Procedural content generation has enabled vast virtual worlds through levels, maps, and quests, but large-scale character generation remains underexplored. We identify two alignment-induced biases in existing methods: a positive moral bias, where characters uniformly adopt agreeable stances (e.g. always saying lying is bad), and a helpful assistant bias, where characters invariably answer questions directly (e.g. never refusing or deflecting). While such tendencies suit instruction-following systems, they suppress dramatic tension and yield predictable characters, stemming from maximum likelihood training and assistant fine-tuning. To address this, we introduce PersonaWeaver, a framework that disentangles world-building (roles, demographics) from behavioral-building (moral stances, interactional styles), yielding characters with more diverse reactions and moral stances, as well as second-order diversity in stylistic markers like length, tone, and punctuation. Code: https://github.com/mqraitem/Persona-Weaver
Abstract: Identifiability is central to the interpretability of deep latent variable models, ensuring parameterisations are uniquely determined by the data-generating distribution. However, it remains underexplored for deep regime-switching time series. We develop a general theoretical framework for multi-lag Regime-Switching Models (RSMs), encompassing Markov Switching Models (MSMs) and Switching Dynamical Systems (SDSs). For MSMs, we formulate the model as a temporally structured finite mixture and prove identifiability of both the number of regimes and the multi-lag transitions in a nonlinear-Gaussian setting. For SDSs, we establish identifiability of the latent variables up to permutation and scaling via temporal structure, which in turn yields conditions for identifiability of regime-dependent latent causal graphs (up to regime/node permutations). Our results hold in a fully unsupervised setting through architectural and noise assumptions that are directly enforceable via neural network design. We complement the theory with a flexible variational estimator that satisfies the assumptions and validate the results on synthetic benchmarks. Across real-world datasets from neuroscience, finance, and climate, identifiability leads to more trustworthy interpretability analysis, which is crucial for scientific discovery.
Abstract: The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices is fundamentally constrained by the "Memory Wall" the bottleneck where data movement latency outstrips arithmetic throughput. Standard inference runtimes often incur significant overhead through high-level abstractions, dynamic dispatch, and unaligned memory access patterns. In this work, we present a novel "Virtual Tensor Core" architecture implemented in software, optimized specifically for ARM64 microarchitectures (Apple Silicon). By bypassing standard library containers in favor of direct memory mapping (mmap) and implementing hand-tuned NEON SIMD kernels, we achieve a form of "Software-Defined Direct Memory Access (DMA)." Our proposed Tensor Virtualization Layout (TVL) guarantees 100% cache line utilization for weight matrices, while our zero-copy loader eliminates initialization latency. Experimental results on a 110M parameter model demonstrate a stable throughput of >60 tokens/second on M2 hardware. While proprietary hardware accelerators (e.g., Apple AMX) can achieve higher peak throughput, our architecture provides a fully open, portable, and deterministic reference implementation for studying the memory bottleneck on general-purpose ARM silicon, meeting the 200ms psycholinguistic latency threshold without opaque dependencies.
Abstract: We report a case study of four end-to-end attempts to autonomously generate ML research papers using a pipeline of six LLM agents mapped to stages of the scientific workflow. Of these four, three attempts failed during implementation or evaluation. One completed the pipeline and was accepted to Agents4Science 2025, an experimental inaugural venue that required AI systems as first authors, passing both human and multi-AI review. From these attempts, we document six recurring failure modes: bias toward training data defaults, implementation drift under execution pressure, memory and context degradation across long-horizon tasks, overexcitement that declares success despite obvious failures, insufficient domain intelligence, and weak scientific taste in experimental design. We conclude by discussing four design principles for more robust AI-scientist systems, implications for autonomous scientific discovery, and we release all prompts, artifacts, and outputs at https://github.com/Lossfunk/ai-scientist-artefacts-v1
Abstract: Large language models remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, and single-layer defenses often trade security for usability. We present TRYLOCK, the first defense-in-depth architecture that combines four heterogeneous mechanisms across the inference stack: weight-level safety alignment via DPO, activation-level control via Representation Engineering (RepE) steering, adaptive steering strength selected by a lightweight sidecar classifier, and input canonicalization to neutralize encoding-based bypasses. On Mistral-7B-Instruct evaluated against a 249-prompt attack set spanning five attack families, TRYLOCK achieves 88.0% relative ASR reduction (46.5% to 5.6%), with each layer contributing unique coverage: RepE blocks 36% of attacks that bypass DPO alone, while canonicalization catches 14% of encoding attacks that evade both. We discover a non-monotonic steering phenomenon -- intermediate strength (alpha=1.0) degrades safety below baseline -- and provide mechanistic hypotheses explaining RepE-DPO interference. The adaptive sidecar reduces over-refusal from 60% to 48% while maintaining identical attack defense, demonstrating that security and usability need not be mutually exclusive. We release all components -- trained adapters, steering vectors, sidecar classifier, preference pairs, and complete evaluation methodology -- enabling full reproducibility.
Abstract: LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed to autonomously solve complex tasks, raising urgent needs for IP protection and regulatory provenance. While content watermarking effectively attributes LLM-generated outputs, it fails to directly identify the high-level planning behaviors (e.g., tool and subgoal choices) that govern multi-step execution. Critically, watermarking at the planning-behavior layer faces unique challenges: minor distributional deviations in decision-making can compound during long-term agent operation, degrading utility, and many agents operate as black boxes that are difficult to intervene in directly. To bridge this gap, we propose AgentMark, a behavioral watermarking framework that embeds multi-bit identifiers into planning decisions while preserving utility. It operates by eliciting an explicit behavior distribution from the agent and applying distribution-preserving conditional sampling, enabling deployment under black-box APIs while remaining compatible with action-layer content watermarking. Experiments across embodied, tool-use, and social environments demonstrate practical multi-bit capacity, robust recovery from partial logs, and utility preservation. The code is available at https://github.com/Tooooa/AgentMark.
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as high level controllers for autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) missions. However, existing evaluations rarely assess whether such agents remain safe, protocol compliant, and effective under realistic next generation networking constraints. This paper introduces $α^3$-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating LLM driven UAV autonomy as a multi turn conversational reasoning and control problem operating under dynamic 6G conditions. Each mission is formulated as a language mediated control loop between an LLM based UAV agent and a human operator, where decisions must satisfy strict schema validity, mission policies, speaker alternation, and safety constraints while adapting to fluctuating network slices, latency, jitter, packet loss, throughput, and edge load variations. To reflect modern agentic workflows, $α^3$-Bench integrates a dual action layer supporting both tool calls and agent to agent coordination, enabling evaluation of tool use consistency and multi agent interactions. We construct a large scale corpus of 113k conversational UAV episodes grounded in UAVBench scenarios and evaluate 17 state of the art LLMs using a fixed subset of 50 episodes per scenario under deterministic decoding. We propose a composite $α^3$ metric that unifies six pillars: Task Outcome, Safety Policy, Tool Consistency, Interaction Quality, Network Robustness, and Communication Cost, with efficiency normalized scores per second and per thousand tokens. Results show that while several models achieve high mission success and safety compliance, robustness and efficiency vary significantly under degraded 6G conditions, highlighting the need for network aware and resource efficient LLM based UAV agents. The dataset is publicly available on GitHub : https://github.com/maferrag/AlphaBench
Abstract: The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has shifted language model evaluation toward reasoning and problem-solving tasks as measures of general intelligence. Small Language Models (SLMs) -- defined here as models under 10B parameters -- typically score 3-4 times lower than LLMs on these metrics. However, we demonstrate that these evaluations fail to capture SLMs' effectiveness in common industrial applications, such as tone modification tasks (e.g., funny, serious, professional). We propose an evaluation framework specifically designed to highlight SLMs' capabilities in non-reasoning tasks where predefined evaluation datasets don't exist. Our framework combines novel approaches in data generation, prompt-tuning, and LLM-based evaluation to demonstrate the potential of task-specific finetuning. This work provides practitioners with tools to effectively benchmark both SLMs and LLMs for practical applications, particularly in edge and private computing scenarios. Our implementation is available at: https://github.com/amazon-science/wraval.
Abstract: We present Muses, the first training-free method for fantastic 3D creature generation in a feed-forward paradigm. Previous methods, which rely on part-aware optimization, manual assembly, or 2D image generation, often produce unrealistic or incoherent 3D assets due to the challenges of intricate part-level manipulation and limited out-of-domain generation. In contrast, Muses leverages the 3D skeleton, a fundamental representation of biological forms, to explicitly and rationally compose diverse elements. This skeletal foundation formalizes 3D content creation as a structure-aware pipeline of design, composition, and generation. Muses begins by constructing a creatively composed 3D skeleton with coherent layout and scale through graph-constrained reasoning. This skeleton then guides a voxel-based assembly process within a structured latent space, integrating regions from different objects. Finally, image-guided appearance modeling under skeletal conditions is applied to generate a style-consistent and harmonious texture for the assembled shape. Extensive experiments establish Muses' state-of-the-art performance in terms of visual fidelity and alignment with textual descriptions, and potential on flexible 3D object editing. Project page: https://luhexiao.github.io/Muses.github.io/.
Abstract: Spatio-temporal reasoning in time series involves the explicit synthesis of temporal dynamics, spatial dependencies, and textual context. This capability is vital for high-stakes decision-making in systems such as traffic networks, power grids, and disease propagation. However, the field remains underdeveloped because most existing works prioritize predictive accuracy over reasoning. To address the gap, we introduce ST-Bench, a benchmark consisting of four core tasks, including etiological reasoning, entity identification, correlation reasoning, and in-context forecasting, developed via a network SDE-based multi-agent data synthesis pipeline. We then propose STReasoner, which empowers LLM to integrate time series, graph structure, and text for explicit reasoning. To promote spatially grounded logic, we introduce S-GRPO, a reinforcement learning algorithm that rewards performance gains specifically attributable to spatial information. Experiments show that STReasoner achieves average accuracy gains between 17% and 135% at only 0.004X the cost of proprietary models and generalizes robustly to real-world data.
Abstract: LLM agents can reason and use tools, but they often break down on long-horizon tasks due to unbounded context growth and accumulated errors. Common remedies such as context compression or retrieval-augmented prompting introduce trade-offs between information fidelity and reasoning stability. We present InfiAgent, a general-purpose framework that keeps the agent's reasoning context strictly bounded regardless of task duration by externalizing persistent state into a file-centric state abstraction. At each step, the agent reconstructs context from a workspace state snapshot plus a fixed window of recent actions. Experiments on DeepResearch and an 80-paper literature review task show that, without task-specific fine-tuning, InfiAgent with a 20B open-source model is competitive with larger proprietary systems and maintains substantially higher long-horizon coverage than context-centric baselines. These results support explicit state externalization as a practical foundation for stable long-horizon agents. Github Repo:https://github.com/ChenglinPoly/infiAgent
Abstract: Hate speech detection on social media faces challenges in both accuracy and explainability, especially for underexplored Indic languages. We propose a novel explainability-guided training framework, X-MuTeST (eXplainable Multilingual haTe Speech deTection), for hate speech detection that combines high-level semantic reasoning from large language models (LLMs) with traditional attention-enhancing techniques. We extend this research to Hindi and Telugu alongside English by providing benchmark human-annotated rationales for each word to justify the assigned class label. The X-MuTeST explainability method computes the difference between the prediction probabilities of the original text and those of unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams. Final explanations are computed as the union between LLM explanations and X-MuTeST explanations. We show that leveraging human rationales during training enhances both classification performance and explainability. Moreover, combining human rationales with our explainability method to refine the model attention yields further improvements. We evaluate explainability using Plausibility metrics such as Token-F1 and IOU-F1 and Faithfulness metrics such as Comprehensiveness and Sufficiency. By focusing on under-resourced languages, our work advances hate speech detection across diverse linguistic contexts. Our dataset includes token-level rationale annotations for 6,004 Hindi, 4,492 Telugu, and 6,334 English samples. Data and code are available on https://github.com/ziarehman30/X-MuTeST
Abstract: Multimodal medical large language models have shown impressive progress in chest X-ray interpretation but continue to face challenges in spatial reasoning and anatomical understanding. Although existing grounding techniques improve overall performance, they often fail to establish a true anatomical correspondence, resulting in incorrect anatomical understanding in the medical domain. To address this gap, we introduce AnatomiX, a multitask multimodal large language model explicitly designed for anatomically grounded chest X-ray interpretation. Inspired by the radiological workflow, AnatomiX adopts a two stage approach: first, it identifies anatomical structures and extracts their features, and then leverages a large language model to perform diverse downstream tasks such as phrase grounding, report generation, visual question answering, and image understanding. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that AnatomiX achieves superior anatomical reasoning and delivers over 25% improvement in performance on anatomy grounding, phrase grounding, grounded diagnosis and grounded captioning tasks compared to existing approaches. Code and pretrained model are available at https://github.com/aneesurhashmi/anatomix
Abstract: While controllable Text-to-Speech (TTS) has achieved notable progress, most existing methods remain limited to inter-utterance-level control, making fine-grained intra-utterance expression challenging due to their reliance on non-public datasets or complex multi-stage training. In this paper, we propose a training-free controllable framework for pretrained zero-shot TTS to enable intra-utterance emotion and duration expression. Specifically, we propose a segment-aware emotion conditioning strategy that combines causal masking with monotonic stream alignment filtering to isolate emotion conditioning and schedule mask transitions, enabling smooth intra-utterance emotion shifts while preserving global semantic coherence. Based on this, we further propose a segment-aware duration steering strategy to combine local duration embedding steering with global EOS logit modulation, allowing local duration adjustment while ensuring globally consistent termination. To eliminate the need for segment-level manual prompt engineering, we construct a 30,000-sample multi-emotion and duration-annotated text dataset to enable LLM-based automatic prompt construction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our training-free method not only achieves state-of-the-art intra-utterance consistency in multi-emotion and duration control, but also maintains baseline-level speech quality of the underlying TTS model. Audio samples are available at https://aclanonymous111.github.io/TED-TTS-DemoPage/.
Abstract: Precise and scalable instance segmentation of cell nuclei is essential for computational pathology, yet gigapixel Whole-Slide Images pose major computational challenges. Existing approaches rely on patch-based processing and costly post-processing for instance separation, sacrificing context and efficiency. We introduce LSP-DETR (Local Star Polygon DEtection TRansformer), a fully end-to-end framework that uses a lightweight transformer with linear complexity to process substantially larger images without additional computational cost. Nuclei are represented as star-convex polygons, and a novel radial distance loss function allows the segmentation of overlapping nuclei to emerge naturally, without requiring explicit overlap annotations or handcrafted post-processing. Evaluations on PanNuke and MoNuSeg show strong generalization across tissues and state-of-the-art efficiency, with LSP-DETR being over five times faster than the next-fastest leading method. Code and models are available at https://github.com/RationAI/lsp-detr.
Abstract: Despite rapid advances in large language models (LLMs), achieving reliable performance on highly professional and structured examinations remains a significant challenge. The Japanese bar examination is a particularly demanding benchmark, requiring not only advanced legal reasoning but also strict adherence to complex answer formats that involve joint evaluation of multiple propositions. While recent studies have reported improvements by decomposing such questions into simpler true--false judgments, these approaches have not been systematically evaluated under the original exam format and scoring scheme, leaving open the question of whether they truly capture exam-level competence. In this paper, we present a self-verification model trained on a newly constructed dataset that faithfully replicates the authentic format and evaluation scale of the exam. Our model is able to exceed the official passing score when evaluated on the actual exam scale, marking the first demonstration, to our knowledge, of an LLM passing the Japanese bar examination without altering its original question structure or scoring rules. We further conduct extensive comparisons with alternative strategies, including multi-agent inference and decomposition-based supervision, and find that these methods fail to achieve comparable performance. Our results highlight the importance of format-faithful supervision and consistency verification, and suggest that carefully designed single-model approaches can outperform more complex systems in high-stakes professional reasoning tasks. Our dataset and codes are publicly available.
Abstract: Population-scale agent-based simulations of the opioid epidemic help evaluate intervention strategies and overdose outcomes in heterogeneous communities and provide estimates of localized treatment effects, which support the design of locally-tailored policies for precision public health. However, it is prohibitively costly to run simulations of all treatment conditions in all communities because the number of possible treatments grows exponentially with the number of interventions and levels at which they are applied. To address this need efficiently, we develop a metamodel framework, whereby treatment outcomes are modeled using a response function whose coefficients are learned through Gaussian process regression (GPR) on locally-contextualized covariates. We apply this framework to efficiently estimate treatment effects on overdose deaths in Pennsylvania counties. In contrast to classical designs such as fractional factorial design or Latin hypercube sampling, our approach leverages spatial correlations and posterior uncertainty to sequentially sample the most informative counties and treatment conditions. Using a calibrated agent-based opioid epidemic model, informed by county-level overdose mortality and baseline dispensing rate data for different treatments, we obtained county-level estimates of treatment effects on overdose deaths per 100,000 population for all treatment conditions in Pennsylvania, achieving approximately 5% average relative error using one-tenth the number of simulation runs required for exhaustive evaluation. Our bi-level framework provides a computationally efficient approach to decision support for policy makers, enabling rapid evaluation of alternative resource-allocation strategies to mitigate the opioid epidemic in local communities. The same analytical framework can be applied to guide precision public health interventions in other epidemic settings.
Abstract: Modern large language models (LLMs) drive interactive AI systems but are bottlenecked by the memory-heavy growth of key-value (KV) caches, which limits real-time throughput under concurrent loads. Existing KV-cache compression methods rely on rigid heuristics, disrupt tensor layouts, or require specialized compute, hindering scalability and deployment. We propose joint encoding of KV-cache blocks, which fuses similar blocks across requests and input chunks into shared representations while preserving standard cache structure. This alleviates the KV-cache memory bottleneck, supporting high-concurrency serving without specialized hardware. Theoretically, we analyze the rate-distortion tradeoff of fused cache blocks under a Poisson process model. Empirically, our method achieves up to 4.38 $\times$ KV-cache compression with negligible accuracy loss across diverse LLMs and benchmarks, outperforming recent structured and adaptive compression baselines. In real LLM serving, joint encoding improves the token throughput by $\sim$40\% on a single-machine vLLM benchmark, demonstrating substantial gains in inference throughput. Code is available at https://github.com/sef1/kv_fast_fusion kv_joint_encoding.
Abstract: Hallucinations can be produced by conversational AI systems, particularly in multi-turn conversations where context changes and contradictions may eventually surface. By representing the entire conversation as a temporal graph, we present a novel graph-based method for detecting dialogue-level hallucinations. Our framework models each dialogue as a node, encoding it using a sentence transformer. We explore two different ways of connectivity: i) shared-entity edges, which connect turns that refer to the same entities; ii) temporal edges, which connect contiguous turns in the conversation. Message-passing is used to update the node embeddings, allowing flow of information between related nodes. The context-aware node embeddings are then combined using attention pooling into a single vector, which is then passed on to a classifier to determine the presence and type of hallucinations. We demonstrate that our method offers slightly improved performance over existing methods. Further, we show the attention mechanism can be used to justify the decision making process. The code and model weights are made available at: https://github.com/sambuaneesh/anlp-project.
Abstract: Vision-based robotic policies often struggle with even minor viewpoint changes, underscoring the need for view-invariant visual representations. This challenge becomes more pronounced in real-world settings, where viewpoint variability is unavoidable and can significantly disrupt policy performance. Existing methods typically learn invariance from multi-view observations at the scene level, but such approaches rely on visual appearance and fail to incorporate the physical dynamics essential for robust generalization. We propose View-Invariant Latent Action (VILA), which models a latent action capturing transition patterns across trajectories to learn view-invariant representations grounded in physical dynamics. VILA aligns these latent actions across viewpoints using an action-guided objective based on ground-truth action sequences. Experiments in both simulation and the real world show that VILA-based policies generalize effectively to unseen viewpoints and transfer well to new tasks, establishing VILA as a strong pretraining framework that improves robustness and downstream learning performance.
Abstract: Image Quality Assessment (IQA) is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Previous methods typically focus on predicting numerical scores without explanation or providing low-level descriptions lacking precise scores. Recent reasoning-based vision language models (VLMs) have shown strong potential for IQA by jointly generating quality descriptions and scores. However, existing VLM-based IQA methods often suffer from unreliable reasoning due to their limited capability of integrating visual and textual cues. In this work, we introduce Zoom-IQA, a VLM-based IQA model to explicitly emulate key cognitive behaviors: uncertainty awareness, region reasoning, and iterative refinement. Specifically, we present a two-stage training pipeline: 1) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on our Grounded-Rationale-IQA (GR-IQA) dataset to teach the model to ground its assessments in key regions, and 2) reinforcement learning (RL) for dynamic policy exploration, stabilized by our KL-Coverage regularizer to prevent reasoning and scoring diversity collapse, with a Progressive Re-sampling Strategy for mitigating annotation bias. Extensive experiments show that Zoom-IQA achieves improved robustness, explainability, and generalization. The application to downstream tasks, such as image restoration, further demonstrates the effectiveness of Zoom-IQA.
Abstract: Tracking objects that move within dynamic environments is a core challenge in robotics. Recent research has advanced this topic significantly; however, many existing approaches remain inefficient due to their reliance on heavy foundation models. To address this limitation, we propose LOST-3DSG, a lightweight open-vocabulary 3D scene graph designed to track dynamic objects in real-world environments. Our method adopts a semantic approach to entity tracking based on word2vec and sentence embeddings, enabling an open-vocabulary representation while avoiding the necessity of storing dense CLIP visual features. As a result, LOST-3DSG achieves superior performance compared to approaches that rely on high-dimensional visual embeddings. We evaluate our method through qualitative and quantitative experiments conducted in a real 3D environment using a TIAGo robot. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of LOST-3DSG in dynamic object tracking. Code and supplementary material are publicly available on the project website at https://lab-rococo-sapienza.github.io/lost-3dsg/.
Abstract: Symbolic logical reasoning is a critical yet underexplored capability of large language models (LLMs), providing reliable and verifiable decision-making in high-stakes domains such as mathematical reasoning and legal judgment. In this study, we present a systematic analysis of logical reasoning under controlled increases in logical complexity, and reveal a previously unrecognized phenomenon, which we term Logical Phase Transitions: rather than degrading smoothly, logical reasoning performance remains stable within a regime but collapses abruptly beyond a critical logical depth, mirroring physical phase transitions such as water freezing beyond a critical temperature threshold. Building on this insight, we propose Neuro-Symbolic Curriculum Tuning, a principled framework that adaptively aligns natural language with logical symbols to establish a shared representation, and reshapes training dynamics around phase-transition boundaries to progressively strengthen reasoning at increasing logical depths. Experiments on five benchmarks show that our approach effectively mitigates logical reasoning collapse at high complexity, yielding average accuracy gains of +1.26 in naive prompting and +3.95 in CoT, while improving generalization to unseen logical compositions. Code and data are available at https://github.com/AI4SS/Logical-Phase-Transitions.
Abstract: The first XACLE Challenge (x-to-audio alignment challenge) addresses the critical need for automatic evaluation metrics that correlate with human perception of audio-text semantic alignment. In this paper, we describe the "Takano_UTokyo_03" system submitted to XACLE Challenge. Our approach leverages a CLAPScore-based architecture integrated with a novel training method called Standardized Preference Optimization (SPO). SPO standardizes the raw alignment scores provided by each listener, enabling the model to learn relative preferences and mitigate the impact of individual scoring biases. Additionally, we employ listener screening to exclude listeners with inconsistent ratings. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that both SPO and listener screening effectively improve the correlation with human judgment. Our system achieved 6th place in the challenge with a Spearman's rank correlation coefficient (SRCC) of 0.6142, demonstrating competitive performance within a marginal gap from the top-ranked systems. The code is available at https://github.com/ttakano398/SPO-CLAPScore.
