Xin Sun

Zhixun Li, Liang Wang, Xin Sun et al. · cmu

Graph Structure Learning (GSL) has recently garnered considerable attention due to its ability to optimize both the parameters of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and the computation graph structure simultaneously. Despite the proliferation of GSL methods developed in recent years, there is no standard experimental setting or fair comparison for performance evaluation, which creates a great obstacle to understanding the progress in this field. To fill this gap, we systematically analyze the performance of GSL in different scenarios and develop a comprehensive Graph Structure Learning Benchmark (GSLB) curated from 20 diverse graph datasets and 16 distinct GSL algorithms. Specifically, GSLB systematically investigates the characteristics of GSL in terms of three dimensions: effectiveness, robustness, and complexity. We comprehensively evaluate state-of-the-art GSL algorithms in node- and graph-level tasks, and analyze their performance in robust learning and model complexity. Further, to facilitate reproducible research, we have developed an easy-to-use library for training, evaluating, and visualizing different GSL methods. Empirical results of our extensive experiments demonstrate the ability of GSL and reveal its potential benefits on various downstream tasks, offering insights and opportunities for future research. The code of GSLB is available at: https://github.com/GSL-Benchmark/GSLB.

Chunhui Zhang, Xin Sun, Yiqian Yang et al.

Current mainstream vision-language (VL) tracking framework consists of three parts, \ie a visual feature extractor, a language feature extractor, and a fusion model. To pursue better performance, a natural modus operandi for VL tracking is employing customized and heavier unimodal encoders, and multi-modal fusion models. Albeit effective, existing VL trackers separate feature extraction and feature integration, resulting in extracted features that lack semantic guidance and have limited target-aware capability in complex scenarios, \eg similar distractors and extreme illumination. In this work, inspired by the recent success of exploring foundation models with unified architecture for both natural language and computer vision tasks, we propose an All-in-One framework, which learns joint feature extraction and interaction by adopting a unified transformer backbone. Specifically, we mix raw vision and language signals to generate language-injected vision tokens, which we then concatenate before feeding into the unified backbone architecture. This approach achieves feature integration in a unified backbone, removing the need for carefully-designed fusion modules and resulting in a more effective and efficient VL tracking framework. To further improve the learning efficiency, we introduce a multi-modal alignment module based on cross-modal and intra-modal contrastive objectives, providing more reasonable representations for the unified All-in-One transformer backbone. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks, \ie OTB99-L, TNL2K, LaSOT, LaSOT$_{\rm Ext}$ and WebUAV-3M, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed tracker against existing state-of-the-arts on VL tracking. Codes will be made publicly available at https://github.com/983632847/All-in-One.

Xin Sun, Xuan Wang, Jialin Gao et al.

Moment retrieval in videos is a challenging task that aims to retrieve the most relevant video moment in an untrimmed video given a sentence description. Previous methods tend to perform self-modal learning and cross-modal interaction in a coarse manner, which neglect fine-grained clues contained in video content, query context, and their alignment. To this end, we propose a novel Multi-Granularity Perception Network (MGPN) that perceives intra-modality and inter-modality information at a multi-granularity level. Specifically, we formulate moment retrieval as a multi-choice reading comprehension task and integrate human reading strategies into our framework. A coarse-grained feature encoder and a co-attention mechanism are utilized to obtain a preliminary perception of intra-modality and inter-modality information. Then a fine-grained feature encoder and a conditioned interaction module are introduced to enhance the initial perception inspired by how humans address reading comprehension problems. Moreover, to alleviate the huge computation burden of some existing methods, we further design an efficient choice comparison module and reduce the hidden size with imperceptible quality loss. Extensive experiments on Charades-STA, TACoS, and ActivityNet Captions datasets demonstrate that our solution outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Codes are available at github.com/Huntersxsx/MGPN.

Xiaoyu Han, Shunyuan Zheng, Zonglin Li et al.

Image-based virtual try-on aims to seamlessly fit in-shop clothing to a person image while maintaining pose consistency. Existing methods commonly employ the thin plate spline (TPS) transformation or appearance flow to deform in-shop clothing for aligning with the person's body. Despite their promising performance, these methods often lack precise control over fine details, leading to inconsistencies in shape between clothing and the person's body as well as distortions in exposed limb regions. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel shape-guided clothing warping method for virtual try-on, dubbed SCW-VTON, which incorporates global shape constraints and additional limb textures to enhance the realism and consistency of the warped clothing and try-on results. To integrate global shape constraints for clothing warping, we devise a dual-path clothing warping module comprising a shape path and a flow path. The former path captures the clothing shape aligned with the person's body, while the latter path leverages the mapping between the pre- and post-deformation of the clothing shape to guide the estimation of appearance flow. Furthermore, to alleviate distortions in limb regions of try-on results, we integrate detailed limb guidance by developing a limb reconstruction network based on masked image modeling. Through the utilization of SCW-VTON, we are able to generate try-on results with enhanced clothing shape consistency and precise control over details. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. The code is available at https://github.com/xyhanHIT/SCW-VTON.

Tao Ge, Heming Xia, Xin Sun et al. · microsoft-research, pku

We study lossless acceleration for seq2seq generation with a novel decoding algorithm -- Aggressive Decoding. Unlike the previous efforts (e.g., non-autoregressive decoding) speeding up seq2seq generation at the cost of quality loss, our approach aims to yield the identical (or better) generation compared with autoregressive decoding but in a significant speedup, achieved by innovative cooperation of aggressive decoding and verification that are both efficient due to parallel computing. We propose two Aggressive Decoding paradigms for 2 kinds of seq2seq tasks: 1) For the seq2seq tasks whose inputs and outputs are highly similar (e.g., Grammatical Error Correction), we propose Input-guided Aggressive Decoding (IAD) that aggressively copies from the input sentence as drafted decoded tokens to verify in parallel; 2) For other general seq2seq tasks (e.g., Machine Translation), we propose Generalized Aggressive Decoding (GAD) that first employs an additional non-autoregressive decoding model for aggressive decoding and then verifies in parallel in the autoregressive manner. We test Aggressive Decoding on the most popular 6-layer Transformer model on GPU in multiple seq2seq tasks: 1) For IAD, we show that it can introduce a 7x-9x speedup for the Transformer in Grammatical Error Correction and Text Simplification tasks with the identical results as greedy decoding; 2) For GAD, we observe a 3x-5x speedup with the identical or even better quality in two important seq2seq tasks: Machine Translation and Abstractive Summarization. Moreover, Aggressive Decoding can benefit even more from stronger computing devices that are better at parallel computing. Given the lossless quality as well as significant and promising speedup, we believe Aggressive Decoding may potentially evolve into a de facto standard for efficient and lossless seq2seq generation in the near future.

