Shuai Nie

Wenda Liu, Zhigang Song, Shuai Nie et al.

LLM-based universal information extraction (UIE) methods often rely on additional information beyond the original training data, which increases training complexity yet often yields limited gains. To address this, we propose ProUIE, a Macro-to-Micro progressive learning approach that improves UIE without introducing any external information. ProUIE consists of three stages: (i) macro-level Complete Modeling (CM), which learns NER, RE, and EE along their intrinsic difficulty order on the full training data to build a unified extraction foundation, (ii) meso-level Streamlined Alignment (SA), which operates on sampled data with simplified target formats, streamlining and regularizing structured outputs to make them more concise and controllable, and (iii) micro-level Deep Exploration (DE), which applies GRPO with stepwise fine-grained rewards (SFR) over structural units to guide exploration and improve performance. Experiments on 36 public datasets show that ProUIE consistently improves unified extraction, outperforming strong instruction-tuned baselines on average for NER and RE while using a smaller backbone, and it further demonstrates clear gains in large-scale production-oriented information extraction.

Jinyang Wu, Changpeng Yang, Yuhao Shen et al.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training intelligent agents. However, existing methods typically employ binary rewards that fail to capture quality differences among trajectories achieving identical outcomes, thereby overlooking potential diversity within the solution space. Inspired by the ``sweet spot'' concept in tennis-the racket's core region that produces optimal hitting effects, we introduce \textbf{S}weet \textbf{S}pot \textbf{L}earning (\textbf{SSL}), a novel framework that provides differentiated guidance for agent optimization. SSL follows a simple yet effective principle: progressively amplified, tiered rewards guide policies toward the sweet-spot region of the solution space. This principle naturally adapts across diverse tasks: visual perception tasks leverage distance-tiered modeling to reward proximity, while complex reasoning tasks reward incremental progress toward promising solutions. We theoretically demonstrate that SSL preserves optimal solution ordering and enhances the gradient signal-to-noise ratio, thereby fostering more directed optimization. Extensive experiments across GUI perception, short/long-term planning, and complex reasoning tasks show consistent improvements over strong baselines on 12 benchmarks, achieving up to 2.5X sample efficiency gains and effective cross-task transferability. Our work establishes SSL as a general principle for training capable and robust agents.

Dezhi Kong, Zhengzhao Feng, Qiliang Liang et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant progress in mobile agent development, yet their capabilities are predominantly confined to a reactive paradigm, where they merely execute explicit user commands. The emerging paradigm of proactive intelligence, where agents autonomously anticipate needs and initiate actions, represents the next frontier for mobile agents. However, its development is critically bottlenecked by the lack of benchmarks that can address real-world complexity and enable objective, executable evaluation. To overcome these challenges, we introduce ProactiveMobile, a comprehensive benchmark designed to systematically advance research in this domain. ProactiveMobile formalizes the proactive task as inferring latent user intent across four dimensions of on-device contextual signals and generating an executable function sequence from a comprehensive function pool of 63 APIs. The benchmark features over 3,660 instances of 14 scenarios that embrace real-world complexity through multi-answer annotations. To ensure quality, a team of 30 experts conducts a final audit of the benchmark, verifying factual accuracy, logical consistency, and action feasibility, and correcting any non-compliant entries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our fine-tuned Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct achieves a success rate of 19.15%, outperforming o1 (15.71%) and GPT-5 (7.39%). This result indicates that proactivity is a critical competency widely lacking in current MLLMs, yet it is learnable, emphasizing the importance of the proposed benchmark for proactivity evaluation.

Liuji Chen, Zeyu Zhang, Xinyuan Zhang et al.

Personalized text generation requires models to capture user-specific writing styles from historical data. Existing approaches based on retrieval, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, or activation steering either introduce inference and storage overhead or struggle to separate stylistic signals from semantic content. We propose GLASS, a training-free framework for personalized generation via Global-Local Activation Steering with Sparse priors. GLASS uses sparse autoencoders to extract a global user-style prior from historical responses and constructs local contrastive style vectors over clustered interaction scenarios. During inference, it jointly injects global and local vectors into different model layers, enabling context-aware personalization without retrieval or parameter updates. Experiments on LaMP and LongLaMP show that GLASS outperforms retrieval-, fine-tuning-, and steering-based baselines across ROUGE metrics and LLM-as-judge evaluations. Further analyses show that SAE-based representations are more robust to topic and length shifts, suggesting better disentanglement of stylistic information from semantic residue.

Bin Liu, Shuai Nie, Yaping Zhang et al.

LSTM-based speaker verification usually uses a fixed-length local segment randomly truncated from an utterance to learn the utterance-level speaker embedding, while using the average embedding of all segments of a test utterance to verify the speaker, which results in a critical mismatch between testing and training. This mismatch degrades the performance of speaker verification, especially when the durations of training and testing utterances are very different. To alleviate this issue, we propose the deep segment attentive embedding method to learn the unified speaker embeddings for utterances of variable duration. Each utterance is segmented by a sliding window and LSTM is used to extract the embedding of each segment. Instead of only using one local segment, we use the whole utterance to learn the utterance-level embedding by applying an attentive pooling to the embeddings of all segments. Moreover, the similarity loss of segment-level embeddings is introduced to guide the segment attention to focus on the segments with more speaker discriminations, and jointly optimized with the similarity loss of utterance-level embeddings. Systematic experiments on Tongdun and VoxCeleb show that the proposed method significantly improves robustness of duration variant and achieves the relative Equal Error Rate reduction of 50% and 11.54% , respectively.

Bin Liu, Shuai Nie, Yaping Zhang et al.

In realistic environments, speech is usually interfered by various noise and reverberation, which dramatically degrades the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. To alleviate this issue, the commonest way is to use a well-designed speech enhancement approach as the front-end of ASR. However, more complex pipelines, more computations and even higher hardware costs (microphone array) are additionally consumed for this kind of methods. In addition, speech enhancement would result in speech distortions and mismatches to training. In this paper, we propose an adversarial training method to directly boost noise robustness of acoustic model. Specifically, a jointly compositional scheme of generative adversarial net (GAN) and neural network-based acoustic model (AM) is used in the training phase. GAN is used to generate clean feature representations from noisy features by the guidance of a discriminator that tries to distinguish between the true clean signals and generated signals. The joint optimization of generator, discriminator and AM concentrates the strengths of both GAN and AM for speech recognition. Systematic experiments on CHiME-4 show that the proposed method significantly improves the noise robustness of AM and achieves the average relative error rate reduction of 23.38% and 11.54% on the development and test set, respectively.