XJ Huang

Antony Garcia, Adrian Noriega, Gabrielle Britton et al.

Black-box models limit the adoption of artificial intelligence in medicine due to their lack of interpretability and reproducibility. We introduce a statistically grounded framework that provides fully interpretable, rule-based clinical classification using the Bernoulli Naïve Bayes (BNB) model. The method applies supervised $χ^2$-guided statistical binarization to continuous variables, identifying thresholds that maximize association with clinical outcomes within the training data. This transformation allows BNB to operate effectively on continuous medical data without sacrificing its inherent transparency. The approach was evaluated on three benchmark datasets, Pima Indians Diabetes, Wisconsin Breast Cancer, and Heart Failure Prediction, achieving area-under-the-curve (AUC) scores of 0.800 for the Pima analysis, 0.984 for Wisconsin Breast Cancer, and 0.919 for Heart Failure Prediction. In addition to discrimination, probabilistic reliability was assessed using leakage-safe cross-validated calibration analysis including Brier score, calibration intercept/slope, and post-hoc beta calibration, which improved probability calibration across datasets. These results suggest that a statistically interpretable framework can achieve performance comparable to more complex models while providing explicit, clinically meaningful decision rules and calibrated risk estimates. To illustrate this transparency concretely, a complete worked example demonstrates that model inference can be reproduced using only a reference table and basic arithmetic, without access to software or proprietary tools. This work offers a practical approach to supporting trustworthy and generalizable AI in real-world healthcare settings.

Zachary Charlick, Nilay Roy Choudhury, Haoyu Ma et al.

The scalability of organic agriculture is partially limited by the labor costs associated with monitoring for pests. While drones and rovers are well-suited for agricultural monitoring from above or next to plants, many pests live on the underside of leaves or on plant stems, making them detectable only after they have caused significant damage. To enable early pest detection we present STEMbot, a miniature climbing robot system designed for autonomous navigation under plant canopies. Unlike existing climbing platforms that lack on-board perception or are restricted to unbranched vertical trunks, STEMbot integrates a fully geometric PIN-SLAM pipeline with a semantic OcTree to achieve robust localization and mapping while climbing the plant. To plan STEMbot's motion we propose a manifold-constrained A* planner along with ray-tracing goal specification to enable branch-aware traversal and the inspection of occluded targets. We validate our system through hardware experiments, demonstrating reliable traversal of stems ranging from 7-33mm and autonomous navigation across four distinct plant specimens. Quantitative evaluations show that our system achieves high-fidelity geometric reconstructions with an average Chamfer distance of less than 1cm relative to an offline photogrammetry baseline, confirming that STEMbot maintains the globally consistent odometry needed for autonomous navigation.

Xiaolong Huang, Benjamin Thérien, James Harrison et al.

Learned optimization aims to improve upon hand-designed optimizers (e.g., Adam and Muon) by meta-learning small neural network optimizers over a distribution of tasks. While recent work has greatly advanced the architectural design and inductive biases of learned optimizers (LOs), current meta-training approaches still suffer from two main difficulties: (1) they cannot efficiently scale meta-training to long-horizon inner problems and (2) they often fail to surpass comparable hand-designed optimizers. To address these limitations, we propose Efficient Long-hOrizon (ELO) learning, an efficient meta-training algorithm that (1) reallocates redundant meta-training compute to longer failure regimes, achieving efficient long-horizon learning, and (2) enforces decoupled progressive expert supervision, providing stable meta-learning signals that additionally improve the generalization of LOs. Our empirical study evaluates ELO for meta-training both element-wise and matrix-based LOs. Across downstream language modeling (GPT-2-124M/350M on FineWeb) and image classification (ViT-B/16, ResNet-50 on ImageNet-1K) tasks, ELO substantially improves the long-unroll performance and out-of-distribution generalization of the base LOs. In particular, ELO-Celo2 consistently outperforms well-tuned AdamW across all evaluated tasks, while remaining competitive with Muon on language modeling. \textit{Notably, all ELO baselines require less than 7 H100 GPU-hours for meta-training.}

Tung-Anh Nguyen, Van-Phuc Bui, Anh Tuyen Le et al.

Distributed IoT systems generate multivariate time-series streams for monitoring physical assets, servers, and embedded sensing platforms. Detecting abnormal temporal behavior is critical for fault diagnosis, predictive maintenance, and security. However, practical IoT anomaly detection is hindered by decentralized and non-IID data, limited bandwidth, and the constrained computation and memory of edge devices. This paper proposes FedKAD, a resource-efficient federated Koopman anomaly detection framework for distributed IoT multivariate time series. Unlike deep-learning-based anomaly detectors that require training and communicating large neural models, FedKAD learns normal temporal dynamics through lightweight sliding-window Koopman representations. Federated training is formulated as a low-rank consensus problem, where raw sensor streams and local reduced dynamics remain on device while only compact subspace variables are exchanged with the server. To optimize the shared representation under orthonormality constraints, we develop a federated Stiefel-ADMM algorithm and provide convergence and stationarity analysis under partial client participation. During inference, each client detects anomalies locally by measuring the prediction residual between observed future trajectories and the learned Koopman dynamics. Experiments on four widely used multivariate time-series anomaly detection benchmarks show that FedKAD maintains or improves detection performance compared with federated deep-learning baselines. More importantly for IoT deployment, FedKAD provides up to $2.1\times10^3$ faster training, $80\times$ lower communication, and $79\times$ lower inference latency than neural baselines, confirming its suitability for resource-constrained edge devices.

Zhiheng Xi, Dingwen Yang, Jiaqi Liu et al.

Language agents, i.e., LLM agents, progress rapidly and are increasingly deployed in production environments. This trend underscores the urgent need for rigorous and realistic evaluations. However, most existing benchmarks evaluate agents in simplified, idealized settings. They typically rely on pre-packaged tool interfaces, overlook critical steps, and assume inputs are clean and fully specified. Consequently, they understate the difficulty of real deployments, where uncertainty and noise are ubiquitous and agents must proactively explore the environment to uncover new tools. To bridge this gap, we present AgentGym2, a new evaluation framework with task instances grounded in real-world end-to-end working demands. Beyond reasoning and planning, it measures agents' ability to execute end-to-end procedures, discover tools via exploration, compose tools for unseen tasks, and remain robust to noisy and underspecified information. Experiments on 15 proprietary and open-source models show that even SOTA systems like Gemini and GPT-5 struggle on AgentGym2, revealing a substantial gap between the capability of current agents and the demands of real-world applications.

