Q. Zhang

Haitao Wu, Qirui Zhang, Zhouheng Yao et al.

Modeling the bidirectional correspondence between external sensory stimuli and internal neural activity has emerged as a critical frontier in neuroscience. However, existing approaches predominantly treat brain encoding and decoding as isolated tasks, relying heavily on unimodal alignment and external priors while overlooking the brain's intrinsic nature as a multimodal integration system. To address these limitations, we propose BrainJanus, the first unified brain model that integrates brain, vision, and language within a single framework. Specifically, we introduce a Unified Brain Tokenizer to quantize continuous neural dynamics into discrete tokens aligned with visual and linguistic representations in a shared Omni space. Building on this, we utilize an All-in-One autoregressive architecture that leverages next-token prediction to enable seamless any-to-any generation, which encompasses image-to-brain and text-to-brain encoding, and brain-to-image and brain-to-text decoding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BrainJanus achieves superior performance across diverse benchmarks. Furthermore, our framework exhibits zero-shot generalization and preserves interpretable biological topography, highlighting its potential as a general-purpose brain modeling paradigm. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/HaitaoWuTJU/BrainJanus}{GitHub}.

Tianhua Zhang, Xinjiang Wang, Qianxi Zhang et al.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in long interactions, existing evaluations focus predominantly on retrospective memory (RM) via explicit queries. Prospective memory (PM), the critical ability to spontaneously recall and act on latent constraints without direct prompts, remains largely unevaluated. We introduce TriggerBench, a comprehensive PM benchmark spanning five dimensions across both daily assistants and professional workflows. TriggerBench pairs scenarios with matched RM controls, contrastive positive/negative variants, and overloaded triggers, enabling fine-grained measurement of proactive recall, false-alarm rate, and attentional robustness under a single protocol. Our evaluation yields three key findings. (i) PM shows a precision-recall trade-off and attentional fragility. Though enhanced reasoning significantly improves proactive recall, models may overfit to an "always-remind" heuristic. Furthermore, PM accuracy degrades substantially under implicit constraints or triggers overloaded by concurrent user requests, indicating that robust PM remains an open challenge. (ii) PM is notably harder than RM: on identical contexts, RM near-saturates up to 100K tokens, while PM decays sharply as context length scales. (iii) PM may serve as a behavioral probe of spare reasoning capacity. Pairing PM scenarios with AIME-2025 math problems reveals that successful trajectories yield higher PM accuracy than failed ones at the same context length, showing PM tracks spare reasoning budget that token count obscures. Project page: https://github.com/KristenZHANG/TriggerBench-Official.

Weidi Luo, Qiming Zhang, Yihao Quan et al.

Coding agents based on large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable autonomous capabilities, but they also introduce significant safety and misuse risks during multi-turn interactions with external environments. Existing safety mechanisms mainly rely on external guardrails, which have a limited ability to perform fine-grained behavioral control during execution. Meanwhile, recent mechanistic interpretability methods for LLM safety are mostly confined to single-turn or jailbreak-style QA settings, limiting their ability to capture the evolving risk dynamics of multi-turn agent execution. In this paper, we investigate the safety of multi-turn coding agents from an internal perspective. We propose AgentLens (Mechanistic Subspace Intervention and Steering), a white-box defense framework that performs runtime safety detection and representation-level mitigation for coding agents. Unlike conventional agent guardrails, AgentLens detect harmful execution states from step-level hidden representations and mitigate unsafe behavior by intervening in a 10-dimensional subspace within a single layer. To support this research, we introduce the Mechanistic Agent Safety (MAS) benchmark, comprising comprehensively annotated multi-turn execution trajectories across 194 tasks using LLaMA-3.1-8B, Qwen-2.5-7B, and Gemma-2-9B. Extensive experiments show that AgentLens achieves strong safety detection performance, provides preliminary evidence for lookahead risk anticipation, and substantially reduces harmful actions of the coding agent, establishing a foundation for applying mechanistic interpretability to dynamic LLM agent safety. The code is available at: https://github.com/EddyLuo1232/AgentLens

Junke Wang, Qihang Zhang, Shuai Yang et al.

This work presents RepWAM, a representation-centric world action model (WAM) built on representation visual-action tokenizers. Existing WAMs typically inherit reconstruction-oriented video tokenizers from pretrained video generation models. Although these tokenizers preserve visual fidelity, pixel reconstruction alone provides limited guidance for learning instruction-following dynamics that connect future prediction with robot control. To address this, we explore a semantic visual-action latent space for representation-centric world action modeling. Specifically, we train a representation visual-action tokenizer that maps visual inputs into aligned visual and latent action tokens. We then pretrain our WAM to jointly model future visual states and the latent actions that connect them under language instructions, followed by adaptation to real robot trajectories for closed-loop manipulation. Experiments on real-world manipulation tasks and simulation benchmarks show that RepWAM delivers strong performance across diverse manipulation settings, while ablations highlight the value of semantic visual-action tokenization over reconstruction-oriented alternatives. These results establish representation visual-action tokenization as a promising foundation for world action models and a step toward generalist robot policies. Code and weights will be available at https://github.com/wdrink/RepWAM.

Songjun Tu, Chengdong Xu, Qichao Zhang et al.

Skill memories can improve agentic reinforcement learning by reusing past experience as textual guidance, but retrieved skills are not oracular: they may help in one state while misleading the same policy in another. This makes the common privileged-teacher assumption fragile, namely that a skill-conditioned prompt can be treated as a fixed teacher for the no-skill prompt. We introduce UCOB, a framework for learning to utilize and evolve agentic skills via credit-aware on-policy bidirectional self-distillation. UCOB treats skill-conditioned and no-skill prompts as two on-policy context views of the same model, compares their return-to-go within the same task and anchor state, and uses the higher-return view as the local teacher. This local credit signal internalizes useful skill-conditioned behavior, corrects misleading skill usage, and guides task/state skill memory updates, utility-aware retrieval, and reflection self-training. Experiments on agentic tasks, including ALFWorld, WebShop, and Search-QA, show that UCOB outperforms skill-free RL, skill-memory baselines, and self-distillation methods across model scales, with up to 23.5 and 18.0 point gains over SOTA baselines on ALFWorld and WebShop. Ablations and analyses further validate its core mechanisms and efficiency.