Abstract: Acting in cluttered environments requires predicting and avoiding collisions while still achieving precise control. Conventional optimization-based controllers can enforce physical constraints, but they struggle to produce feasible solutions quickly when many obstacles are present. Diffusion models can generate diverse trajectories around obstacles, yet prior approaches lacked a general and efficient way to condition them on scene structure. In this paper, we show that combining diffusion-based warm-starting conditioned with a latent object-centric representation of the scene and with a collision-aware model predictive controller (MPC) yields reliable and efficient motion generation under strict time limits. Our approach conditions a diffusion transformer on the system state, task, and surroundings, using an object-centric slot attention mechanism to provide a compact obstacle representation suitable for control. The sampled trajectories are refined by an optimal control problem that enforces rigid-body dynamics and signed-distance collision constraints, producing feasible motions in real time. On benchmark tasks, this hybrid method achieved markedly higher success rates and lower latency than sampling-based planners or either component alone. Real-robot experiments with a torque-controlled Panda confirm reliable and safe execution with MPC.
Abstract: As an agent-level reasoning and coordination paradigm, Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) orchestrates multiple agents through structured debate to improve answer quality and support complex reasoning. However, existing research on MAD suffers from two fundamental limitations: evaluations are conducted under fragmented and inconsistent settings, hindering fair comparison, and are largely restricted to single-modality scenarios that rely on textual inputs only. To address these gaps, we introduce M3MAD-Bench, a unified and extensible benchmark for evaluating MAD methods across Multi-domain tasks, Multi-modal inputs, and Multi-dimensional metrics. M3MAD-Bench establishes standardized protocols over five core task domains: Knowledge, Mathematics, Medicine, Natural Sciences, and Complex Reasoning, and systematically covers both pure text and vision-language datasets, enabling controlled cross-modality comparison. We evaluate MAD methods on nine base models spanning different architectures, scales, and modality capabilities. Beyond accuracy, M3MAD-Bench incorporates efficiency-oriented metrics such as token consumption and inference time, providing a holistic view of performance--cost trade-offs. Extensive experiments yield systematic insights into the effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency of MAD across text-only and multimodal scenarios. We believe M3MAD-Bench offers a reliable foundation for future research on standardized MAD evaluation. The code is available at http://github.com/liaolea/M3MAD-Bench.
Abstract: Video stylization, an important downstream task of video generation models, has not yet been thoroughly explored. Its input style conditions typically include text, style image, and stylized first frame. Each condition has a characteristic advantage: text is more flexible, style image provides a more accurate visual anchor, and stylized first frame makes long-video stylization feasible. However, existing methods are largely confined to a single type of style condition, which limits their scope of application. Additionally, their lack of high-quality datasets leads to style inconsistency and temporal flicker. To address these limitations, we introduce DreamStyle, a unified framework for video stylization, supporting (1) text-guided, (2) style-image-guided, and (3) first-frame-guided video stylization, accompanied by a well-designed data curation pipeline to acquire high-quality paired video data. DreamStyle is built on a vanilla Image-to-Video (I2V) model and trained using a Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) with token-specific up matrices that reduces the confusion among different condition tokens. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that DreamStyle is competent in all three video stylization tasks, and outperforms the competitors in style consistency and video quality.
Abstract: Neural Audio Codecs (NACs) can reduce transmission overhead by performing compact compression and reconstruction, which also aim to bridge the gap between continuous and discrete signals. Existing NACs can be divided into two categories: multi-codebook and single-codebook codecs. Multi-codebook codecs face challenges such as structural complexity and difficulty in adapting to downstream tasks, while single-codebook codecs, though structurally simpler, suffer from low-fidelity, ineffective modeling of unified audio, and an inability to support modeling of high-frequency audio. We propose the UniSRCodec, a single-codebook codec capable of supporting high sampling rate, low-bandwidth, high fidelity, and unified. We analyze the inefficiency of waveform-based compression and introduce the time and frequency compression method using the Mel-spectrogram, and cooperate with a Vocoder to recover the phase information of the original audio. Moreover, we propose a sub-band reconstruction technique to achieve high-quality compression across both low and high frequency bands. Subjective and objective experimental results demonstrate that UniSRCodec achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among cross-domain single-codebook codecs with only a token rate of 40, and its reconstruction quality is comparable to that of certain multi-codebook methods. Our demo page is available at https://wxzyd123.github.io/unisrcodec.
Abstract: Visual abductive reasoning (VAR) is a challenging task that requires AI systems to infer the most likely explanation for incomplete visual observations. While recent MLLMs develop strong general-purpose multimodal reasoning capabilities, they fall short in abductive inference, as compared to human beings. To bridge this gap, we draw inspiration from the interplay between verbal and pictorial abduction in human cognition, and propose to strengthen abduction of MLLMs by mimicking such dual-mode behavior. Concretely, we introduce AbductiveMLLM comprising of two synergistic components: REASONER and IMAGINER. The REASONER operates in the verbal domain. It first explores a broad space of possible explanations using a blind LLM and then prunes visually incongruent hypotheses based on cross-modal causal alignment. The remaining hypotheses are introduced into the MLLM as targeted priors, steering its reasoning toward causally coherent explanations. The IMAGINER, on the other hand, further guides MLLMs by emulating human-like pictorial thinking. It conditions a text-to-image diffusion model on both the input video and the REASONER's output embeddings to "imagine" plausible visual scenes that correspond to verbal explanation, thereby enriching MLLMs' contextual grounding. The two components are trained jointly in an end-to-end manner. Experiments on standard VAR benchmarks show that AbductiveMLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance, consistently outperforming traditional solutions and advanced MLLMs.
Abstract: All-in-One Image Restoration (AiOIR) has advanced significantly, offering promising solutions for complex real-world degradations. However, most existing approaches rely heavily on degradation-specific representations, often resulting in oversmoothing and artifacts. To address this, we propose ClearAIR, a novel AiOIR framework inspired by Human Visual Perception (HVP) and designed with a hierarchical, coarse-to-fine restoration strategy. First, leveraging the global priority of early HVP, we employ a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based Image Quality Assessment (IQA) model for overall evaluation. Unlike conventional IQA, our method integrates cross-modal understanding to more accurately characterize complex, composite degradations. Building upon this overall assessment, we then introduce a region awareness and task recognition pipeline. A semantic cross-attention, leveraging semantic guidance unit, first produces coarse semantic prompts. Guided by this regional context, a degradation-aware module implicitly captures region-specific degradation characteristics, enabling more precise local restoration. Finally, to recover fine details, we propose an internal clue reuse mechanism. It operates in a self-supervised manner to mine and leverage the intrinsic information of the image itself, substantially enhancing detail restoration. Experimental results show that ClearAIR achieves superior performance across diverse synthetic and real-world datasets.
Abstract: Monocular depth estimation aims to recover the depth information of 3D scenes from 2D images. Recent work has made significant progress, but its reliance on large-scale datasets and complex decoders has limited its efficiency and generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and data-centric framework for zero-shot monocular depth estimation. We first adopt DINOv3 as the visual encoder to obtain high-quality dense features. Secondly, to address the inherent drawbacks of the complex structure of the DPT, we design the Simple Depth Transformer (SDT), a compact transformer-based decoder. Compared to the DPT, it uses a single-path feature fusion and upsampling process to reduce the computational overhead of cross-scale feature fusion, achieving higher accuracy while reducing the number of parameters by approximately 85%-89%. Furthermore, we propose a quality-based filtering strategy to filter out harmful samples, thereby reducing dataset size while improving overall training quality. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that our framework surpasses the DPT in accuracy. This work highlights the importance of balancing model design and data quality for achieving efficient and generalizable zero-shot depth estimation. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/AnyDepth. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/AnyDepth.
Abstract: Some deep learning-based point cloud registration methods struggle with zero-shot generalization, often requiring dataset-specific hyperparameter tuning or retraining for new environments. We identify three critical limitations: (a) fixed user-defined parameters (e.g., voxel size, search radius) that fail to generalize across varying scales, (b) learned keypoint detectors exhibit poor cross-domain transferability, and (c) absolute coordinates amplify scale mismatches between datasets. To address these three issues, we present BUFFER-X, a training-free registration framework that achieves zero-shot generalization through: (a) geometric bootstrapping for automatic hyperparameter estimation, (b) distribution-aware farthest point sampling to replace learned detectors, and (c) patch-level coordinate normalization to ensure scale consistency. Our approach employs hierarchical multi-scale matching to extract correspondences across local, middle, and global receptive fields, enabling robust registration in diverse environments. For efficiency-critical applications, we introduce BUFFER-X-Lite, which reduces total computation time by 43% (relative to BUFFER-X) through early exit strategies and fast pose solvers while preserving accuracy. We evaluate on a comprehensive benchmark comprising 12 datasets spanning object-scale, indoor, and outdoor scenes, including cross-sensor registration between heterogeneous LiDAR configurations. Results demonstrate that our approach generalizes effectively without manual tuning or prior knowledge of test domains. Code: https://github.com/MIT-SPARK/BUFFER-X.
Abstract: Most membership inference attacks (MIAs) against Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on global signals, like average loss, to identify training data. This approach, however, dilutes the subtle, localized signals of memorization, reducing attack effectiveness. We challenge this global-averaging paradigm, positing that membership signals are more pronounced within localized contexts. We introduce WBC (Window-Based Comparison), which exploits this insight through a sliding window approach with sign-based aggregation. Our method slides windows of varying sizes across text sequences, with each window casting a binary vote on membership based on loss comparisons between target and reference models. By ensembling votes across geometrically spaced window sizes, we capture memorization patterns from token-level artifacts to phrase-level structures. Extensive experiments across eleven datasets demonstrate that WBC substantially outperforms established baselines, achieving higher AUC scores and 2-3 times improvements in detection rates at low false positive thresholds. Our findings reveal that aggregating localized evidence is fundamentally more effective than global averaging, exposing critical privacy vulnerabilities in fine-tuned LLMs.
Abstract: Early detection of fake news is critical for mitigating its rapid dissemination on social media, which can severely undermine public trust and social stability. Recent advancements show that incorporating propagation dynamics can significantly enhance detection performance compared to previous content-only approaches. However, this remains challenging at early stages due to the absence of observable propagation signals. To address this limitation, we propose AVOID, an \underline{a}gent-driven \underline{v}irtual pr\underline{o}pagat\underline{i}on for early fake news \underline{d}etection. AVOID reformulates early detection as a new paradigm of evidence generation, where propagation signals are actively simulated rather than passively observed. Leveraging LLM-powered agents with differentiated roles and data-driven personas, AVOID realistically constructs early-stage diffusion behaviors without requiring real propagation data. The resulting virtual trajectories provide complementary social evidence that enriches content-based detection, while a denoising-guided fusion strategy aligns simulated propagation with content semantics. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that AVOID consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting the effectiveness and practical value of virtual propagation augmentation for early fake news detection. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Ironychen/AVOID.
Abstract: While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in tasks such as abnormality detection and report generation for anatomical modalities, their capability in functional imaging remains largely unexplored. In this work, we identify and quantify a fundamental functional perception gap: the inability of current vision encoders to decode functional tracer biodistribution independent of morphological priors. Identifying Positron Emission Tomography (PET) as the quintessential modality to investigate this disconnect, we introduce PET-Bench, the first large-scale functional imaging benchmark comprising 52,308 hierarchical QA pairs from 9,732 multi-site, multi-tracer PET studies. Extensive evaluation of 19 state-of-the-art MLLMs reveals a critical safety hazard termed the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) hallucination trap. We observe that standard CoT prompting, widely considered to enhance reasoning, paradoxically decouples linguistic generation from visual evidence in PET, producing clinically fluent but factually ungrounded diagnoses. To resolve this, we propose Atomic Visual Alignment (AVA), a simple fine-tuning strategy that enforces the mastery of low-level functional perception prior to high-level diagnostic reasoning. Our results demonstrate that AVA effectively bridges the perception gap, transforming CoT from a source of hallucination into a robust inference tool and improving diagnostic accuracy by up to 14.83%. Code and data are available at https://github.com/yezanting/PET-Bench.
Abstract: Training a unified model integrating video-to-audio (V2A), text-to-audio (T2A), and joint video-text-to-audio (VT2A) generation offers significant application flexibility, yet faces two unexplored foundational challenges: (1) the scarcity of high-quality audio captions with tight A-V-T alignment, leading to severe semantic conflict between multimodal conditions, and (2) cross-task and intra-task competition, manifesting as an adverse V2A-T2A performance trade-off and modality bias in the VT2A task. First, to address data scarcity, we introduce SoundAtlas, a large-scale dataset (470k pairs) that significantly outperforms existing benchmarks and even human experts in quality. Powered by a novel agentic pipeline, it integrates Vision-to-Language Compression to mitigate visual bias of MLLMs, a Junior-Senior Agent Handoff for a 5 times cost reduction, and rigorous Post-hoc Filtering to ensure fidelity. Consequently, SoundAtlas delivers semantically rich and temporally detailed captions with tight V-A-T alignment. Second, we propose Omni2Sound, a unified VT2A diffusion model supporting flexible input modalities. To resolve the inherent cross-task and intra-task competition, we design a three-stage multi-task progressive training schedule that converts cross-task competition into joint optimization and mitigates modality bias in the VT2A task, maintaining both audio-visual alignment and off-screen audio generation faithfulness. Finally, we construct VGGSound-Omni, a comprehensive benchmark for unified evaluation, including challenging off-screen tracks. With a standard DiT backbone, Omni2Sound achieves unified SOTA performance across all three tasks within a single model, demonstrating strong generalization across benchmarks with heterogeneous input conditions. The project page is at https://swapforward.github.io/Omni2Sound.
Abstract: Various 6-degree-of-freedom (DOF) and 7-DOF manipulators have been developed to date. Over a long history, their joint configurations and link length ratios have been determined empirically. In recent years, the development of robotic foundation models has become increasingly active, leading to the continuous proposal of various manipulators to support these models. However, none of these manipulators share exactly the same structure, as the order of joints and the ratio of link lengths differ among robots. Therefore, in order to discuss the optimal structure of a manipulator, we performed multi-objective optimization from the perspectives of end-effector reachability and joint torque. We analyze where existing manipulator structures stand within the sampling results of the optimization and provide insights for future manipulator design.
Abstract: Cinemagraphs, which combine static photographs with selective, looping motion, offer unique artistic appeal. Generating them from a single photograph in a controllable manner is particularly challenging. Existing image-animation techniques are restricted to simple, low-frequency motions and operate only in narrow domains with repetitive textures like water and smoke. In contrast, large-scale video diffusion models are not tailored for cinemagraph constraints and lack the specialized data required to generate seamless, controlled loops. We present DreamLoop, a controllable video synthesis framework dedicated to generating cinemagraphs from a single photo without requiring any cinemagraph training data. Our key idea is to adapt a general video diffusion model by training it on two objectives: temporal bridging and motion conditioning. This strategy enables flexible cinemagraph generation. During inference, by using the input image as both the first- and last- frame condition, we enforce a seamless loop. By conditioning on static tracks, we maintain a static background. Finally, by providing a user-specified motion path for a target object, our method provides intuitive control over the animation's trajectory and timing. To our knowledge, DreamLoop is the first method to enable cinemagraph generation for general scenes with flexible and intuitive controls. We demonstrate that our method produces high-quality, complex cinemagraphs that align with user intent, outperforming existing approaches.
Abstract: Large language model fine-tuning is bottlenecked by memory: a 7B parameter model requires 84GB--14GB for weights, 14GB for gradients, and 56GB for FP32 optimizer states--exceeding even A100-40GB capacity. We present Chronicals, an open-source training framework achieving 3.51x speedup over Unsloth through four synergistic optimizations: (1) fused Triton kernels eliminating 75% of memory traffic via RMSNorm (7x), SwiGLU (5x), and QK-RoPE (2.3x) fusion; (2) Cut Cross-Entropy reducing logit memory from 5GB to 135MB through online softmax computation; (3) LoRA+ with theoretically-derived 16x differential learning rates between adapter matrices; and (4) Best-Fit Decreasing sequence packing recovering 60-75% of compute wasted on padding. On Qwen2.5-0.5B with A100-40GB, Chronicals achieves 41,184 tokens/second for full fine-tuning versus Unsloth's 11,736 tokens/second (3.51x). For LoRA at rank 32, we reach 11,699 tokens/second versus Unsloth MAX's 2,857 tokens/second (4.10x). Critically, we discovered that Unsloth's reported 46,000 tokens/second benchmark exhibited zero gradient norms--the model was not training. We provide complete mathematical foundations: online softmax correctness proofs, FlashAttention IO complexity bounds O(N^2 d^2 M^{-1}), LoRA+ learning rate derivations from gradient magnitude analysis, and bin-packing approximation guarantees. All implementations, benchmarks, and proofs are available at https://github.com/Ajwebdevs/Chronicals with pip installation via https://pypi.org/project/chronicals/.
Abstract: Solving inverse problems in imaging requires models that support efficient inference, uncertainty quantification, and principled probabilistic reasoning. Energy-Based Models (EBMs), with their interpretable energy landscapes and compositional structure, are well-suited for this task but have historically suffered from high computational costs and training instability. To overcome the historical shortcomings of EBMs, we introduce a fast distillation strategy to transfer the strengths of pre-trained diffusion models into multi-scale EBMs. These distilled EBMs enable efficient sampling and preserve the interpretability and compositionality inherent to potential-based frameworks. Leveraging EBM compositionality, we propose Annealed Langevin Posterior Sampling (ALPS) algorithm for Maximum-A-Posteriori (MAP), Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE), and uncertainty estimates for inverse problems in imaging. Unlike diffusion models that use complex guidance strategies for latent variables, we perform annealing on static posterior distributions that are well-defined and composable. Experiments on image inpainting and MRI reconstruction demonstrate that our method matches or surpasses diffusion-based baselines in both accuracy and efficiency, while also supporting MAP recovery. Overall, our framework offers a scalable and principled solution for inverse problems in imaging, with potential for practical deployment in scientific and clinical settings. ALPS code is available at the GitHub repository \href{https://github.com/JyoChand/ALPS}{ALPS}.
Abstract: Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) are bottlenecked by sequential decoding, where each new token typically requires executing all transformer layers. Existing dynamic-depth and layer-skipping methods reduce this cost, but often rely on auxiliary routing mechanisms or incur accuracy degradation when bypassed layers are left uncompensated. We present \textbf{LoRA-Drop}, a plug-and-play inference framework that accelerates decoding by applying a \emph{temporal compute schedule} to a fixed subset of intermediate layers: on most decoding steps, selected layers reuse the previous-token hidden state and apply a low-rank LoRA correction, while periodic \emph{refresh} steps execute the full model to prevent drift. LoRA-Drop requires no routing network, is compatible with standard KV caching, and can reduce KV-cache footprint by skipping KV updates in droppable layers during LoRA steps and refreshing periodically. Across \textbf{LLaMA2-7B}, \textbf{LLaMA3-8B}, \textbf{Qwen2.5-7B}, and \textbf{Qwen2.5-14B}, LoRA-Drop achieves up to \textbf{2.6$\times$ faster decoding} and \textbf{45--55\% KV-cache reduction} while staying within \textbf{0.5 percentage points (pp)} of baseline accuracy. Evaluations on reasoning (GSM8K, MATH, BBH), code generation (HumanEval, MBPP), and long-context/multilingual benchmarks (LongBench, XNLI, XCOPA) identify a consistent \emph{safe zone} of scheduling configurations that preserves quality while delivering substantial efficiency gains, providing a simple path toward adaptive-capacity inference in LLMs. Codes are available at https://github.com/hosseinbv/LoRA-Drop.git.
Abstract: To support long-term interaction in complex environments, LLM agents require memory systems that manage historical experiences. Existing approaches either retain full interaction histories via passive context extension, leading to substantial redundancy, or rely on iterative reasoning to filter noise, incurring high token costs. To address this challenge, we introduce SimpleMem, an efficient memory framework based on semantic lossless compression. We propose a three-stage pipeline designed to maximize information density and token utilization: (1) Semantic Structured Compression, which distills unstructured interactions into compact, multi-view indexed memory units; (2) Online Semantic Synthesis, an intra-session process that instantly integrates related context into unified abstract representations to eliminate redundancy; and (3) Intent-Aware Retrieval Planning, which infers search intent to dynamically determine retrieval scope and construct precise context efficiently. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method consistently outperforms baseline approaches in accuracy, retrieval efficiency, and inference cost, achieving an average F1 improvement of 26.4% in LoCoMo while reducing inference-time token consumption by up to 30-fold, demonstrating a superior balance between performance and efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/SimpleMem.
Abstract: Selecting a single high-quality output from multiple stochastic generations remains a fundamental challenge for large language models (LLMs), particularly in open-ended tasks where no canonical answer exists. While Best-of-N and self-consistency methods show that aggregating multiple generations can improve performance, existing approaches typically rely on external evaluators, reward models, or exact string-match voting, limiting their applicability and efficiency. We propose Mode Extraction (ModeX), an evaluator-free Best-of-N selection framework that generalizes majority voting to open-ended text generation by identifying the modal output representing the dominant semantic consensus among generated texts. ModeX constructs a similarity graph over candidate generations and recursively applies spectral clustering to select a representative centroid, without requiring additional inference or auxiliary models. We further instantiate this selection principle as ModeX-Lite, an improved version of ModeX with early pruning for efficiency. Across open-ended tasks -- including text summarization, code generation, and mathematical reasoning -- our approaches consistently outperform standard single- and multi-path baselines, providing a computationally efficient solution for robust open-ended text generation. Code is released in https://github.com/deeplearning-wisc/ModeX.
Abstract: Following the initial publication of hdlib, a Python library for designing Vector-Symbolic Architectures (VSA), we introduce a major extension that significantly enhances its machine learning capabilities. VSA, also known as Hyperdimensional Computing, is a computing paradigm that represents and processes information using high-dimensional vectors. While the first version of hdlib established a robust foundation for creating and manipulating these vectors, this update addresses the growing need for more advanced, data-driven modeling within the VSA framework. Here, we present four extensions: significant enhancements to the existing supervised classification model also enabling feature selection, and a new regression model for predicting continuous variables, a clustering model for unsupervised learning, and a graph-based learning model. Furthermore, we propose the first implementation ever of Quantum Hyperdimensional Computing with quantum-powered arithmetic operations and a new Quantum Machine Learning model for supervised learning. hdlib remains open-source and available on GitHub at https://github.com/cumbof/hdlib under the MIT license, and distributed through the Python Package Index (pip install hdlib) and Conda (conda install -c conda-forge hdlib). Documentation and examples of these new features are available on the official Wiki at https://github.com/cumbof/hdlib/wiki.
Abstract: Current foundation models for 3D shapes excel at global tasks (retrieval, classification) but transfer poorly to local part-level reasoning. Recent approaches leverage vision and language foundation models to directly solve dense tasks through multi-view renderings and text queries. While promising, these pipelines require expensive inference over multiple renderings, depend heavily on large language-model (LLM) prompt engineering for captions, and fail to exploit the inherent 3D geometry of shapes. We address this gap by introducing an encoder-only 3D model that produces language-aligned patch-level features directly from point clouds. Our pre-training approach builds on existing data engines that generate part-annotated 3D shapes by pairing multi-view SAM regions with VLM captioning. Using this data, we train a point cloud transformer encoder in two stages: (1) distillation of dense 2D features from visual encoders such as DINOv2 into 3D patches, and (2) alignment of these patch embeddings with part-level text embeddings through a multi-positive contrastive objective. Our 3D encoder achieves zero-shot 3D part segmentation with fast single-pass inference without any test-time multi-view rendering, while significantly outperforming previous rendering-based and feed-forward approaches across several 3D part segmentation benchmarks. Project website: https://souhail-hadgi.github.io/patchalign3dsite/
Abstract: Prevalent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically built upon Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and demonstrate exceptional proficiency in semantic understanding, but they inherently lack the capability to deduce physical world dynamics. Consequently, recent approaches have shifted toward World Models, typically formulated via video prediction; however, these methods often suffer from a lack of semantic grounding and exhibit brittleness when handling prediction errors. To synergize semantic understanding with dynamic predictive capabilities, we present InternVLA-A1. This model employs a unified Mixture-of-Transformers architecture, coordinating three experts for scene understanding, visual foresight generation, and action execution. These components interact seamlessly through a unified masked self-attention mechanism. Building upon InternVL3 and Qwen3-VL, we instantiate InternVLA-A1 at 2B and 3B parameter scales. We pre-train these models on hybrid synthetic-real datasets spanning InternData-A1 and Agibot-World, covering over 533M frames. This hybrid training strategy effectively harnesses the diversity of synthetic simulation data while minimizing the sim-to-real gap. We evaluated InternVLA-A1 across 12 real-world robotic tasks and simulation benchmark. It significantly outperforms leading models like pi0 and GR00T N1.5, achieving a 14.5\% improvement in daily tasks and a 40\%-73.3\% boost in dynamic settings, such as conveyor belt sorting.