Zihan Wang, Peiyi Wang, Lianzhe Huang et al. · pku

Hierarchical text classification is a challenging subtask of multi-label classification due to its complex label hierarchy. Existing methods encode text and label hierarchy separately and mix their representations for classification, where the hierarchy remains unchanged for all input text. Instead of modeling them separately, in this work, we propose Hierarchy-guided Contrastive Learning (HGCLR) to directly embed the hierarchy into a text encoder. During training, HGCLR constructs positive samples for input text under the guidance of the label hierarchy. By pulling together the input text and its positive sample, the text encoder can learn to generate the hierarchy-aware text representation independently. Therefore, after training, the HGCLR enhanced text encoder can dispense with the redundant hierarchy. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of HGCLR.

Yu-Ming Shang, Heyan Huang, Xin Sun et al. · microsoft-research

Extracting relational triples from unstructured text is an essential task in natural language processing and knowledge graph construction. Existing approaches usually contain two fundamental steps: (1) finding the boundary positions of head and tail entities; (2) concatenating specific tokens to form triples. However, nearly all previous methods suffer from the problem of error accumulation, i.e., the boundary recognition error of each entity in step (1) will be accumulated into the final combined triples. To solve the problem, in this paper, we introduce a fresh perspective to revisit the triple extraction task, and propose a simple but effective model, named DirectRel. Specifically, the proposed model first generates candidate entities through enumerating token sequences in a sentence, and then transforms the triple extraction task into a linking problem on a "head $\rightarrow$ tail" bipartite graph. By doing so, all triples can be directly extracted in only one step. Extensive experimental results on two widely used datasets demonstrate that the proposed model performs better than the state-of-the-art baselines.

Liuji Chen, Xiaofang Yang, Yuanzhuo Lu et al.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems improve the factual grounding of large language models (LLMs) but remain vulnerable to retrieval poisoning, where adversaries seed the corpus with manipulated content. Prior work largely evaluates this threat under a simplified single-attacker assumption. In practice, however, high-value or high-visibility queries attract multiple adversaries with conflicting objectives. Motivated by real cases, we introduce the setting of competing attacks, in which multiple attackers simultaneously attempt to steer the same or closely related query toward different targets. We formalize this threat model and propose competitive effectiveness, a metric that quantifies an attacker's advantage under competition. Extensive experiments show that many strategies that succeed in the single-attacker regime degrade markedly under competition, revealing performance inversions and highlighting the limits of conventional metrics such as attack success rate and F1. Furthermore, we present PoisonArena, a standardized framework and benchmark for evaluating poisoning attacks and defenses under realistic, multi-adversary conditions.

Xin Sun, Zhongqi Chen, Xing Zheng et al.

Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) challenges models to bridge the gap between natural language and strict knowledge graph schemas by generating executable logical forms. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced this field, current approaches often struggle with a dichotomy of failure: they either generate hallucinated queries without verifying schema existence or exhibit rigid, template-based reasoning that mimics synthesized traces without true comprehension of the environment. To address these limitations, we present \textbf{KBQA-R1}, a framework that shifts the paradigm from text imitation to interaction optimization via Reinforcement Learning. Treating KBQA as a multi-turn decision process, our model learns to navigate the knowledge base using a list of actions, leveraging Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to refine its strategies based on concrete execution feedback rather than static supervision. Furthermore, we introduce \textbf{Referenced Rejection Sampling (RRS)}, a data synthesis method that resolves cold-start challenges by strictly aligning reasoning traces with ground-truth action sequences. Extensive experiments on WebQSP, GrailQA, and GraphQuestions demonstrate that KBQA-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance, effectively grounding LLM reasoning in verifiable execution.

Xin Sun, Zhongqi Chen, Qiang Liu et al.

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.

Qingyang Tan, Yi Zhou, Tuanfeng Wang et al.

Despite recent success, deep learning-based methods for predicting 3D garment deformation under body motion suffer from interpenetration problems between the garment and the body. To address this problem, we propose a novel collision handling neural network layer called Repulsive Force Unit (ReFU). Based on the signed distance function (SDF) of the underlying body and the current garment vertex positions, ReFU predicts the per-vertex offsets that push any interpenetrating vertex to a collision-free configuration while preserving the fine geometric details. We show that ReFU is differentiable with trainable parameters and can be integrated into different network backbones that predict 3D garment deformations. Our experiments show that ReFU significantly reduces the number of collisions between the body and the garment and better preserves geometric details compared to prior methods based on collision loss or post-processing optimization.

Yunseok Jang, Ruben Villegas, Jimei Yang et al. · pku

There have been remarkable successes in computer vision with deep learning. While such breakthroughs show robust performance, there have still been many challenges in learning in-depth knowledge, like occlusion or predicting physical interactions. Although some recent works show the potential of 3D data in serving such context, it is unclear how we efficiently provide 3D input to the 2D models due to the misalignment in dimensionality between 2D and 3D. To leverage the successes of 2D models in predicting self-occlusions, we design Ray-marching in Camera Space (RiCS), a new method to represent the self-occlusions of foreground objects in 3D into a 2D self-occlusion map. We test the effectiveness of our representation on the human image harmonization task by predicting shading that is coherent with a given background image. Our experiments demonstrate that our representation map not only allows us to enhance the image quality but also to model temporally coherent complex shadow effects compared with the simulation-to-real and harmonization methods, both quantitatively and qualitatively. We further show that we can significantly improve the performance of human parts segmentation networks trained on existing synthetic datasets by enhancing the harmonization quality with our method.

Yichen Sheng, Jianming Zhang, Julien Philip et al. · pku

Lighting effects such as shadows or reflections are key in making synthetic images realistic and visually appealing. To generate such effects, traditional computer graphics uses a physically-based renderer along with 3D geometry. To compensate for the lack of geometry in 2D Image compositing, recent deep learning-based approaches introduced a pixel height representation to generate soft shadows and reflections. However, the lack of geometry limits the quality of the generated soft shadows and constrain reflections to pure specular ones. We introduce PixHt-Lab, a system leveraging an explicit mapping from pixel height representation to 3D space. Using this mapping, PixHt-Lab reconstructs both the cutout and background geometry and renders realistic, diverse, lighting effects for image compositing. Given a surface with physically-based materials, we can render reflections with varying glossiness. To generate more realistic soft shadows, we further propose to use 3D-aware buffer channels to guide a neural renderer. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that PixHt-Lab significantly improves soft shadow generation.

Xin Sun, Yue Su, Yifan Mo et al.

Building trustworthy AI systems for mental health support is a shared priority across stakeholders from multiple disciplines. However, "trustworthy" remains loosely defined and inconsistently operationalized. AI research often focuses on technical criteria (e.g., robustness, explainability, and safety), while therapeutic practitioners emphasize therapeutic fidelity (e.g., appropriateness, empathy, and long-term user outcomes). To bridge the fragmented landscape, we propose a three-layer trust framework, covering human-oriented, AI-oriented, and interaction-oriented trust, integrating the viewpoints of key stakeholders (e.g., practitioners, researchers, regulators). Using this framework, we systematically review existing AI-driven research in mental health domain and examine evaluation practices for ``trustworthy'' ranging from automatic metrics to clinically validated approaches. We highlight critical gaps between what NLP currently measures and what real-world mental health contexts require, and outline a research agenda for building socio-technically aligned and genuinely trustworthy AI for mental health support.