Huaze Tang, Bill Zeng, Chao Wang et al.

Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) systems are cloud-based platforms designed to manage and coordinate multiple aerial vehicles remotely. UTM systems are safety-critical which cannot tolerate failures like crash or collision. To reveal latent vulnerabilities, there are neither optimal failure-exposing demonstrations nor clear reward signals. Additionally, UTM's self-healing capability introduces the ``long-tail effect'' of critical failures. We propose framing UTM vulnerability discovery as a sequence modeling problem amenable to transformer-based RL architectures. Our approach leverages attention mechanisms to directly model the relationship among system states, and predict optimal actions. Our framework introduces a Policy Model that generates targeted test scenarios and an Action Sampler that enforces domain constraints. We use a risk-based reward function to guide exploration. Through extensive evaluation on a 700-hour simulation study, we demonstrate an 8$\times$ improvement in vulnerability discovery efficiency compared to expert-guided testing. It also discovers critical edge cases that traditional methods have missed.

Zhihao Liu, Qiuyi Gu, Yitao Wang et al.

Real-world robot learning increasingly relies on heterogeneous data, but demonstrations and rollouts often mix useful progress with stalls, corrections, and suboptimal behavior. Effective policy learning therefore requires frame-level advantages that distinguish reliable local progress from failures and regressions. We propose Self-supervised Temporal Ensemble Advantage Modeling (STEAM), a label-free method that learns such advantages from expert demonstrations. STEAM trains an ensemble of temporal-offset predictors on frame pairs within expert trajectories, using the normalized temporal offset between two frames as a self-supervised signal. Each predictor maps a frame pair to a distribution over temporal offsets, which is converted into a scalar advantage. STEAM then takes the minimum advantage across the ensemble to score mixed-quality rollout data conservatively. Across real-world bimanual towel folding, chip checkout, cola restocking, and single-arm pick-and-place tasks, STEAM identifies stalls, failures, and recoveries. When combined with CFGRL, STEAM further improves policy success rate by 59%, 54.3%, 23% and 16.2% over baselines, respectively.

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.

Lingfeng Zhang, Zeying Gong, Xiaoshuai Hao et al.

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) in continuous environments requires an agent to ground instructions in egocentric observations while maintaining spatial understanding across long action sequences. Recent navigation foundation models have shown strong progress by scaling vision-language models, but they often learn navigation primarily as direct action generation, without explicitly modeling world states or predicting their future evolution. We introduce FutureNav, a VLM-based unified world-action modeling framework for vision-and-language navigation. Specifically, FutureNav jointly encodes text, visual, and spatial features and feeds them into the LLM, and optimizes four objectives for simultaneous world and action modeling: an action policy objective for navigation action prediction, inverse and forward dynamics objectives for modeling state transitions, and a future generation objective for predicting future spatial states. This unified architecture strengthens action prediction while explicitly modeling the world, without sacrificing inference speed. Extensive experiments show that, with only a 4B-scale backbone, FutureNav achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple VLN benchmarks and substantially outperforms prior VLN methods, paving the way toward future world-action models for VLN. We will release the code and models to support future research.

Guanchen Tao, Alexander Knapen, Jacob Mack et al.

Scaling fault tolerant quantum computing is increasingly constrained by the limited bandwidth and power budget across the 4 K to room temperature (RT) interface. We present CryoZip, a cross stack cryogenic compression framework that cooperates with a lightweight cryogenic quantum error correction (QEC) predecoder to reduce 4 K to RT syndrome transmission under realistic, circuit level noise. CryoZip targets sparse syndrome vectors with a sliding window compression architecture sized under strict decoding latency constraints to maximize energy efficiency. We implement and evaluate the design in 22 nm FDSOI characterized at 4 K, using vector based power, performance, and area analysis to obtain realistic hardware data. CryoZip achieves up to 48x compression, 1.8x higher than state of the art compressors, across various QEC codes while delivering 4 to 26x energy savings. When paired with a QEC predecoder, it yields over 14,238x bandwidth reduction, while energy savings rise to 42x when accounting for realistic QEC interface overheads.

Yiting Hu, Lingjie Duan, Qian Zhang

Machine unlearning aims to eliminate the influence of specific data from trained models to safeguard privacy. However, this presents a significant challenge in the context of continual learning (CL), where models update sequentially on dynamic datasets. A major limitation is that current certified unlearning algorithms fail to account for the complex, cumulative model evolution inherent to CL framework. In this work, we establish the first theoretical foundation bridging CL and machine unlearning. We formulate the CL's unlearning objective as the minimization of post-unlearning excess risk, which decomposes into CL excess risk and unlearning loss, characterizing the fundamental trade-off between preserving historical knowledge and targeted forgetting. Under mild assumptions, we first establish an upper bound for the CL excess risk in non-convex models. We then adapt two certified unlearning approaches, gradient-based and Hessian-based, to the CL framework. Our analysis reveals that while the gradient-based approach is less effective than the Hessian-based method in minimizing unlearning loss, it offers the distinct advantage of nearly zero storage overhead for enabling unlearning. This insight motivates a hybrid strategy that reduces storage costs while maintaining post-unlearning performance. Experimental results further validate our theoretical findings.

Haohua Que, Haojia Gao, Mingkai Liu et al.