Xiao Lin, Xiaohu Huang, Kai Han

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated substantial promise in spatial understanding. Existing works typically incorporate prior knowledge extracted from a pre-trained foundation model to further enhance the spatial awareness of MLLMs. In this paper, we first reveal that when integrating diverse foundation models into MLLMs, different models provide complementary spatial priors that benefit different tasks. Motivated by this, we propose $\textbf{ViPS}$, a novel multi-model prior framework designed to fully unleash the potential of incorporating multiple $\textbf{Vi}$sual $\textbf{P}$riors from diverse models into MLLMs for $\textbf{S}$patial understanding. Specifically, ViPS introduces an Efficient Prior Proxy to generate multiple foundational priors with minimal inference overhead, and a Dynamic Prior Fusion mechanism to achieve harmonious and context-aware prior fusion and injection from the prior proxies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ViPS successfully harmonizes diverse visual priors, establishing new state-of-the-art performance across multiple complex spatial reasoning and 3D spatial understanding benchmarks. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/vips

Ho-Lin Chen, Xiang Huang

We present Ripple, an open, AI-formalized Lean 4 framework for the mathematics of computing real numbers with chemical reaction networks (CRNs). Ripple formalizes the full ladder of models -- the GPAC / CRN continuum and the CRN-computable reals, the large-population-protocol (LPP) compilation pipeline, and a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) layer bridged to the deterministic mean-field limit by three machine-checked versions of Kurtz's theorem, and two Turing-completeness results -- the Bournez-Graça-Pouly GPAC Turing-completeness construction and the Soloveichik-Cook-Winfree-Bruck stochastic-CRN universality theorem. The development is reliable (its core constructions are verified to depend on exactly the three Mathlib foundational axioms, with no sorry); it exposed genuine, fixable gaps in published proofs (the approximate-majority convergence argument and the LPP main theorem); and it proves new results -- a fully machine-checked construction of Apéry's constant ζ(3) as a CRN-computable number via its holonomic generating function, the same recipe turning the modular 1/π series of Ramanujan into a sharp open problem. The formalization was carried out predominantly by AI agents using only publicly available models, so the workflow is reproducible.

Xuyue Huang, Zhe Chen, Wang Shen et al.

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have driven substantial progress in image and video generation but suffer from prohibitive computational costs. Feature caching accelerates inference by reusing intermediate representations. Existing methods rely on historical features for implementation simplicity, yet suffer from severe error accumulation at high acceleration ratios. To address this limitation, we investigate the nature of the requisite feature correction. We demonstrate that the optimal calibration update is characterized by a shared low-rank subspace across diverse prompts. Guided by this structural insight, we propose LearniBridge, a learnable calibration mechanism for feature caching that bridges multiple timesteps through lightweight LoRA updates. This mechanism enables effective calibration requiring only 3-5 training samples. Extensive experiments on image and video generation show that LearniBridge achieves up to $5.87\times$, $5.75\times$, and $4.10\times$ acceleration on FLUX, HunyuanVideo, and WAN2.1, respectively. On WAN2.1, it improves VBench by 1.28% over the previous SOTA at $4.10\times$ acceleration. Our code is available at https://github.com/Iiiiiiirene/LearniBridge.

Shikai Qiu, Xiaowen Xu, Benlei Cui et al.

General-purpose models often struggle to reliably identify and understand real-world multimodal risks, largely due to the inherent multimodal adversarial nature of content and AI safety. We present Yuvion VL, a family of multimodal large language models purpose-built for content and AI safety, with both instruction-tuned and reasoning-oriented variants. Yuvion VL addresses this gap by treating safety as an inherently adversarial and multimodal problem and designing the entire pipeline around adversarial robustness. For data construction, we develop an automated pipeline integrating adversarial-aware data synthesis with multi-stage quality control, producing large-scale, high-quality multimodal samples augmented with domain knowledge and reasoning annotations. For training, we adopt a three-stage pipeline that includes continued pretraining for risk-concept cross-modal alignment, instruct post-training for production-grade safety tasks, and reasoning post-training for enhanced interpretability and performance in complex tasks. We further introduce Confuse-then-Contrast Fine-Tuning, a contrastive framework that mines model-specific confusions and constructs multi-image contrastive groups to enforce explicit discrimination of fine-grained visual-semantic elements, enabling the model to distinguish between visually similar cases with different safety implications in adversarial safety tasks. To support rigorous evaluation, we further introduce Yuvion VL RiskEval (YVRE), a collection of benchmarks covering diverse open and internal evaluations, with a focus on content and AI safety, adversarial robustness, and real-world capability requirements. Experiments show that Yuvion VL-32B achieves industry-leading safety performance, surpassing comparably sized open-source models and best closed-source commercial models, while maintaining comparable general capabilities.

Xiangming Huang, Guannan Zhang, Lu Lu et al.

The inverse design of physical systems governed by partial differential equations is computationally demanding due to the high dimensionality and non-convexity of design spaces. Generative models for inverse design often lack robustness and transferability, whereas evolutionary strategies are robust but struggle in high-dimensional spaces. This paper introduces a Neural Operator-enabled Topology-informed Evolutionary Strategy (NOTES) that integrates dimensionality reduction, representation learning, and evolutionary optimization for efficient and transferable inverse design. NOTES couples a DeepONet-based neural operator with the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) to perform global optimization in a compact latent space that encodes topology-aware priors while discovering high-performance designs for unseen operating conditions. Applied to nanophotonic beam-deflector inverse design governed by Maxwell's equations, NOTES reduces the design dimensionality from 256 to 25 and consistently achieves over 95 percent efficiency, outperforming CMA-ES, topology optimization, and other baselines. Applied to structural optimization, NOTES discovers designs that achieve compliance down to 246. By decoupling topology learning of a DeepONet from the governing physics in a PDE solver, NOTES provides a flexible and transferable framework for the inverse design of physical systems.

Xiaopei Wu, Chenshu Hou, Liang Peng et al.