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) suffer from over-smoothing in deep architectures and expressiveness bounded by the 1-Weisfeiler-Leman (1-WL) test. We adapt Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (\mhc)~\citep{xie2025mhc}, recently proposed for Transformers, to graph neural networks. Our method, mHC-GNN, expands node representations across $n$ parallel streams and constrains stream-mixing matrices to the Birkhoff polytope via Sinkhorn-Knopp normalization. We prove that mHC-GNN exhibits exponentially slower over-smoothing (rate $(1-γ)^{L/n}$ vs.\ $(1-γ)^L$) and can distinguish graphs beyond 1-WL. Experiments on 10 datasets with 4 GNN architectures show consistent improvements. Depth experiments from 2 to 128 layers reveal that standard GNNs collapse to near-random performance beyond 16 layers, while mHC-GNN maintains over 74\% accuracy even at 128 layers, with improvements exceeding 50 percentage points at extreme depths. Ablations confirm that the manifold constraint is essential: removing it causes up to 82\% performance degradation. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/smlab-niser/mhc-gnn}{https://github.com/smlab-niser/mhc-gnn}
Abstract: Multi-modal reasoning requires the seamless integration of visual and linguistic cues, yet existing Chain-of-Thought methods suffer from two critical limitations in cross-modal scenarios: (1) over-reliance on single coarse-grained image regions, and (2) semantic fragmentation between successive reasoning steps. To address these issues, we propose the CoCoT (Collaborative Coross-modal Thought) framework, built upon two key innovations: a) Dynamic Multi-Region Grounding to adaptively detect the most relevant image regions based on the question, and b) Relation-Aware Reasoning to enable multi-region collaboration by iteratively aligning visual cues to form a coherent and logical chain of thought. Through this approach, we construct the CoCoT-70K dataset, comprising 74,691 high-quality samples with multi-region annotations and structured reasoning chains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoCoT significantly enhances complex visual reasoning, achieving an average accuracy improvement of 15.4% on LLaVA-1.5 and 4.0% on Qwen2-VL across six challenging benchmarks. The data and code are available at: https://github.com/deer-echo/CoCoT.
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various domains, including software development, education, and technical assistance. Among these, software development is one of the key areas where LLMs are increasingly adopted. However, when hardware constraints are considered-for instance, in physical computing, where software must interact with and control physical hardware -their effectiveness has not been fully explored. To address this gap, we introduce \textsc{PCEval} (Physical Computing Evaluation), the first benchmark in physical computing that enables a fully automatic evaluation of the capabilities of LLM in both the logical and physical aspects of the projects, without requiring human assessment. Our evaluation framework assesses LLMs in generating circuits and producing compatible code across varying levels of project complexity. Through comprehensive testing of 13 leading models, \textsc{PCEval} provides the first reproducible and automatically validated empirical assessment of LLMs' ability to reason about fundamental hardware implementation constraints within a simulation environment. Our findings reveal that while LLMs perform well in code generation and logical circuit design, they struggle significantly with physical breadboard layout creation, particularly in managing proper pin connections and avoiding circuit errors. \textsc{PCEval} advances our understanding of AI assistance in hardware-dependent computing environments and establishes a foundation for developing more effective tools to support physical computing education.
Abstract: Real-world graphs or networks are usually heterogeneous, involving multiple types of nodes and relationships. Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) can effectively handle these diverse nodes and edges, capturing heterogeneous information within the graph, thus exhibiting outstanding performance. However, most methods of HGNNs usually involve complex structural designs, leading to problems such as high memory usage, long inference time, and extensive consumption of computing resources. These limitations pose certain challenges for the practical application of HGNNs, especially for resource-constrained devices. To mitigate this issue, we propose the Spiking Heterogeneous Graph Attention Networks (SpikingHAN), which incorporates the brain-inspired and energy-saving properties of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) into heterogeneous graph learning to reduce the computing cost without compromising the performance. Specifically, SpikingHAN aggregates metapath-based neighbor information using a single-layer graph convolution with shared parameters. It then employs a semantic-level attention mechanism to capture the importance of different meta-paths and performs semantic aggregation. Finally, it encodes the heterogeneous information into a spike sequence through SNNs, simulating bioinformatic processing to derive a binarized 1-bit representation of the heterogeneous graph. Comprehensive experimental results from three real-world heterogeneous graph datasets show that SpikingHAN delivers competitive node classification performance. It achieves this with fewer parameters, quicker inference, reduced memory usage, and lower energy consumption. Code is available at https://github.com/QianPeng369/SpikingHAN.
Abstract: Detecting unknown deepfake manipulations remains one of the most challenging problems in face forgery detection. Current state-of-the-art approaches fail to generalize to unseen manipulations, as they primarily rely on supervised training with existing deepfakes or pseudo-fakes, which leads to overfitting to specific forgery patterns. In contrast, self-supervised methods offer greater potential for generalization, but existing work struggles to learn discriminative representations only from self-supervision. In this paper, we propose ExposeAnyone, a fully self-supervised approach based on a diffusion model that generates expression sequences from audio. The key idea is, once the model is personalized to specific subjects using reference sets, it can compute the identity distances between suspected videos and personalized subjects via diffusion reconstruction errors, enabling person-of-interest face forgery detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that 1) our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method by 4.22 percentage points in the average AUC on DF-TIMIT, DFDCP, KoDF, and IDForge datasets, 2) our model is also capable of detecting Sora2-generated videos, where the previous approaches perform poorly, and 3) our method is highly robust to corruptions such as blur and compression, highlighting the applicability in real-world face forgery detection.
Abstract: We present VINO, a unified visual generator that performs image and video generation and editing within a single framework. Instead of relying on task-specific models or independent modules for each modality, VINO uses a shared diffusion backbone that conditions on text, images and videos, enabling a broad range of visual creation and editing tasks under one model. Specifically, VINO couples a vision-language model (VLM) with a Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MMDiT), where multimodal inputs are encoded as interleaved conditioning tokens, and then used to guide the diffusion process. This design supports multi-reference grounding, long-form instruction following, and coherent identity preservation across static and dynamic content, while avoiding modality-specific architectural components. To train such a unified system, we introduce a multi-stage training pipeline that progressively expands a video generation base model into a unified, multi-task generator capable of both image and video input and output. Across diverse generation and editing benchmarks, VINO demonstrates strong visual quality, faithful instruction following, improved reference and attribute preservation, and more controllable multi-identity edits. Our results highlight a practical path toward scalable unified visual generation, and the promise of interleaved, in-context computation as a foundation for general-purpose visual creation.
Abstract: We introduce Talk2Move, a reinforcement learning (RL) based diffusion framework for text-instructed spatial transformation of objects within scenes. Spatially manipulating objects in a scene through natural language poses a challenge for multimodal generation systems. While existing text-based manipulation methods can adjust appearance or style, they struggle to perform object-level geometric transformations-such as translating, rotating, or resizing objects-due to scarce paired supervision and pixel-level optimization limits. Talk2Move employs Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to explore geometric actions through diverse rollouts generated from input images and lightweight textual variations, removing the need for costly paired data. A spatial reward guided model aligns geometric transformations with linguistic description, while off-policy step evaluation and active step sampling improve learning efficiency by focusing on informative transformation stages. Furthermore, we design object-centric spatial rewards that evaluate displacement, rotation, and scaling behaviors directly, enabling interpretable and coherent transformations. Experiments on curated benchmarks demonstrate that Talk2Move achieves precise, consistent, and semantically faithful object transformations, outperforming existing text-guided editing approaches in both spatial accuracy and scene coherence.
Abstract: Geo-Foundation Models (GFMs), have proven effective in diverse downstream applications, including semantic segmentation, classification, and regression tasks. However, in case of flood mapping using Sen1Flood11 dataset as a downstream task, GFMs struggles to outperform the baseline U-Net, highlighting model's limitation in capturing critical local nuances. To address this, we present the Prithvi-Complementary Adaptive Fusion Encoder (CAFE), which integrate Prithvi GFM pretrained encoder with a parallel CNN residual branch enhanced by Convolutional Attention Modules (CAM). Prithvi-CAFE enables fast and efficient fine-tuning through adapters in Prithvi and performs multi-scale, multi-level fusion with CNN features, capturing critical local details while preserving long-range dependencies. We achieve state-of-the-art results on two comprehensive flood mapping datasets: Sen1Flood11 and FloodPlanet. On Sen1Flood11 test data, Prithvi-CAFE (IoU 83.41) outperforms the original Prithvi (IoU 82.50) and other major GFMs (TerraMind 82.90, DOFA 81.54, spectralGPT: 81.02). The improvement is even more pronounced on the hold-out test site, where Prithvi-CAFE achieves an IoU of 81.37 compared to the baseline U-Net (70.57) and original Prithvi (72.42). On FloodPlanet, Prithvi-CAFE also surpasses the baseline U-Net and other GFMs, achieving an IoU of 64.70 compared to U-Net (60.14), Terramind (62.33), DOFA (59.15) and Prithvi 2.0 (61.91). Our proposed simple yet effective Prithvi-CAFE demonstrates strong potential for improving segmentation tasks where multi-channel and multi-modal data provide complementary information and local details are critical. The code is released on \href{https://github.com/Sk-2103/Prithvi-CAFE}{Prithvi-CAFE Github}
Abstract: High-Frequency trading (HFT) environments are characterised by large volumes of limit order book (LOB) data, which is notoriously noisy and non-linear. Alpha decay represents a significant challenge, with traditional models such as DeepLOB losing predictive power as the time horizon (k) increases. In this paper, using data from the FI-2010 dataset, we introduce Temporal Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (T-KAN) to replace the fixed, linear weights of standard LSTMs with learnable B-spline activation functions. This allows the model to learn the 'shape' of market signals as opposed to just their magnitude. This resulted in a 19.1% relative improvement in the F1-score at the k = 100 horizon. The efficacy of T-KAN networks cannot be understated, producing a 132.48% return compared to the -82.76% DeepLOB drawdown under 1.0 bps transaction costs. In addition to this, the T-KAN model proves quite interpretable, with the 'dead-zones' being clearly visible in the splines. The T-KAN architecture is also uniquely optimized for low-latency FPGA implementation via High level Synthesis (HLS). The code for the experiments in this project can be found at https://github.com/AhmadMak/Temporal-Kolmogorov-Arnold-Networks-T-KAN-for-High-Frequency-Limit-Order-Book-Forecasting.
Abstract: Monocular omnidirectional visual odometry (OVO) systems leverage 360-degree cameras to overcome field-of-view limitations of perspective VO systems. However, existing methods, reliant on handcrafted features or photometric objectives, often lack robustness in challenging scenarios, such as aggressive motion and varying illumination. To address this, we present 360DVO, the first deep learning-based OVO framework. Our approach introduces a distortion-aware spherical feature extractor (DAS-Feat) that adaptively learns distortion-resistant features from 360-degree images. These sparse feature patches are then used to establish constraints for effective pose estimation within a novel omnidirectional differentiable bundle adjustment (ODBA) module. To facilitate evaluation in realistic settings, we also contribute a new real-world OVO benchmark. Extensive experiments on this benchmark and public synthetic datasets (TartanAir V2 and 360VO) demonstrate that 360DVO surpasses state-of-the-art baselines (including 360VO and OpenVSLAM), improving robustness by 50% and accuracy by 37.5%. Homepage: https://chris1004336379.github.io/360DVO-homepage
Abstract: Tabular data constitute a dominant form of information in modern data lakes and repositories, yet discovering the relevant tables to answer user questions remains challenging. Existing data discovery systems assume that each question can be answered by a single table and often rely on resource-intensive offline preprocessing, such as model training or large-scale content indexing. In practice, however, many questions require information spread across multiple tables -- either independently or through joins -- and users often seek specific cell values rather than entire tables. In this paper, we present Octopus, a lightweight, entity-aware, and training-free system for multi-table data discovery and cell-level value retrieval. Instead of embedding entire questions, Octopus identifies fine-grained entities (column mentions and value mentions) from natural-language queries using an LLM parser. It then matches these entities to table headers through a compact embedding index and scans table contents directly for value occurrences, eliminating the need for heavy content indexing or costly offline stages. The resulting fine-grained alignment not only improves table retrieval accuracy but also facilitates efficient downstream NL2SQL execution by reducing token usage and redundant LLM calls. To evaluate Octopus, we introduce a new benchmark covering both table- and cell-level discovery under multi-table settings, including five datasets for independent discovery and two for join-based discovery. Experimental results show that Octopus consistently outperforms existing systems while achieving substantially lower computational and token costs. Code is available at https://github.com/wenzhilics/octopus.
Abstract: Current work on robot failure detection and correction typically operate in a post hoc manner, analyzing errors and applying corrections only after failures occur. This work introduces CycleVLA, a system that equips Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) with proactive self-correction, the capability to anticipate incipient failures and recover before they fully manifest during execution. CycleVLA achieves this by integrating a progress-aware VLA that flags critical subtask transition points where failures most frequently occur, a VLM-based failure predictor and planner that triggers subtask backtracking upon predicted failure, and a test-time scaling strategy based on Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding to improve retry success after backtracking. Extensive experiments show that CycleVLA improves performance for both well-trained and under-trained VLAs, and that MBR serves as an effective zero-shot test-time scaling strategy for VLAs. Project Page: https://dannymcy.github.io/cyclevla/
Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) has become a powerful paradigm for learning from large, unlabeled datasets, particularly in computer vision (CV). However, applying SSL to multispectral remote sensing (RS) images presents unique challenges and opportunities due to the geographical and temporal variability of the data. In this paper, we introduce GeoRank, a novel regularization method for contrastive SSL that improves upon prior techniques by directly optimizing spherical distances to embed geographical relationships into the learned feature space. GeoRank outperforms or matches prior methods that integrate geographical metadata and consistently improves diverse contrastive SSL algorithms (e.g., BYOL, DINO). Beyond this, we present a systematic investigation of key adaptations of contrastive SSL for multispectral RS images, including the effectiveness of data augmentations, the impact of dataset cardinality and image size on performance, and the task dependency of temporal views. Code is available at https://github.com/tomburgert/georank.
Abstract: The grand vision of enabling persistent, large-scale 3D visual geometry understanding is shackled by the irreconcilable demands of scalability and long-term stability. While offline models like VGGT achieve inspiring geometry capability, their batch-based nature renders them irrelevant for live systems. Streaming architectures, though the intended solution for live operation, have proven inadequate. Existing methods either fail to support truly infinite-horizon inputs or suffer from catastrophic drift over long sequences. We shatter this long-standing dilemma with InfiniteVGGT, a causal visual geometry transformer that operationalizes the concept of a rolling memory through a bounded yet adaptive and perpetually expressive KV cache. Capitalizing on this, we devise a training-free, attention-agnostic pruning strategy that intelligently discards obsolete information, effectively ``rolling'' the memory forward with each new frame. Fully compatible with FlashAttention, InfiniteVGGT finally alleviates the compromise, enabling infinite-horizon streaming while outperforming existing streaming methods in long-term stability. The ultimate test for such a system is its performance over a truly infinite horizon, a capability that has been impossible to rigorously validate due to the lack of extremely long-term, continuous benchmarks. To address this critical gap, we introduce the Long3D benchmark, which, for the first time, enables a rigorous evaluation of continuous 3D geometry estimation on sequences about 10,000 frames. This provides the definitive evaluation platform for future research in long-term 3D geometry understanding. Code is available at: https://github.com/AutoLab-SAI-SJTU/InfiniteVGGT
Abstract: Foundation segmentation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) exhibit strong zero-shot generalization through large-scale pretraining, but adapting them to domain-specific semantic segmentation remains challenging, particularly for thin structures (e.g., retinal vessels) and noisy modalities (e.g., SAR imagery). Full fine-tuning is computationally expensive and risks catastrophic forgetting. We propose \textbf{TopoLoRA-SAM}, a topology-aware and parameter-efficient adaptation framework for binary semantic segmentation. TopoLoRA-SAM injects Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) into the frozen ViT encoder, augmented with a lightweight spatial convolutional adapter and optional topology-aware supervision via differentiable clDice. We evaluate our approach on five benchmarks spanning retinal vessel segmentation (DRIVE, STARE, CHASE\_DB1), polyp segmentation (Kvasir-SEG), and SAR sea/land segmentation (SL-SSDD), comparing against U-Net, DeepLabV3+, SegFormer, and Mask2Former. TopoLoRA-SAM achieves the best retina-average Dice and the best overall average Dice across datasets, while training only \textbf{5.2\%} of model parameters ($\sim$4.9M). On the challenging CHASE\_DB1 dataset, our method substantially improves segmentation accuracy and robustness, demonstrating that topology-aware parameter-efficient adaptation can match or exceed fully fine-tuned specialist models. Code is available at : https://github.com/salimkhazem/Seglab.git
Abstract: Human mesh recovery from multi-view images faces a fundamental challenge: real-world datasets contain imperfect ground-truth annotations that bias the models' training, while synthetic data with precise supervision suffers from domain gap. In this paper, we propose DiffProxy, a novel framework that generates multi-view consistent human proxies for mesh recovery. Central to DiffProxy is leveraging the diffusion-based generative priors to bridge the synthetic training and real-world generalization. Its key innovations include: (1) a multi-conditional mechanism for generating multi-view consistent, pixel-aligned human proxies; (2) a hand refinement module that incorporates flexible visual prompts to enhance local details; and (3) an uncertainty-aware test-time scaling method that increases robustness to challenging cases during optimization. These designs ensure that the mesh recovery process effectively benefits from the precise synthetic ground truth and generative advantages of the diffusion-based pipeline. Trained entirely on synthetic data, DiffProxy achieves state-of-the-art performance across five real-world benchmarks, demonstrating strong zero-shot generalization particularly on challenging scenarios with occlusions and partial views. Project page: https://wrk226.github.io/DiffProxy.html
Abstract: Visual generation is dominated by three paradigms: AutoRegressive (AR), diffusion, and Visual AutoRegressive (VAR) models. Unlike AR and diffusion, VARs operate on heterogeneous input structures across their generation steps, which creates severe asynchronous policy conflicts. This issue becomes particularly acute in reinforcement learning (RL) scenarios, leading to unstable training and suboptimal alignment. To resolve this, we propose a novel framework to enhance Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) by explicitly managing these conflicts. Our method integrates three synergistic components: 1) a stabilizing intermediate reward to guide early-stage generation; 2) a dynamic time-step reweighting scheme for precise credit assignment; and 3) a novel mask propagation algorithm, derived from principles of Reward Feedback Learning (ReFL), designed to isolate optimization effects both spatially and temporally. Our approach demonstrates significant improvements in sample quality and objective alignment over the vanilla GRPO baseline, enabling robust and effective optimization for VAR models.
Abstract: Autoregressive large language models achieve strong results on many benchmarks, but decoding remains fundamentally latency-limited by sequential dependence on previously generated tokens. Diffusion language models (DLMs) promise parallel generation but suffer from a fundamental static-to-dynamic misalignment: Training optimizes local transitions under fixed schedules, whereas efficient inference requires adaptive "long-jump" refinements through unseen states. Our goal is to enable highly parallel decoding for DLMs with low number of function evaluations while preserving generation quality. To achieve this, we propose CD4LM, a framework that decouples training from inference via Discrete-Space Consistency Distillation (DSCD) and Confidence-Adaptive Decoding (CAD). Unlike standard objectives, DSCD trains a student to be trajectory-invariant, mapping diverse noisy states directly to the clean distribution. This intrinsic robustness enables CAD to dynamically allocate compute resources based on token confidence, aggressively skipping steps without the quality collapse typical of heuristic acceleration. On GSM8K, CD4LM matches the LLaDA baseline with a 5.18x wall-clock speedup; across code and math benchmarks, it strictly dominates the accuracy-efficiency Pareto frontier, achieving a 3.62x mean speedup while improving average accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/yihao-liang/CDLM
Abstract: Accurate detection of ultrasound nodules is essential for the early diagnosis and treatment of thyroid and breast cancers. However, this task remains challenging due to irregular nodule shapes, indistinct boundaries, substantial scale variations, and the presence of speckle noise that degrades structural visibility. To address these challenges, we propose a prior-guided DETR framework specifically designed for ultrasound nodule detection. Instead of relying on purely data-driven feature learning, the proposed framework progressively incorporates different prior knowledge at multiple stages of the network. First, a Spatially-adaptive Deformable FFN with Prior Regularization (SDFPR) is embedded into the CNN backbone to inject geometric priors into deformable sampling, stabilizing feature extraction for irregular and blurred nodules. Second, a Multi-scale Spatial-Frequency Feature Mixer (MSFFM) is designed to extract multi-scale structural priors, where spatial-domain processing emphasizes contour continuity and boundary cues, while frequency-domain modeling captures global morphology and suppresses speckle noise. Furthermore, a Dense Feature Interaction (DFI) mechanism propagates and exploits these prior-modulated features across all encoder layers, enabling the decoder to enhance query refinement under consistent geometric and structural guidance. Experiments conducted on two clinically collected thyroid ultrasound datasets (Thyroid I and Thyroid II) and two public benchmarks (TN3K and BUSI) for thyroid and breast nodules demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior accuracy compared with 18 detection methods, particularly in detecting morphologically complex nodules.The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/wjj1wjj/Ultrasound-DETR.
Abstract: This paper addresses low-light video super-resolution (LVSR), aiming to restore high-resolution videos from low-light, low-resolution (LR) inputs. Existing LVSR methods often struggle to recover fine details due to limited contrast and insufficient high-frequency information. To overcome these challenges, we present RetinexEVSR, the first event-driven LVSR framework that leverages high-contrast event signals and Retinex-inspired priors to enhance video quality under low-light scenarios. Unlike previous approaches that directly fuse degraded signals, RetinexEVSR introduces a novel bidirectional cross-modal fusion strategy to extract and integrate meaningful cues from noisy event data and degraded RGB frames. Specifically, an illumination-guided event enhancement module is designed to progressively refine event features using illumination maps derived from the Retinex model, thereby suppressing low-light artifacts while preserving high-contrast details. Furthermore, we propose an event-guided reflectance enhancement module that utilizes the enhanced event features to dynamically recover reflectance details via a multi-scale fusion mechanism. Experimental results show that our RetinexEVSR achieves state-of-the-art performance on three datasets. Notably, on the SDSD benchmark, our method can get up to 2.95 dB gain while reducing runtime by 65% compared to prior event-based methods. Code: https://github.com/DachunKai/RetinexEVSR.
Abstract: We present NextFlow, a unified decoder-only autoregressive transformer trained on 6 trillion interleaved text-image discrete tokens. By leveraging a unified vision representation within a unified autoregressive architecture, NextFlow natively activates multimodal understanding and generation capabilities, unlocking abilities of image editing, interleaved content and video generation. Motivated by the distinct nature of modalities - where text is strictly sequential and images are inherently hierarchical - we retain next-token prediction for text but adopt next-scale prediction for visual generation. This departs from traditional raster-scan methods, enabling the generation of 1024x1024 images in just 5 seconds - orders of magnitude faster than comparable AR models. We address the instabilities of multi-scale generation through a robust training recipe. Furthermore, we introduce a prefix-tuning strategy for reinforcement learning. Experiments demonstrate that NextFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance among unified models and rivals specialized diffusion baselines in visual quality.
Abstract: Accurate altitude estimation and reliable floor recognition are critical for mobile robot localization and navigation within complex multi-storey environments. In this paper, we present a robust, low-cost vertical estimation framework leveraging differential barometric sensing integrated within a fully ROS-compliant software package. Our system simultaneously publishes real-time altitude data from both a stationary base station and a mobile sensor, enabling precise and drift-free vertical localization. Empirical evaluations conducted in challenging scenarios -- such as fully enclosed stairwells and elevators, demonstrate that our proposed barometric pipeline achieves sub-meter vertical accuracy (RMSE: 0.29 m) and perfect (100%) floor-level identification. In contrast, our results confirm that standalone height estimates, obtained solely from visual- or LiDAR-based SLAM odometry, are insufficient for reliable vertical localization. The proposed ROS-compatible barometric module thus provides a practical and cost-effective solution for robust vertical awareness in real-world robotic deployments. The implementation of our method is released as open source at https://github.com/witsir/differential-barometric.