Massive robot swarms can explore unknown environments quickly, but adding robots eventually stops helping. Doorways and dense traffic create congestion, increasing inter-robot contacts and reducing the value of each additional robot. We study this safety-efficiency tradeoff for ground swarms of tens to hundreds of robots. We present SPACE, Swarm Pheromone Fields for Adaptive Collision-Aware Exploration. Inspired by ant foraging, SPACE maintains a shared environmental field with an attractive frontier pheromone, a repellent explore pheromone, and a fast robot-density field. Coordination is decentralized and mediated through this field. We evaluate SPACE on real building floorplans, namely sixteen home layouts from the HouseExpo dataset and eight campus floors from the KTH dataset, with swarms of up to two hundred and fifty-six robots. SPACE lies on the empirical Pareto frontier. It attains the lowest inter-robot contact rate at every congested swarm size, four to seventeen times fewer than a greedy nearest-frontier planner, while keeping coverage time within about two percent of that near time-optimal planner. The results indicate that, at this scale, coordination mainly improves safety rather than coverage time.

Shenghan Zheng, Qifan Zhang, Zheng Zhang et al.

AI agent protocols define how agents use tools, delegate work, and coordinate across software systems, but their security requirements remain incomplete and inconsistently enforced across deployments. We present AgentThread, a source-linked framework for security assurance analysis of agent protocols, from specification text to running SDKs. AgentThread contributes a layered security scope, protocol-derived checks formalized as TLA+ invariants, and a two-phase checker that compiles protocol specifications into model-checkable models and replays executable counterexamples against real SDKs through protocol adapters. For each finding, AgentThread records the source text behind the check and separates violated protocol requirements from missing recommendations, hardening gaps, and unassigned cross-protocol responsibilities. Across five emerging agent protocols, AgentThread identifies 35 specification-level findings, supports them with 80 implementation tests against production SDKs and reference servers, and finds 30 additional failures that emerge only under protocol composition. We further show that only one protocol enforces a security-relevant control in practice and no protocol assigns enforcement for cross-protocol behavior. Insecurity in agent protocols is therefore not only a specification or implementation problem, but also a responsibility gap across protocols, SDKs, and deployments.

Tinghao Wang, Yichen Guo, Rui Huang et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved strong multimodal reasoning capabilities, but their efficiency is limited by the large number of visual tokens, which introduces substantial computational overhead. Visual token pruning offers a natural solution, yet existing methods are imperfect: attention-based criteria tend to retain redundant tokens, while diversity-based criteria are often agnostic to user instructions. Even methods that combine multiple criteria still lack a principled formulation of the intrinsic objective of token pruning. In this paper, we revisit visual token pruning from a first-principles perspective and formulate it as constructing Token Optimal Preservation Sets. Through a top-down information-theoretic analysis, we identify three fundamental principles for effective token selection: Task Relevance, Information Coverage, and Semantic Diversity. Based on these principles, we propose TOPS, a training-free and model-agnostic pruning module that can be applied to various MLLMs. Extensive experiments on 7 MLLM backbones and 14 benchmarks demonstrate that TOPS outperforms prior methods under diverse pruning settings. Notably, on LLaVA-NeXT, TOPS removes 77.8% of visual tokens while preserving 100.0% and 100.6% performance on its 7B and 13B models, respectively, suggesting that pruning redundant visual tokens can sometimes mitigate hallucination and inspire future lightweight MLLM design.

Jingfeng Mao, Xuyang Chen, Qilin Zhang et al.

Aerial 6DoF localization typically relies on precise GNSS signals or radiometrically rich 3D reconstructions, limiting scalability and on-board deployment. We propose SemCityLoc, a semantic-geometric alignment system that reframes aerial pose estimation as structured surface registration between foundation-model-derived visual priors and standardized LoD-compliant 3D city models. Instead of matching sparse contours or dense texture, our method aligns semantic surfaces and monocular depth with lightweight semantic 3D building models, increasing pose discriminability in repetitive and occluded urban environments. To enable accurate evaluation, we introduce SemCityLockeD, the first real-world benchmark combining centimeter-accurate UAV poses with standardized LoD1--LoD3 semantic city models and challenging low-altitude imagery. Experiments demonstrate substantial improvements over existing map-based approaches, improving recall by up to 36% and reducing mean positional error from 9.89m to 2.62m in challenging urban canyons. Our results indicate that semantically structured geometry provides sufficient and scalable constraints for high-precision aerial localization without radiometric scene reconstructions. The code and data are available at https://albertchen98.github.io/SemCityLoc.

Jingyi Cui, Qi Zhang, Hongwei Wen et al.

Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for world modeling by learning predictive dynamics in a latent space rather than generating future observations at the input level. Despite their empirical success, the theoretical understanding of JEPA-based world models remains limited. In this paper, we develop the first generalization theory for JEPA-based world models. We formulate JEPA pretraining as a conditional spectral graph learning problem and show that the JEPA objective is equivalent to a low-rank factorization of an action-conditioned co-occurrence matrix. Building on this characterization, we establish a connection between JEPA pretraining error and downstream planning regret, leading to a finite-sample generalization bound for JEPA-based world models. Our analysis reveals an inherent trade-off between approximation and sample errors with respect to the latent dimension, providing theoretical insights into the advantages and limitations of latent predictive models compared with input-level predictive approaches.

Qinkai Zhang, Yanyan Zhao, Xin Lu et al.