Xin Sun, Liang Wang, Qiang Liu et al.

This paper addresses the challenge of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization in graph machine learning, a field rapidly advancing yet grappling with the discrepancy between source and target data distributions. Traditional graph learning algorithms, based on the assumption of uniform distribution between training and test data, falter in real-world scenarios where this assumption fails, resulting in suboptimal performance. A principal factor contributing to this suboptimal performance is the inherent simplicity bias of neural networks trained through Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), which prefer simpler features over more complex yet equally or more predictive ones. This bias leads to a reliance on spurious correlations, adversely affecting OOD performance in various tasks such as image recognition, natural language understanding, and graph classification. Current methodologies, including subgraph-mixup and information bottleneck approaches, have achieved partial success but struggle to overcome simplicity bias, often reinforcing spurious correlations. To tackle this, we propose DIVE, training a collection of models to focus on all label-predictive subgraphs by encouraging the models to foster divergence on the subgraph mask, which circumvents the limitation of a model solely focusing on the subgraph corresponding to simple structural patterns. Specifically, we employs a regularizer to punish overlap in extracted subgraphs across models, thereby encouraging different models to concentrate on distinct structural patterns. Model selection for robust OOD performance is achieved through validation accuracy. Tested across four datasets from GOOD benchmark and one dataset from DrugOOD benchmark, our approach demonstrates significant improvement over existing methods, effectively addressing the simplicity bias and enhancing generalization in graph machine learning.

Guangyu Li, Xin Sun, Tianwei Hou et al.

Pinching-antenna systems (PASS) have emerged as a promising flexible-antenna architecture capable of dynamically reconfiguring wireless channels by activating dielectric particles along waveguides. The sum rate maximization problem in multi-waveguide PASS is investigated in this study. Both in-waveguide propagation loss and coupling effects are explicitly modeled. To tackle the optimization problem, a hierarchical user scheduling (HUS) algorithm is proposed. The HUS algorithm minimizes the sum of squared distances between users and their associated waveguides to mitigate path loss. Additionally, spatially separated users are assigned within each time slot to reduce inter-user interference. Furthermore, a joint optimization framework integrating power allocation and pinching-antenna (PA) positioning is developed to further improve system sum rate. Specifically, PAs' positions are optimized via one-dimensional search, while the power allocation problem is solved by using the Lagrangian duality and fractional programming. Numerical results show that the HUS algorithm clearly outperforms random pairing, and the proposed power allocation algorithm shows a marked performance improvement over the maximum ratio transmission algorithm. Moreover, the results explicitly demonstrate the considerable impact of in-waveguide propagation loss and coupling effects on the performance of PASS.

Xin Sun, Jianan Xie, Zhongqi Chen et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a natural fit for agentic knowledge base question answering (KBQA), where a model must issue executable actions, observe knowledge-base feedback, and eventually return an answer. However, current RL-based KBQA systems mainly optimize sparse rewards from the final answer, leaving intermediate action errors weakly supervised. This is especially limiting for logical-form annotated KBQA benchmarks: gold logical forms can be converted into executable action sequences, but existing pipelines use them mainly for warm-start data construction rather than for on-policy RL updates. We propose GAPD, a training-time Gold-Action Policy Distillation framework that adds dense token-level guidance to outcome-based RL. To align gold actions with on-policy student rollouts, GAPD uses MID-ANCHOR MATCHING: it treats the intermediate entities reached during student exploration and gold execution as state anchors, and matches student states to gold states through these explored entity sets. The current policy conditioned on this aligned gold action serves as a stop-gradient teacher, whose token distribution is distilled back to the ordinary student policy over generated action-token spans. GAPD consistently surpasses the current state of the art on WebQSP, GrailQA, and GraphQ.

Wenbo Hu, Xin Sun, Qiang liu et al.

Post-click conversion rate (CVR) is a reliable indicator of online customers' preferences, making it crucial for developing recommender systems. A major challenge in predicting CVR is severe selection bias, arising from users' inherent self-selection behavior and the system's item selection process. To mitigate this issue, the inverse propensity score (IPS) is employed to weight the prediction error of each observed instance. However, current propensity score estimations are unreliable due to the lack of a quality measure. To address this, we evaluate the quality of propensity scores from the perspective of uncertainty calibration, proposing the use of Expected Calibration Error (ECE) as a measure of propensity-score quality, which quantifies the extent to which predicted probabilities are overconfident by assessing the difference between predicted probabilities and actual observed frequencies. Miscalibrated propensity scores can lead to distorted IPS weights, thereby compromising the debiasing process in CVR prediction. In this paper, we introduce a model-agnostic calibration framework for propensity-based debiasing of CVR predictions. Theoretical analysis on bias and generalization bounds demonstrates the superiority of calibrated propensity estimates over uncalibrated ones. Experiments conducted on the Coat, Yahoo and KuaiRand datasets show improved uncertainty calibration, as evidenced by lower ECE values, leading to enhanced CVR prediction outcomes.

Puyang Wang, Dazhou Guo, Dandan Zheng et al.

Intrathoracic airway segmentation in computed tomography (CT) is a prerequisite for various respiratory disease analyses such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma and lung cancer. Unlike other organs with simpler shapes or topology, the airway's complex tree structure imposes an unbearable burden to generate the "ground truth" label (up to 7 or 3 hours of manual or semi-automatic annotation on each case). Most of the existing airway datasets are incompletely labeled/annotated, thus limiting the completeness of computer-segmented airway. In this paper, we propose a new anatomy-aware multi-class airway segmentation method enhanced by topology-guided iterative self-learning. Based on the natural airway anatomy, we formulate a simple yet highly effective anatomy-aware multi-class segmentation task to intuitively handle the severe intra-class imbalance of the airway. To solve the incomplete labeling issue, we propose a tailored self-iterative learning scheme to segment toward the complete airway tree. For generating pseudo-labels to achieve higher sensitivity , we introduce a novel breakage attention map and design a topology-guided pseudo-label refinement method by iteratively connecting breaking branches commonly existed from initial pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments have been conducted on four datasets including two public challenges. The proposed method ranked 1st in both EXACT'09 challenge using average score and ATM'22 challenge on weighted average score. In a public BAS dataset and a private lung cancer dataset, our method significantly improves previous leading approaches by extracting at least (absolute) 7.5% more detected tree length and 4.0% more tree branches, while maintaining similar precision.

Haifeng Wang, Hua Wu, Tian Wu et al.