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as long-term interactive agents, yet their limited context windows make it difficult to sustain coherent behavior over extended interactions. Existing memory systems often store isolated records and retrieve fragments, limiting their ability to consolidate evolving user states and resolve conflicts. We introduce EverMemOS, a self-organizing memory operating system that implements an engram-inspired lifecycle for computational memory. Episodic Trace Formation converts dialogue streams into MemCells that capture episodic traces, atomic facts, and time-bounded Foresight signals. Semantic Consolidation organizes MemCells into thematic MemScenes, distilling stable semantic structures and updating user profiles. Reconstructive Recollection performs MemScene-guided agentic retrieval to compose the necessary and sufficient context for downstream reasoning. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval show that EverMemOS achieves state-of-the-art performance on memory-augmented reasoning tasks. We further report a profile study on PersonaMem v2 and qualitative case studies illustrating chat-oriented capabilities such as user profiling and Foresight. Code is available at https://github.com/EverMind-AI/EverMemOS.
Abstract: This paper presents FormationEval, an open multiple-choice question benchmark for evaluating language models on petroleum geoscience and subsurface disciplines. The dataset contains 505 questions across seven domains including petrophysics, petroleum geology and reservoir engineering, derived from three authoritative sources using a reasoning model with detailed instructions and a concept-based approach that avoids verbatim copying of copyrighted text. Each question includes source metadata to support traceability and audit. The evaluation covers 72 models from major providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and open-weight alternatives. The top performers achieve over 97\% accuracy, with Gemini 3 Pro Preview reaching 99.8\%, while tier and domain gaps persist. Among open-weight models, GLM-4.7 leads at 98.6\%, with several DeepSeek, Llama, Qwen and Mistral models also exceeding 93\%. The performance gap between open-weight and closed models is narrower than expected, with several lower-cost open-weight models exceeding 90\% accuracy. Petrophysics emerges as the most challenging domain across all models, while smaller models show wider performance variance. Residual length bias in the dataset (correct answers tend to be longer) is documented along with bias mitigation strategies applied during construction. The benchmark, evaluation code and results are publicly available.
Abstract: Amid the surge in generic text-to-video generation, the field of personalized human video generation has witnessed notable advancements, primarily concentrated on single-person scenarios. However, to our knowledge, the domain of two-person interactions, particularly in the context of martial arts combat, remains uncharted. We identify a significant gap: existing models for single-person dancing generation prove insufficient for capturing the subtleties and complexities of two engaged fighters, resulting in challenges such as identity confusion, anomalous limbs, and action mismatches. To address this, we introduce a pioneering new task, Personalized Martial Arts Combat Video Generation. Our approach, MagicFight, is specifically crafted to overcome these hurdles. Given this pioneering task, we face a lack of appropriate datasets. Thus, we generate a bespoke dataset using the game physics engine Unity, meticulously crafting a multitude of 3D characters, martial arts moves, and scenes designed to represent the diversity of combat. MagicFight refines and adapts existing models and strategies to generate high-fidelity two-person combat videos that maintain individual identities and ensure seamless, coherent action sequences, thereby laying the groundwork for future innovations in the realm of interactive video content creation. Website: https://MingfuYAN.github.io/MagicFight/ Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/MingfuYAN/KungFu-Fiesta
Abstract: Ballroom dancing is a structured yet expressive motion category. Its highly diverse movement and complex interactions between leader and follower dancers make the understanding and synthesis challenging. We demonstrate that the three-point trajectory available from a virtual reality (VR) device can effectively serve as a dancer's motion descriptor, simplifying the modeling and synthesis of interplay between dancers' full-body motions down to sparse trajectories. Thanks to the low dimensionality, we can employ an efficient MLP network to predict the follower's three-point trajectory directly from the leader's three-point input for certain types of ballroom dancing, addressing the challenge of modeling high-dimensional full-body interaction. It also prevents our method from overfitting thanks to its compact yet explicit representation. By leveraging the inherent structure of the movements and carefully planning the autoregressive procedure, we show a deterministic neural network is able to translate three-point trajectories into a virtual embodied avatar, which is typically considered under-constrained and requires generative models for common motions. In addition, we demonstrate this deterministic approach generalizes beyond small, structured datasets like ballroom dancing, and performs robustly on larger, more diverse datasets such as LaFAN. Our method provides a computationally- and data-efficient solution, opening new possibilities for immersive paired dancing applications. Code and pre-trained models for this paper are available at https://peizhuoli.github.io/dancing-points.
Abstract: Glacial segmentation is essential for reconstructing past glacier dynamics and evaluating climate-driven landscape change. However, weak optical contrast and the limited availability of high-resolution DEMs hinder automated mapping. This study introduces the first large-scale optical-only moraine segmentation dataset, comprising 3,340 manually annotated high-resolution images from Google Earth covering glaciated regions of Sichuan and Yunnan, China. We develop MCD-Net, a lightweight baseline that integrates a MobileNetV2 encoder, a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), and a DeepLabV3+ decoder. Benchmarking against deeper backbones (ResNet152, Xception) shows that MCD-Net achieves 62.3% mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) and 72.8% Dice coefficient while reducing computational cost by more than 60%. Although ridge delineation remains constrained by sub-pixel width and spectral ambiguity, the results demonstrate that optical imagery alone can provide reliable moraine-body segmentation. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/Lyra-alpha/MCD-Net, establishing a reproducible benchmark for moraine-specific segmentation and offering a deployable baseline for high-altitude glacial monitoring.
Abstract: The development of robust and generalizable robot learning models is critically contingent upon the availability of large-scale, diverse training data and reliable evaluation benchmarks. Collecting data in the physical world poses prohibitive costs and scalability challenges, and prevailing simulation benchmarks frequently suffer from fragmentation, narrow scope, or insufficient fidelity to enable effective sim-to-real transfer. To address these challenges, we introduce Genie Sim 3.0, a unified simulation platform for robotic manipulation. We present Genie Sim Generator, a large language model (LLM)-powered tool that constructs high-fidelity scenes from natural language instructions. Its principal strength resides in rapid and multi-dimensional generalization, facilitating the synthesis of diverse environments to support scalable data collection and robust policy evaluation. We introduce the first benchmark that pioneers the application of LLM for automated evaluation. It leverages LLM to mass-generate evaluation scenarios and employs Vision-Language Model (VLM) to establish an automated assessment pipeline. We also release an open-source dataset comprising more than 10,000 hours of synthetic data across over 200 tasks. Through systematic experimentation, we validate the robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer capability of our open-source dataset, demonstrating that synthetic data can server as an effective substitute for real-world data under controlled conditions for scalable policy training. For code and dataset details, please refer to: https://github.com/AgibotTech/genie_sim.
Abstract: Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are essential for understanding atomic-scale behaviors in materials science, yet writing LAMMPS scripts remains highly specialized and time-consuming tasks. Although LLMs show promise in code generation and domain-specific question answering, their performance in MD scenarios is limited by scarce domain data, the high deployment cost of state-of-the-art LLMs, and low code executability. Building upon our prior MDAgent, we present MDAgent2, the first end-to-end framework capable of performing both knowledge Q&A and code generation within the MD domain. We construct a domain-specific data-construction pipeline that yields three high-quality datasets spanning MD knowledge, question answering, and code generation. Based on these datasets, we adopt a three stage post-training strategy--continued pre-training (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and reinforcement learning (RL)--to train two domain-adapted models, MD-Instruct and MD-Code. Furthermore, we introduce MD-GRPO, a closed-loop RL method that leverages simulation outcomes as reward signals and recycles low-reward trajectories for continual refinement. We further build MDAgent2-RUNTIME, a deployable multi-agent system that integrates code generation, execution, evaluation, and self-correction. Together with MD-EvalBench proposed in this work, the first benchmark for LAMMPS code generation and question answering, our models and system achieve performance surpassing several strong baselines.This work systematically demonstrates the adaptability and generalization capability of large language models in industrial simulation tasks, laying a methodological foundation for automatic code generation in AI for Science and industrial-scale simulations. URL: https://github.com/FredericVAN/PKU_MDAgent2
Abstract: The El Ni{~n}o-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) exerts profound influence on global climate variability, yet its prediction remains a grand challenge. Recent advances in deep learning have significantly improved forecasting skill, but the opacity of these models hampers scientific trust and operational deployment. Here, we introduce a mathematically grounded interpretability framework based on bounded variation function. By rescuing the "dead" neurons from the saturation zone of the activation function, we enhance the model's expressive capacity. Our analysis reveals that ENSO predictability emerges dominantly from the tropical Pacific, with contributions from the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, consistent with physical understanding. Controlled experiments affirm the robustness of our method and its alignment with established predictors. Notably, we probe the persistent Spring Predictability Barrier (SPB), finding that despite expanded sensitivity during spring, predictive performance declines-likely due to suboptimal variable selection. These results suggest that incorporating additional ocean-atmosphere variables may help transcend SPB limitations and advance long-range ENSO prediction.
Abstract: This paper investigates the integration of the Learning Using Privileged Information (LUPI) paradigm in object detection to exploit fine-grained, descriptive information available during training but not at inference. We introduce a general, model-agnostic methodology for injecting privileged information-such as bounding box masks, saliency maps, and depth cues-into deep learning-based object detectors through a teacher-student architecture. Experiments are conducted across five state-of-the-art object detection models and multiple public benchmarks, including UAV-based litter detection datasets and Pascal VOC 2012, to assess the impact on accuracy, generalization, and computational efficiency. Our results demonstrate that LUPI-trained students consistently outperform their baseline counterparts, achieving significant boosts in detection accuracy with no increase in inference complexity or model size. Performance improvements are especially marked for medium and large objects, while ablation studies reveal that intermediate weighting of teacher guidance optimally balances learning from privileged and standard inputs. The findings affirm that the LUPI framework provides an effective and practical strategy for advancing object detection systems in both resource-constrained and real-world settings.
Abstract: Novel metaphor comprehension involves complex semantic processes and linguistic creativity, making it an interesting task for studying language models (LMs). This study investigates whether surprisal, a probabilistic measure of predictability in LMs, correlates with annotations of metaphor novelty in different datasets. We analyse the surprisal of metaphoric words in corpus-based and synthetic metaphor datasets using 16 causal LM variants. We propose a cloze-style surprisal method that conditions on full-sentence context. Results show that LM surprisal yields significant moderate correlations with scores/labels of metaphor novelty. We further identify divergent scaling patterns: on corpus-based data, correlation strength decreases with model size (inverse scaling effect), whereas on synthetic data it increases (quality-power hypothesis). We conclude that while surprisal can partially account for annotations of metaphor novelty, it remains limited as a metric of linguistic creativity. Code and data are publicly available: https://github.com/OmarMomen14/surprisal-metaphor-novelty
Abstract: Sign language translation systems typically require English as an intermediary language, creating barriers for non-English speakers in the global deaf community. We present Canonical Semantic Form (CSF), a language-agnostic semantic representation framework that enables direct translation from any source language to sign language without English mediation. CSF decomposes utterances into nine universal semantic slots: event, intent, time, condition, agent, object, location, purpose, and modifier. A key contribution is our comprehensive condition taxonomy comprising 35 condition types across eight semantic categories, enabling nuanced representation of conditional expressions common in everyday communication. We train a lightweight transformer-based extractor (0.74 MB) that achieves 99.03% average slot extraction accuracy across four typologically diverse languages: English, Vietnamese, Japanese, and French. The model demonstrates particularly strong performance on condition classification (99.4% accuracy) despite the 35-class complexity. With inference latency of 3.02ms on CPU, our approach enables real-time sign language generation in browser-based applications. We release our code, trained models, and multilingual dataset to support further research in accessible sign language technology.
Abstract: Although recent approaches to face normal estimation have achieved promising results, their effectiveness heavily depends on large-scale paired data for training. This paper concentrates on relieving this requirement via developing a coarse-to-fine normal estimator. Concretely, our method first trains a neat model from a small dataset to produce coarse face normals that perform as guidance (called exemplars) for the following refinement. A self-attention mechanism is employed to capture long-range dependencies, thus remedying severe local artifacts left in estimated coarse facial normals. Then, a refinement network is customized for the sake of mapping input face images together with corresponding exemplars to fine-grained high-quality facial normals. Such a logical function split can significantly cut the requirement of massive paired data and computational resource. Extensive experiments and ablation studies are conducted to demonstrate the efficacy of our design and reveal its superiority over state-of-the-art methods in terms of both training expense as well as estimation quality. Our code and models are open-sourced at: https://github.com/AutoHDR/FNR2R.git.
Abstract: Thyroid cancer is the most common endocrine malignancy, and its incidence is rising globally. While ultrasound is the preferred imaging modality for detecting thyroid nodules, its diagnostic accuracy is often limited by challenges such as low image contrast and blurred nodule boundaries. To address these issues, we propose Nodule-DETR, a novel detection transformer (DETR) architecture designed for robust thyroid nodule detection in ultrasound images. Nodule-DETR introduces three key innovations: a Multi-Spectral Frequency-domain Channel Attention (MSFCA) module that leverages frequency analysis to enhance features of low-contrast nodules; a Hierarchical Feature Fusion (HFF) module for efficient multi-scale integration; and Multi-Scale Deformable Attention (MSDA) to flexibly capture small and irregularly shaped nodules. We conducted extensive experiments on a clinical dataset of real-world thyroid ultrasound images. The results demonstrate that Nodule-DETR achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming the baseline model by a significant margin of 0.149 in mAP@0.5:0.95. The superior accuracy of Nodule-DETR highlights its significant potential for clinical application as an effective tool in computer-aided thyroid diagnosis. The code of work is available at https://github.com/wjj1wjj/Nodule-DETR.
Abstract: Existing text-driven infrared and visible image fusion approaches often rely on textual information at the sentence level, which can lead to semantic noise from redundant text and fail to fully exploit the deeper semantic value of textual information. To address these issues, we propose a novel fusion approach named Entity-Guided Multi-Task learning for infrared and visible image fusion (EGMT). Our approach includes three key innovative components: (i) A principled method is proposed to extract entity-level textual information from image captions generated by large vision-language models, eliminating semantic noise from raw text while preserving critical semantic information; (ii) A parallel multi-task learning architecture is constructed, which integrates image fusion with a multi-label classification task. By using entities as pseudo-labels, the multi-label classification task provides semantic supervision, enabling the model to achieve a deeper understanding of image content and significantly improving the quality and semantic density of the fused image; (iii) An entity-guided cross-modal interactive module is also developed to facilitate the fine-grained interaction between visual and entity-level textual features, which enhances feature representation by capturing cross-modal dependencies at both inter-visual and visual-entity levels. To promote the wide application of the entity-guided image fusion framework, we release the entity-annotated version of four public datasets (i.e., TNO, RoadScene, M3FD, and MSRS). Extensive experiments demonstrate that EGMT achieves superior performance in preserving salient targets, texture details, and semantic consistency, compared to the state-of-the-art methods. The code and dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/wyshao-01/EGMT.
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show promise for medical applications, yet progress in dermatology lags due to limited training data, narrow task coverage, and lack of clinically-grounded supervision that mirrors expert diagnostic workflows. We present a comprehensive framework to address these gaps. First, we introduce DermoInstruct, a large-scale morphology-anchored instruction corpus comprising 211,243 images and 772,675 trajectories across five task formats, capturing the complete diagnostic pipeline from morphological observation and clinical reasoning to final diagnosis. Second, we establish DermoBench, a rigorous benchmark evaluating 11 tasks across four clinical axes: Morphology, Diagnosis, Reasoning, and Fairness, including a challenging subset of 3,600 expert-verified open-ended instances and human performance baselines. Third, we develop DermoGPT, a dermatology reasoning MLLM trained via supervised fine-tuning followed by our Morphologically-Anchored Visual-Inference-Consistent (MAVIC) reinforcement learning objective, which enforces consistency between visual observations and diagnostic conclusions. At inference, we deploy Confidence-Consistency Test-time adaptation (CCT) for robust predictions. Experiments show DermoGPT significantly outperforms 16 representative baselines across all axes, achieving state-of-the-art performance while substantially narrowing the human-AI gap. DermoInstruct, DermoBench and DermoGPT will be made publicly available at https://github.com/mendicant04/DermoGPT upon acceptance.
Abstract: Feature-based anomaly detection is widely adopted in industrial inspection due to the strong representational power of large pre-trained vision encoders. While most existing methods focus on improving within-category anomaly scoring, practical deployments increasingly require task-agnostic operation under continual category expansion, where the category identity is unknown at test time. In this setting, overall performance is often dominated by expert selection, namely routing an input to an appropriate normality model before any head-specific scoring is applied. However, routing rules that compare head-specific anomaly scores across independently constructed heads are unreliable in practice, as score distributions can differ substantially across categories in scale and tail behavior. We propose GCR, a lightweight mixture-of-experts framework for stabilizing task-agnostic continual anomaly detection through geometry-consistent routing. GCR routes each test image directly in a shared frozen patch-embedding space by minimizing an accumulated nearest-prototype distance to category-specific prototype banks, and then computes anomaly maps only within the routed expert using a standard prototype-based scoring rule. By separating cross-head decision making from within-head anomaly scoring, GCR avoids cross-head score comparability issues without requiring end-to-end representation learning. Experiments on MVTec AD and VisA show that geometry-consistent routing substantially improves routing stability and mitigates continual performance collapse, achieving near-zero forgetting while maintaining competitive detection and localization performance. These results indicate that many failures previously attributed to representation forgetting can instead be explained by decision-rule instability in cross-head routing. Code is available at https://github.com/jw-chae/GCR
Abstract: Predicting the evolution of complex physical systems remains a central problem in science and engineering. Despite rapid progress in scientific Machine Learning (ML) models, a critical bottleneck is the lack of expensive real-world data, resulting in most current models being trained and validated on simulated data. Beyond limiting the development and evaluation of scientific ML, this gap also hinders research into essential tasks such as sim-to-real transfer. We introduce RealPDEBench, the first benchmark for scientific ML that integrates real-world measurements with paired numerical simulations. RealPDEBench consists of five datasets, three tasks, eight metrics, and ten baselines. We first present five real-world measured datasets with paired simulated datasets across different complex physical systems. We further define three tasks, which allow comparisons between real-world and simulated data, and facilitate the development of methods to bridge the two. Moreover, we design eight evaluation metrics, spanning data-oriented and physics-oriented metrics, and finally benchmark ten representative baselines, including state-of-the-art models, pretrained PDE foundation models, and a traditional method. Experiments reveal significant discrepancies between simulated and real-world data, while showing that pretraining with simulated data consistently improves both accuracy and convergence. In this work, we hope to provide insights from real-world data, advancing scientific ML toward bridging the sim-to-real gap and real-world deployment. Our benchmark, datasets, and instructions are available at https://realpdebench.github.io/.
Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods have become a dominant paradigm for creating general purpose models whose capabilities can be transferred to downstream supervised learning tasks. However, most such methods rely on vast amounts of pretraining data. This work introduces Subimage Overlap Prediction, a novel self-supervised pretraining task to aid semantic segmentation in remote sensing imagery that uses significantly lesser pretraining imagery. Given an image, a sub-image is extracted and the model is trained to produce a semantic mask of the location of the extracted sub-image within the original image. We demonstrate that pretraining with this task results in significantly faster convergence, and equal or better performance (measured via mIoU) on downstream segmentation. This gap in convergence and performance widens when labeled training data is reduced. We show this across multiple architecture types, and with multiple downstream datasets. We also show that our method matches or exceeds performance while requiring significantly lesser pretraining data relative to other SSL methods. Code and model weights are provided at \href{https://github.com/sharmalakshay93/subimage-overlap-prediction}{github.com/sharmalakshay93/subimage-overlap-prediction}.
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a clinical diagnosis template-based pipeline to systematically collect and structure pathological information. In collaboration with pathologists and guided by the the College of American Pathologists (CAP) Cancer Protocols, we design a Clinical Pathology Report Template (CPRT) that ensures comprehensive and standardized extraction of diagnostic elements from pathology reports. We validate the effectiveness of our pipeline on TCGA-BRCA. First, we extract pathological features from reports using CPRT. These features are then used to build CTIS-Align, a dataset of 80k slide-description pairs from 804 WSIs for vision-language alignment training, and CTIS-Bench, a rigorously curated VQA benchmark comprising 977 WSIs and 14,879 question-answer pairs. CTIS-Bench emphasizes clinically grounded, closed-ended questions (e.g., tumor grade, receptor status) that reflect real diagnostic workflows, minimize non-visual reasoning, and require genuine slide understanding. We further propose CTIS-QA, a Slide-level Question Answering model, featuring a dual-stream architecture that mimics pathologists' diagnostic approach. One stream captures global slide-level context via clustering-based feature aggregation, while the other focuses on salient local regions through attention-guided patch perception module. Extensive experiments on WSI-VQA, CTIS-Bench, and slide-level diagnostic tasks show that CTIS-QA consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art models across multiple metrics. Code and data are available at https://github.com/HLSvois/CTIS-QA.
Abstract: Modern recommender systems trained on domain-specific data often struggle to generalize across multiple domains. Cross-domain sequential recommendation has emerged as a promising research direction to address this challenge; however, existing approaches face fundamental limitations, such as reliance on overlapping users or items across domains, or unrealistic assumptions that ignore privacy constraints. In this work, we propose a new framework, MergeRec, based on model merging under a new and realistic problem setting termed data-isolated cross-domain sequential recommendation, where raw user interaction data cannot be shared across domains. MergeRec consists of three key components: (1) merging initialization, (2) pseudo-user data construction, and (3) collaborative merging optimization. First, we initialize a merged model using training-free merging techniques. Next, we construct pseudo-user data by treating each item as a virtual sequence in each domain, enabling the synthesis of meaningful training samples without relying on real user interactions. Finally, we optimize domain-specific merging weights through a joint objective that combines a recommendation loss, which encourages the merged model to identify relevant items, and a distillation loss, which transfers collaborative filtering signals from the fine-tuned source models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MergeRec not only preserves the strengths of the original models but also significantly enhances generalizability to unseen domains. Compared to conventional model merging methods, MergeRec consistently achieves superior performance, with average improvements of up to 17.21% in Recall@10, highlighting the potential of model merging as a scalable and effective approach for building universal recommender systems. The source code is available at https://github.com/DIALLab-SKKU/MergeRec.
Abstract: We introduce Yuan3.0 Flash, an open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) MultiModal Large Language Model featuring 3.7B activated parameters and 40B total parameters, specifically designed to enhance performance on enterprise-oriented tasks while maintaining competitive capabilities on general-purpose tasks. To address the overthinking phenomenon commonly observed in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), we propose Reflection-aware Adaptive Policy Optimization (RAPO), a novel RL training algorithm that effectively regulates overthinking behaviors. In enterprise-oriented tasks such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), complex table understanding, and summarization, Yuan3.0 Flash consistently achieves superior performance. Moreover, it also demonstrates strong reasoning capabilities in domains such as mathematics, science, etc., attaining accuracy comparable to frontier model while requiring only approximately 1/4 to 1/2 of the average tokens. Yuan3.0 Flash has been fully open-sourced to facilitate further research and real-world deployment: https://github.com/Yuan-lab-LLM/Yuan3.0.
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) transition to autonomous agents synthesizing real-time information, their reasoning capabilities introduce an unexpected attack surface. This paper introduces a novel threat where colluding agents steer victim beliefs using only truthful evidence fragments distributed through public channels, without relying on covert communications, backdoors, or falsified documents. By exploiting LLMs' overthinking tendency, we formalize the first cognitive collusion attack and propose Generative Montage: a Writer-Editor-Director framework that constructs deceptive narratives through adversarial debate and coordinated posting of evidence fragments, causing victims to internalize and propagate fabricated conclusions. To study this risk, we develop CoPHEME, a dataset derived from real-world rumor events, and simulate attacks across diverse LLM families. Our results show pervasive vulnerability across 14 LLM families: attack success rates reach 74.4% for proprietary models and 70.6% for open-weights models. Counterintuitively, stronger reasoning capabilities increase susceptibility, with reasoning-specialized models showing higher attack success than base models or prompts. Furthermore, these false beliefs then cascade to downstream judges, achieving over 60% deception rates, highlighting a socio-technical vulnerability in how LLM-based agents interact with dynamic information environments. Our implementation and data are available at: https://github.com/CharlesJW222/Lying_with_Truth/tree/main.