Personalized language-model assistants are often evaluated through a memory lens: can a model recall preferences users have explicitly stated in dialogue? More comprehensive personalization demands a harder capability -- inferring what users care about from the multimodal traces they naturally leave behind. We introduce SocialPersona, a benchmark for evaluating whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can recover revealed preferences from longitudinal social-media timelines and use them in dialogue. Built from longitudinal timelines of 171 everyday, non-promotional social-media users, SocialPersona contains text, images, timestamps, and 2,597 human-verified preference tags across seven interest domains, separating stable interests from recent interests. It supports two tasks: constructing structured user profiles from multimodal context and generating responses aligned with inferred profiles. Experiments with proprietary and open-weight MLLMs show that models can identify broad interest domains, yet their performance drops on fine-grained and recent interests and degrades further when inferred profiles must be used to personalize dialogue. Together with evidence that text and images provide complementary preference signals, these results indicate that robust cross-modal, long-horizon user modeling remains a key challenge, and that SocialPersona can help measure and advance progress toward assistants that infer and act on revealed preferences.

Qihan Zhang, Mengyuan Li, Ibrahim Sabek

With the growing adoption of Confidential Computing, running databases in confidential virtual machines (CVMs) such as AMD SEV-SNP has become an attractive way to protect sensitive cloud data with minimal changes to legacy DBMSs. However, analytical queries in such CVMs often suffer substantial overhead, and prior database work has largely stopped at benchmarking these slowdowns rather than optimizing them. We show that this problem stems from a hardware-software mismatch: query optimizers still rely on KVM-oriented (non-encrypted VM) cost assumptions that no longer hold in CVMs. To address this, we propose a lightweight CVM-aware cost calibration. It models two dominant sources of optimizer-facing overhead: data movement and RMP-related translation using simple physical proxies already available to the optimizer. Experiments show that the calibration significantly narrows the KVM/CVM performance gap, recovering up to 48 percent performance and even outperforming the KVM baseline on some workloads.

Zhaoxuan Li, Qionglu Zhang, Hengyuan Liu et al.

Manual formal analysis of cryptographic schemes is labor-intensive and requires substantial expertise. While model-checking tools (e.g., Scyther and Tamarin) and computational-security tools (e.g., CryptoVerif and EasyCrypt) improve the automation of security proofs, they still rely on experts to abstract schemes and write tool-specific formal descriptions. Large language models (LLMs) are a promising alternative, but their effectiveness in this domain remains unexplored due to the absence of standardized evaluation methodologies. To fill this gap, we introduce CrypFormBench (C.F.B for short), a comprehensive benchmark jointly covering symbolic and computational security to evaluate five core LLM capabilities: interpretation, generation, completion, transformation, and correction. It comprises 700 instances spanning 677 schemes, 7 mainstream formal verifier languages, and 160 security properties. The evaluation of 9 state-of-the-art LLMs reveals that most of them perform well on interpretation and completion, given their code-awareness advantages, but struggle with generation, transformation, and correction. Overall, their performance remains limited, with Claude-3.5 achieving the highest score at 48.7 out of 100. We further provide practical guidance, e.g., few-shot prompting, Pass@K sampling, and lightweight fine-tuning, to mitigate the executability bottleneck and improve tool-usable outputs. Taken together, our benchmark and analyses offer a grounded view of current progress and concrete directions toward reliable LLM-assisted formal cryptographic analysis.

Chang Liu, Mingwen Shao, Xiang Lv et al.

Recent breakthroughs in 3D generation have advanced notably with the development of text-to-image diffusion model. However, existing methods remain two practical challenges: (1) They primarily generate single 3D object, but struggle to generate multi-object compositional 3D assets due to the lack of the modeling for Gaussian primitives in reasonable interactions. (2) They often suffer from cross-view inconsistency during 3D optimization, as Score Distillation Sampling inherently performs on each single view, inevitably resulting in cross-view hallucinations. To solve above issues, we propose I2C-3D, a novel optimization-based method to generate multi-view consistent compositional 3D assets with reasonable interactions. Specifically, we propose an Inclusive Interactive Collisions strategy to guide Gaussian primitives appearing in reasonable interaction regions naturally, thereby ensuring objects in the compositional scene interact in a physically plausible and visually coherent way. Additionally, to enhance multi-view consistency, Multi-View Adaptive Score Distillation Sampling is devised to distill multi-view consistency prior and layout prior from pre-trained diffusion model by modulating attention map of instance token and spatial token across viewpoints. Benefiting from above elaborate designs, I2C-3D not only generates high-fidelity multi-view consistent compositional 3D assets but also supports 3D editing flexibly, facilitating complex scene generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate our I2C-3D outperforms existing methods in generation quality and multi-view consistency.

Honglin Guo, Qi Zhang, Yu Zhang et al.

Large language models are increasingly deployed as agents that reason over documents rather than answer from parametric knowledge. We study archive-grounded reasoning: locating sparse evidence across a large, messy collection of workplace files, reconciling inconsistent terminology, units, and time conventions, and computing an answer. Existing benchmarks address only parts of this setting and none jointly stresses archive-groundedness, agentic exploration, and cross-domain coverage. We introduce Agora, a benchmark pairing 362 questions with eight domain collections of 9,664 authentic documents and 372M tokens, far exceeding any model's context window, so agents must explore deliberately rather than scan exhaustively. Agora is built by an agentic pipeline combining cross-document task synthesis, leakage-preventing obfuscation, and difficulty filtering. Evaluating eight models, we find the task far from solved: even the strongest reaches only 59.4% accuracy, with notable variation across domains.

Costas Mylonas, Magda Foti, Andrea Pomarico et al.