3D dense captioning, an emerging vision-language task, aims to generate descriptive sentences for each object in the 3D scene. Despite the impressive results achieved by previous methods, they suffer from two limitations. First, current research often employs global rigid transformations, such as rotation, to augment scenes without changing their spatial layouts. However, diverse spatial layouts are crucial for training a 3D dense captioning model to describe spatial relations between objects. Second, previous works mainly focus on the design of the caption generation pipeline while utilizing a simple network architecture for other components, i.e., backbone and detection head, which is crucial for extracting rich semantic information for captioning. In this paper, we propose PVCap to alleviate the aforementioned problems. Our PVCap consists of PseudoCap and VoxelCapNet. Specifically, PseudoCap employs a random mixing technique on instances within the dataset, generating numerous pseudo frames with diverse spatial layouts at the instance level. By utilizing a teacher-student framework, PseudoCap obtains pseudo caption labels for these pseudo frames. This data augmentation approach significantly increases the number of training samples and enhances the model's ability to describe the environment effectively. Regarding VoxelCapNet, we introduce a robust caption network that utilizes voxel features and adapts the caption head to the voxel-based network architecture. Our VoxelCapNet can serve as a competitive baseline for future research on 3D dense captioning. Extensive experiments are conducted on two prevalent benchmarks, i.e., ScanRefer and Nr3D. Notably, our method surpasses current state-of-the-art by 11.41% and 13.99% in CIDEr@0.5IoU, respectively. Codes will be made publicly available.

Xianliang Huang, Chen Xiao, Yuanxiang Ni et al.

Removing unwanted objects from reconstructed 3D scenes is an important task in computer vision, supporting applications in AR/VR, robotics, and digital content creation. Existing methods typically complete the entire masked region in a single step and without effectively utilizing semantic information from other views, leading to difficulties in handling complex geometric details and textures. In this work, we propose a novel framework that integrates Semantic-guided Block Matching (SBM) and Region-Wise Progressive Refinement (RPR) for high-quality 3D object removal. First, we leverage DINOv2 to encode semantic guidance from multi-view observations, and the best match tokens are decoded to complete missing regions in the target view while maintaining cross-view consistency. Second, we introduce a RPR strategy that segments the target mask into multiple subregions and selectively refines those with poor visual quality. Our method is built upon Gaussian Splatting, ensuring high-fidelity scene reconstruction with efficient computation. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing Gaussian-based methods in terms of perceptual quality and coherence in 3D object removal.

Yacong Gu, Lingyun Ying, Zidong Zhang et al.

AI-powered Applications (AI-Apps), hosted on platforms such as Hugging Face, are democratizing access to pre-trained models through online inference and fine-tuning services. While lowering AI adoption barriers, these platforms introduce an unexplored attack surface, as AI-Apps are often developed by untrusted parties with weak isolation and misconfigured security settings. In this paper, we present the first systematic security analysis of AI-Apps across three leading platforms. To structure our investigation, we map the AI-App lifecycle to established risk taxonomies (e.g., OWASP), identifying five threat categories and ten attack vectors ranging from generic web flaws to high-impact architectural issues. Our analysis reveals critical failures including broken access control, insecure resource reuse, insufficient input validation, and sensitive data exposure. Notably, we uncover three novel architectural vulnerabilities inherent to platform design and demonstrate how traditional issues (e.g., world-readable logs) are uniquely amplified in this ecosystem. To assess real-world impact, we develop an analysis framework Insightor and apply it to over 970,000 public AI-Apps. Alarmingly, we find thousands of apps leaking credentials, hundreds containing input injection vulnerabilities that allow arbitrary code execution, and tens harboring embedded backdoors -- indicating active exploitation. We have responsibly disclosed all findings to the affected platforms and developers.

Sheng Zhang, Qinglin Li, Yuechao Zang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) provide a promising interface for high-level robotic task planning, but their use in multi-UAV collaboration remains difficult to evaluate systematically. Existing UAV simulators mainly emphasize dynamics, perception, or low-level control, while existing LLM-agent benchmarks rarely capture aerial-robotics constraints such as partial observability, spatial coverage, UAV assignment, and multi-vehicle coordination. To bridge this gap, we present MultiUAV-Plat, a lightweight, easy-to-use, LLM-agent-oriented simulation platform for multi-UAV collaborative task planning. The platform exposes concise RESTful APIs, agent-facing observations, role-based information access, hidden validation logic, and optional 2D/3D visualization, allowing agents to solve missions through realistic tool interaction rather than privileged simulator access. Built on this platform, the MultiUAV-Plat Benchmark contains 75 mission sessions, 1500 natural-language tasks, and 9396 validation checks across target assignment, area search, and area assignment and patrol scenarios. We further propose Agent4Drone, a task-specific LLM agent framework that structures multi-UAV behavior into memory, observation, task understanding, planning, execution, and verification. In a full paired benchmark comparison, Agent4Drone achieves a 57.9% task pass rate, a 74.6% average task check pass rate, and a 72.0% global check pass rate, substantially outperforming a ReAct baseline at 30.6%, 47.9%, and 43.1%, respectively. Agent4Drone also reduces the total failed task rate from 32.4% to 12.9%. These results demonstrate that MultiUAV-Plat and MultiUAV-Plat Benchmark provide a reproducible foundation for studying LLM-driven multi-UAV autonomy under realistic information and execution constraints.

Shuo Liu, Chen Fan, Zhihe Chen et al.

Long-wave infrared (LWIR) hyperspectral observations contain distance-dependent atmospheric absorption signatures, providing a physical basis for long-range passive ranging. However, in natural scenes, these signatures are nonlinearly coupled with target temperature, material emissivity, and path radiance, making distance inversion from observed radiance ill posed. Existing methods typically rely on full-band measurements and pixel-wise joint optimization, which is computationally expensive and does not explicitly exploit sharp atmospheric absorption structures. This paper proposes an Absorption-Guided Distance-Decoupled Estimation and Refinement (ADER) framework for LWIR hyperspectral passive ranging. ADER represents emissivity with B-spline control points under a smoothness prior, suppressing overfitting to atmospheric absorption structures and enabling distance-decoupled estimation. It further uses ozone-absorption cues to classify pixels into emission-dominant and reflection-dominant groups. For emission-dominant pixels, ADER compensates path radiance and transmittance and estimates distance by one-dimensional absorption-residual minimization. For reflection-dominant pixels, ADER refines the initial estimate using downwelling-radiance compensation based on the complete radiative model. To reduce spectral redundancy, ADER also introduces a greedy band selection strategy based on multi-scene effective Fisher information for the distance parameter. Experiments on real scenes show that ADER recovers LiDAR-consistent spatial distance structures under both full-band and 20-band settings, improves ranging accuracy in the evaluated regions, and achieves approximately two orders of magnitude speedup over a public full-band hyperspectral ranging method.