In this report, we introduce ERNIE 5.0, a natively autoregressive foundation model desinged for unified multimodal understanding and generation across text, image, video, and audio. All modalities are trained from scratch under a unified next-group-of-tokens prediction objective, based on an ultra-sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture with modality-agnostic expert routing. To address practical challenges in large-scale deployment under diverse resource constraints, ERNIE 5.0 adopts a novel elastic training paradigm. Within a single pre-training run, the model learns a family of sub-models with varying depths, expert capacities, and routing sparsity, enabling flexible trade-offs among performance, model size, and inference latency in memory- or time-constrained scenarios. Moreover, we systematically address the challenges of scaling reinforcement learning to unified foundation models, thereby guaranteeing efficient and stable post-training under ultra-sparse MoE architectures and diverse multimodal settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ERNIE 5.0 achieves strong and balanced performance across multiple modalities. To the best of our knowledge, among publicly disclosed models, ERNIE 5.0 represents the first production-scale realization of a trillion-parameter unified autoregressive model that supports both multimodal understanding and generation. To facilitate further research, we present detailed visualizations of modality-agnostic expert routing in the unified model, alongside comprehensive empirical analysis of elastic training, aiming to offer profound insights to the community.

Da Guan, Xin Sun, Tianwei Hou et al.

A transmitting intelligent surfaces (TISs) aided satellite indoor navigation system is investigated. By leveraging the unique features of TIS, we address the limitations of conventional global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) in providing reliable positioning services within indoor environments. To facilitate the extension of GNSS indoor signals, we establish an extended line-of-sight link using TIS which has the capability to change signal direction. A three-stage TIS-aided satellite indoor positioning algorithm (TSIPA), which utilizes the positions of TIS arrays and the angle of arrival, is proposed to locate indoor users. To evaluate the distribution of TIS arrays, we propose TIS position dilution of precision (TPDoP) to evaluate centroid deviation and utilize the root mean square error (RMSE) to represent compactness.

Jianfei Zhao, Feng Zhang, Xin Sun et al.

Multimodal large language models are typically trained end-to-end to predict ground-truth answers, yet supervision signals are applied exclusively to text tokens. Visual tokens, the core carriers of visual information, are optimized only implicitly as part of the context, leading to coarse-grained visual understanding. Prior works attempt to supervise visual inputs but inevitably rely on auxiliary components such as additional decoders or forward passes, because visual tokens lack readily interpretable labels. This limits their practical applicability. In this work, we propose \textbf{D}irect \textbf{V}ision \textbf{S}upervised \textbf{F}ine-\textbf{T}uning (DV-SFT), which constructs explicit, token-level supervision for visual tokens and trains them through the same next-token prediction objective used for text. Specifically, we exploit the direct vision--text correspondence in OCR-related scenarios and automatically label each visual token with the word in its corresponding image patch. DV-SFT treats the MLLM as a black box, requiring no architectural modifications or additional forward passes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of direct vision supervision. DV-SFT consistently outperforms standard SFT across three in-domain and four out-of-domain benchmarks. Further analyses show that vision supervision effectively enhances fine-grained visual understanding and achieves higher multimodal alignment efficiency.

Tianwei Hou, Da Guan, Xin Sun et al.

This study investigates the application of a simultaneous transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS)-aided medium-Earth-orbit (MEO) satellite network for providing both global positioning services and communication services in the urban canyons, where the direct satellite-user links are obstructed. Superposition coding (SC) and successive interference cancellation (SIC) techniques are utilized for the integrated navigation and communication (INAC) networks, and the composed navigation and communication signals are reflected or transmitted to ground users or indoor users located in urban canyons. To meet diverse application needs, navigation-oriented (NO)-INAC and communication-oriented (CO)-INAC have been developed, each tailored according to distinct power allocation factors. We then proposed two algorithms, namely navigation-prioritized-algorithm (NPA) and communication-prioritized-algorithm (CPA), to improve the navigation or communication performance by selecting the satellite with the optimized position dilution of precision (PDoP) or with the best channel gain. The effectiveness of the proposed STAR-RIS-aided INAC network is quantified by analyzing the positioning error for navigation services and by evaluating communication performance through achievable ergodic rate metrics. Our satellite selection approach indicates that: the positioning services at the urban canyon users can be completed with the aid of STAR-RIS. 2) Additionally, it is observed that while a single STAR-RIS array can extend the navigational link, it fails to serve users in indoor scenarios, highlighting a limitation in the current system design.

Bowen Fang, Wen Ye, Yunyue Su et al.

Prevalent retrieval-based tool-use pipelines struggle with a dual semantic challenge: their retrievers often employ encoders that fail to capture complex semantics, while the Large Language Model (LLM) itself lacks intrinsic tool knowledge from its natural language pretraining. Generative methods offer a powerful alternative by unifying selection and execution, tasking the LLM to directly learn and generate tool identifiers. However, the common practice of mapping each tool to a unique new token introduces substantial limitations: it creates a scalability and generalization crisis, as the vocabulary size explodes and each tool is assigned a semantically isolated token. This approach also creates a semantic bottleneck that hinders the learning of collaborative tool relationships, as the model must infer them from sparse co-occurrences of monolithic tool IDs within a vast library. To address these limitations, we propose ToolWeaver, a novel generative tool learning framework that encodes tools into hierarchical sequences. This approach makes vocabulary expansion logarithmic to the number of tools. Crucially, it enables the model to learn collaborative patterns from the dense co-occurrence of shared codes, rather than the sparse co-occurrence of monolithic tool IDs. We generate these structured codes through a novel tokenization process designed to weave together a tool's intrinsic semantics with its extrinsic co-usage patterns. These structured codes are then integrated into the LLM through a generative alignment stage, where the model is fine-tuned to produce the hierarchical code sequences. Evaluation results with nearly 47,000 tools show that ToolWeaver significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, establishing a more scalable, generalizable, and semantically-aware foundation for advanced tool-augmented agents.

Shanwen Wang, Xin Sun, Danfeng Hong et al.

The semi-supervised semantic segmentation (S4) can learn rich visual knowledge from low-cost unlabeled images. However, traditional S4 architectures all face the challenge of low-quality pseudo-labels, especially for the teacher-student framework.We propose a novel SemiEarth model that introduces vision-language models (VLMs) to address the S4 issues for the remote sensing (RS) domain. Specifically, we invent a VLM pseudo-label purifying (VLM-PP) structure to purify the teacher network's pseudo-labels, achieving substantial improvements. Especially in multi-class boundary regions of RS images, the VLM-PP module can significantly improve the quality of pseudo-labels generated by the teacher, thereby correctly guiding the student model's learning. Moreover, since VLM-PP equips VLMs with open-world capabilities and is independent of the S4 architecture, it can correct mispredicted categories in low-confidence pseudo-labels whenever a discrepancy arises between its prediction and the pseudo-label. We conducted extensive experiments on multiple RS datasets, which demonstrate that our SemiEarth achieves SOTA performance. More importantly, unlike previous SOTA RS S4 methods, our model not only achieves excellent performance but also offers good interpretability. The code is released at https://github.com/wangshanwen001/SemiEarth.

Chengan He, Xin Sun, Zhixin Shu et al.