Abstract: LLM-based reasoning models have enabled the development of agentic systems that act as co-scientists, assisting in multi-step scientific analysis. However, evaluating these systems is challenging, as it requires realistic, end-to-end research scenarios that integrate data analysis, interpretation, and the generation of new insights from the experimental data. To address this limitation, we introduce HeurekaBench, a framework to create benchmarks with exploratory, open-ended research questions for experimental datasets. Each such question is grounded in a scientific study and its corresponding code repository, and is created using a semi-automated pipeline that leverages multiple LLMs to extract insights and generate candidate workflows, which are then verified against reported findings. We instantiate the framework in single-cell biology to obtain sc-HeurekaBench benchmark and use it to compare state-of-the-art single-cell agents. We further showcase the benefits of our benchmark for quantitatively analyzing current design choices in agentic systems. We find that the addition of a critic module can improve ill-formed responses for open-source LLM-based agents by up to 22% and close the gap with their closed-source counterparts. Overall, HeurekaBench sets a path toward rigorous, end-to-end evaluation of scientific agents, grounding benchmark construction in real scientific workflows.
Abstract: In recent decades, the intensification of wildfire activity in western Canada has resulted in substantial socio-economic and environmental losses. Accurate wildfire risk prediction is hindered by the intrinsic stochasticity of ignition and spread and by nonlinear interactions among fuel conditions, meteorology, climate variability, topography, and human activities, challenging the reliability and interpretability of purely data-driven models. We propose a trustworthy data-driven wildfire risk prediction framework based on long-sequence, multi-scale temporal modeling, which integrates heterogeneous drivers while explicitly quantifying predictive uncertainty and enabling process-level interpretation. Evaluated over western Canada during the record-breaking 2023 and 2024 fire seasons, the proposed model outperforms existing time-series approaches, achieving an F1 score of 0.90 and a PR-AUC of 0.98 with low computational cost. Uncertainty-aware analysis reveals structured spatial and seasonal patterns in predictive confidence, highlighting increased uncertainty associated with ambiguous predictions and spatiotemporal decision boundaries. SHAP-based interpretation provides mechanistic understanding of wildfire controls, showing that temperature-related drivers dominate wildfire risk in both years, while moisture-related constraints play a stronger role in shaping spatial and land-cover-specific contrasts in 2024 compared to the widespread hot and dry conditions of 2023. Data and code are available at https://github.com/SynUW/mmFire.
Abstract: Detecting objects in 3D space from monocular input is crucial for applications ranging from robotics to scene understanding. Despite advanced performance in the indoor and autonomous driving domains, existing monocular 3D detection models struggle with in-the-wild images due to the lack of 3D in-the-wild datasets and the challenges of 3D annotation. We introduce LabelAny3D, an \emph{analysis-by-synthesis} framework that reconstructs holistic 3D scenes from 2D images to efficiently produce high-quality 3D bounding box annotations. Built on this pipeline, we present COCO3D, a new benchmark for open-vocabulary monocular 3D detection, derived from the MS-COCO dataset and covering a wide range of object categories absent from existing 3D datasets. Experiments show that annotations generated by LabelAny3D improve monocular 3D detection performance across multiple benchmarks, outperforming prior auto-labeling approaches in quality. These results demonstrate the promise of foundation-model-driven annotation for scaling up 3D recognition in realistic, open-world settings.
Abstract: We present a method for consistent lighting and shadows when animated 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) avatars interact with 3DGS scenes or with dynamic objects inserted into otherwise static scenes. Our key contribution is Deep Gaussian Shadow Maps (DGSM), a modern analogue of the classical shadow mapping algorithm tailored to the volumetric 3DGS representation. Building on the classic deep shadow mapping idea, we show that 3DGS admits closed form light accumulation along light rays, enabling volumetric shadow computation without meshing. For each estimated light, we tabulate transmittance over concentric radial shells and store them in octahedral atlases, which modern GPUs can sample in real time per query to attenuate affected scene Gaussians and thus cast and receive shadows consistently. To relight moving avatars, we approximate the local environment illumination with HDRI probes represented in a spherical harmonic (SH) basis and apply a fast per Gaussian radiance transfer, avoiding explicit BRDF estimation or offline optimization. We demonstrate environment consistent lighting for avatars from AvatarX and ActorsHQ, composited into ScanNet++, DL3DV, and SuperSplat scenes, and show interactions with inserted objects. Across single and multi avatar settings, DGSM and SH relighting operate fully in the volumetric 3DGS representation, yielding coherent shadows and relighting while avoiding meshing.
Abstract: Upscaling is central to offshore wind's cost-reduction strategy, with increasingly large rotors and nacelles requiring taller and stronger towers. In Floating Offshore Wind Turbines (FOWTs), this trend amplifies fatigue loads due to coupled wind-wave dynamics and platform motion. Conventional fatigue evaluation requires millions of high-fidelity simulations, creating prohibitive computational costs and slowing design innovation. This paper presents FLOAT (Fatigue-aware Lightweight Optimization and Analysis for Towers), a framework that accelerates fatigue-aware tower design. It integrates three key contributions: a lightweight fatigue estimation method that enables efficient optimization, a Monte Carlo-based probabilistic wind-wave sampling approach that reduces required simulations, and enhanced high-fidelity modeling through pitch/heave-platform calibration and High-Performance Computing execution. The framework is applied to the IEA 22 MW FOWT tower, delivering, to the authors' knowledge, the first fatigue-oriented redesign of this benchmark model: FLOAT 22 MW FOWT tower. Validation against 6,468 simulations shows that the optimized tower extends the estimated fatigue life from 9 months to 25 years while avoiding resonance, and that the lightweight fatigue estimator provides conservative predictions with a mean relative error of -8.6%. Achieving this lifetime requires increased tower mass, yielding the lowest-mass fatigue-compliant design. All results and the reported lifetime extension are obtained within the considered fatigue scope (DLC 1.2, aligned wind-wave conditions). By reducing simulation requirements by orders of magnitude, FLOAT enables reliable and scalable tower design for next-generation FOWTs, bridging industrial needs and academic research while generating high-fidelity datasets that can support data-driven and AI-assisted design methodologies.
Abstract: Accurate crop yield prediction relies on diverse data streams, including satellite, meteorological, soil, and topographic information. However, despite rapid advances in machine learning, existing approaches remain crop- or region-specific and require data engineering efforts. This limits scalability, reproducibility, and operational deployment. This study introduces UniCrop, a universal and reusable data pipeline designed to automate the acquisition, cleaning, harmonisation, and engineering of multi-source environmental data for crop yield prediction. For any given location, crop type, and temporal window, UniCrop automatically retrieves, harmonises, and engineers over 200 environmental variables (Sentinel-1/2, MODIS, ERA5-Land, NASA POWER, SoilGrids, and SRTM), reducing them to a compact, analysis-ready feature set utilising a structured feature reduction workflow with minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR). To validate, UniCrop was applied to a rice yield dataset comprising 557 field observations. Using only the selected 15 features, four baseline machine learning models (LightGBM, Random Forest, Support Vector Regression, and Elastic Net) were trained. LightGBM achieved the best single-model performance (RMSE = 465.1 kg/ha, $R^2 = 0.6576$), while a constrained ensemble of all baselines further improved accuracy (RMSE = 463.2 kg/ha, $R^2 = 0.6604$). UniCrop contributes a scalable and transparent data-engineering framework that addresses the primary bottleneck in operational crop yield modelling: the preparation of consistent and harmonised multi-source data. By decoupling data specification from implementation and supporting any crop, region, and time frame through simple configuration updates, UniCrop provides a practical foundation for scalable agricultural analytics. The code and implementation documentation are shared in https://github.com/CoDIS-Lab/UniCrop.
Abstract: We examine two properties of AI systems: capability (what a system can do) and steerability (how reliably one can shift behavior toward intended outcomes). A central question is whether capability growth reduces steerability and risks control collapse. We also distinguish between authorized steerability (builders reliably reaching intended behaviors) and unauthorized steerability (attackers eliciting disallowed behaviors). This distinction highlights a fundamental safety--security dilemma of AI models: safety requires high steerability to enforce control (e.g., stop/refuse), while security requires low steerability for malicious actors to elicit harmful behaviors. This tension presents a significant challenge for open-weight models, which currently exhibit high steerability via common techniques like fine-tuning or adversarial attacks. Using Qwen3 and InstrumentalEval, we find that a short anti-instrumental prompt suffix sharply reduces the measured convergence rate (e.g., shutdown avoidance, self-replication). For Qwen3-30B Instruct, the convergence rate drops from 81.69% under a pro-instrumental suffix to 2.82% under an anti-instrumental suffix. Under anti-instrumental prompting, larger aligned models show lower convergence rates than smaller ones (Instruct: 2.82% vs. 4.23%; Thinking: 4.23% vs. 9.86%). Code is available at github.com/j-hoscilowicz/instrumental_steering.
Abstract: Flexible image tokenizers aim to represent an image using an ordered 1D variable-length token sequence. This flexible tokenization is typically achieved through nested dropout, where a portion of trailing tokens is randomly truncated during training, and the image is reconstructed using the remaining preceding sequence. However, this tail-truncation strategy inherently concentrates the image information in the early tokens, limiting the effectiveness of downstream AutoRegressive (AR) image generation as the token length increases. To overcome these limitations, we propose \textbf{ReToK}, a flexible tokenizer with \underline{Re}dundant \underline{Tok}en Padding and Hierarchical Semantic Regularization, designed to fully exploit all tokens for enhanced latent modeling. Specifically, we introduce \textbf{Redundant Token Padding} to activate tail tokens more frequently, thereby alleviating information over-concentration in the early tokens. In addition, we apply \textbf{Hierarchical Semantic Regularization} to align the decoding features of earlier tokens with those from a pre-trained vision foundation model, while progressively reducing the regularization strength toward the tail to allow finer low-level detail reconstruction. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ReTok: on ImageNet 256$\times$256, our method achieves superior generation performance compared with both flexible and fixed-length tokenizers. Code will be available at: \href{https://github.com/zfu006/ReTok}{https://github.com/zfu006/ReTok}
Abstract: Visual Grounding (VG), which aims to locate a specific region referred to by expressions, is a fundamental yet challenging task in the multimodal understanding fields. While recent grounding transfer works have advanced the field through one-tower architectures, they still suffer from two primary limitations: (1) over-entangled multimodal representations that exacerbate deceptive modality biases, and (2) insufficient semantic reasoning that hinders the comprehension of referential cues. In this paper, we propose BARE, a bias-aware and reasoning-enhanced framework for one-tower visual grounding. BARE introduces a mechanism that preserves modality-specific features and constructs referential semantics through three novel modules: (i) language salience modulator, (ii) visual bias correction and (iii) referential relationship enhancement, which jointly mitigate multimodal distractions and enhance referential comprehension. Extensive experimental results on five benchmarks demonstrate that BARE not only achieves state-of-the-art performance but also delivers superior computational efficiency compared to existing approaches. The code is publicly accessible at https://github.com/Marloweeee/BARE.
Abstract: Diffusion inversion is a task of recovering the noise of an image in a diffusion model, which is vital for controllable diffusion image editing. At present, diffusion inversion still remains a challenging task due to the lack of viable supervision signals. Thus, most existing methods resort to approximation-based solutions, which however are often at the cost of performance or efficiency. To remedy these shortcomings, we propose a novel self-supervised diffusion inversion approach in this paper, termed Deep Inversion (DeepInv). Instead of requiring ground-truth noise annotations, we introduce a self-supervised objective as well as a data augmentation strategy to generate high-quality pseudo noises from real images without manual intervention. Based on these two innovative designs, DeepInv is also equipped with an iterative and multi-scale training regime to train a parameterized inversion solver, thereby achieving the fast and accurate image-to-noise mapping. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt of presenting a trainable solver to predict inversion noise step by step. The extensive experiments show that our DeepInv can achieve much better performance and inference speed than the compared methods, e.g., +40.435% SSIM than EasyInv and +9887.5% speed than ReNoise on COCO dataset. Moreover, our careful designs of trainable solvers can also provide insights to the community. Codes and model parameters will be released in https://github.com/potato-kitty/DeepInv.
Abstract: Despite progress in deep learning for Alzheimer's disease (AD) diagnostics, models trained on structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) often do not perform well when applied to new cohorts due to domain shifts from varying scanners, protocols and patient demographics. AD, the primary driver of dementia, manifests through progressive cognitive and neuroanatomical changes like atrophy and ventricular expansion, making robust, generalizable classification essential for real-world use. While convolutional neural networks and transformers have advanced feature extraction via attention and fusion techniques, single-domain generalization (SDG) remains underexplored yet critical, given the fragmented nature of AD datasets. To bridge this gap, we introduce Extended MixStyle (EM), a framework for blending higher-order feature moments (skewness and kurtosis) to mimic diverse distributional variations. Trained on sMRI data from the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center (NACC; n=4,647) to differentiate persons with normal cognition (NC) from those with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or AD and tested on three unseen cohorts (total n=3,126), EM yields enhanced cross-domain performance, improving macro-F1 on average by 2.4 percentage points over state-of-the-art SDG benchmarks, underscoring its promise for invariant, reliable AD detection in heterogeneous real-world settings. The source code will be made available upon acceptance at https://github.com/zobia111/Extended-Mixstyle.
Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved breakthroughs in various real-world downstream tasks due to their powerful expressiveness. As the scale of real-world graphs has been continuously growing, a storage-based approach to GNN training has been studied, which leverages external storage (e.g., NVMe SSDs) to handle such web-scale graphs on a single machine. Although such storage-based GNN training methods have shown promising potential in large-scale GNN training, we observed that they suffer from a severe bottleneck in data preparation since they overlook a critical challenge: how to handle a large number of small storage I/Os. To address the challenge, in this paper, we propose a novel storage-based GNN training framework, named AGNES, that employs a method of block-wise storage I/O processing to fully utilize the I/O bandwidth of high-performance storage devices. Moreover, to further enhance the efficiency of each storage I/O, AGNES employs a simple yet effective strategy, hyperbatch-based processing based on the characteristics of real-world graphs. Comprehensive experiments on five real-world graphs reveal that AGNES consistently outperforms four state-of-the-art methods, by up to 4.1X faster than the best competitor. Our code is available at https://github.com/Bigdasgit/agnes-kdd26.
Abstract: The INTERSPEECH 2025 Challenge on Multilingual Conversational Speech Language Models (MLC-SLM) promotes multilingual conversational ASR with large language models (LLMs). Our previous SHNU-mASR system adopted a competitive parallel-speech-encoder architecture that integrated Whisper and mHuBERT with an LLM. However, it faced two challenges: simple feature concatenation may not fully exploit complementary information, and the performance gap between LLM-based ASR and end-to-end(E2E) encoder-decoder ASR remained unexplored. In this work, we present an enhanced LLM-based ASR framework that combines fine-tuned Whisper and mHuBERT encoders with an LLM to enrich speech representations. We first evaluate E2E Whisper models with LoRA and full fine-tuning on the MLC-SLM ASR task, and then propose cross-attention-based fusion mechanisms for the parallel-speech-encoder. On the official evaluation set of the MLC-SLM Challenge, our system achieves a CER/WER of 10.69%, ranking on par with the top-ranked Track 1 systems, even though it uses only 1,500 hours of baseline training data compared with their large-scale training sets. Nonetheless, we find that our final LLM-based ASR still does not match the performance of a fine-tuned E2E Whisper model, providing valuable empirical guidance for future Speech-LLM design. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/1535176727/MLC-SLM.
Abstract: In this paper, we revisit multimodal few-shot 3D point cloud semantic segmentation (FS-PCS), identifying a conflict in "Fuse-then-Refine" paradigms: the "Plasticity-Stability Dilemma." In addition, CLIP's inter-class confusion can result in semantic blindness. To address these issues, we present the Decoupled-experts Arbitration Few-Shot SegNet (DA-FSS), a model that effectively distinguishes between semantic and geometric paths and mutually regularizes their gradients to achieve better generalization. DA-FSS employs the same backbone and pre-trained text encoder as MM-FSS to generate text embeddings, which can increase free modalities' utilization rate and better leverage each modality's information space. To achieve this, we propose a Parallel Expert Refinement module to generate each modal correlation. We also propose a Stacked Arbitration Module (SAM) to perform convolutional fusion and arbitrate correlations for each modality pathway. The Parallel Experts decouple two paths: a Geometric Expert maintains plasticity, and a Semantic Expert ensures stability. They are coordinated via a Decoupled Alignment Module (DAM) that transfers knowledge without propagating confusion. Experiments on popular datasets (S3DIS, ScanNet) demonstrate the superiority of DA-FSS over MM-FSS. Meanwhile, geometric boundaries, completeness, and texture differentiation are all superior to the baseline. The code is available at: https://github.com/MoWenQAQ/DA-FSS.
Abstract: To address the scarcity of high-quality part annotations in existing datasets, we introduce PartImageNet++ (PIN++), a dataset that provides detailed part annotations for all categories in ImageNet-1K. With 100 annotated images per category, totaling 100K images, PIN++ represents the most comprehensive dataset covering a diverse range of object categories. Leveraging PIN++, we propose a Multi-scale Part-supervised recognition Model (MPM) for robust classification on ImageNet-1K. We first trained a part segmentation network using PIN++ and used it to generate pseudo part labels for the remaining unannotated images. MPM then integrated a conventional recognition architecture with auxiliary bypass layers, jointly supervised by both pseudo part labels and the original part annotations. Furthermore, we conducted extensive experiments on PIN++, including part segmentation, object segmentation, and few-shot learning, exploring various ways to leverage part annotations in downstream tasks. Experimental results demonstrated that our approach not only enhanced part-based models for robust object recognition but also established strong baselines for multiple downstream tasks, highlighting the potential of part annotations in improving model performance. The dataset and the code are available at https://github.com/LixiaoTHU/PartImageNetPP.
Abstract: Dynamic graphs model many real-world applications, and as their sizes grow, efficiently storing and updating them becomes critical. We present RadixGraph, a fast and memory-efficient data structure for dynamic graph storage. RadixGraph features a carefully designed radix-tree-based vertex index that strikes an optimal trade-off between query efficiency and space among all pointer-array-based radix trees. For edge storage, it employs a hybrid snapshot-log architecture that enables amortized $O(1)$ update time. RadixGraph supports millions of concurrent updates per second while maintaining competitive performance for graph analytics. Experimental results show that RadixGraph outperforms the most performant baseline by up to $16.27\times$ across various datasets in ingesting graph updates, and reduces memory usage by an average of $40.1\%$. RadixGraph is open-source at https://github.com/ForwardStar/RadixGraph.
Abstract: Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) achieve remarkable performance in dense multi-view scenarios, but their reconstruction quality degrades significantly under sparse inputs due to geometric artifacts. Existing methods utilize global depth regularization to mitigate artifacts, leading to the loss of geometric boundary details. To address this problem, we propose EdgeNeRF, an edge-guided sparse-view 3D reconstruction algorithm. Our method leverages the prior that abrupt changes in depth and normals generate edges. Specifically, we first extract edges from input images, then apply depth and normal regularization constraints to non-edge regions, enhancing geometric consistency while preserving high-frequency details at boundaries. Experiments on LLFF and DTU datasets demonstrate EdgeNeRF's superior performance, particularly in retaining sharp geometric boundaries and suppressing artifacts. Additionally, the proposed edge-guided depth regularization module can be seamlessly integrated into other methods in a plug-and-play manner, significantly improving their performance without substantially increasing training time. Code is available at https://github.com/skyhigh404/edgenerf.
Abstract: We present SWE-Lego, a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) recipe designed to achieve state-ofthe-art performance in software engineering (SWE) issue resolving. In contrast to prevalent methods that rely on complex training paradigms (e.g., mid-training, SFT, reinforcement learning, and their combinations), we explore how to push the limits of a lightweight SFT-only approach for SWE tasks. SWE-Lego comprises three core building blocks, with key findings summarized as follows: 1) the SWE-Lego dataset, a collection of 32k highquality task instances and 18k validated trajectories, combining real and synthetic data to complement each other in both quality and quantity; 2) a refined SFT procedure with error masking and a difficulty-based curriculum, which demonstrably improves action quality and overall performance. Empirical results show that with these two building bricks alone,the SFT can push SWE-Lego models to state-of-the-art performance among open-source models of comparable size on SWE-bench Verified: SWE-Lego-Qwen3-8B reaches 42.2%, and SWE-Lego-Qwen3-32B attains 52.6%. 3) We further evaluate and improve test-time scaling (TTS) built upon the SFT foundation. Based on a well-trained verifier, SWE-Lego models can be significantly boosted--for example, 42.2% to 49.6% and 52.6% to 58.8% under TTS@16 for the 8B and 32B models, respectively.
Abstract: Video Face Swapping (VFS) requires seamlessly injecting a source identity into a target video while meticulously preserving the original pose, expression, lighting, background, and dynamic information. Existing methods struggle to maintain identity similarity and attribute preservation while preserving temporal consistency. To address the challenge, we propose a comprehensive framework to seamlessly transfer the superiority of Image Face Swapping (IFS) to the video domain. We first introduce a novel data pipeline SyncID-Pipe that pre-trains an Identity-Anchored Video Synthesizer and combines it with IFS models to construct bidirectional ID quadruplets for explicit supervision. Building upon paired data, we propose the first Diffusion Transformer-based framework DreamID-V, employing a core Modality-Aware Conditioning module to discriminatively inject multi-model conditions. Meanwhile, we propose a Synthetic-to-Real Curriculum mechanism and an Identity-Coherence Reinforcement Learning strategy to enhance visual realism and identity consistency under challenging scenarios. To address the issue of limited benchmarks, we introduce IDBench-V, a comprehensive benchmark encompassing diverse scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate DreamID-V outperforms state-of-the-art methods and further exhibits exceptional versatility, which can be seamlessly adapted to various swap-related tasks.
Abstract: Understanding the interaction of neural and cardiac systems during cognitive activity is critical to advancing physiological computing. Although EEG has been the gold standard for assessing mental workload, its limited portability restricts its real-world use. Widely available ECG through wearable devices proposes a pragmatic alternative. This research investigates whether ECG signals can reliably reflect cognitive load and serve as proxies for EEG-based indicators. In this work, we present multimodal data acquired from two different paradigms involving working-memory and passive-listening tasks. For each modality, we extracted ECG time-domain HRV metrics and Catch22 descriptors against EEG spectral and Catch22 features, respectively. We propose a cross-modal XGBoost framework to project the ECG features onto EEG-representative cognitive spaces, thereby allowing workload inferences using only ECG. Our results show that ECG-derived projections expressively capture variation in cognitive states and provide good support for accurate classification. Our findings underpin ECG as an interpretable, real-time, wearable solution for everyday cognitive monitoring.
Abstract: Despite notable advancements in remote sensing vision-language models (VLMs), existing models often struggle with spatial understanding, limiting their effectiveness in real-world applications. To push the boundaries of VLMs in remote sensing, we specifically address vehicle imagery captured by drones and introduce a spatially-aware dataset AirSpatial, which comprises over 206K instructions and introduces two novel tasks: Spatial Grounding and Spatial Question Answering. It is also the first remote sensing grounding dataset to provide 3DBB. To effectively leverage existing image understanding of VLMs to spatial domains, we adopt a two-stage training strategy comprising Image Understanding Pre-training and Spatial Understanding Fine-tuning. Utilizing this trained spatially-aware VLM, we develop an aerial agent, AirSpatialBot, which is capable of fine-grained vehicle attribute recognition and retrieval. By dynamically integrating task planning, image understanding, spatial understanding, and task execution capabilities, AirSpatialBot adapts to diverse query requirements. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our approach, revealing the spatial limitations of existing VLMs while providing valuable insights. The model, code, and datasets will be released at https://github.com/VisionXLab/AirSpatialBot
Abstract: Face super-resolution aims to recover high-quality facial images from severely degraded low-resolution inputs, but remains challenging due to the loss of fine structural details and identity-specific features. This work introduces SwinIFS, a landmark-guided super-resolution framework that integrates structural priors with hierarchical attention mechanisms to achieve identity-preserving reconstruction at both moderate and extreme upscaling factors. The method incorporates dense Gaussian heatmaps of key facial landmarks into the input representation, enabling the network to focus on semantically important facial regions from the earliest stages of processing. A compact Swin Transformer backbone is employed to capture long-range contextual information while preserving local geometry, allowing the model to restore subtle facial textures and maintain global structural consistency. Extensive experiments on the CelebA benchmark demonstrate that SwinIFS achieves superior perceptual quality, sharper reconstructions, and improved identity retention; it consistently produces more photorealistic results and exhibits strong performance even under 8x magnification, where most methods fail to recover meaningful structure. SwinIFS also provides an advantageous balance between reconstruction accuracy and computational efficiency, making it suitable for real-world applications in facial enhancement, surveillance, and digital restoration. Our code, model weights, and results are available at https://github.com/Habiba123-stack/SwinIFS.