Zhixin Wang, Zhengbo Wang, Fangcheng Fu et al.

Heterogeneous prefill-decode (PD) inference is now in production: prefill on cost-efficient or supply-available accelerators, decode on bandwidth-strong ones, and KV state crossing mixed interconnects in mixed numerical formats. Each deployment makes these decisions on its own. What is missing is the picture across configurations-which decisions must be made jointly at the PD boundary, and which can be made independently. We propose a design space organized along four design axes-accelerator, precision, interconnect, and KV residency and the workload regime (stage pressure) they respond to. We show that only a subset of interactions among these factors become binding constraints once PD inference becomes heterogeneous. These interactions surface through three recurring boundary decisions: compute placement, KV representation, and KV ownership. The resulting analysis yields concrete guidance. Precision policy belongs to runtime roles rather than to a single system-wide setting, because the same low-bit format relieves different bottlenecks on each side of the boundary. KV transfer engines move bytes rather than tensor semantics, making representation compatibility an explicit boundary concern whenever producer and consumer differ. The KV handoff also carries a lifecycle-reservation, release, and failure recovery-that spans prefill and decode and requires explicit ownership. Two further interactions remain open. Cross-vendor and interconnect-related claims are stated as design guidance grounded in industrial deployment observations and source-code inspection of the runtimes involved.

Wentao Qu, Qi Zhang, Chenxu Wang et al.

Recent progress in Text-to-Image generation benefits from large-scale Text-Image pairs. However, the scarcity of Text-LiDAR pairs often causes over-smoothed scenes and limited controllability. In this paper, we rethink the limitations of Text-LiDAR generation task, focusing on alleviating insufficient training priors and constructing controllable Text-LiDAR data. We propose a \textbf{T}ext-\textbf{to}-\textbf{L}iDAR \textbf{D}iffusion \textbf{M}odel for LiDAR scene generation, T2LDM++, with a Self-Conditioned Representation Guidance (SCRG). Specifically, to alleviate object over-smoothing, SCRG employs a Guidance Network (GN) to provide reconstruction-based soft supervision to the Denoising Network (DN). This enables DN to learn geometry-aware representations through reconstruction guidance, leading to more accurate denoising in DDPMs. Meanwhile, through analysis and design, SCRG exhibits more effective and lightweight, while decoupled in inference, avoiding computational overhead. Furthermore, we construct two high-quality Text-LiDAR benchmarks ($>$100K samples) using a generalized strategy of geometric annotations, along with a controllability metric. Moreover, a directional position prior is designed to mitigate street distortion, further improving scene fidelity. Additionally, T2LDM++ supports multiple conditions, including (Semantic, Box, BEV, Camera)-to-LiDAR, Sparse-to-Dense, and Dense-to-Sparse generation, by learning a control encoder via frozen DN. With effective prior modeling and high-quality Text-LiDAR benchmarks, T2LDM++ can generate realistic LiDAR scenes with rich geometric details in unconditional and conditional settings.

Yixu Huang, Yunlu Yin, Jiayu Lin et al.

Consumer confidence is typically modeled as a persistent macroeconomic index, yet its movements arise from households that interpret economic information through heterogeneous constraints, exposures, prior beliefs, and attention. We introduce ConsumerSim, a generative Human--Environment response framework that reconstructs Consumer Confidence Index (CCI) dynamics from a microdata-calibrated synthetic population, time-stamped macroeconomic, financial, policy, and news signals, survey-like response generation, post-stratified belief expansion, and behavioral inertia alignment. Across U.S., EU27, and Japanese official CCI target series, ConsumerSim ranks first among persistence, time-series, regression, and information-augmented baselines on the reported reconstruction metrics, with clear gains around high-salience shocks. Its reconstructed signal also improves short-horizon prediction of real activity, most consistently for housing outcomes. Mechanism analyses show that CCI movements concentrate around salient events; subgroup trajectories often align in direction while differing in magnitude; and signal sensitivity varies across income, homeownership, education, and political-alignment groups. Population-expansion and ablation results indicate that representative aggregation, situational signals, persona heterogeneity, and inertia are necessary for both accuracy and diagnosis. The findings support a behavioral view of consumer confidence as an interpretable Human--Environment response process rather than a purely aggregate time series.

Yingjie Wang, Yi Dong, Edmund Lau et al.

Rare events govern the safety profile of modern AI systems, yet their probabilities are extremely difficult to estimate: direct Monte Carlo requires prohibitive sample budgets. Subset Simulation (SS) addresses this by decomposing a rare-event probability into moderate conditional probabilities over nested intermediate events. However, classical SS requires a handcrafted scalar performance function whose sublevel sets define those events, demanding detailed knowledge of the failure geometry and limiting transfer to new domains. We propose SCARCE (Scalable Cascade Analysis for Rare-event Characterisation via Embeddings), which replaces the performance function with learned latent representations and geometric rulers that score proximity to failure regions. Adaptive thresholding constructs nested intermediate events directly from data. We formalise SCARCE through a non-negative supermartingale, yielding a high-probability upper envelope that remains valid under early stopping. On MNIST misclassification, where dense Monte Carlo provides ground truth, SCARCE achieves approximately 400--500 times lower mean absolute error than grid-searched traditional SS while eliminating systematic over-counting. We then study PAIR-style LLM jailbreaks under a fleet-level threat model with adversarial fraction $η$. On Llama-Guard-3-8B hidden states, a PCA-based ruler attains 2.6% mean relative error for $η\geq 10^{-3}$ against finite-sample references whose average bootstrap relative half-width is 27.9%, and transfers to a GCG-style corpus with 2.93% relative error after recalibration. A directional criterion $\mathrm{KL}(p_{\mathrm{good}}\,\|\,p_{\mathrm{bad}})$ ranks rulers consistently with estimation error (Spearman $ρ=0.83$).