Power system benchmarks usually evaluate numerical solvers, prediction models, or sequential controllers. These benchmarks are necessary, but they do not directly test whether a Large Language Model (LLM) agent can execute an engineering workflow: inspect a grid case, select tools, call simulators, screen contingencies, propose admissible mitigations, validate results, and produce an auditable evidence trail. This paper introduces PowerAgentBench-SS, a steady-state benchmark framework for evaluating tool-using agents in power system operation and planning studies. The benchmark exposes public case data, action constraints, a tool API, and a validation budget to an agent, while a hidden evaluator recomputes physical validity and scores the submitted report. We define the agent interface, tool contract, evidence log, and risk-sensitive metrics, including submitted recall, evidence-backed recall, found recall, false-safe penalties, severity regret, residual violation score, action cost, tool-use efficiency, and workflow diagnostics. To make the framework concrete, we instantiate the protocol in a reproducible DC thermal N-2 contingency-search pilot on deterministic IEEE 39-bus operating-point variants, with scripted baselines, an LLM JSON-command adapter, three locally hosted Ollama LLM agents, and one OpenAI API agent. The results show why solver-only or answer-only evaluation is insufficient: agents are distinguished not only by top-contingency discovery, but also by validation-budget use, explicit submission, type coercions, duplicate validations, evidence-backed reporting, and mitigation behavior.

Tianqi Du, Qi Zhang, Yifei Wang et al.

Recently, world models have emerged as a promising paradigm for building intelligent agents by learning predictive models that estimate future environment states conditioned on observations and actions. In particular, JEPA-style latent world models provide an efficient alternative to pixel space prediction by learning action-conditioned dynamics in compact representation spaces. However, existing latent world models typically rely on one-step prediction and must be recursively rolled out for long-horizon planning, which leads to compounding errors and a mismatch between training objectives and downstream planning tasks. To address this limitation, we propose Variable-length Latent World Models (VLWMs), a framework that learns to predict future latent states conditioned on action sequences of variable lengths. Instead of training only on one-step transitions, VLWMs directly model temporally extended dynamics, allowing the same predictor to evaluate action plans over different horizons. We further introduce a curriculum training strategy that progressively expands the action horizon, stabilizing optimization from short-range dynamics to long-range prediction. At test time, we design planning methods tailored to VLWMs to better exploit their variable-length predictive capabilities. Experiments on long-horizon control tasks show that VLWMs significantly improve latent space world models, achieving 13\% average improvement over the state-of-the-art LeWM across different datasets, with especially large gains on tasks requiring extended planning. These results suggest that VLWM provides a simple yet effective paradigm for improving long-horizon prediction and planning in latent world models.

Yongheng Zhang, Ziang Liu, Jiaxuan Zhu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are undergoing a fundamental transformation from conversational generators into integrated AI systems capable of reasoning, action, memory, and self-improvement. We conceptualize this transition as a shift from Chatbot to Digital Colleague: from conversational answers to persistent work. We organize this transition along two tightly coupled dimensions. First, at the cognitive core level, LLMs are advancing from Chatbot-era "fast thinking" systems driven by next-token prediction toward Thinking LLMs that leverage inference-time computation, Chain-of-Thought reasoning, reflection, process supervision, and reinforcement learning to support more deliberate and reliable cognition. Second, at the tool-augmented task execution level, LLMs are progressing from tool-calling Agents that invoke external resources in an ad hoc manner toward OpenClaw-style workstation systems (OpenClaw) equipped with persistent Workspaces, skills, verification loops, and governance. The "Workspace + Skill" paradigm makes episodic tool use colleague-like via state persistence, reusable procedures, task closure, and experience reuse. We examine data construction shifts from instruction-response pairs to State-Action-Observation trajectories and evaluation from static benchmarks to sandboxed, auditable, self-evolving AI ecosystems.

Xirou Zhou, Zijing Xu, Yibo Qu et al.

The quantum nature of light determines the inherent Poisson stochasticity of photon detection, which is ubiquitous in photography, microscopy, and astronomy. However, our controlled numerical studies reveal that the signal-dependency, heteroscedasticity, and statistical asymmetry of Poisson-mixed noise make it challenging for existing denoisers to learn. In contrast, i.i.d. Gaussian noise, with its statistical independence and symmetric distribution, is easier to model for networks. To address this gap, we propose Poisson2Gaussian (P2G), a noise Gaussianization method that explicitly converts complex real-world noise to i.i.d. Gaussian noise via probability density matching beyond low-order moments. We also design an unbiased denoising framework that synergizes P2G with downstream denoisers, ensuring convergence to the underlying signal without requiring paired clean data or explicit noise parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that P2G consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse datasets. In challenging scenarios where noise strongly deviates from Gaussian statistics, our method improves the PSNR by up to 0.75 dB. Notably, P2G is architecture-agnostic and can provide universal improvements for various denoisers. The source code will be publicly available.

Yunan Wang, Minghui Song, Zihan Zhang et al.

Group-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) has significantly enhanced Large Language Models (LLMs) in agentic scenarios. To achieve finer-grained policy updates, recent agentic RL frameworks have shifted from trajectory-level to step-level training. However, long-horizon agentic RL suffers from severe reward sparsity and delay, as feedback is often deferred for dozens of interaction steps. While existing step-level frameworks refine training granularity, their credit assignment remains coarse-grained and still treats agent exploration as isolated, linear trajectories. This oversimplified perspective ignores the inherent graph structure of state transitions, leading to high-variance state-value estimation and myopic, localized credit assignment. To overcome these critical bottlenecks, we propose Group-Graph Policy Optimization (G2PO), a novel group-based RL algorithm tailored for multi-turn agentic tasks. G2PO explicitly transforms linear interaction trajectories into a global state-transition graph. By aggregating identical observations across different trajectories, we introduce group-aggregation state-value estimation that reduces sampling variance and trajectory-dependent bias. Furthermore, we redefine agent actions as transitions between state nodes and propose an edge-centric advantage estimation strategy. By globally standardizing Temporal Difference (TD) errors across the entire graph, G2PO explicitly identifies and prioritizes critical transitions that drive absolute task progress. Extensive experiments on representative long-horizon benchmarks-WebShop, ALFWorld, and AppWorld-demonstrate that G2PO substantially outperforms state-of-the-art prompt-based and RL baselines, achieving remarkable success rate improvements of up to 22.2% over GRPO.