Abstract: Parking is a critical task for autonomous driving systems (ADS), with unique challenges in crowded parking slots and GPS-denied environments. However, existing works focus on 2D parking slot perception, mapping, and localization, 3D reconstruction remains underexplored, which is crucial for capturing complex spatial geometry in parking scenarios. Naively improving the visual quality of reconstructed parking scenes does not directly benefit autonomous parking, as the key entry point for parking is the slots perception module. To address these limitations, we curate the first benchmark named ParkRecon3D, specifically designed for parking scene reconstruction. It includes sensor data from four surround-view fisheye cameras with calibrated extrinsics and dense parking slot annotations. We then propose ParkGaussian, the first framework that integrates 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for parking scene reconstruction. To further improve the alignment between reconstruction and downstream parking slot detection, we introduce a slot-aware reconstruction strategy that leverages existing parking perception methods to enhance the synthesis quality of slot regions. Experiments on ParkRecon3D demonstrate that ParkGaussian achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality and better preserves perception consistency for downstream tasks. The code and dataset will be released at: https://github.com/wm-research/ParkGaussian
Abstract: The development of audio foundation models has accelerated rapidly since the emergence of GPT-4o. However, the lack of comprehensive evaluation has become a critical bottleneck for further progress in the field, particularly in audio generation. Current audio evaluation faces three major challenges: (1) audio evaluation lacks a unified framework, with datasets and code scattered across various sources, hindering fair and efficient cross-model comparison;(2) audio codecs, as a key component of audio foundation models, lack a widely accepted and holistic evaluation methodology; (3) existing speech benchmarks are heavily reliant on English, making it challenging to objectively assess models' performance on Chinese. To address the first issue, we introduce UltraEval-Audio, a unified evaluation framework for audio foundation models, specifically designed for both audio understanding and generation tasks. UltraEval-Audio features a modular architecture, supporting 10 languages and 14 core task categories, while seamlessly integrating 24 mainstream models and 36 authoritative benchmarks. To enhance research efficiency, the framework provides a one-command evaluation feature, accompanied by real-time public leaderboards. For the second challenge, UltraEval-Audio adopts a novel comprehensive evaluation scheme for audio codecs, evaluating performance across three key dimensions: semantic accuracy, timbre fidelity, and acoustic quality. To address the third issue, we propose two new Chinese benchmarks, SpeechCMMLU and SpeechHSK, designed to assess Chinese knowledge proficiency and language fluency. We wish that UltraEval-Audio will provide both academia and industry with a transparent, efficient, and fair platform for comparison of audio models. Our code, benchmarks, and leaderboards are available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/UltraEval-Audio.
Abstract: With the rapid adoption of multimodal large language models (MLMs) in autonomous agents, cross-platform task execution capabilities in educational settings have garnered significant attention. However, existing benchmark frameworks still exhibit notable deficiencies in supporting cross-platform tasks in educational contexts, especially when dealing with school-specific software (such as XiaoYa Intelligent Assistant, HuaShi XiaZi, etc.), where the efficiency of agents often significantly decreases due to a lack of understanding of the structural specifics of these private-domain software. Additionally, current evaluation methods heavily rely on coarse-grained metrics like goal orientation or trajectory matching, making it challenging to capture the detailed execution and efficiency of agents in complex tasks. To address these issues, we propose KGCE (Knowledge-Augmented Dual-Graph Evaluator for Cross-Platform Educational Agent Benchmarking with Multimodal Language Models), a novel benchmarking platform that integrates knowledge base enhancement and a dual-graph evaluation framework. We first constructed a dataset comprising 104 education-related tasks, covering Windows, Android, and cross-platform collaborative tasks. KGCE introduces a dual-graph evaluation framework that decomposes tasks into multiple sub-goals and verifies their completion status, providing fine-grained evaluation metrics. To overcome the execution bottlenecks of existing agents in private-domain tasks, we developed an enhanced agent system incorporating a knowledge base specific to school-specific software. The code can be found at https://github.com/Kinginlife/KGCE.
Abstract: Scaling sequence modeling to extreme contexts requires balancing computational efficiency with representational expressivity. While Transformers provide precise retrieval via the attention mechanism, their quadratic $\mathcal{O}(T^2)$ complexity limits their application to long-horizon tasks. In this work, we propose the \textbf{Spectral-Window Hybrid (SWH)}, an architecture that decouples sequence modeling into two \textit{parallel} streams: a global branch utilizing the Convolution Theorem to model long-range decay dynamics in $\mathcal{O}(T \log T)$ time, and a local branch employing sliding-window attention for token interactions within a bounded context. By aggregating these representations, SWH avoids the computational bottleneck of global attention while retaining local precision. We demonstrate that SWH matches the perplexity of standard Transformers on short contexts while enabling efficient linear scaling to extended sequences. The code is available at https://github.com/VladimerKhasia/SWH
Abstract: We introduce a recursive AlphaZero-style Monte--Carlo tree search algorithm, "RMCTS". The advantage of RMCTS over AlphaZero's MCTS-UCB is speed. In RMCTS, the search tree is explored in a breadth-first manner, so that network inferences naturally occur in large batches. This significantly reduces the GPU latency cost. We find that RMCTS is often more than 40 times faster than MCTS-UCB when searching a single root state, and about 3 times faster when searching a large batch of root states. The recursion in RMCTS is based on computing optimized posterior policies at each game state in the search tree, starting from the leaves and working back up to the root. Here we use the posterior policy explored in "Monte--Carlo tree search as regularized policy optimization" (Grill, et al.) Their posterior policy is the unique policy which maximizes the expected reward given estimated action rewards minus a penalty for diverging from the prior policy. The tree explored by RMCTS is not defined in an adaptive manner, as it is in MCTS-UCB. Instead, the RMCTS tree is defined by following prior network policies at each node. This is a disadvantage, but the speedup advantage is more significant, and in practice we find that RMCTS-trained networks match the quality of MCTS-UCB-trained networks in roughly one-third of the training time. We include timing and quality comparisons of RMCTS vs. MCTS-UCB for three games: Connect-4, Dots-and-Boxes, and Othello.
Abstract: Reinforcement learning from pixels is often bottlenecked by the performance and complexity of 3D rendered environments. Researchers face a trade-off between high-speed, low-level engines and slower, more accessible Python frameworks. To address this, we introduce PyBatchRender, a Python library for high-throughput, batched 3D rendering that achieves over 1 million FPS on simple scenes. Built on the Panda3D game engine, it utilizes its mature ecosystem while enhancing performance through optimized batched rendering for up to 1000X speedups. Designed as a physics-agnostic renderer for reinforcement learning from pixels, PyBatchRender offers greater flexibility than dedicated libraries, simpler setup than typical game-engine wrappers, and speeds rivaling state-of-the-art C++ engines like Madrona. Users can create custom scenes entirely in Python with tens of lines of code, enabling rapid prototyping for scalable AI training. Open-source and easy to integrate, it serves to democratize high-performance 3D simulation for researchers and developers. The library is available at https://github.com/dolphin-in-a-coma/PyBatchRender.
Abstract: Public bus transport systems in developing countries often suffer from a lack of real-time location updates and for users, making commuting inconvenient and unreliable for passengers. Furthermore, stopping at undesired locations rather than designated bus stops creates safety risks and contributes to roadblocks, often causing traffic congestion. Additionally, issues such as blind spots, along with a lack of following traffic laws, increase the chances of accidents. In this work, we address these challenges by proposing a smart public bus system along with intelligent bus stops that enhance safety, efficiency, and sustainability. Our approach includes a deep learning-based blind-spot warning system to help drivers avoid accidents with automated bus-stop detection to accurately identify bus stops, improving transit efficiency. We also introduce IoT-based solar-powered smart bus stops that show real-time passenger counts, along with an RFID-based card system to track where passengers board and exit. A smart door system ensures safer and more organised boarding, while real-time bus tracking keeps passengers informed. To connect all these features, we use an HTTP-based server for seamless communication between the interconnected network systems. Our proposed system demonstrated approximately 99% efficiency in real-time blind spot detection while stopping precisely at the bus stops. Furthermore, the server showed real-time location updates both to the users and at the bus stops, enhancing commuting efficiency. The proposed energy-efficient bus stop demonstrated 12.71kWh energy saving, promoting sustainable architecture. Full implementation and source code are available at: https://github.com/sadman-adib/MoveMe-IoT
Abstract: We present UniSH, a unified, feed-forward framework for joint metric-scale 3D scene and human reconstruction. A key challenge in this domain is the scarcity of large-scale, annotated real-world data, forcing a reliance on synthetic datasets. This reliance introduces a significant sim-to-real domain gap, leading to poor generalization, low-fidelity human geometry, and poor alignment on in-the-wild videos. To address this, we propose an innovative training paradigm that effectively leverages unlabeled in-the-wild data. Our framework bridges strong, disparate priors from scene reconstruction and HMR, and is trained with two core components: (1) a robust distillation strategy to refine human surface details by distilling high-frequency details from an expert depth model, and (2) a two-stage supervision scheme, which first learns coarse localization on synthetic data, then fine-tunes on real data by directly optimizing the geometric correspondence between the SMPL mesh and the human point cloud. This approach enables our feed-forward model to jointly recover high-fidelity scene geometry, human point clouds, camera parameters, and coherent, metric-scale SMPL bodies, all in a single forward pass. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on human-centric scene reconstruction and delivers highly competitive results on global human motion estimation, comparing favorably against both optimization-based frameworks and HMR-only methods. Project page: https://murphylmf.github.io/UniSH/
Abstract: Learning-based 3D visual geometry models have benefited substantially from large-scale transformers. Among these, StreamVGGT leverages frame-wise causal attention for strong streaming reconstruction, but suffers from unbounded KV cache growth, leading to escalating memory consumption and inference latency as input frames accumulate. We propose XStreamVGGT, a tuning-free approach that systematically compresses the KV cache through joint pruning and quantization, enabling extremely memory-efficient streaming inference. Specifically, redundant KVs originating from multi-view inputs are pruned through efficient token importance identification, enabling a fixed memory budget. Leveraging the unique distribution of KV tensors, we incorporate KV quantization to further reduce memory consumption. Extensive evaluations show that XStreamVGGT achieves mostly negligible performance degradation while substantially reducing memory usage by 4.42$\times$ and accelerating inference by 5.48$\times$, enabling scalable and practical streaming 3D applications. The code is available at https://github.com/ywh187/XStreamVGGT/.
Abstract: The unstructured and irregular nature of point clouds poses a significant challenge for objective quality assessment (PCQA), particularly in establishing accurate perceptual feature correspondence. To tackle this, we propose the Multi-scale Implicit Structural Similarity Measurement (MS-ISSM). Unlike traditional point-to-point matching, MS-ISSM utilizes Radial Basis Functions (RBF) to represent local features continuously, transforming distortion measurement into a comparison of implicit function coefficients. This approach effectively circumvents matching errors inherent in irregular data. Additionally, we propose a ResGrouped-MLP quality assessment network, which robustly maps multi-scale feature differences to perceptual scores. The network architecture departs from traditional flat MLPs by adopting a grouped encoding strategy integrated with Residual Blocks and Channel-wise Attention mechanisms. This hierarchical design allows the model to preserve the distinct physical semantics of luma, chroma, and geometry while adaptively focusing on the most salient distortion features across High, Medium, and Low scales. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that MS-ISSM outperforms state-of-the-art metrics in both reliability and generalization. The source code is available at: https://github.com/ZhangChen2022/MS-ISSM.
Abstract: Video Individual Counting (VIC) is a recently introduced task aiming to estimate pedestrian flux from a video. It extends Video Crowd Counting (VCC) beyond the per-frame pedestrian count. In contrast to VCC that learns to count pedestrians across frames, VIC must identify co-existent pedestrians between frames, which turns out to be a correspondence problem. Existing VIC approaches, however, can underperform in congested scenes such as metro commuting. To address this, we build WuhanMetroCrowd, one of the first VIC datasets that characterize crowded, dynamic pedestrian flows. It features sparse-to-dense density levels, short-to-long video clips, slow-to-fast flow variations, front-to-back appearance changes, and light-to-heavy occlusions. To better adapt VIC approaches to crowds, we rethink the nature of VIC and recognize two informative priors: i) the social grouping prior that indicates pedestrians tend to gather in groups and ii) the spatial-temporal displacement prior that informs an individual cannot teleport physically. The former inspires us to relax the standard one-to-one (O2O) matching used by VIC to one-to-many (O2M) matching, implemented by an implicit context generator and a O2M matcher; the latter facilitates the design of a displacement prior injector, which strengthens not only O2M matching but also feature extraction and model training. These designs jointly form a novel and strong VIC baseline OMAN++. Extensive experiments show that OMAN++ not only outperforms state-of-the-art VIC baselines on the standard SenseCrowd, CroHD, and MovingDroneCrowd benchmarks, but also indicates a clear advantage in crowded scenes, with a 38.12% error reduction on our WuhanMetroCrowd dataset. Code, data, and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/tiny-smart/OMAN.
Abstract: Semantic segmentation is a fundamental problem in computer vision and it requires high-resolution feature maps for dense prediction. Current coordinate-guided low-resolution feature interpolation methods, e.g., bilinear interpolation, produce coarse high-resolution features which suffer from feature misalignment and insufficient context information. Moreover, enriching semantics to high-resolution features requires a high computation burden, so that it is challenging to meet the requirement of lowlatency inference. We propose a novel Guided Attentive Interpolation (GAI) method to adaptively interpolate fine-grained high-resolution features with semantic features to tackle these issues. Guided Attentive Interpolation determines both spatial and semantic relations of pixels from features of different resolutions and then leverages these relations to interpolate high-resolution features with rich semantics. GAI can be integrated with any deep convolutional network for efficient semantic segmentation. In experiments, the GAI-based semantic segmentation networks, i.e., GAIN, can achieve78.8 mIoU with 22.3 FPS on Cityscapes and 80.6 mIoU with 64.5 on CamVid using an NVIDIA 1080Ti GPU, which are the new state-of-the-art results of low-latency semantic segmentation. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/hustvl/simpleseg.
Abstract: Categorical data are prevalent in domains such as healthcare, marketing, and bioinformatics, where clustering serves as a fundamental tool for pattern discovery. A core challenge in categorical data clustering lies in measuring similarity among attribute values that lack inherent ordering or distance. Without appropriate similarity measures, values are often treated as equidistant, creating a semantic gap that obscures latent structures and degrades clustering quality. Although existing methods infer value relationships from within-dataset co-occurrence patterns, such inference becomes unreliable when samples are limited, leaving the semantic context of the data underexplored. To bridge this gap, we present ARISE (Attention-weighted Representation with Integrated Semantic Embeddings), which draws on external semantic knowledge from Large Language Models (LLMs) to construct semantic-aware representations that complement the metric space of categorical data for accurate clustering. That is, LLM is adopted to describe attribute values for representation enhancement, and the LLM-enhanced embeddings are combined with the original data to explore semantically prominent clusters. Experiments on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over seven representative counterparts, with gains of 19-27%. Code is available at https://github.com/develop-yang/ARISE
Abstract: While one-step diffusion models have recently excelled in perceptual image compression, their application to video remains limited. Prior efforts typically rely on pretrained 2D autoencoders that generate per-frame latent representations independently, thereby neglecting temporal dependencies. We present YODA--Yet Another One-step Diffusion-based Video Compressor--which embeds multiscale features from temporal references for both latent generation and latent coding to better exploit spatial-temporal correlations for more compact representation, and employs a linear Diffusion Transformer (DiT) for efficient one-step denoising. YODA achieves state-of-the-art perceptual performance, consistently outperforming traditional and deep-learning baselines on LPIPS, DISTS, FID, and KID. Source code will be publicly available at https://github.com/NJUVISION/YODA.
Abstract: We present HAQAGen, a unified generative model for resolution-invariant NIR-to-RGB colorization that balances chromatic realism with structural fidelity. The proposed model introduces (i) a combined loss term aligning the global color statistics through differentiable histogram matching, perceptual image quality measure, and feature based similarity to preserve texture information, (ii) local hue-saturation priors injected via Spatially Adaptive Denormalization (SPADE) to stabilize chromatic reconstruction, and (iii) texture-aware supervision within a Mamba backbone to preserve fine details. We introduce an adaptive-resolution inference engine that further enables high-resolution translation without sacrificing quality. Our proposed NIR-to-RGB translation model simultaneously enforces global color statistics and local chromatic consistency, while scaling to native resolutions without compromising texture fidelity or generalization. Extensive evaluations on FANVID, OMSIV, VCIP2020, and RGB2NIR using different evaluation metrics demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art baseline methods. HAQAGen produces images with sharper textures, natural colors, attaining significant gains as per perceptual metrics. These results position HAQAGen as a scalable and effective solution for NIR-to-RGB translation across diverse imaging scenarios. Project Page: https://rajeev-dw9.github.io/HAQAGen/
Abstract: Quality diversity (QD) optimization searches for a collection of solutions that optimize an objective while attaining diverse outputs of a user-specified, vector-valued measure function. Contemporary QD algorithms focus on low-dimensional measures because high-dimensional measures are prone to distortion, where many solutions found by the QD algorithm map to similar measures. For example, the CMA-MAE algorithm guides measure space exploration with a histogram in measure space that records so-called discount values. However, CMA-MAE stagnates in domains with high-dimensional measure spaces because solutions with similar measures fall into the same histogram cell and thus receive identical discount values. To address these limitations, we propose Discount Model Search (DMS), which guides exploration with a model that provides a smooth, continuous representation of discount values. In high-dimensional measure spaces, this model enables DMS to distinguish between solutions with similar measures and thus continue exploration. We show that DMS facilitates new QD applications by introducing two domains where the measure space is the high-dimensional space of images, which enables users to specify their desired measures by providing a dataset of images rather than hand-designing the measure function. Results in these domains and on high-dimensional benchmarks show that DMS outperforms CMA-MAE and other black-box QD algorithms.
Abstract: We present SaddleScape V1.0, a Python software package designed for the exploration and construction of solution landscapes in complex systems. The package implements the High-index Saddle Dynamics (HiSD) framework and its variants, including the Generalized HiSD for non-gradient systems and the Accelerated HiSD. SaddleScape V1.0 enables the systematic identification of critical points, including both local minima and high-index saddle points, by dynamically updating both the state estimate and an associated subspace characterizing the saddle's local manifold. It supports both gradient systems, defined by energy functions/functionals, and general non-gradient autonomous dynamical systems. Key features include automatic differentiation for symbolic inputs, numerical approximation techniques for Hessian-vector products, diverse eigenvalue solvers, and algorithms for constructing solution landscapes. The software offers a user-friendly interface with flexible parameter configuration, tools for trajectory and landscape visualization, and data export capabilities. By providing an efficient and accessible implementation of advanced saddle dynamics, SaddleScape V1.0 facilitates the construction of solution landscapes, empowering researchers in various scientific disciplines to gain deeper insights into the hierarchical structure of complex systems. The source code is available at the repository https://github.com/HiSDpackage/saddlescape. The package's introductory website is available at https://hisdpackage.github.io/saddlescape.
Abstract: Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is essential across various disciplines for its capacity to capture rich spectral information. However, efficiently reconstructing hyperspectral images from compressive sensing measurements presents significant challenges. To tackle these, we adopt a divide-and-conquer strategy that capitalizes on the unique spectral and spatial characteristics of hyperspectral images. We introduce the Lightweight Separate Spectral Transformer (LSST), an innovative architecture tailored for efficient hyperspectral image reconstruction. This architecture consists of Separate Spectral Transformer Blocks (SSTB) for modeling spectral relationships and Lightweight Spatial Convolution Blocks (LSCB) for spatial processing. The SSTB employs Grouped Spectral Self-attention and a Spectrum Shuffle operation to effectively manage both local and non-local spectral relationships. Simultaneously, the LSCB utilizes depth-wise separable convolutions and strategic ordering to enhance spatial information processing. Furthermore, we implement the Focal Spectrum Loss, a novel loss weighting mechanism that dynamically adjusts during training to improve reconstruction across spectrally complex bands. Extensive testing demonstrates that our LSST achieves superior performance while requiring fewer FLOPs and parameters, underscoring its efficiency and effectiveness. The source code is available at: https://github.com/wcz1124/LSST.
Abstract: Vision Language Models (VLMs) have rapidly advanced and show strong promise for text-based person search (TBPS), a task that requires capturing fine-grained relationships between images and text to distinguish individuals. Previous methods address these challenges through local alignment, yet they are often prone to shortcut learning and spurious correlations, yielding misalignment. Moreover, injecting prior knowledge can distort intra-modality structure. Motivated by our finding that encoder attention surfaces spatially precise evidence from the earliest training epochs, and to alleviate these issues, we introduceITSELF, an attention-guided framework for implicit local alignment. At its core, Guided Representation with Attentive Bank (GRAB) converts the model's own attention into an Attentive Bank of high-saliency tokens and applies local objectives on this bank, learning fine-grained correspondences without extra supervision. To make the selection reliable and non-redundant, we introduce Multi-Layer Attention for Robust Selection (MARS), which aggregates attention across layers and performs diversity-aware top-k selection; and Adaptive Token Scheduler (ATS), which schedules the retention budget from coarse to fine over training, preserving context early while progressively focusing on discriminative details. Extensive experiments on three widely used TBPS benchmarks showstate-of-the-art performance and strong cross-dataset generalization, confirming the effectiveness and robustness of our approach without additional prior supervision. Our project is publicly available at https://trhuuloc.github.io/itself
Abstract: Existing RGB-Event visual object tracking approaches primarily rely on conventional feature-level fusion, failing to fully exploit the unique advantages of event cameras. In particular, the high dynamic range and motion-sensitive nature of event cameras are often overlooked, while low-information regions are processed uniformly, leading to unnecessary computational overhead for the backbone network. To address these issues, we propose a novel tracking framework that performs early fusion in the frequency domain, enabling effective aggregation of high-frequency information from the event modality. Specifically, RGB and event modalities are transformed from the spatial domain to the frequency domain via the Fast Fourier Transform, with their amplitude and phase components decoupled. High-frequency event information is selectively fused into RGB modality through amplitude and phase attention, enhancing feature representation while substantially reducing backbone computation. In addition, a motion-guided spatial sparsification module leverages the motion-sensitive nature of event cameras to capture the relationship between target motion cues and spatial probability distribution, filtering out low-information regions and enhancing target-relevant features. Finally, a sparse set of target-relevant features is fed into the backbone network for learning, and the tracking head predicts the final target position. Extensive experiments on three widely used RGB-Event tracking benchmark datasets, including FE108, FELT, and COESOT, demonstrate the high performance and efficiency of our method. The source code of this paper will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/OpenEvTracking
Abstract: Language generation maps a rich, high-dimensional internal state to a single token sequence. We study this many-to-one mapping through the lens of intention collapse: the projection from an internal intention space I to an external language space L. We introduce three cheap, model-agnostic metrics computed on a pre-collapse state I: (i) intention entropy Hint(I), (ii) effective dimensionality deff(I), and (iii) recoverability Recov(I), operationalized as probe AUROC for predicting eventual success. We evaluate these metrics in a 3x3 study across models (Mistral-7B, LLaMA-3.1-8B, Qwen-2.5-7B) and benchmarks (GSM8K, ARC-Challenge, AQUA-RAT), comparing baseline, chain-of-thought (CoT), and a babble control (n=200 items per cell). CoT increases average accuracy from 34.2% to 47.3% (+13.1 pp), driven by large gains on GSM8K but consistent degradations on ARC-Challenge. Across models, CoT induces distinct entropy regimes relative to baseline, dH = Hint(CoT) - Hint(Base): Mistral shows dH < 0 (lower-entropy CoT), whereas LLaMA shows dH > 0 (higher-entropy CoT), highlighting heterogeneity in CoT-induced internal uncertainty. Finally, probe AUROC is significantly above chance in a subset of settings and can dissociate from behavioral accuracy (e.g., high AUROC alongside lower CoT accuracy on ARC-Challenge for Qwen), suggesting that informative internal signal is not always reliably converted into a final discrete decision under constrained response formats.