Xiaohao Xu, Feng Xue, Xiang Li et al.

A faithful 3D world representation should account for layered geometry, where a single camera ray may contain multiple visible and geometrically valid surfaces. Monocular depth estimation, however, reduces this structure to one scalar depth per pixel. Transparent scenes make this ambiguity measurable: the same ray can pass through foreground glass and observe the background, turning the supervised target into a convention of annotation, data, and training rather than a scene-intrinsic truth. A learned predictor exposes this convention as its depth-layer preference. We introduce MultiDepth-3k (MD-3k), a sparse two-layer ordinal benchmark for measuring depth-layer preference and multi-layer spatial relationship accuracy (ML-SRA). On MD-3k, leading depth foundation models exhibit diverse layer preferences under standard RGB input, showing that the same layered geometry can be resolved differently across models. We further find that Laplacian Visual Prompting (LVP), a training-free spectral input transformation, can substantially change the reported layer for certain frozen models. The strongest RGB/LVP pair, DAv2-L, reaches 75.5% ML-SRA. These results suggest that depth foundation models may express complementary geometric hypotheses that standard RGB inference leaves unexpressed. We invite the community to rethink depth supervision and evaluation through an ambiguity-aware lens, where multiple valid 3D interpretations are treated as geometric structure to be measured, preserved, and expressed.

Jie Zhang, Youmei Qiu, Hanling Tian et al.

Benefiting from the strong ability to capture data distributions, diffusion models have become powerful tools for solving image inverse problems. The key is to controllably steer the sampling trajectory toward the measurements while respecting the diffusion prior. In this work, we introduce Stochastic Optimal Control Sampling (SOCS), which models the denoising process as a dynamical system and injects control signals via SOC. Previous SOC-based approach addresses inverse problems by optimizing over the entire trajectory, which is computationally expensive. In contrast, we derive a closed-form control update and apply it at each sampling step, pulling the measurement-consistent clean prediction back onto the denoising flow. In SOCS, we can readily modulate the control strength to align with the diffusion model's native capabilities and thereby enhance perceptual quality. Our method is compatible with a variety of linear stochastic differential equation backbones. Extensive experiments across a broad spectrum of image inverse tasks demonstrate that SOCS achieves accurate measurement-aligned reconstructions with improved visual fidelity and stronger quantitative performance.

Ting Ma, Xiufeng Huang, Benlei Cui et al.

As large language models are increasingly deployed in real-world systems, safety failures can still lead to harmful outputs and dangerous misuse. We argue that the essence of safety is adversarial: many failures arise not from natural inputs alone, but from strategic attempts to evade model policies and safeguards. However, existing general-purpose model development largely overlook this adversarial nature, and often remain insufficient for realistic safety scenarios involving planning, tool use, and multi-step reasoning, causing measured safety performance to overestimate real deployment robustness. To address this gap, we present Yuvion LLM, a large language model built for adversarially robust content safety and broader AI safety. Yuvion LLM treats adversarial robustness and agentic capability as first-class objectives. Its pipeline combines adversarially aware data construction, knowledge-enhanced continued pretraining, and policy-grounded multi-task safety post-training, including risk-aware supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning-based policy optimization, together with safety-aware agentic reinforcement learning for tool use and multi-step reasoning in complex safety scenarios. We further introduce the Yuvion LLM RiskEval (YLRE), a collection of 93 benchmarks across four evaluation categories, covering diverse open and internal evaluations with a focus on safety, adversarial robustness, and real-world capability requirements. Across these evaluations, Yuvion LLM demonstrates clear advantages on safety-focused benchmarks and particularly strong robustness under adversarial conditions, while maintaining solid overall capability. Notably, Yuvion-8B outperforms most state-of-the-art baselines, including substantially larger models such as GPT-5.4 and Qwen3-MAX, on several safety tasks.

Changze Lv, Zhenghua Wang, Yiran Ding et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) still struggle with the ``lost-in-the-middle'' problem, where critical information located in the middle of long-context inputs is often underrepresented or lost. While existing methods attempt to address this by combining multi-scale rotary position embeddings (RoPE), they typically suffer from high latency or rely on suboptimal hand-crafted scaling strategies. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a layer-specific positional embedding scaling~(LPES) method that assigns distinct scaling factors to each layer. LPES achieves a more balanced attention distribution without fine-tuning model parameters or increasing inference delay. A specially designed genetic algorithm is employed to efficiently select the optimal scaling factors for each layer by incorporating Bézier curves to significantly reduce the search space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LPES effectively mitigates positional attention bias and delivers consistent improvements across multiple long-context benchmarks, yielding up to an $11.2$\% accuracy gain on the key-value retrieval dataset.

Chentao Shen, Chen Jia, Mingjie Huang et al.

Recent advances in 3D mesh generation have enabled the creation of visually realistic assets. However, much of their visual fidelity is encoded in textures rather than geometry. When such assets are fabricated using monochromatic materials, texture information is largely lost, causing visually important details to disappear even when the original geometry is faithfully preserved. A key challenge is that the geometric perturbations required to recover texture-dependent appearance cues often introduce sharp local features and high-frequency surface structures, which may increase stress concentration and fabrication risk. In this paper, we present GenMF, an appearance-oriented geometry refinement framework for monochromatic fabrication. GenMF transforms texture-dependent visual cues into geometry-induced shading effects and formulates geometry refinement as a balance between appearance preservation and fabrication-oriented robustness. To discourage structurally and narrow the gap between simulation and physical manufacturing, we further introduce a differentiable stress-aware regularization based on a learned thermal-stress predictor. Experimental results demonstrate that GenMF significantly improves appearance preservation under monochromatic rendering while reducing stress concentration under a consistent thermo-mechanical simulation setting. Physical 3D printing examples further show that the refined geometries preserve more recognizable visual details while remaining suitable for fabrication. These results suggest that appearance-aware geometry refinement provides an effective bridge between generated 3D assets and fabrication-ready monochromatic objects.

Jinghan Wang, Yanjun Chen, Wei Zhang et al.