We present Perm, a learned parametric representation of human 3D hair designed to facilitate various hair-related applications. Unlike previous work that jointly models the global hair structure and local curl patterns, we propose to disentangle them using a PCA-based strand representation in the frequency domain, thereby allowing more precise editing and output control. Specifically, we leverage our strand representation to fit and decompose hair geometry textures into low- to high-frequency hair structures, termed guide textures and residual textures, respectively. These decomposed textures are later parameterized with different generative models, emulating common stages in the hair grooming process. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the architecture design of Perm, and finally deploy the trained model as a generic prior to solve task-agnostic problems, further showcasing its flexibility and superiority in tasks such as single-view hair reconstruction, hairstyle editing, and hair-conditioned image generation. More details can be found on our project page: https://cs.yale.edu/homes/che/projects/perm/.

Jiancheng Dong, Pengyue Jia, Derong Xu et al.

LLMs typically linearize 2D tables into 1D sequences to fit their autoregressive architecture, which weakens row-column adjacency and other layout cues. In contrast, purely visual encoders can capture spatial cues, yet often struggle to preserve exact cell text. Our analysis reveals that these two modalities provide highly distinct information to LLMs and exhibit strong complementarity. However, direct concatenation and other fusion methods yield limited gains and frequently introduce cross-modal interference. To address this issue, we propose DiVA-Former, a lightweight architecture designed to effectively integrate vision and text information. DiVA-Former leverages visual tokens as dynamic queries to distill long textual sequences into digest vectors, thereby effectively exploiting complementary vision--text information. Evaluated across 13 table benchmarks, DiVA-Former improves upon the pure-text baseline by 23.9\% and achieves consistent gains over existing baselines using visual inputs, textual inputs, or a combination of both.

Desai Xie, Jiahao Li, Hao Tan et al.

Multi-view diffusion models, obtained by applying Supervised Finetuning (SFT) to text-to-image diffusion models, have driven recent breakthroughs in text-to-3D research. However, due to the limited size and quality of existing 3D datasets, they still suffer from multi-view inconsistencies and Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) reconstruction artifacts. We argue that multi-view diffusion models can benefit from further Reinforcement Learning Finetuning (RLFT), which allows models to learn from the data generated by themselves and improve beyond their dataset limitations during SFT. To this end, we introduce Carve3D, an improved RLFT algorithm coupled with a novel Multi-view Reconstruction Consistency (MRC) metric, to enhance the consistency of multi-view diffusion models. To measure the MRC metric on a set of multi-view images, we compare them with their corresponding NeRF renderings at the same camera viewpoints. The resulting model, which we denote as Carve3DM, demonstrates superior multi-view consistency and NeRF reconstruction quality than existing models. Our results suggest that pairing SFT with Carve3D's RLFT is essential for developing multi-view-consistent diffusion models, mirroring the standard Large Language Model (LLM) alignment pipeline. Our code, training and testing data, and video results are available at: https://desaixie.github.io/carve-3d.

Xin Sun, Xiao Tang, Abdallah El Ali et al.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in generating psychotherapeutic dialogues, particularly in the context of motivational interviewing (MI). However, the inherent lack of transparency in LLM outputs presents significant challenges given the sensitive nature of psychotherapy. Applying MI strategies, a set of MI skills, to generate more controllable therapeutic-adherent conversations with explainability provides a possible solution. In this work, we explore the alignment of LLMs with MI strategies by first prompting the LLMs to predict the appropriate strategies as reasoning and then utilizing these strategies to guide the subsequent dialogue generation. We seek to investigate whether such alignment leads to more controllable and explainable generations. Multiple experiments including automatic and human evaluations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of MI strategies in aligning psychotherapy dialogue generation. Our findings demonstrate the potential of LLMs in producing strategically aligned dialogues and suggest directions for practical applications in psychotherapeutic settings.

Xiaosong Wang, Xiaofan Zhang, Guotai Wang et al.

The emerging trend of advancing generalist artificial intelligence, such as GPTv4 and Gemini, has reshaped the landscape of research (academia and industry) in machine learning and many other research areas. However, domain-specific applications of such foundation models (e.g., in medicine) remain untouched or often at their very early stages. It will require an individual set of transfer learning and model adaptation techniques by further expanding and injecting these models with domain knowledge and data. The development of such technologies could be largely accelerated if the bundle of data, algorithms, and pre-trained foundation models were gathered together and open-sourced in an organized manner. In this work, we present OpenMEDLab, an open-source platform for multi-modality foundation models. It encapsulates not only solutions of pioneering attempts in prompting and fine-tuning large language and vision models for frontline clinical and bioinformatic applications but also building domain-specific foundation models with large-scale multi-modal medical data. Importantly, it opens access to a group of pre-trained foundation models for various medical image modalities, clinical text, protein engineering, etc. Inspiring and competitive results are also demonstrated for each collected approach and model in a variety of benchmarks for downstream tasks. We welcome researchers in the field of medical artificial intelligence to continuously contribute cutting-edge methods and models to OpenMEDLab, which can be accessed via https://github.com/openmedlab.

Xin Sun, Shu Wei, Ting Pan et al.

Modeling users' cognitive states (e.g., cognitive load and decision confidence) is essential for building adaptive AI in high-stakes decision-making. While eye tracking provides non-invasive behavioral signals correlated with cognitive effort, prior work has not systematically examined how AI assistance contexts, specifically varying advice reliability and user heterogeneity, can alter the mapping between gaze signals and cognitive states. We conducted a within-subject lab eye-tracking study (N=54) on factual verification tasks under three conditions: No-AI, Correct-AI advice, and Incorrect-AI advice. We analyze condition-dependent changes in self-reports and eye-tracking patterns and evaluate the robustness of eye-tracking-based user modeling. Results show that AI advice increases decision confidence compared to No-AI, while Correct-AI is associated with lower perceived cognitive load and more efficient gaze behavior. Crucially, predictive modeling is context-sensitive: the relationship between eye-tracking signals and cognitive states shifts across AI conditions. Finally, fusing eye-tracking features with user priors (demographics, AI literacy/experience, and propensity to trust technology) improves cross-participant generalization. These findings support condition-aware and personalized user modeling for cognitively aligned adaptive AI systems.

Feng Zhang, Xinhong Ma, Ziqiang Dong et al.

RLVR has become a widely adopted paradigm for improving LLMs' reasoning capabilities, and GRPO is one of its most representative algorithms. In this paper, we first show that GRPO admits an equivalent discriminative reformulation as a weighted positive-negative score difference. Under this view, GRPO increases sequence-level scores of verified positive rollouts and decreases those of negative rollouts, where the scores are averages of clipped token-level importance sampling ratios. This reformulation reveals two structural limitations of GRPO: likelihood-misaligned scoring, where clipped ratio-based surrogate scores are optimized instead of generation likelihoods, and score-insensitive credit assignment, where rollout-level credit is assigned without accounting for relative score gaps between positive and negative rollouts in the same group. To address these limitations, we propose ConSPO, a framework for Contrastive Sequence-level Policy Optimization in RLVR. ConSPO replaces GRPO's clipped ratio-based scores with length-normalized sequence log-probabilities, aligning the optimized rollout scores with the likelihoods used in autoregressive generation. It then optimizes a group-wise InfoNCE-style objective that contrasts each positive rollout against negative distractors from the same group, enabling credit assignment to depend on their relative scores. This contrastive formulation amplifies updates for poorly separated positives while concentrating suppressive updates on high-scoring negatives. Moreover, ConSPO introduces a curriculum-scheduled margin, guiding optimization from coarse positive-negative ordering in early training toward stronger separation in later stages. Extensive evaluations across diverse backbone models, parameter scales, and training datasets show that ConSPO consistently outperforms several strong RLVR baselines on challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks.