Qi Zhang, Fangping Lan, Cornelia Caragea et al.

In-context learning (ICL) with large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a powerful alternative to fine-tuning for Named Entity Recognition (NER), achieving strong performance with minimal annotation and no additional training. However, prior work has shown that despite their adaptability, LLMs still lag behind fully supervised models such as fine-tuned BERT in structured tasks like NER. While existing studies on ICL for NER have mainly explored few-shot settings, the potential of scaling to hundreds of demonstrations has not been thoroughly investigated. To address this gap, we conduct a comprehensive investigation of many-shot ICL for NER and further explore its effectiveness in annotating and refining data for low-resource NER tasks. Specifically, we evaluate various LLMs across multiple domains using hundreds of ICL examples and then assess the feasibility of using many-shot ICL as a data annotation framework. Our experiments demonstrate that: (1) scaling to hundreds of in-context examples enables LLMs to match or even surpass the performance of fully supervised BERT models; and (2) using about one hundred human-labeled examples as demonstrations, many-shot in-context annotation can generate high-quality labeled data, leading to approximately 10% absolute F1 improvement over existing state-of-the-art approaches when used to fine-tune BERT on low-resource NER.

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.

Mark Huasong Meng, Qing Zhang, Weirao Lu et al.

Android app signing relies on developer-managed credentials, making secure key protection essential for the integrity of the software supply chain. A recent platform key leakage incident involving two major OEM manufacturers demonstrates that even robustly designed signing mechanisms can be compromised due to developers' oversight. In this work, we conduct a longitudinal ecosystem study to characterize this threat by mining public repositories for Android signing credentials, recovering compromised keys via exposed passwords, and matching them against signatures from over 4,000 apps collected from major stores and OEM system images. Our analysis identifies 5,673 compromised keystores on GitHub and 26 unique certificates linked to 278 real-world apps. These include 26 third-party apps in public app stores and 252 preinstalled apps from seven manufacturers, collectively affecting over 10 billion users. We demonstrate the practical exploitability of these leaks through a proof-of-concept app replacement attack and identify spillover risks in non-smartphone platforms, including a popular automotive head-unit platform installed in over 1,100 vehicle models. Our results reveal that signing-key mismanagement is a systemic risk, underscoring the need for a more rigorous key-management support in Android release engineering and distribution infrastructures.

Hongyuan Adam Lu, Z. L. Victor Wei, Qun Zhang et al.

Current world models face a fundamental tension: faithful long-horizon simulation demands deep computation, but deeper models are expensive to deploy and prone to compounding errors. We resolve this by introducing Looped World Models (LoopWM), which are the first looped architectures for world modelling. Our method iteratively refines latent environment states through a parameter-shared transformer block. This yield up to 100x parameter efficiency over conventional approaches with adaptive computation that automatically scales depth to match the complexity of each prediction step. Orthogonal to scaling model size and training data, LoopWM establishes iterative latent depth as a new scaling axis for world simulation, which might significantly push the community forward.

Qian Zhang, Andrea Pomarico, Costas Mylonas et al.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly being used to automate multi-step engineering work flows by interacting with software tools, interpreting intermediate results, and autonomously planning subsequent actions. Power system dynamic studies represent a particularly promising yet largely unexplored application domain for these agents. Unlike static computational tasks, dynamic studies often require more time on model parameter calibration, engineering judgment, and decision making under constrained action spaces. This paper introduces PowerAgentBench-Dyn, a benchmark designed to evaluate Agentic AI systems on power system dynamic-analysis tasks. The benchmark targets problems that cannot be reduced to a single optimization or coding task, but instead require a type of reasoning, tool usage, and iterative experimentation routinely performed by experienced power system engineers. The proposed framework includes two initial benchmark tasks. The first, the Dynamic Model Quality Review Benchmark, evaluates agents' ability to validate and diagnose dynamic models based on model-quality compliance criteria specified by system operators. The second, the Dynamic Security Risk Screening Benchmark, assesses agents' capability to leverage semantic memory and a limited simulation budget to identify, rank, and analyze the most critical short-circuit contingencies from an unseen fault dataset, as well as propose and evaluate possible mitigation measures. For each task, we define the simulation environment, observation and action spaces, and evaluation metrics. The benchmark is reproducible in a metric-based sense: released cases and simulator settings define a deterministic evaluator, while stochastic agent behavior is assessed over repeated runs using success rates and other metrics. The benchmark supports the development of future Agentic AI for power system operation and planning.

Guangyi Liu, Gao Wu, Congxiao Liu et al.

MLLM-based mobile GUI agents have made substantial progress on short-horizon tasks, yet remain unreliable on long-horizon tasks that require retaining intermediate facts across many steps and app transitions. We attribute this limitation to ReAct-style prompting, which passively accumulates per-step records, leading to prompt explosion and dilution of critical cross-app facts. To address this, we introduce MemGUI-Agent, an end-to-end long-horizon mobile GUI agent with proactive context management. MemGUI-Agent is built on Context-as-Action (ConAct), which casts context management as first-class actions emitted by the same policy that selects UI actions. Instead of passively appending history, ConAct maintains three structured context fields: folded action history, folded UI state, and recent step record, preserving critical UI facts while keeping context compact. To make proactive context management learnable across model scales, we construct MemGUI-3K, a 2,956-trajectory dataset with full ConAct annotations for supervised training and offline analysis. Training an 8B model on MemGUI-3K produces MemGUI-8B-SFT, an 8B MemGUI-Agent that achieves the best open-data 8B performance on MemGUI-Bench and generalizes to the out-of-distribution MobileWorld benchmark. Code, data, and trained models will be released at https://memgui-agent.github.io/.

Kairos Team, Fei Wang, Shan You et al.