Deploying large language models (LLMs) on Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) edge devices demands extreme compression, yet existing structured pruning methods collapse at high compression ratios due to one-shot importance estimation, and their cross-architecture behavior remains unpredictable. This article presents a cascaded multi-granularity pruning framework that removes layers, attention heads, and feed-forward channels in coarse-to-fine order, with lightweight low-rank recovery between stages to re-estimate component importance. An information-theoretic analysis motivates this ordering, and the Structural Independence Assumption (SIA) is formalized as a checkable condition predicting whether per-component pruning criteria are reliable for a given architecture: Multi-Head Attention (MHA)+GELU designs satisfy the SIA, whereas Grouped Query Attention (GQA)+SwiGLU designs violate it. On bearing fault diagnosis spanning 88M to 6.25B-parameter models, the framework extends achievable compression to 13.8 times on MHA+GELU architectures with 83.82% accuracy (+3.70 percentage points (pp) over the strongest baseline), while exposing a ~74pp accuracy collapse on GQA+SwiGLU architectures that violate the SIA. Deployed on an industrial slewing bearing fault diagnosis platform with NVIDIA DGX Spark, compressed models reduce inference latency by up to 67.2% and peak memory by 62.5%, demonstrating viability for IIoT edge inference.

Zhen Li, Xin Huang, Liang Wang et al.

LLM-based text embedders have substantially improved retrieval and semantic representation quality, but their deployment remains costly: large backbone models slow down embedding inference, while high-dimensional full-precision embeddings impose substantial storage and bandwidth overhead on large-scale indexes. In this paper, we present BITEMBED, an extreme low-bit framework for LLM-based text embedding that jointly targets encoding efficiency and vector storage. BITEMBED converts pretrained LLM backbones into BitNet-style embedding encoders with ternary weights, quantized activations, and lightweight normalization refinement. The converted model is adapted to representation learning through continual contrastive pre-training, followed by supervised contrastive fine-tuning with both similarity-distribution distillation and attention-relation distillation from a full-precision teacher. Beyond quantizing the backbone, BITEMBED further trains output embeddings to support multiple storage precisions meeting different storage needs in various scenarios. Experiments on MMTEB (eng, v2) with Qwen3-0.6B and Gemma3-270M show that BITEMBED is largely comparable to full precision teacher embedders. Moreover, BITEMBED flexibly obtains text embeddings of various precisions, achieving a trade-off between performance and storage cost.

Juntao Wu, Wei Wen, Xianting Huang et al.

Evaluating the exhaustive search capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is plagued by a fundamental paradox: verifying completeness requires complete ground truth, yet high-entropy enumeration tasks make such ground truth impossible for humans to create. This causes benchmarks to systematically penalize models for outperforming their human annotators. Despite rapid progress in web-search and deep research agents -- which now issue hundreds of queries, traverse diverse sites, and synthesize long reports -- evaluation still largely relies on partially annotated answer sets, LLM-based judges, or single-answer questions that avoid genuinely exhaustive search scenarios. We break this paradox by shifting the evaluation paradigm from simulating a messy reality to constructing computationally pure challenges. We introduce VERITAS (Verifiable Traversal Assessment for Search), a framework built on the principle of computationally irreducible constraints. By introducing novel, non-optimizable constraints, we create verifiable, sparse-answer search tasks that are computationally equivalent to exhaustive enumeration. These constraints are easy to verify but impossible for LLMs or search engines to optimize, forcing agents to genuinely traverse the entire search space. VERITAS can automatically generate a virtually infinite number of test cases with perfect ground truth and precise difficulty control, with marginal instance cost dominated by hash computations. This provides not only a robust benchmark for evaluating systematic exploration under uncertainty but also a scalable method for generating training data to improve these crucial, yet underdeveloped, capabilities.

Mingkai Liu, Haohua Que, Dikai Fan et al.

Per-scene 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables high-fidelity rendering, but practical robotic and AR scene capture pipelines often depend on external geometric initialization (e.g., SfM point clouds or depth estimates), which can be slow and brittle in on-site deployment. We present ACEsplat, a fast per-scene optimization framework that reconstructs 3D Gaussian representations from RGB images and camera poses only, without requiring external 3D priors (e.g., precomputed SfM models or supervised depth maps). ACEsplat uses a two-stage pipeline: (1) a self-supervised scene coordinate regression (SCR) module builds an internal geometry prior within 4--5 minutes; (2) SCR features and coordinate priors are fused by a lightweight Gaussian initialization head, followed by per-scene 3DGS optimization. On static-view rendering, ACEsplat achieves 29.11 dB PSNR on Wayspots with real-time SLAM poses and 33.20 dB on Cambridge Landmarks with SfM-refined poses. On RealEstate10K sparse-view novel view synthesis, it achieves competitive image fidelity under a challenging 2-view setting. ACEsplat completes scene-specific SCR mapping and 3DGS reconstruction within 15--25 minutes on a single GPU, making it a practical RGB+pose-only solution for rapid scene setup in robotics and mixed-reality applications.

Songhan Zuo, Shengbin Yue, Tao Chiang et al.

Civil litigation is inherently a life-cycle process: what a lawyer drafts on day one constrains what unfolds at trial months later. Yet existing legal benchmarks evaluate isolated subtasks, and prior legal-agent simulators reinitialize each scenario from shared ground truth, leaving cross-stage causal dependencies unmodeled. We present LegalWorld, a life-cycle interactive environment that models Chinese civil litigation as a causally connected state chain of five stages (seven sub-scenarios), grounded in 75,309 paired Chinese civil judgments. We pair it with reusable infrastructure (local memory, global case memory, a Skill/Tool library) that keeps each dispute consistent across its full life cycle. Building on this environment, we construct LongJud-Bench to evaluate agent capability across all five connected stages. 18,992 ratings from 217 legal-background evaluators confirm that LegalWorld trajectories are procedurally faithful and role-consistent; and a capability-level cross-model evaluation reveals sharp divergences that aggregate scores cannot expose, with no single backbone leading across consultation, drafting, and courtroom advocacy. Detailed resources will be released publicly.

Zhuoyun Li, Boxuan Wang, Changshun Wu et al.