Peiyu Xu, Xin Sun, Krishna Mullia et al.

Ray-tracing-based 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) methods overcome the limitations of rasterization -- rigid pinhole camera assumptions, inaccurate shadows, and lack of native reflection or refraction -- but remain slower due to the cost of sorting all intersecting Gaussians along every ray. Moreover, existing ray-tracing methods still rely on rasterization-style approximations such as shadow mapping for relightable scenes, undermining the generality that ray tracing promises. We present a differentiable, sorting-free stochastic formulation for ray-traced 3DGS -- the first framework that uses stochastic ray tracing to both reconstruct and render standard and relightable 3DGS scenes. At its core is an unbiased Monte Carlo estimator for pixel-color gradients that evaluates only a small sampled subset of Gaussians per ray, bypassing the need for sorting. For standard 3DGS, our method matches the reconstruction quality and speed of rasterization-based 3DGS while substantially outperforming sorting-based ray tracing. For relightable 3DGS, the same stochastic estimator drives per-Gaussian shading with fully ray-traced shadow rays, delivering notably higher reconstruction fidelity than prior work.

Jiahuan Pei, Fanghua Ye, Xin Sun et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced virtual educators and learners, bridging NLP with AI4Education. Existing work often lacks scalability and fails to leverage diverse, large-scale course content, with limited frameworks for assessing pedagogic quality. To this end, we propose WikiHowAgent, a multi-agent workflow leveraging LLMs to simulate interactive teaching-learning conversations. It integrates teacher and learner agents, an interaction manager, and an evaluator to facilitate procedural learning and assess pedagogic quality. We introduce a dataset of 114,296 teacher-learner conversations grounded in 14,287 tutorials across 17 domains and 727 topics. Our evaluation protocol combines computational and rubric-based metrics with human judgment alignment. Results demonstrate the workflow's effectiveness in diverse setups, offering insights into LLM capabilities across domains. Our datasets and implementations are fully open-sourced.

Weinan Dai, Yifeng Jiang, Yuanjing Liu et al.

This paper addresses the persistent challenge in Keyword Spotting (KWS), a fundamental component in speech technology, regarding the acquisition of substantial labeled data for training. Given the difficulty in obtaining large quantities of positive samples and the laborious process of collecting new target samples when the keyword changes, we introduce a novel approach combining unsupervised contrastive learning and a unique augmentation-based technique. Our method allows the neural network to train on unlabeled data sets, potentially improving performance in downstream tasks with limited labeled data sets. We also propose that similar high-level feature representations should be employed for speech utterances with the same keyword despite variations in speed or volume. To achieve this, we present a speech augmentation-based unsupervised learning method that utilizes the similarity between the bottleneck layer feature and the audio reconstructing information for auxiliary training. Furthermore, we propose a compressed convolutional architecture to address potential redundancy and non-informative information in KWS tasks, enabling the model to simultaneously learn local features and focus on long-term information. This method achieves strong performance on the Google Speech Commands V2 Dataset. Inspired by recent advancements in sign spotting and spoken term detection, our method underlines the potential of our contrastive learning approach in KWS and the advantages of Query-by-Example Spoken Term Detection strategies. The presented CAB-KWS provide new perspectives in the field of KWS, demonstrating effective ways to reduce data collection efforts and increase the system's robustness.

Yiming Ma, Xinjie Li, Xin Sun et al.

Ellipsometry is used to indirectly measure the optical properties and thickness of thin films. However, solving the inverse problem of ellipsometry is time-consuming since it involves human expertise to apply the data fitting techniques. Many studies use traditional machine learning-based methods to model the complex mathematical fitting process. In our work, we approach this problem from a deep learning perspective. First, we introduce a large-scale benchmark dataset to facilitate deep learning methods. The proposed dataset encompasses 98 types of thin film materials and 4 types of substrate materials, including metals, alloys, compounds, and polymers, among others. Additionally, we propose a deep learning framework that leverages residual connections and self-attention mechanisms to learn the massive data points. We also introduce a reconstruction loss to address the common challenge of multiple solutions in thin film thickness prediction. Compared to traditional machine learning methods, our framework achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on our proposed dataset. The dataset and code will be available upon acceptance.

Wengang Guo, Wei Ye, Chunchun Chen et al.

Spectral clustering is a leading clustering method. Two of its major shortcomings are the disjoint optimization process and the limited representation capacity. To address these issues, we propose a deep spectral clustering model (named BootSC), which jointly learns all stages of spectral clustering -- affinity matrix construction, spectral embedding, and $k$-means clustering -- using a single network in an end-to-end manner. BootSC leverages effective and efficient optimal-transport-derived supervision to bootstrap the affinity matrix and the cluster assignment matrix. Moreover, a semantically-consistent orthogonal re-parameterization technique is introduced to orthogonalize spectral embeddings, significantly enhancing the discrimination capability. Experimental results indicate that BootSC achieves state-of-the-art clustering performance. For example, it accomplishes a notable 16\% NMI improvement over the runner-up method on the challenging ImageNet-Dogs dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/spdj2271/BootSC.

Hanting Li, Fei Zhou, Xin Sun et al.

Recent Transformer-based low-light enhancement methods have made promising progress in recovering global illumination. However, they still struggle with non-uniform lighting scenarios, such as backlit and shadow, appearing as over-exposure or inadequate brightness restoration. To address this challenge, we present a Spatially-Adaptive Illumination-Guided Transformer (SAIGFormer) framework that enables accurate illumination restoration. Specifically, we propose a dynamic integral image representation to model the spatially-varying illumination, and further construct a novel Spatially-Adaptive Integral Illumination Estimator ($\text{SAI}^2\text{E}$). Moreover, we introduce an Illumination-Guided Multi-head Self-Attention (IG-MSA) mechanism, which leverages the illumination to calibrate the lightness-relevant features toward visual-pleased illumination enhancement. Extensive experiments on five standard low-light datasets and a cross-domain benchmark (LOL-Blur) demonstrate that our SAIGFormer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative and qualitative metrics. In particular, our method achieves superior performance in non-uniform illumination enhancement while exhibiting strong generalization capabilities across multiple datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/LHTcode/SAIGFormer.git.

Xiao Wang, Jiahuan Pei, Diancheng Shui et al.