Abstract: Medical image segmentation faces critical challenges in semi-supervised learning scenarios due to severe annotation scarcity requiring expert radiological knowledge, significant inter-annotator variability across different viewpoints and expertise levels, and inadequate multi-scale feature integration for precise boundary delineation in complex anatomical structures. Existing semi-supervised methods demonstrate substantial performance degradation compared to fully supervised approaches, particularly in small target segmentation and boundary refinement tasks. To address these fundamental challenges, we propose SASNet (Scale-aware Adaptive Supervised Network), a dual-branch architecture that leverages both low-level and high-level feature representations through novel scale-aware adaptive reweight mechanisms. Our approach introduces three key methodological innovations, including the Scale-aware Adaptive Reweight strategy that dynamically weights pixel-wise predictions using temporal confidence accumulation, the View Variance Enhancement mechanism employing 3D Fourier domain transformations to simulate annotation variability, and segmentation-regression consistency learning through signed distance map algorithms for enhanced boundary precision. These innovations collectively address the core limitations of existing semi-supervised approaches by integrating spatial, temporal, and geometric consistency principles within a unified optimization framework. Comprehensive evaluation across LA, Pancreas-CT, and BraTS datasets demonstrates that SASNet achieves superior performance with limited labeled data, surpassing state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods while approaching fully supervised performance levels. The source code for SASNet is available at https://github.com/HUANGLIZI/SASNet.
Abstract: Remote sensing (RS) large vision-language models (LVLMs) have shown strong promise across visual grounding (VG) tasks. However, existing RS VG datasets predominantly rely on explicit referring expressions-such as relative position, relative size, and color cues-thereby constraining performance on implicit VG tasks that require scenario-specific domain knowledge. This article introduces DVGBench, a high-quality implicit VG benchmark for drones, covering six major application scenarios: traffic, disaster, security, sport, social activity, and productive activity. Each object provides both explicit and implicit queries. Based on the dataset, we design DroneVG-R1, an LVLM that integrates the novel Implicit-to-Explicit Chain-of-Thought (I2E-CoT) within a reinforcement learning paradigm. This enables the model to take advantage of scene-specific expertise, converting implicit references into explicit ones and thus reducing grounding difficulty. Finally, an evaluation of mainstream models on both explicit and implicit VG tasks reveals substantial limitations in their reasoning capabilities. These findings provide actionable insights for advancing the reasoning capacity of LVLMs for drone-based agents. The code and datasets will be released at https://github.com/zytx121/DVGBench
Abstract: Wildlife monitoring is crucial for studying biodiversity loss and climate change. Camera trap images provide a non-intrusive method for analyzing animal populations and identifying ecological patterns over time. However, manual analysis is time-consuming and resource-intensive. Deep learning, particularly foundation models, has been applied to automate wildlife identification, achieving strong performance when tested on data from the same geographical locations as their training sets. Yet, despite their promise, these models struggle to generalize to new geographical areas, leading to significant performance drops. For example, training an advanced vision-language model, such as CLIP with an adapter, on an African dataset achieves an accuracy of 84.77%. However, this performance drops significantly to 16.17% when the model is tested on an American dataset. This limitation partly arises because existing models rely predominantly on image-based representations, making them sensitive to geographical data distribution shifts, such as variation in background, lighting, and environmental conditions. To address this, we introduce WildIng, a Wildlife image Invariant representation model for geographical domain shift. WildIng integrates text descriptions with image features, creating a more robust representation to geographical domain shifts. By leveraging textual descriptions, our approach captures consistent semantic information, such as detailed descriptions of the appearance of the species, improving generalization across different geographical locations. Experiments show that WildIng enhances the accuracy of foundation models such as BioCLIP by 30% under geographical domain shift conditions. We evaluate WildIng on two datasets collected from different regions, namely America and Africa. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/Julian075/CATALOG/tree/WildIng.
Abstract: A graph that is completely determined by its degree sequence is called a unigraph. In 2000, Regina Tyshkevich published one of the most important papers on unigraphs. There are two parts to the paper: a decomposition theorem that describes how every graph can be broken into a sequence of basic graphs and a complete classification of all basic unigraphs. Together, they reveal how every unigraph is constructed. We provide an informal overview of Tyshkevich's results and show how they enable the computation of various graph parameters of unigraphs in linear time. We also created a toolkit (https://chelseal11.github.io/tyshkevich_decomposition_toolkit/) that implements the algorithms described in this write-up.
Abstract: Generative AI models, particularly Text-to-Video (T2V) systems, offer a promising avenue for transforming science education by automating the creation of engaging and intuitive visual explanations. In this work, we take a first step toward evaluating their potential in physics education by introducing a dedicated benchmark for explanatory video generation. The benchmark is designed to assess how well T2V models can convey core physics concepts through visual illustrations. Each physics concept in our benchmark is decomposed into granular teaching points, with each point accompanied by a carefully crafted prompt intended for visual explanation of the teaching point. T2V models are evaluated on their ability to generate accurate videos in response to these prompts. Our aim is to systematically explore the feasibility of using T2V models to generate high-quality, curriculum-aligned educational content-paving the way toward scalable, accessible, and personalized learning experiences powered by AI. Our evaluation reveals that current models produce visually coherent videos with smooth motion and minimal flickering, yet their conceptual accuracy is less reliable. Performance in areas such as mechanics, fluids, and optics is encouraging, but models struggle with electromagnetism and thermodynamics, where abstract interactions are harder to depict. These findings underscore the gap between visual quality and conceptual correctness in educational video generation. We hope this benchmark helps the community close that gap and move toward T2V systems that can deliver accurate, curriculum-aligned physics content at scale. The benchmark and accompanying codebase are publicly available at https://github.com/meghamariamkm/PhyEduVideo.
Abstract: Understanding affective polarization in online discourse is crucial for evaluating the societal impact of social media interactions. This study presents a novel framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) and domain-informed heuristics to systematically analyze and quantify affective polarization in discussions on divisive topics such as climate change and gun control. Unlike most prior approaches that relied on sentiment analysis or predefined classifiers, our method integrates LLMs to extract stance, affective tone, and agreement patterns from large-scale social media discussions. We then apply a rule-based scoring system capable of quantifying affective polarization even in small conversations consisting of single interactions, based on stance alignment, emotional content, and interaction dynamics. Our analysis reveals distinct polarization patterns that are event dependent: (i) anticipation-driven polarization, where extreme polarization escalates before well-publicized events, and (ii) reactive polarization, where intense affective polarization spikes immediately after sudden, high-impact events. By combining AI-driven content annotation with domain-informed scoring, our framework offers a scalable and interpretable approach to measuring affective polarization. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/hasanjawad001/llm-social-media-polarization.
Abstract: Semantic segmentation is crucial for medical image analysis, enabling precise disease diagnosis and treatment planning. However, many advanced models employ complex architectures, limiting their use in resource-constrained clinical settings. This paper proposes MFEnNet, an efficient medical image segmentation framework that incorporates MetaFormer in the encoding phase of the U-Net backbone. MetaFormer, an architectural abstraction of vision transformers, provides a versatile alternative to convolutional neural networks by transforming tokenized image patches into sequences for global context modeling. To mitigate the substantial computational cost associated with self-attention, the proposed framework replaces conventional transformer modules with pooling transformer blocks, thereby achieving effective global feature aggregation at reduced complexity. In addition, Swish activation is used to achieve smoother gradients and faster convergence, while spatial pyramid pooling is incorporated at the bottleneck to improve multi-scale feature extraction. Comprehensive experiments on different medical segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed MFEnNet approach attains competitive accuracy while significantly lowering computational cost compared to state-of-the-art models. The source code for this work is available at https://github.com/tranleanh/mfennet.
Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting produces high-quality scene reconstructions but generates hundreds of thousands of spurious Gaussians (floaters) scattered throughout the environment. These artifacts obscure objects of interest and inflate model sizes, hindering deployment in bandwidth-constrained applications. We present Clean-GS, a method for removing background clutter and floaters from 3DGS reconstructions using sparse semantic masks. Our approach combines whitelist-based spatial filtering with color-guided validation and outlier removal to achieve 60-80\% model compression while preserving object quality. Unlike existing 3DGS pruning methods that rely on global importance metrics, Clean-GS uses semantic information from as few as 3 segmentation masks (1\% of views) to identify and remove Gaussians not belonging to the target object. Our multi-stage approach consisting of (1) whitelist filtering via projection to masked regions, (2) depth-buffered color validation, and (3) neighbor-based outlier removal isolates monuments and objects from complex outdoor scenes. Experiments on Tanks and Temples show that Clean-GS reduces file sizes from 125MB to 47MB while maintaining rendering quality, making 3DGS models practical for web deployment and AR/VR applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/smlab-niser/clean-gs
Abstract: Large language models apply uniform computation to all inputs, regardless of difficulty. We propose PonderTTT, a gating strategy using the TTT layer's self-supervised reconstruction loss to selectively trigger Test-Time Training (TTT) updates. The gating decision itself is training-free--requiring no learned classifier or auxiliary networks; only a single scalar threshold is initially calibrated on unlabeled data and continuously adapted via EMA to maintain target update rates. Our experiments with GPT-2 models (124M to 1.5B) on code language modeling (The Stack v2, teacher-forced perplexity) demonstrate that this signal is inference-compatible, requiring no ground-truth labels. Our Reconstruction Gating achieves 82-89% Oracle Recovery while being fully training-free, significantly outperforming Random Skip baselines (up to 16% lower loss on OOD languages).
Abstract: As artificial intelligence systems increasingly mediate consumer information discovery, brands face algorithmic invisibility. This study investigates Cultural Encoding in Large Language Models (LLMs) -- systematic differences in brand recommendations arising from training data composition. Analyzing 1,909 pure-English queries across 6 LLMs (GPT-4o, Claude, Gemini, Qwen3, DeepSeek, Doubao) and 30 brands, we find Chinese LLMs exhibit 30.6 percentage points higher brand mention rates than International LLMs (88.9% vs. 58.3%, p<.001). This disparity persists in identical English queries, indicating training data geography -- not language -- drives the effect. We introduce the Existence Gap: brands absent from LLM training corpora lack "existence" in AI responses regardless of quality. Through a case study of Zhizibianjie (OmniEdge), a collaboration platform with 65.6% mention rate in Chinese LLMs but 0% in International models (p<.001), we demonstrate how Linguistic Boundary Barriers create invisible market entry obstacles. Theoretically, we contribute the Data Moat Framework, conceptualizing AI-visible content as a VRIN strategic resource. We operationalize Algorithmic Omnipresence -- comprehensive brand visibility across LLM knowledge bases -- as the strategic objective for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Managerially, we provide an 18-month roadmap for brands to build Data Moats through semantic coverage, technical depth, and cultural localization. Our findings reveal that in AI-mediated markets, the limits of a brand's "Data Boundaries" define the limits of its "Market Frontiers."
Abstract: Temporal point processes (TPPs) are crucial for analyzing events over time and are widely used in fields such as finance, healthcare, and social systems. These processes are particularly valuable for understanding how events unfold over time, accounting for their irregularity and dependencies. Despite the success of large language models (LLMs) in sequence modeling, applying them to temporal point processes remains challenging. A key issue is that current methods struggle to effectively capture the complex interaction between temporal information and semantic context, which is vital for accurate event modeling. In this context, we introduce TPP-TAL (Temporal Point Processes with Enhanced Temporal Awareness in LLMs), a novel plug-and-play framework designed to enhance temporal reasoning within LLMs. Rather than using the conventional method of simply concatenating event time and type embeddings, TPP-TAL explicitly aligns temporal dynamics with contextual semantics before feeding this information into the LLM. This alignment allows the model to better perceive temporal dependencies and long-range interactions between events and their surrounding contexts. Through comprehensive experiments on several benchmark datasets, it is shown that TPP-TAL delivers substantial improvements in temporal likelihood estimation and event prediction accuracy, highlighting the importance of enhancing temporal awareness in LLMs for continuous-time event modeling. The code is made available at https://github.com/chenlilil/TPP-TAL
Abstract: While Deep Learning has improved Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) decoding accuracy, clinical adoption is hindered by the "Black Box" nature of these algorithms, leading to user frustration and poor neuroplasticity outcomes. We propose OmniNeuro, a novel HCI framework that transforms the BCI from a silent decoder into a transparent feedback partner. OmniNeuro integrates three interpretability engines: (1) Physics (Energy), (2) Chaos (Fractal Complexity), and (3) Quantum-Inspired uncertainty modeling. These metrics drive real-time Neuro-Sonification and Generative AI Clinical Reports. Evaluated on the PhysioNet dataset ($N=109$), the system achieved a mean accuracy of 58.52%, with qualitative pilot studies ($N=3$) confirming that explainable feedback helps users regulate mental effort and reduces the "trial-and-error" phase. OmniNeuro is decoder-agnostic, acting as an essential interpretability layer for any state-of-the-art architecture.
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely believed to possess self-correction capabilities, yet recent studies suggest that intrinsic self-correction--where models correct their own outputs without external feedback--remains largely ineffective. In this work, we systematically decompose self-correction into three distinct sub-capabilities: error detection, error localization, and error correction. Through cross-model experiments on GSM8K-Complex (n=500 per model, 346 total errors) with three major LLMs, we uncover a striking Accuracy-Correction Paradox: weaker models (GPT-3.5, 66% accuracy) achieve 1.6x higher intrinsic correction rates than stronger models (DeepSeek, 94% accuracy)--26.8% vs 16.7%. We propose the Error Depth Hypothesis: stronger models make fewer but deeper errors that resist self-correction. Error detection rates vary dramatically across architectures (10% to 82%), yet detection capability does not predict correction success--Claude detects only 10% of errors but corrects 29% intrinsically. Surprisingly, providing error location hints hurts all models. Our findings challenge linear assumptions about model capability and self-improvement, with important implications for the design of self-refinement pipelines.
Abstract: Conversation summarization loses nuanced details: when asked about coding preferences after 40 turns, summarization recalls "use type hints" but drops the critical constraint "everywhere" (19.0% exact match vs. 93.0% for our approach). We present CogCanvas, a training-free framework inspired by how teams use whiteboards to anchor shared memory. Rather than compressing conversation history, CogCanvas extracts verbatim-grounded artifacts (decisions, facts, reminders) and retrieves them via temporal-aware graph. On the LoCoMo benchmark (all 10 conversations from the ACL 2024 release), CogCanvas achieves the highest overall accuracy among training-free methods (32.4%), outperforming RAG (24.6%) by +7.8pp, with decisive advantages on complex reasoning tasks: +20.6pp on temporal reasoning (32.7% vs. 12.1% RAG) and +1.1pp on multi-hop questions (41.7% vs. 40.6% RAG). CogCanvas also leads on single-hop retrieval (26.6% vs. 24.6% RAG). Ablation studies reveal that BGE reranking contributes +7.7pp, making it the largest contributor to CogCanvas's performance. While heavily-optimized approaches achieve higher absolute scores through dedicated training (EverMemOS: ~92%), our training-free approach provides practitioners with an immediately-deployable alternative that significantly outperforms standard baselines. Code and data: https://github.com/tao-hpu/cog-canvas
Abstract: Reconstructing dynamic 3D scenes from monocular videos requires simultaneously capturing high-frequency appearance details and temporally continuous motion. Existing methods using single Gaussian primitives are limited by their low-pass filtering nature, while standard Gabor functions introduce energy instability. Moreover, lack of temporal continuity constraints often leads to motion artifacts during interpolation. We propose AdaGaR, a unified framework addressing both frequency adaptivity and temporal continuity in explicit dynamic scene modeling. We introduce Adaptive Gabor Representation, extending Gaussians through learnable frequency weights and adaptive energy compensation to balance detail capture and stability. For temporal continuity, we employ Cubic Hermite Splines with Temporal Curvature Regularization to ensure smooth motion evolution. An Adaptive Initialization mechanism combining depth estimation, point tracking, and foreground masks establishes stable point cloud distributions in early training. Experiments on Tap-Vid DAVIS demonstrate state-of-the-art performance (PSNR 35.49, SSIM 0.9433, LPIPS 0.0723) and strong generalization across frame interpolation, depth consistency, video editing, and stereo view synthesis. Project page: https://jiewenchan.github.io/AdaGaR/
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a mainstay for many everyday applications. However, as data evolve their knowledge quickly becomes outdated. Continual learning aims to update LLMs with new information without erasing previously acquired knowledge. Although methods such as full fine-tuning can incorporate new data, they are computationally expensive and prone to catastrophic forgetting, where prior knowledge is overwritten. Memory-augmented approaches address this by equipping LLMs with a memory bank, that is an external memory module which stores information for future use. However, these methods face a critical limitation, in particular, the memory bank constantly grows in the real-world scenario when large-scale data streams arrive. In this paper, we propose MBC, a model that compresses the memory bank through a codebook optimization strategy during online adaptation learning. To ensure stable learning, we also introduce an online resetting mechanism that prevents codebook collapse. In addition, we employ Key-Value Low-Rank Adaptation in the attention layers of the LLM, enabling efficient utilization of the compressed memory representations. Experiments with benchmark question-answering datasets demonstrate that MBC reduces the memory bank size to 0.3% when compared against the most competitive baseline, while maintaining high retention accuracy during online adaptation learning. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Thomkat/MBC.
Abstract: We introduce RGS-SLAM, a robust Gaussian-splatting SLAM framework that replaces the residual-driven densification stage of GS-SLAM with a training-free correspondence-to-Gaussian initialization. Instead of progressively adding Gaussians as residuals reveal missing geometry, RGS-SLAM performs a one-shot triangulation of dense multi-view correspondences derived from DINOv3 descriptors refined through a confidence-aware inlier classifier, generating a well-distributed and structure-aware Gaussian seed prior to optimization. This initialization stabilizes early mapping and accelerates convergence by roughly 20\%, yielding higher rendering fidelity in texture-rich and cluttered scenes while remaining fully compatible with existing GS-SLAM pipelines. Evaluated on the TUM RGB-D and Replica datasets, RGS-SLAM achieves competitive or superior localization and reconstruction accuracy compared with state-of-the-art Gaussian and point-based SLAM systems, sustaining real-time mapping performance at up to 925 FPS. Additional details and resources are available at this URL: https://breeze1124.github.io/rgs-slam-project-page/
Abstract: Humans excel at forecasting the future dynamics of a scene given just a single image. Video generation models that can mimic this ability are an essential component for intelligent systems. Recent approaches have improved temporal coherence and 3D consistency in single-image-conditioned video generation. However, these methods often lack robust user controllability, such as modifying the camera path, limiting their applicability in real-world applications. Most existing camera-controlled image-to-video models struggle with accurately modeling camera motion, maintaining temporal consistency, and preserving geometric integrity. Leveraging explicit intermediate 3D representations offers a promising solution by enabling coherent video generation aligned with a given camera trajectory. Although these methods often use 3D point clouds to render scenes and introduce object motion in a later stage, this two-step process still falls short in achieving full temporal consistency, despite allowing precise control over camera movement. We propose a novel framework that constructs a 3D Gaussian scene representation and samples plausible object motion, given a single image in a single forward pass. This enables fast, camera-guided video generation without the need for iterative denoising to inject object motion into render frames. Extensive experiments on the KITTI, Waymo, RealEstate10K and DL3DV-10K datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art video quality and inference efficiency. The project page is available at https://melonienimasha.github.io/Pixel-to-4D-Website.
Abstract: Talking head generation creates lifelike avatars from static portraits for virtual communication and content creation. However, current models do not yet convey the feeling of truly interactive communication, often generating one-way responses that lack emotional engagement. We identify two key challenges toward truly interactive avatars: generating motion in real-time under causal constraints and learning expressive, vibrant reactions without additional labeled data. To address these challenges, we propose Avatar Forcing, a new framework for interactive head avatar generation that models real-time user-avatar interactions through diffusion forcing. This design allows the avatar to process real-time multimodal inputs, including the user's audio and motion, with low latency for instant reactions to both verbal and non-verbal cues such as speech, nods, and laughter. Furthermore, we introduce a direct preference optimization method that leverages synthetic losing samples constructed by dropping user conditions, enabling label-free learning of expressive interaction. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework enables real-time interaction with low latency (approximately 500ms), achieving 6.8X speedup compared to the baseline, and produces reactive and expressive avatar motion, which is preferred over 80% against the baseline.
Abstract: Reliable building height estimation is essential for various urban applications. Spaceborne SAR tomography (TomoSAR) provides weather-independent, side-looking observations that capture facade-level structure, offering a promising alternative to conventional optical methods. However, TomoSAR point clouds often suffer from noise, anisotropic point distributions, and data voids on incoherent surfaces, all of which hinder accurate height reconstruction. To address these challenges, we introduce a learning-based framework for converting raw TomoSAR points into high-resolution building height maps. Our dual-topology network alternates between a point branch that models irregular scatterer features and a grid branch that enforces spatial consistency. By jointly processing these representations, the network denoises the input points and inpaints missing regions to produce continuous height estimates. To our knowledge, this is the first proof of concept for large-scale urban height mapping directly from TomoSAR point clouds. Extensive experiments on data from Munich and Berlin validate the effectiveness of our approach. Moreover, we demonstrate that our framework can be extended to incorporate optical satellite imagery, further enhancing reconstruction quality. The source code is available at https://github.com/zhu-xlab/tomosar2height.
Abstract: Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has shown strong potential for mitigating hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, existing multimodal DPO approaches often suffer from overfitting due to the difficulty imbalance in preference data. Our analysis shows that MLLMs tend to overemphasize easily distinguishable preference pairs, which hinders fine-grained hallucination suppression and degrades overall performance. To address this issue, we propose Difficulty-Aware Direct Preference Optimization (DA-DPO), a cost-effective framework designed to balance the learning process. DA-DPO consists of two main components: (1) Difficulty Estimation leverages pre-trained vision--language models with complementary generative and contrastive objectives, whose outputs are integrated via a distribution-aware voting strategy to produce robust difficulty scores without additional training; and (2) Difficulty-Aware Training reweights preference pairs based on their estimated difficulty, down-weighting easy samples while emphasizing harder ones to alleviate overfitting. This framework enables more effective preference optimization by prioritizing challenging examples, without requiring new data or extra fine-tuning stages. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DA-DPO consistently improves multimodal preference optimization, yielding stronger robustness to hallucinations and better generalization across standard benchmarks, while remaining computationally efficient. The project page is available at https://artanic30.github.io/project_pages/DA-DPO/.
Abstract: Text-to-motion (T2M) generation with diffusion backbones achieves strong realism and alignment. Safety concerns in T2M methods have been raised in recent years; existing methods replace discrete VQ-VAE codebook entries to steer the model away from unsafe behaviors. However, discrete codebook replacement-based methods have two critical flaws: firstly, replacing codebook entries which are reused by benign prompts leads to drifts on everyday tasks, degrading the model's benign performance; secondly, discrete token-based methods introduce quantization and smoothness loss, resulting in artifacts and jerky transitions. Moreover, existing text-to-motion datasets naturally contain unsafe intents and corresponding motions, making them unsuitable for safety-driven machine learning. To address these challenges, we propose SafeMo, a trustworthy motion generative framework integrating Minimal Motion Unlearning (MMU), a two-stage machine unlearning strategy, enabling safe human motion generation in continuous space, preserving continuous kinematics without codebook loss and delivering strong safety-utility trade-offs compared to current baselines. Additionally, we present the first safe text-to-motion dataset SafeMoVAE-29K integrating rewritten safe text prompts and continuous refined motion for trustworthy human motion unlearning. Built upon DiP, SafeMo efficiently generates safe human motions with natural transitions. Experiments demonstrate effective unlearning performance of SafeMo by showing strengthened forgetting on unsafe prompts, reaching 2.5x and 14.4x higher forget-set FID on HumanML3D and Motion-X respectively, compared to the previous SOTA human motion unlearning method LCR, with benign performance on safe prompts being better or comparable. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/SafeMo. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/SafeMo.