Rejecting inputs outside the defined in-distribution (IND) service scope is critical for large language model (LLM) services, where unsupported requests should be filtered before full generation. Existing out-of-distribution (OOD) detectors often rely on final outputs or final-layer representations, leaving unclear where service-boundary signals are most clearly encoded inside the model; they also lack a theoretical guarantee for held-out inputs. In this paper, we introduce SCOPE (Sequential Conformal OOD Probing and Evaluation), a framework that selects a readable hidden layer, constructs a conformal gate with IND calibration, and uses a supermartingale e-process to certify persistent service-boundary evidence. Experiments across multiple LLM backbones and six carefully designed boundary conditions show that SCOPE improves gate-level rejection over standard final-layer detectors, while revealing how different OOD boundaries take different geometric forms in hidden space.

Boyin Tan, Xiaowei Huang, Youcheng Sun

Agent skills encode reusable procedural knowledge that guides large language model agents across tasks and execution contexts. Existing evaluations primarily assess skills through task level outcomes, yet task success alone does not reveal which parts of a skill have been exercised or which remain untested. We introduce skill coverage, a test adequacy metric that treats the skill artifact as the object under test. Our approach extracts observable skill behavior constraints from skill documents and measures whether an agent trajectory provides sufficient evidence to exercise and evaluate each constraint. Skill coverage uses a binary cover or not cover judgment, which reports whether a documented behavior has been exercised with sufficient observable evidence, without assigning an additional outcome label to the behavior. Applying skill coverage to SkillsBench reveals that existing benchmark executions cover only 39.90 to 43.98% of skill behavior constraints, suggesting that current benchmark tasks leave large portions of documented skill guidance untested. These findings show that successful task completion does not imply adequate testing of the skill artifact, highlighting skill coverage as a measure of how thoroughly agent skills are tested.

Jingyuan Zhang, Yucheng Bai, Peixi Wen et al.

Large Language Model (LLM) unlearning aims to remove undesirable knowledge or behaviors while preserving retained capabilities. Current unlearning methods all involve a trade-off between unlearning and retention. We have found that the retention activation bias can also be used to quantify the damage an unlearning method inflicts on retention, without considering the specific implementation of the unlearning process. This allows us to restore retention performance for any unlearning method using a post-hoc approach. Therefore, we propose a complementary post-hoc setting to sanitize the final update vector without rerunning the original unlearning pipeline. In this setting, we design SAGE, Spectral Activation-GEometry Sanitization, a source-agnostic correction for final unlearning updates. SAGE collects real module inputs from a small retain proxy, extracts their dominant activation geometry, and solves a source-anchored optimization objective in closed form, which suppresses update components aligned with high-energy retained directions while preserving the source method's forgetting carrier. Across multiple unlearning methods, model scales, and benchmarks, SAGE consistently relieves the retain-forget trade-off, identifying post-hoc sanitization of final vectors as a practical and underexplored axis for machine unlearning.

Xiwen Huang, Pierre Pinson

Data acquisition is a major bottleneck for learning in real-time streams: analysts must decide on the fly which labels to purchase while respecting a rolling budget. However, existing online active learning rarely unifies pricing, information gain, and rolling budget constraints under concept drift. We introduce QueryMarket, a market-inspired framework that queries each incoming data point based on its estimated utility to the model and its price. Within this framework, we propose OVBAL (online variance-based active learning), which integrates data pricing with information-driven selection by estimating each sample's marginal utility via a D-optimality criterion with exponential forgetting and executing cost-aware purchases under rolling budget constraints. OVBAL yields a simple, fully online decision rule that adapts to nonstationary streams and heterogeneous label costs. Experiments on synthetic data and a real-world solar power generation forecasting task show that OVBAL is particularly effective under seller-centric pricing and yields a more favorable long-run error-cost trade-off in the real-world task under both pricing schemes.

Xin Huang, Yongcai Wang, Fengyi Zhang et al.

Disruption recovery in industrial assembly lines requires timely decisions under machine faults, worker absence, and emergency orders. Existing methods either rely on rigid handcrafted recovery logic or learn adaptive policies that do not readily exploit heterogeneous external recovery knowledge at decision time to reduce abnormal recovery time (ART) and preserve on-time delivery (OTD). To address this gap, we propose a phase-aware guidance injection framework that augments a trained recurrent MAPPO (RMAPPO) scheduling policy through logit-level action bias during evaluation. The framework provides a unified decision-time interface for rule-based, replay-based, and online LLM-based guidance, while activating intervention only during abnormal and recovery phases. Experiments on a custom AssemblyLineEnv show that high-quality rule guidance yields the strongest gains, replay-based guidance degrades smoothly under imperfect availability, and online LLM guidance still provides useful intermediate improvements. These results show that decision-time guidance injection can exploit heterogeneous recovery hints without redesigning the actor.

Ruoxuan Yang, Tieyuan Chen, Xiaofeng Huang et al.

Viewer sentiment prediction in video advertisements aims to infer the latent affective response evoked in the audience. To bridge the gap between what is shown and what is felt, models must deduce hidden viewer emotions from explicit visual narratives, concrete character-object interactions, and visible textual cues. However, standard Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) typically rely on holistic frame representations, which leave these fine-grained, affect-relevant events implicit and complicate precise emotional reasoning. To address this, we propose a grounded action-centric evidence augmentation framework that enhances video MLLMs' clue extraction and comprehension by introducing explicit event structure and localized visual evidence. Our method extracts temporally ordered subject-verb-object (SVO) triplets and auxiliary visible textual cues from action-centric video descriptions, grounds subject and object entities as visual entity crops, and then enables the MLLM to perform clue-enhanced emotional reasoning based on these extracted structured clues. In this way, action triplets specify "what happens", while grounded visual entity crops anchor "who or what participates in each event" to concrete visual evidence. Experiments on the Pitts dataset show consistent improvements over Qwen2.5-VL and Qwen3-VL baselines. Ablation studies, cross-dataset evaluation on AdsQA, and transfer experiments on an emotion-focused TVQA subset further support the effectiveness and generalization of our approach.

Yangjia Hu, Haodong Wang, Zicong Hong et al.