Legal judgment prediction offers a compelling method to aid legal practitioners and researchers. However, the research question remains relatively under-explored: Should multiple defendants and charges be treated separately in LJP? To address this, we introduce a new dataset namely multi-person multi-charge prediction (MPMCP), and seek the answer by evaluating the performance of several prevailing legal large language models (LLMs) on four practical legal judgment scenarios: (S1) single defendant with a single charge, (S2) single defendant with multiple charges, (S3) multiple defendants with a single charge, and (S4) multiple defendants with multiple charges. We evaluate the dataset across two LJP tasks, i.e., charge prediction and penalty term prediction. We have conducted extensive experiments and found that the scenario involving multiple defendants and multiple charges (S4) poses the greatest challenges, followed by S2, S3, and S1. The impact varies significantly depending on the model. For example, in S4 compared to S1, InternLM2 achieves approximately 4.5% lower F1-score and 2.8% higher LogD, while Lawformer demonstrates around 19.7% lower F1-score and 19.0% higher LogD. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/lololo-xiao/MultiJustice-MPMCP.

Fei Zhou, Xin Sun, Junyu Dong et al.

Although Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) has made substantial progress in the low-light image enhancement task, one critical problem of CNNs is the paradox of model complexity and performance. This paper presents a novel SurroundNet which only involves less than 150$K$ parameters (about 80-98 percent size reduction compared to SOTAs) and achieves very competitive performance. The proposed network comprises several Adaptive Retinex Blocks (ARBlock), which can be viewed as a novel extension of Single Scale Retinex in feature space. The core of our ARBlock is an efficient illumination estimation function called Adaptive Surround Function (ASF). It can be regarded as a general form of surround functions and be implemented by convolution layers. In addition, we also introduce a Low-Exposure Denoiser (LED) to smooth the low-light image before the enhancement. We evaluate the proposed method on the real-world low-light dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the superiority of our submitted SurroundNet in both performance and network parameters against State-of-the-Art low-light image enhancement methods. Code is available at https: github.com/ouc-ocean-group/SurroundNet.

Xin Sun, Tao Ge, Furu Wei et al.

In this paper, we propose Shallow Aggressive Decoding (SAD) to improve the online inference efficiency of the Transformer for instantaneous Grammatical Error Correction (GEC). SAD optimizes the online inference efficiency for GEC by two innovations: 1) it aggressively decodes as many tokens as possible in parallel instead of always decoding only one token in each step to improve computational parallelism; 2) it uses a shallow decoder instead of the conventional Transformer architecture with balanced encoder-decoder depth to reduce the computational cost during inference. Experiments in both English and Chinese GEC benchmarks show that aggressive decoding could yield the same predictions as greedy decoding but with a significant speedup for online inference. Its combination with the shallow decoder could offer an even higher online inference speedup over the powerful Transformer baseline without quality loss. Not only does our approach allow a single model to achieve the state-of-the-art results in English GEC benchmarks: 66.4 F0.5 in the CoNLL-14 and 72.9 F0.5 in the BEA-19 test set with an almost 10x online inference speedup over the Transformer-big model, but also it is easily adapted to other languages. Our code is available at https://github.com/AutoTemp/Shallow-Aggressive-Decoding.

Xin Sun, Di Wu, Sijing Qin et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as automated evaluators (LLM-as-a-Judge). This work challenges its reliability by showing that trust judgments by LLMs are biased by disclosed source labels. Using a counterfactual design, we find that both humans and LLM judges assign higher trust to information labeled as human-authored than to the same content labeled as AI-generated. Eye-tracking data reveal that humans rely heavily on source labels as heuristic cues for judgments. We analyze LLM internal states during judgment. Across label conditions, models allocate denser attention to the label region than the content region, and this label dominance is stronger under Human labels than AI labels, consistent with the human gaze patterns. Besides, decision uncertainty measured by logits is higher under AI labels than Human labels. These results indicate that the source label is a salient heuristic cue for both humans and LLMs. It raises validity concerns for label-sensitive LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation, and we cautiously raise that aligning models with human preferences may propagate human heuristic reliance into models, motivating debiased evaluation and alignment.

Qingyu Meng, Min Chen, Dingming Liu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent dialogue, but prior works lack situational grounding, dynamic strategy control, and evaluation aligned with clinical standards in motivational interviewing (MI). We introduce StoryMI, a multi-LLM agent framework for controllable MI dialogue generation, where questionnaire-based client profiles are expanded into situational stories that provide narrative context for the dialogue. Therapist and client agents generate MI-coded utterances guided by MI codes selected by the interaction agent, while an interaction agent dynamically coordinates exchanges to control MI strategies during a multi-turn conversation. We propose a two-level evaluation protocol: lexical metrics and MI-specific measures of macro-level counseling strategies, alongside LLM-as-judge and human expert assessments. We construct a dataset of 6K simulated MI dialogues grounded in 1K questionnaire-story pairs, covering 12 MI codes and 13 symptom domains, and benchmark six open- and closed-source LLMs. Our results show that situational grounding and macro-level control can improve MI adherence and clinical plausibility, demonstrating the effectiveness of a structured multi-agent workflow for psychotherapy dialogue generation. We provide code and data for reproducibility.

Yue Niu, Zhaokai Sun, Jiayi Yang et al.

Despite their success in various domains, the growing dependence on GNNs raises a critical concern about the nature of the combinatorial reasoning underlying their predictions, which is often hidden within their black-box architectures. Addressing this challenge requires understanding how GNNs translate topological patterns into logical rules. However, current works only uncover the hard logical rules over graph concepts, which cannot quantify the contribution of each concept to prediction. Moreover, they are post-hoc interpretable methods that generate explanations after model training and may not accurately reflect the true combinatorial reasoning of GNNs, since they approximate it with a surrogate. In this work, we develop a graph concept bottleneck layer that can be integrated into any GNN architectures to guide them to predict the selected discriminative global graph concepts. The predicted concept scores are further projected to class labels by a sparse linear layer. It enforces the combinatorial reasoning of GNNs' predictions to fit the soft logical rule over graph concepts and thus can quantify the contribution of each concept. To further improve the quality of the concept bottleneck, we treat concepts as "graph words" and graphs as "graph sentences", and leverage language models to learn graph concept embeddings. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that our method GCBMs achieve state-of-the-art performance both in classification and interpretability.

Xin Sun, Daniel Ståhl, Kristian Sandahl et al.