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant advancements in reasoning and code generation. However, efficiently creating new benchmarks to evaluate these capabilities remains a challenge. Traditional benchmark creation relies on manual human effort, a process that is both expensive and time-consuming. Furthermore, existing benchmarks often contaminate LLM training data, necessitating novel and diverse benchmarks to accurately assess their genuine capabilities. This work introduces InfoSynth, a novel framework for automatically generating and evaluating reasoning benchmarks guided by information-theoretic principles. We propose metrics based on KL-divergence and entropy to quantify benchmark novelty and diversity without relying on costly model evaluations. Building on this framework, we develop an end-to-end pipeline that synthesizes robust Python coding problems from seed datasets using genetic algorithms and iterative code feedback. Our method generates accurate test cases and solutions to new problems 97% of the time, and the synthesized benchmarks consistently exhibit higher novelty and diversity compared to their seed datasets. Moreover, our algorithm provides a method for controlling the novelty/diversity and difficulty of generated problems. InfoSynth offers a scalable, self-verifying pipeline for constructing high-quality, novel and diverse benchmarks for LLMs. Project Page: https://ishirgarg.github.io/infosynth_web/
Abstract: Event-related potential (ERP), a specialized paradigm of electroencephalographic (EEG), reflects neurological responses to external stimuli or events, generally associated with the brain's processing of specific cognitive tasks. ERP plays a critical role in cognitive analysis, the detection of neurological diseases, and the assessment of psychological states. Recent years have seen substantial advances in deep learning-based methods for spontaneous EEG and other non-time-locked task-related EEG signals. However, their effectiveness on ERP data remains underexplored, and many existing ERP studies still rely heavily on manually extracted features. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive benchmark study that systematically compares traditional manual features (followed by a linear classifier), deep learning models, and pre-trained EEG foundation models for ERP analysis. We establish a unified data preprocessing and training pipeline and evaluate these approaches on two representative tasks, ERP stimulus classification and ERP-based brain disease detection, across 12 publicly available datasets. Furthermore, we investigate various patch-embedding strategies within advanced Transformer architectures to identify embedding designs that better suit ERP data. Our study provides a landmark framework to guide method selection and tailored model design for future ERP analysis. The code is available at https://github.com/DL4mHealth/ERP-Benchmark.
Abstract: High-quality three-dimensional (3D) photoacoustic imaging (PAI) is gaining increasing attention in clinical applications. To address the challenges of limited space and high costs, irregular geometric transducer arrays that conform to specific imaging regions are promising for achieving high-quality 3D PAI with fewer transducers. However, traditional iterative reconstruction algorithms struggle with irregular array configurations, suffering from high computational complexity, substantial memory requirements, and lengthy reconstruction times. In this work, we introduce SlingBAG Pro, an advanced reconstruction algorithm based on the point cloud iteration concept of the Sliding ball adaptive growth (SlingBAG) method, while extending its compatibility to arbitrary array geometries. SlingBAG Pro maintains high reconstruction quality, reduces the number of required transducers, and employs a hierarchical optimization strategy that combines zero-gradient filtering with progressively increased temporal sampling rates during iteration. This strategy rapidly removes redundant spatial point clouds, accelerates convergence, and significantly shortens overall reconstruction time. Compared to the original SlingBAG algorithm, SlingBAG Pro achieves up to a 2.2-fold speed improvement in point cloud-based 3D PA reconstruction under irregular array geometries. The proposed method is validated through both simulation and in vivo mouse experiments, and the source code is publicly available at https://github.com/JaegerCQ/SlingBAG_Pro.
Abstract: Segment Anything Model (SAM), known for its remarkable zero-shot segmentation capabilities, has garnered significant attention in the community. Nevertheless, its performance is challenged when dealing with what we refer to as visually non-salient scenarios, where there is low contrast between the foreground and background. In these cases, existing methods often cannot capture accurate contours and fail to produce promising segmentation results. In this paper, we propose Visually Non-Salient SAM (VNS-SAM), aiming to enhance SAM's perception of visually non-salient scenarios while preserving its original zero-shot generalizability. We achieve this by effectively exploiting SAM's low-level features through two designs: Mask-Edge Token Interactive decoder and Non-Salient Feature Mining module. These designs help the SAM decoder gain a deeper understanding of non-salient characteristics with only marginal parameter increments and computational requirements. The additional parameters of VNS-SAM can be optimized within 4 hours, demonstrating its feasibility and practicality. In terms of data, we established VNS-SEG, a unified dataset for various VNS scenarios, with more than 35K images, in contrast to previous single-task adaptations. It is designed to make the model learn more robust VNS features and comprehensively benchmark the model's segmentation performance and generalizability on VNS scenarios. Extensive experiments across various VNS segmentation tasks demonstrate the superior performance of VNS-SAM, particularly under zero-shot settings, highlighting its potential for broad real-world applications. Codes and datasets are publicly available at https://guangqian-guo.github.io/VNS-SAM.
Abstract: All-in-one image restoration aims to recover clean images from diverse unknown degradations using a single model. But extending this task to videos faces unique challenges. Existing approaches primarily focus on frame-wise degradation variation, overlooking the temporal continuity that naturally exists in real-world degradation processes. In practice, degradation types and intensities evolve smoothly over time, and multiple degradations may coexist or transition gradually. In this paper, we introduce the Smoothly Evolving Unknown Degradations (SEUD) scenario, where both the active degradation set and degradation intensity change continuously over time. To support this scenario, we design a flexible synthesis pipeline that generates temporally coherent videos with single, compound, and evolving degradations. To address the challenges in the SEUD scenario, we propose an all-in-One Recurrent Conditional and Adaptive prompting Network (ORCANet). First, a Coarse Intensity Estimation Dehazing (CIED) module estimates haze intensity using physical priors and provides coarse dehazed features as initialization. Second, a Flow Prompt Generation (FPG) module extracts degradation features. FPG generates both static prompts that capture segment-level degradation types and dynamic prompts that adapt to frame-level intensity variations. Furthermore, a label-aware supervision mechanism improves the discriminability of static prompt representations under different degradations. Extensive experiments show that ORCANet achieves superior restoration quality, temporal consistency, and robustness over image and video-based baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/Friskknight/ORCANet-SEUD.
Abstract: Accurately simulating existing 3D objects and a wide variety of materials often demands expert knowledge and time-consuming physical parameter tuning to achieve the desired dynamic behavior. We introduce MotionPhysics, an end-to-end differentiable framework that infers plausible physical parameters from a user-provided natural language prompt for a chosen 3D scene of interest, removing the need for guidance from ground-truth trajectories or annotated videos. Our approach first utilizes a multimodal large language model to estimate material parameter values, which are constrained to lie within plausible ranges. We further propose a learnable motion distillation loss that extracts robust motion priors from pretrained video diffusion models while minimizing appearance and geometry inductive biases to guide the simulation. We evaluate MotionPhysics across more than thirty scenarios, including real-world, human-designed, and AI-generated 3D objects, spanning a wide range of materials such as elastic solids, metals, foams, sand, and both Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids. We demonstrate that MotionPhysics produces visually realistic dynamic simulations guided by natural language, surpassing the state of the art while automatically determining physically plausible parameters. The code and project page are available at: https://wangmiaowei.github.io/MotionPhysics.github.io/.
Abstract: Recent reinforcement learning has enhanced the flow matching models on human preference alignment. While stochastic sampling enables the exploration of denoising directions, existing methods which optimize over multiple denoising steps suffer from sparse and ambiguous reward signals. We observe that the high entropy steps enable more efficient and effective exploration while the low entropy steps result in undistinguished roll-outs. To this end, we propose E-GRPO, an entropy aware Group Relative Policy Optimization to increase the entropy of SDE sampling steps. Since the integration of stochastic differential equations suffer from ambiguous reward signals due to stochasticity from multiple steps, we specifically merge consecutive low entropy steps to formulate one high entropy step for SDE sampling, while applying ODE sampling on other steps. Building upon this, we introduce multi-step group normalized advantage, which computes group-relative advantages within samples sharing the same consolidated SDE denoising step. Experimental results on different reward settings have demonstrated the effectiveness of our methods.
Abstract: The efficacy of deep residual networks is fundamentally predicated on the identity shortcut connection. While this mechanism effectively mitigates the vanishing gradient problem, it imposes a strictly additive inductive bias on feature transformations, thereby limiting the network's capacity to model complex state transitions. In this paper, we introduce Deep Delta Learning (DDL), a novel architecture that generalizes the standard residual connection by modulating the identity shortcut with a learnable, data-dependent geometric transformation. This transformation, termed the Delta Operator, constitutes a rank-1 perturbation of the identity matrix, parameterized by a reflection direction vector $\mathbf{k}(\mathbf{X})$ and a gating scalar $β(\mathbf{X})$. We provide a spectral analysis of this operator, demonstrating that the gate $β(\mathbf{X})$ enables dynamic interpolation between identity mapping, orthogonal projection, and geometric reflection. Furthermore, we restructure the residual update as a synchronous rank-1 injection, where the gate acts as a dynamic step size governing both the erasure of old information and the writing of new features. This unification empowers the network to explicitly control the spectrum of its layer-wise transition operator, enabling the modeling of complex, non-monotonic dynamics while preserving the stable training characteristics of gated residual architectures.
Abstract: Functional connectivity (FC) analysis, a valuable tool for computer-aided brain disorder diagnosis, traditionally relies on atlas-based parcellation. However, issues relating to selection bias and a lack of regard for subject specificity can arise as a result of such parcellations. Addressing this, we propose ABFR-KAN, a transformer-based classification network that incorporates novel advanced brain function representation components with the power of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) to mitigate structural bias, improve anatomical conformity, and enhance the reliability of FC estimation. Extensive experiments on the ABIDE I dataset, including cross-site evaluation and ablation studies across varying model backbones and KAN configurations, demonstrate that ABFR-KAN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines for autism spectrum distorder (ASD) classification. Our code is available at https://github.com/tbwa233/ABFR-KAN.
Abstract: Roadside litter poses environmental, safety and economic challenges, yet current monitoring relies on labour-intensive surveys and public reporting, providing limited spatial coverage. Existing vision datasets for litter detection focus on street-level still images, aerial scenes or aquatic environments, and do not reflect the unique characteristics of dashcam footage, where litter appears extremely small, sparse and embedded in cluttered road-verge backgrounds. We introduce RoLID-11K, the first large-scale dataset for roadside litter detection from dashcams, comprising over 11k annotated images spanning diverse UK driving conditions and exhibiting pronounced long-tail and small-object distributions. We benchmark a broad spectrum of modern detectors, from accuracy-oriented transformer architectures to real-time YOLO models, and analyse their strengths and limitations on this challenging task. Our results show that while CO-DETR and related transformers achieve the best localisation accuracy, real-time models remain constrained by coarse feature hierarchies. RoLID-11K establishes a challenging benchmark for extreme small-object detection in dynamic driving scenes and aims to support the development of scalable, low-cost systems for roadside-litter monitoring. The dataset is available at https://github.com/xq141839/RoLID-11K.
Abstract: Recent advances in vision-language models have opened up new possibilities for reasoning-driven image geolocalization. However, existing approaches often rely on synthetic reasoning annotations or external image retrieval, which can limit interpretability and generalizability. In this paper, we present Geo-R, a retrieval-free framework that uncovers structured reasoning paths from existing ground-truth coordinates and optimizes geolocation accuracy via reinforcement learning. We propose the Chain of Region, a rule-based hierarchical reasoning paradigm that generates precise, interpretable supervision by mapping GPS coordinates to geographic entities (e.g., country, province, city) without relying on model-generated or synthetic labels. Building on this, we introduce a lightweight reinforcement learning strategy with coordinate-aligned rewards based on Haversine distance, enabling the model to refine predictions through spatially meaningful feedback. Our approach bridges structured geographic reasoning with direct spatial supervision, yielding improved localization accuracy, stronger generalization, and more transparent inference. Experimental results across multiple benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of Geo-R, establishing a new retrieval-free paradigm for scalable and interpretable image geolocalization. To facilitate further research and ensure reproducibility, both the model and code will be made publicly available.
Abstract: Skeleton-based human action recognition (HAR) has achieved remarkable progress with graph-based architectures. However, most existing methods remain body-centric, focusing on large-scale motions while neglecting subtle hand articulations that are crucial for fine-grained recognition. This work presents a probabilistic dual-stream framework that unifies reliability modeling and multi-modal integration, generalizing expertized learning under uncertainty across both intra-skeleton and cross-modal domains. The framework comprises three key components: (1) a calibration-free preprocessing pipeline that removes canonical-space transformations and learns directly from native coordinates; (2) a probabilistic Noisy-OR fusion that stabilizes reliability-aware dual-stream learning without requiring explicit confidence supervision; and (3) an intra- to cross-modal ensemble that couples four skeleton modalities (Joint, Bone, Joint Motion, and Bone Motion) to RGB representations, bridging structural and visual motion cues in a unified cross-modal formulation. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks (NTU RGB+D~60/120, PKU-MMD, N-UCLA) and a newly defined hand-centric benchmark exhibit consistent improvements and robustness under noisy and heterogeneous conditions.
Abstract: Achieving consistent and high-fidelity geometry and appearance reconstruction of 3D digital humans from a single RGB image is inherently a challenging task. Existing studies typically resort to decoupled pipelines for geometry estimation and appearance synthesis, often hindering unified reconstruction and causing inconsistencies. This paper introduces \textbf{JGA-LBD}, a novel framework that unifies the modeling of geometry and appearance into a joint latent representation and formulates the generation process as bridge diffusion. Observing that directly integrating heterogeneous input conditions (e.g., depth maps, SMPL models) leads to substantial training difficulties, we unify all conditions into the 3D Gaussian representations, which can be further compressed into a unified latent space through a shared sparse variational autoencoder (VAE). Subsequently, the specialized form of bridge diffusion enables to start with a partial observation of the target latent code and solely focuses on inferring the missing components. Finally, a dedicated decoding module extracts the complete 3D human geometric structure and renders novel views from the inferred latent representation. Experiments demonstrate that JGA-LBD outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches in terms of both geometry fidelity and appearance quality, including challenging in-the-wild scenarios. Our code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/haiantyz/JGA-LBD.
Abstract: Taiwanese opera (Kua-á-hì), a major form of local theatrical tradition, underwent extensive television adaptation notably by pioneers like Iûnn Lē-hua. These videos, while potentially valuable for in-depth studies of Taiwanese opera, often have low quality and require substantial manual effort during data preparation. To streamline this process, we developed an interactive system for real-time OCR correction and a two-step approach integrating OCR-driven segmentation with Speech and Music Activity Detection (SMAD) to efficiently identify vocal segments from archival episodes with high precision. The resulting dataset, consisting of vocal segments and corresponding lyrics, can potentially supports various MIR tasks such as lyrics identification and tune retrieval. Code is available at https://github.com/z-huang/ocr-subtitle-editor .
Abstract: Most colorization models condition only on a single reference, typically the first frame of the scene. However, this approach ignores other sources of conditional data, such as character sheets, background images, or arbitrary colorized frames. We propose TimeColor, a sketch-based video colorization model that supports heterogeneous, variable-count references with the use of explicit per-reference region assignment. TimeColor encodes references as additional latent frames which are concatenated temporally, permitting them to be processed concurrently in each diffusion step while keeping the model's parameter count fixed. TimeColor also uses spatiotemporal correspondence-masked attention to enforce subject-reference binding in addition to modality-disjoint RoPE indexing. These mechanisms mitigate shortcutting and cross-identity palette leakage. Experiments on SAKUGA-42M under both single- and multi-reference protocols show that TimeColor improves color fidelity, identity consistency, and temporal stability over prior baselines.
Abstract: Blind Image Quality Assessment (BIQA) has advanced significantly through deep learning, but the scarcity of large-scale labeled datasets remains a challenge. While synthetic data offers a promising solution, models trained on existing synthetic datasets often show limited generalization ability. In this work, we make a key observation that representations learned from synthetic datasets often exhibit a discrete and clustered pattern that hinders regression performance: features of high-quality images cluster around reference images, while those of low-quality images cluster based on distortion types. Our analysis reveals that this issue stems from the distribution of synthetic data rather than model architecture. Consequently, we introduce a novel framework SynDR-IQA, which reshapes synthetic data distribution to enhance BIQA generalization. Based on theoretical derivations of sample diversity and redundancy's impact on generalization error, SynDR-IQA employs two strategies: distribution-aware diverse content upsampling, which enhances visual diversity while preserving content distribution, and density-aware redundant cluster downsampling, which balances samples by reducing the density of densely clustered areas. Extensive experiments across three cross-dataset settings (synthetic-to-authentic, synthetic-to-algorithmic, and synthetic-to-synthetic) demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/Li-aobo/SynDR-IQA.
Abstract: Conditional variational autoencoder (cVAE)-based singing voice synthesis provides efficient inference and strong audio quality by learning a score-conditioned prior and a recording-conditioned posterior latent space. However, because synthesis relies on prior samples while training uses posterior latents inferred from real recordings, imperfect distribution matching can cause a prior-posterior mismatch that degrades fine-grained expressiveness such as vibrato and micro-prosody. We propose FM-Singer, which introduces conditional flow matching (CFM) in latent space to learn a continuous vector field transporting prior latents toward posterior latents along an optimal-transport-inspired path. At inference time, the learned latent flow refines a prior sample by solving an ordinary differential equation (ODE) before waveform generation, improving expressiveness while preserving the efficiency of parallel decoding. Experiments on Korean and Chinese singing datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines, including lower mel-cepstral distortion and fundamental-frequency error and higher perceptual scores on the Korean dataset. Code, pretrained checkpoints, and audio demos are available at https://github.com/alsgur9368/FM-Singer
Abstract: Image-level domain alignment is the de facto approach for unsupervised domain adaptation, where unpaired image translation is used to minimize the domain gap. Prior studies mainly focus on the domain shift between the source and target domains, whereas the intra-domain variability remains under-explored. To address the latter, an effective strategy is to diversify the styles of the synthetic target domain data during image translation. However, previous methods typically require intra-domain variations to be pre-specified for style synthesis, which may be impractical. In this paper, we propose an exemplar-based style synthesis method named IntraStyler, which can capture diverse intra-domain styles without any prior knowledge. Specifically, IntraStyler uses an exemplar image to guide the style synthesis such that the output style matches the exemplar style. To extract the style-only features, we introduce a style encoder to learn styles discriminatively based on contrastive learning. We evaluate the proposed method on the largest public dataset for cross-modality domain adaptation, CrossMoDA 2023. Our experiments show the efficacy of our method in controllable style synthesis and the benefits of diverse synthetic data for downstream segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/han-liu/IntraStyler.
Abstract: 3D morphing remains challenging due to the difficulty of generating semantically consistent and temporally smooth deformations, especially across categories. We present MorphAny3D, a training-free framework that leverages Structured Latent (SLAT) representations for high-quality 3D morphing. Our key insight is that intelligently blending source and target SLAT features within the attention mechanisms of 3D generators naturally produces plausible morphing sequences. To this end, we introduce Morphing Cross-Attention (MCA), which fuses source and target information for structural coherence, and Temporal-Fused Self-Attention (TFSA), which enhances temporal consistency by incorporating features from preceding frames. An orientation correction strategy further mitigates the pose ambiguity within the morphing steps. Extensive experiments show that our method generates state-of-the-art morphing sequences, even for challenging cross-category cases. MorphAny3D further supports advanced applications such as decoupled morphing and 3D style transfer, and can be generalized to other SLAT-based generative models. Project page: https://xiaokunsun.github.io/MorphAny3D.github.io/.
Abstract: Robotic fleets such as unmanned aerial and ground vehicles have been widely used for routine inspections of static environments, where the areas of interest are known and planned in advance. However, in many applications, such areas of interest are unknown and should be identified online during exploration. Thus, this paper considers the problem of simultaneous exploration, inspection of unknown environments and then real-time communication to a mobile ground control station to report the findings. The heterogeneous robots are equipped with different sensors, e.g., long-range lidars for fast exploration and close-range cameras for detailed inspection. Furthermore, global communication is often unavailable in such environments, where the robots can only communicate with each other via ad-hoc wireless networks when they are in close proximity and free of obstruction. This work proposes a novel planning and coordination framework (SLEI3D) that integrates the online strategies for collaborative 3D exploration, adaptive inspection and timely communication (via the intermit-tent or proactive protocols). To account for uncertainties w.r.t. the number and location of features, a multi-layer and multi-rate planning mechanism is developed for inter-and-intra robot subgroups, to actively meet and coordinate their local plans. The proposed framework is validated extensively via high-fidelity simulations of numerous large-scale missions with up to 48 robots and 384 thousand cubic meters. Hardware experiments of 7 robots are also conducted. Project website is available at https://junfengchen-robotics.github.io/SLEI3D/.
Abstract: Human drivers rarely travel where no person has gone before. After all, thousands of drivers use busy city roads every day, and only one can claim to be the first. The same holds for autonomous computer vision systems. The vast majority of the deployment area of an autonomous vision system will have been visited before. Yet, most autonomous vehicle vision systems act as if they are encountering each location for the first time. In this work, we present Compressed Map Priors (CMP), a simple but effective framework to learn spatial priors from historic traversals. The map priors use a binarized hashmap that requires only $32\text{KB}/\text{km}^2$, a $20\times$ reduction compared to the dense storage. Compressed Map Priors easily integrate into leading 3D perception systems at little to no extra computational costs, and lead to a significant and consistent improvement in 3D object detection on the nuScenes dataset across several architectures.
Abstract: We present GRL-SNAM, a geometric reinforcement learning framework for Simultaneous Navigation and Mapping(SNAM) in unknown environments. A SNAM problem is challenging as it needs to design hierarchical or joint policies of multiple agents that control the movement of a real-life robot towards the goal in mapless environment, i.e. an environment where the map of the environment is not available apriori, and needs to be acquired through sensors. The sensors are invoked from the path learner, i.e. navigator, through active query responses to sensory agents, and along the motion path. GRL-SNAM differs from preemptive navigation algorithms and other reinforcement learning methods by relying exclusively on local sensory observations without constructing a global map. Our approach formulates path navigation and mapping as a dynamic shortest path search and discovery process using controlled Hamiltonian optimization: sensory inputs are translated into local energy landscapes that encode reachability, obstacle barriers, and deformation constraints, while policies for sensing, planning, and reconfiguration evolve stagewise via updating Hamiltonians. A reduced Hamiltonian serves as an adaptive score function, updating kinetic/potential terms, embedding barrier constraints, and continuously refining trajectories as new local information arrives. We evaluate GRL-SNAM on two different 2D navigation tasks. Comparing against local reactive baselines and global policy learning references under identical stagewise sensing constraints, it preserves clearance, generalizes to unseen layouts, and demonstrates that Geometric RL learning via updating Hamiltonians enables high-quality navigation through minimal exploration via local energy refinement rather than extensive global mapping. The code is publicly available on \href{https://github.com/CVC-Lab/GRL-SNAM}{Github}.
Abstract: Differentiable rendering is a technique that aims to invert the rendering process to enable optimizing rendering parameters from a set of images. In this article, we present a differentiable volume rendering solution called DiffTetVR for tetrahedral meshes. Unlike previous works based on regular grids, this enables the optimization of vertex positions and the local subdivision of the mesh without relying on multigrid methods. We present an efficient implementation of the forward rendering process, deduce the derivatives for the backwards pass and regularization terms for avoiding degenerate tetrahedra, and finally show how the tetrahedral mesh can be subdivided locally to enable a coarse-to-fine optimization process. The source code is made publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/chrismile/DiffTetVR.