World models are transitioning from passive visual generators to foundational, operational infrastructure for Physical AI: they must natively acquire world knowledge from heterogeneous experience, maintain persistent states over long horizons, and execute efficiently within real deployment constraints. We introduce Kairos, a native world model stack designed around these requirements. (1) Kairos learns the world by pioneering a Native Pre-training Paradigm governed by a Cross-Embodiment Data Curriculum, which organizes open-world videos, human behavioral data, and robot interactions into a progressive developmental pathway. (2) Kairos maintains the world by unified world understanding, generation, and prediction within a Native Unified Architecture equipped with Hybrid Linear Temporal Attention, where sliding-window attention captures local dynamics, dilated sliding windows capture mid-range dependencies, and gated linear attention maintains persistent global memory. We establish formal theoretical bounds demonstrating that this temporal factorization strictly limits error accumulation, mathematically guaranteeing state propagation across extended horizons. (3) Kairos runs the world by incorporating a Deployment-Aware System Co-Design to support low-latency rollout generation on server and consumer-grade hardware for real-world observation-action-feedback loops. Experiments on embodied world-model, long-horizon, and action-policy benchmarks show that Kairos achieves top level performance while offering a strong efficiency-capability trade-off. Together, these results position Kairos as a cohesive operational foundation for future self-evolving physical intelligence.

Yuxin Qiu, Jiyuan Wang, Ronak Badhe et al.

The growing deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) necessitates robust deep learning (DL) compilers, such as TVM and ONNX-MLIR. These compilers take as input high-level AI models, lower them through multi-layer transformations, and specialize them to diverse hardware. Testing such compilers is uniquely challenging as correctness depends on implicit constraints embedded throughout the compilation stack. Existing testing approaches largely take type constraints to restrict input model generation and therefore emphasize type validation and monitor compilation crashes or coverage gains. This focus overlooks compiler-platform interaction bugs that arise from interleaved effects across compilation and execution environments. In this work, we propose a scalable, automated DL compiler testing framework for, in tandem, (1) finding compiler-platform interaction bugs and (2) enabling behavior equivalence partitioning. Our key insight is that these bugs are caused by violated assumptions arising from interactions across compilation passes and hardware platforms. Therefore, we move beyond constraining input generation and derive full-stack constraints. Our approach is three-fold. First, we design an automated approach to extract full-stack constraints that jointly guide model generation and characterize compilation behaviors. Second, we prioritize constraints that expose interaction-sensitive behaviors, so our generated models are capable of exercising deep compilation logic. Third, we enable behavior equivalence partitioning by automatically inserting assertions to monitor distinct compilation symptoms that coverage or pass/fail signals miss. We evaluated our tool, XCheck, on three widely-used DL compilers and found 2,034 bug-revealing cases, including memory overflows, integer overflows, and silent unexpected compilations that were rooted in compiler-platform interactions.

Jiawei Zhang, Yiming Yan, Chao Liang et al.

Training embodied agents in the real world requires skilled operators and expensive hardware. Simulation environments offer a compelling alternative by enabling large-scale, cost-effective data augmentation. Consequently, rapidly constructing high-fidelity simulation scenes with a minimal sim-to-real gap has become a critical objective in robot learning. While reconstruction-based methods provide superior visual quality, current workflows are hindered by inefficient data acquisition and subpar foreground object extraction. We thus propose GASE, a highly automated system for simulation scene construction. GASE leverages multi-view video streams from panoramic camera arrays to enable rapid environment scanning. To ensure high-quality asset generation, our pipeline introduces a camera-pose-based strategy that robustly extracts objects across frames in the 2D domain, followed by high-fidelity scene inpainting. Foreground objects and the static background are then reconstructed independently and seamlessly imported into physics simulators for policy training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GASE outperforms existing 3D Gaussian-based methods in segmentation accuracy by over 10\% while achieving state-of-the-art inpainting quality. Furthermore, real-robot deployments across manipulation and navigation tasks maintains a performance gap of less than 10\% compared to policies trained purely on real-world data. These results confirm that GASE provides an efficient and highly effective solution for bridging the sim-to-real gap. Code will be released.

Maonan Wang, Zhengyan Huang, Kemou Jiang et al.

Traffic scene understanding requires models to reason beyond object recognition, including lane topology, multi-view geometry, temporal evolution, and signal-phase semantics. However, existing traffic-oriented multimodal benchmarks largely emphasize passive visual recognition or isolated video understanding, offering limited support for evaluating structure-aware traffic reasoning under controlled conditions. We introduce OmniTraffic, a controllable generation pipeline and benchmark for spatio-temporal traffic reasoning. Built around 12 real-world intersections reconstructed into editable 3D traffic environments and complemented by surveillance footage from two countries, OmniTraffic supports both controlled and natural-condition evaluation. It defines a three-level task hierarchy spanning scene perception, multi-view and temporal reasoning, and decision support. Using structured traffic metadata, OmniTraffic generates synchronized multi-view VQA samples covering vehicle states, lane functions, view--BEV correspondence, temporal dynamics, and signal-phase analysis, resulting in 8M VQA samples and a 3K human-verified test set. Evaluation of eleven frontier MLLMs reveals a large human--model gap, with the most pronounced failures in topology-grounded and spatio-temporal reasoning tasks. Fine-tuning a lightweight MLLM on simulated OmniTraffic data further improves performance on real-world traffic scenes, demonstrating the value of simulation-generated supervision for traffic-specific multimodal reasoning. Beyond a fixed dataset, OmniTraffic provides an extensible pipeline with configurable intersections, camera views, traffic demands, signal phases, visual conditions, and rare events.

Miaoyun Zhao, Jing Chen, Miaoni Zhao et al.