4-bit quantization significantly reduces the memory footprint and accelerates the inference of large language models (LLMs). However, its limited bit-width representation struggles to faithfully capture both dense common values (\emph{inliers}) and rare large-magnitude values (\emph{outliers}), causing substantial accuracy degradation. Existing mixed-precision methods mitigate this by retaining outliers in high precision, but at the cost of breaking the uniformity of low-bit execution, introducing precision conversion and extra data movement that undermine practical speedup. We propose \textbf{MosaicQuant}, a unified 4-bit LLM quantization paradigm built on a novel principle of \emph{inlier--outlier disaggregation}. Rather than elevating outlier precision, MosaicQuant quantizes the full weight matrix into a dense 4-bit base component, where inliers are captured faithfully while outlier are inevitably quantized. A sparse 4-bit residual component is then introduced to compensate for these quantization errors, selectively targeting the most error-critical weight blocks where output distortion is shown to be concentrated. However, a unified representation alone is insufficient, as naïvely executing the sparse residual as a separate kernel still breaks the unified low-bit inference pipeline. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{ZipperEngine}, which fuses sparse block computation into the dense 4-bit GEMM kernel via an overlapped pipeline, unifying not only the representation but also the execution into a single coherent low-bit inference pipeline. Extensive experiments on LLaMA3 and Qwen3 demonstrate that MosaicQuant preserves near-FP16 accuracy while achieving up to $1.24\times$ speedup over the W16A16 baseline.

Rongzhi Zhu, Xiang Huang, Yuchuan Wu et al.

Emotional intelligence (EI) in Large Language Models (LLMs) is often evaluated through static understanding tasks or single-response dialogue generation. However, emotion management is interactive: a good model should not only recognize a user's emotion, but also improve the user's emotional and relational state over several turns. We introduce EIBench, a simulator-based benchmark for interactive emotion management. EIBench contains 2,222 scenarios, with 2,009 for training and 213 for held-out testing. The scenarios are organized by a 2x2 taxonomy covering Support, Defense, Repair, and Charm, which together capture different forms of support, boundary maintenance, trust repair, and rapport building. In each scenario, an LLM simulator plays the user, updates an emotion-relation state after each turn, and maps the final state to an anchor-based score. This design makes EIBench both an evaluation benchmark and a training environment: the final state gives the outcome reward, while the per-turn state updates provide dense feedback for RL. We evaluate 15 open- and closed-source LLMs. Current models perform well on support and rapport-building scenes, but struggle with boundary maintenance under user pressure. To improve the EI ability of LLMs, we propose Centered Turn-Credit GRPO (CTC-GRPO), a GRPO extension that reuses the simulator's per-turn state updates as dense turn-level feedback while preserving the final outcome reward. CTC-GRPO improves Qwen3-8B from -22.4 to +22.4 on EIBench and also improves on out-of-distribution evaluations including SAGE (+12.4) and EQBench3 (+20.9%). Our results show that simulator-tracked user states can support both evaluation and training for multi-turn emotion management.

Long Chen, Xuehai Huang, Ruishu Wang et al.

This paper develops a novel staggered discontinuous Galerkin (SDG) method for linear elasticity based on the Hellinger-Reissner variational principle. We construct symmetric stress spaces with normal continuity across element boundaries on arbitrary polytopal meshes, while approximating the displacement field using piecewise polynomial functions defined on the same meshes. The method is locking-free and satisfies a local balance of linear momentum and angular momentum. We present a comprehensive theoretical analysis, including proofs of stability and error estimates. The formulation admits a hybridizable structure, which significantly simplifies the numerical implementation. Numerical experiments validate the theoretical results and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Xuzhao Huang, Kai Tang, Fuyuki Tokuda et al.

Seams encode rich structural information about garments but are frequently partially observable in robotic manipulation scenarios. To robustly leverage seam information, we propose a Seam-to-Graph network based on graph neural networks and attention mechanisms. This network maps unstructured seam observations to a topology-encoded structural skeleton graph for real-time garment state estimation. Using this skeleton-graph-based state estimation, we design a deformation-aware, hierarchical visual servoing controller for garment configuration alignment. We implement this controller on a bimanual robot system to load a garment onto a screen printing platen and to align it to the desired configuration precisely. Real-robot experiments demonstrate that the robot using the proposed method not only achieves human-level alignment accuracy with reduced variance in alignment error but is also robust to different garments. These results demonstrate that the use of seam information is effective for garment manipulation.

Yuefan Shen, Yican Dong, Xiufeng Huang et al.

The fundamental limitation of traditional strand-based modeling is not simply data scarcity, but the ill-posedness of inferring complex 3D fields from 2D imagery without structural constraints. This unconstrained regression leads to catastrophic failures in resolving both global occlusion (e.g., in ponytails) and local directionality (e.g., in curls), resulting in over-smoothed, plausible-but-incorrect geometries. To resolve this, we integrate the strong geometric priors of Large Reconstruction Models (LRMs) into the strand generation pipeline. Using the LRM mesh as a structural anchor, we employ a novel Dual Orientation AutoEncoder to lift coarse geometry into high-fidelity strands. By resolving vector field singularities through latent-space optimization and surface-guided refinement, our method effectively disentangles complex topological structures, setting a new benchmark for robustness and accuracy in hair reconstruction.

Abdur Rasool, Xiaohui Huang, Yanqing Hu et al.

Peer review is central to scientific quality control, yet it can undervalue papers that later achieve substantial citation impact. While frontier large language models have shown promise in automating aspects of peer review, they primarily mimic human reviewer preferences rather than predict long-term scientific value. We introduce ReviewGuard, a two-stage framework that aligns LLM-generated reviews with citation-based estimates of long-term scientific impact rather than contemporaneous reviewer judgments. On 20,861 AI/ML papers from OpenReview augmented with Semantic Scholar citation data, ReviewGuard achieves a Spearman correlation of \r{ho} = 0.776 with future citations on rejected-then-published papers, outperforming human reviewers (\r{ho} = 0.492) and a supervised Expert model (\r{ho} = 0.681). Under the same decision threshold, ReviewGuard flags 10.2% of high-impact rejected papers, compared with 1.8% for human reviewers, corresponding to a 5.6x improvement. Our results demonstrate that impact-aligned reinforcement learning can provide editors with a complementary signal for identifying high-potential work, without replacing human judgment.