In recent years, LLMs have been widely integrated into software engineering workflows, supporting tasks like code generation. However, while these models often generate functionally correct outputs, we still lack a systematic understanding and evaluation of their non-functional qualities. Existing studies focus mainly on whether generated code passes the tests rather than whether it passes with quality. Guided by the ISO/IEC 25010 quality model, this study conducted three complementary investigations: a systematic review of 108 papers, two industry workshops with practitioners from multiple organizations, and an empirical analysis of patching real-world software issues using three LLMs. Motivated by insights from both the literature and practitioners, the empirical study examined the quality of generated patches on security, maintainability, and performance efficiency. Across the literature, we found that security and performance efficiency dominate academic attention, while maintainability and other qualities are understudied. In contrast, industry experts prioritize maintainability and readability, warning that generated code may accelerate the accumulation of technical debt. In our evaluation of functionally correct patches generated by three LLMs, improvements in one quality dimension often come at the cost of others. Runtime and memory results further show high variance across models and optimization strategies. Overall, our findings reveal a mismatch between academic focus, industry priorities, and model performance, highlighting the urgent need to integrate quality assurance mechanisms into LLM code generation pipelines to ensure that future generated code not only passes tests but truly passes with quality.

Feng Zhang, Zezhong Tan, Xinhong Ma et al.

To combine the advantages of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), recent methods have integrated ''hints'' into post-training, which are prefix segments of complete reasoning trajectories, aiming for powerful knowledge expansion and reasoning generalization. However, existing hint-based RL methods typically ignore difficulty when scheduling hint ratios and estimating relative advantages, leading to unstable learning and excessive imitation of off-policy hints. In this work, we propose ADHint, which treats difficulty as a key factor in both hint-ratio schedule and relative-advantage estimation to achieve a better trade-off between exploration and imitation. Specifically, we propose Adaptive Hint with Sample Difficulty Prior, which evaluates each sample's difficulty under the policy model and accordingly schedules an appropriate hint ratio to guide its rollouts. We also introduce Consistency-based Gradient Modulation and Selective Masking for Hint Preservation to modulate token-level gradients within hints, preventing biased and destructive updates. Additionally, we propose Advantage Estimation with Rollout Difficulty Posterior, which leverages the relative difficulty of rollouts with and without hints to estimate their respective advantages, thereby achieving more balanced updates. Extensive experiments across diverse modalities, model scales, and domains demonstrate that ADHint delivers superior reasoning ability and out-of-distribution generalization, consistently surpassing existing methods in both pass@1 and avg@8. Our code and dataset will be made publicly available upon paper acceptance.

Xiao Zhou, Luoyi Sun, Dexuan He et al.

Deep learning has enabled the development of highly robust foundation models for various pathological tasks across diverse diseases and patient cohorts. Among these models, vision-language pre-training, which leverages large-scale paired data to align pathology image and text embedding spaces, and provides a novel zero-shot paradigm for downstream tasks. However, existing models have been primarily data-driven and lack the incorporation of domain-specific knowledge, which limits their performance in cancer diagnosis, especially for rare tumor subtypes. To address this limitation, we establish a Knowledge-enhanced Pathology (KEEP) foundation model that harnesses disease knowledge to facilitate vision-language pre-training. Specifically, we first construct a disease knowledge graph (KG) that covers 11,454 human diseases with 139,143 disease attributes, including synonyms, definitions, and hypernym relations. We then systematically reorganize the millions of publicly available noisy pathology image-text pairs, into 143K well-structured semantic groups linked through the hierarchical relations of the disease KG. To derive more nuanced image and text representations, we propose a novel knowledge-enhanced vision-language pre-training approach that integrates disease knowledge into the alignment within hierarchical semantic groups instead of unstructured image-text pairs. Validated on 18 diverse benchmarks with more than 14,000 whole slide images (WSIs), KEEP achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot cancer diagnostic tasks. Notably, for cancer detection, KEEP demonstrates an average sensitivity of 89.8% at a specificity of 95.0% across 7 cancer types. For cancer subtyping, KEEP achieves a median balanced accuracy of 0.456 in subtyping 30 rare brain cancers, indicating strong generalizability for diagnosing rare tumors.

Linyuan Wang, Haibo Yao, Te-Ming Tseng et al.

Weeds compete with crops for light, water, and nutrients, reducing yield and crop quality. Efficient weed detection is essential for site-specific weed management (SSWM). Although deep learning models have been deployed on UAV-based edge systems, a systematic understanding of how different model architectures perform under real-world resource constraints is still lacking. To address this gap, this study proposes a deployment-oriented framework for real-time UAV-based weed detection on resource-constrained edge platforms. The framework integrates UAV data acquisition, model development, and on-device inference, with a focus on balancing detection accuracy and computational efficiency. A diverse set of state-of-the-art object detection models is evaluated, including convolution-based YOLO models (v8-v12) and transformer-based RT-DETR models (v1-v2). Experiments on three edge devices (Jetson Orin Nano, Jetson AGX Xavier, and Jetson AGX Orin) demonstrate clear trade-offs between accuracy and inference latency across models and hardware configurations. Results show that high-capacity models achieve up to 86.9% mAP50 but suffer from high latency, limiting real-time deployment. In contrast, lightweight models achieve 66%-71% mAP50 with significantly lower latency, enabling real-time performance. Among all models, RT-DETRv2-R50-M achieves competitive accuracy (79% mAP50) with improved efficiency, while YOLOv10n provides the fastest inference speed. YOLOv11s and RT-DETRv2-R50-M offer the best balance between accuracy and speed, making them strong candidates for real-time UAV deployment.

Hanwen Jiang, Zexiang Xu, Desai Xie et al.

We propose scaling up 3D scene reconstruction by training with synthesized data. At the core of our work is MegaSynth, a procedurally generated 3D dataset comprising 700K scenes - over 50 times larger than the prior real dataset DL3DV - dramatically scaling the training data. To enable scalable data generation, our key idea is eliminating semantic information, removing the need to model complex semantic priors such as object affordances and scene composition. Instead, we model scenes with basic spatial structures and geometry primitives, offering scalability. Besides, we control data complexity to facilitate training while loosely aligning it with real-world data distribution to benefit real-world generalization. We explore training LRMs with both MegaSynth and available real data. Experiment results show that joint training or pre-training with MegaSynth improves reconstruction quality by 1.2 to 1.8 dB PSNR across diverse image domains. Moreover, models trained solely on MegaSynth perform comparably to those trained on real data, underscoring the low-level nature of 3D reconstruction. Additionally, we provide an in-depth analysis of MegaSynth's properties for enhancing model capability, training stability, and generalization, as well as application to other tasks.

Yuto Mandai, Katie Seaborn, Tomoyasu Nakano et al.

"Kawaii" is the Japanese concept of cute, which carries sociocultural connotations related to social identities and emotional responses. Yet, virtually all work to date has focused on the visual side of kawaii, including in studies of computer agents and social robots. In pursuit of formalizing the new science of kawaii vocalics, we explored what elements of voice relate to kawaii and how they might be manipulated, manually and automatically. We conducted a four-phase study (grand N = 512) with two varieties of computer voices: text-to-speech (TTS) and game character voices. We found kawaii "sweet spots" through manipulation of fundamental and formant frequencies, but only for certain voices and to a certain extent. Findings also suggest a ceiling effect for the kawaii vocalics of certain voices. We offer empirical validation of the preliminary kawaii vocalics model and an elementary method for manipulating kawaii perceptions of computer voice.