Industrial anomaly detection suffers from limited data, making cross-domain generalization particularly challenging. Generalist Anomaly Detection (GAD) aims to train a unified model on a source domain that can effectively detect anomalies in unseen target domains. In the initial semantic feature space, strong entanglement between anomalies and object categories or defect types hinders effective generalization across domains. Recent works address this issue by projecting features into a residual space; however, such methods primarily increase cross-domain overlap for normal features, while anomalous features remain specific to object categories, defect types and data domains, leading to poor alignment and generalization. To address this limitation, we propose Value-order Decomposition (VOD), a simple yet effective technique that bridges \textbf{three types of generalization gaps} across object categories, defect types (including real and synthetic defects), and data domains. VOD disentangles and suppresses object-category-, defect-type-, and domain-specific information, promoting alignment within normal and abnormal samples while preserving their separability, thereby enabling robust generalization across the three gaps. Leveraging the strong alignment between real and synthetic defects within the same object, we perform anomaly detection using only normal and synthetic-abnormal reference, and effectively generalize to unseen real defect types. Experiments on diverse industrial and medical benchmarks demonstrate that our method, using a simple cut-and-paste anomaly simulation strategy, achieves strong generalization across the three gaps.

Zhihai Bi, Qiang Zhang, Guoyang Zhao et al.

Humanoid-Object Interaction (HOI) is a fundamental capability for humanoid robots, yet it remains challenging due to the tight coupling between dynamic balance and stable interaction with diverse objects. Existing methods often require time-consuming task-specific policy training or rely on rigid trajectory replay, which limits their ability to accommodate novel interaction scenarios. In this work, we present \textit{GenHOI}, a simple yet effective framework that enables humanoid robots to perform diverse object-interaction tasks in a zero-shot manner by directly imitating a single generated video, without task-specific training or physical demonstration data. GenHOI first reconstructs the robot-object scene in simulation and renders a first-frame image, which, together with the language command, conditions the synthesis of a task-oriented interaction video. The generated video is then analyzed to identify interaction-relevant contact events and estimate hand-object contact regions, which are encoded as object-centric geometric constraints that convert visual interaction cues into physically grounded optimization priors. Guided by these priors, the reference motion recovered from the video is refined and smoothed to resolve the scale ambiguity inherent in 2D video generation, while adapting a single reference trajectory to unseen robot-object relative poses. The optimized trajectory is finally executed by a closed-loop tracking controller. We validate the proposed framework in extensive simulation and real-world experiments across diverse object-interaction tasks, including box grasping, asymmetric bimanual chair carrying, table lifting from below, and cylindrical-object enveloping.

Jianli Sun, Bin Tian, Qiyao Zhang et al.

Aerial manipulation systems have long suffered from representation coupling in end-to-end control, as platform-level Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) movement and end-effector-level arm manipulation differ substantially in action scale, dynamics, and control objectives. In this paper, we propose AIR-VLA+, a flow matching action generation architecture specifically designed for aerial manipulation, featuring cascaded dual-action decoders and an asymmetric feature-level Mixture of Experts (MoE). We construct cascaded manipulation and movement decoders, allowing the UAV to unidirectionally observe the manipulator's intent during movement to achieve workflow coordination, while isolating the impact of UAV movement information backpropagation on arm manipulation stability. Addressing the characteristic that UAV movement is highly dependent on high-level semantics and responsible for task state transitions in aerial manipulation, we design an input feature enhancement module for the UAV movement decoder. This module introduces an implicit visual grasp projector to perceive the interaction state between the gripper and the object, and injects compressed global semantic features. Within the UAV movement decoder, we deploy an implicit MoE architecture, enabling different movement experts to spontaneously exhibit capacity inclinations for various task stages during training. Through dense soft blending computation on the feature manifold, the UAV movement is endowed with stronger task-stage adaptability. Experiments on the standardized AIR-VLA benchmark demonstrate that our method comprehensively surpasses all baselines with an overall average score of 48.0. The overall task completion score improves by 80.2\% compared to the single-head $π_{0.5}$ policy, effectively mitigating the heterogeneous coordinated control conflicts of composite robots.

Ruxue Shi, Yili Wang, Mengnan Du et al.

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) solve complex tasks through inter-agent collaboration, but their communication-driven nature also allows security risks to spread across agents and trigger system-wide failures. Existing MAS defenses mainly follow a reactive paradigm after execution by detecting and isolating harmful agents, which may cause irreversible damage and degrade collaborative utility. To address this, we propose a proactive defense framework for MAS security, namely a Simulation-aware Interception Guard (SAIGuard). SAIGuard performs communication-state simulation over the MAS interaction graph, estimates the impact of incoming messages on local agent states and the global MAS state, and detects risky messages via reconstruction deviations from benign communication patterns. Instead of isolating agents, SAIGuard sanitizes or regenerates suspicious messages before it propagation into system. Experiments across diverse topologies and attack scenarios show that SAIGuard reduces attack success rates while maintaining MAS utility, outperforming reactive defenses.

Qingfeng Zhang, Yuanxiong Guo, Yanmin Gong

Voice-based screening offers a scalable and non-invasive way to assess neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease (PD), but their staging remains challenging due to the difficulty of integrating heterogeneous data. This paper presents NeurMLLM, an efficient multimodal generative framework for neurodegenerative disease staging. NeurMLLM first encodes the spectrograms and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients of audio data with vision transformers and projects their representations into the embedding space of a large language model (LLM), where they are concatenated with transcript and demographic instruction tokens as a single unified sequence. The LLM is then instruction-tuned via Low-Rank Adaptation using task prompts to autoregressively predict a constrained label token, enabling a generative classification. By evaluating on the Bridge2AI-Voice dataset for fine-grained staging of AD and PD, we observe that NeurMLLM achieves strong performance, consistently outperforming classical machine learning methods and existing LLM-based approaches. The results show the high potential of multimodal LLMs in neurodegenerative disease staging, improving staging accuracy and supporting accessible deployment.