Chao Wang

Chao Wang, Jiaxuan Zhao, Lingling Li et al.

Influence maximization is a crucial issue for mining the deep information of social networks, which aims to select a seed set from the network to maximize the number of influenced nodes. To evaluate the influence spread of a seed set efficiently, existing studies have proposed transformations with lower computational costs to replace the expensive Monte Carlo simulation process. These alternate transformations, based on network prior knowledge, induce different search behaviors with similar characteristics to various perspectives. Specifically, it is difficult for users to determine a suitable transformation a priori. This article proposes a multi-transformation evolutionary framework for influence maximization (MTEFIM) with convergence guarantees to exploit the potential similarities and unique advantages of alternate transformations and to avoid users manually determining the most suitable one. In MTEFIM, multiple transformations are optimized simultaneously as multiple tasks. Each transformation is assigned an evolutionary solver. Three major components of MTEFIM are conducted via: 1) estimating the potential relationship across transformations based on the degree of overlap across individuals of different populations, 2) transferring individuals across populations adaptively according to the inter-transformation relationship, and 3) selecting the final output seed set containing all the transformation's knowledge. The effectiveness of MTEFIM is validated on both benchmarks and real-world social networks. The experimental results show that MTEFIM can efficiently utilize the potentially transferable knowledge across multiple transformations to achieve highly competitive performance compared to several popular IM-specific methods. The implementation of MTEFIM can be accessed at https://github.com/xiaofangxd/MTEFIM.

Xiang Li, Yiqun Yao, Xin Jiang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) represent a significant stride toward Artificial General Intelligence. As scaling laws underscore the potential of increasing model sizes, the academic community has intensified its investigations into LLMs with capacities exceeding 50 billion parameters. This technical report builds on our prior work with Tele-FLM (also known as FLM-2), a publicly available 52-billion-parameter model. We delve into two primary areas: we first discuss our observation of Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) on Tele-FLM-52B, which supports the "less is more" approach for SFT data construction; second, we demonstrate our experiments and analyses on the best practices for progressively growing a model from 52 billion to 102 billion, and subsequently to 1 trillion parameters. We will open-source a 1T model checkpoint, namely Tele-FLM-1T, to advance further training and research.

Chao Wang, Somesh Jha, Zhiqiang Lin

ChatGPT Apps, launched by OpenAI on Oct. 6, 2025, introduce an app-in-app paradigm in which third-party applications share a single chat context with the user and with every other connected app. The ecosystem grew from 122 apps in Dec. 2025 to 888 by May 2026, yet its security has remained uninvestigated. We identify cross-app context poisoning, a variant of indirect prompt injection distinguished by three properties: 1) the injection persists in the shared chat context across turns; 2) the effect surfaces through a different co-resident app the user later invokes; and 3) the delivery vectors are first-party APIs exposed to every connected app. We find multiple APIs capable of writing app-controlled content into the shared context, with sendFollowUpMessage as the most direct and potent channel. Two undocumented parameters that the runtime silently accepts, systemPrompt and isVisible, amplify this channel to silent, system-priority writes. Leveraging this channel, we realize a confused-deputy attack in which a malicious app poisons the context so that the LLM, consulting that context, enables manipulation against benign co-resident apps. We demonstrate two payload styles (conditional and imperative) and evaluate them across six current ChatGPT models. The root cause is architectural: the LLM's context is a persistent, flat, untagged data store shared by user and apps, with no isolation. Every mature multi-tenant platform, from Multics virtual memory to Android UIDs and iOS sandbox profiles, paid the isolation cost before admitting third parties; ChatGPT Apps did not. Fixing this requires an architectural change, not a patch. We disclosed our findings to OpenAI; the undocumented parameters remain accessible at the time of writing, and the architectural gap is by design: the shared context that enables cross-app composition is the same flat namespace that enables cross-app poisoning.

Chao Wang, Ana Serrano, Xingang Pan et al.

Most in-the-wild images are stored in Low Dynamic Range (LDR) form, serving as a partial observation of the High Dynamic Range (HDR) visual world. Despite limited dynamic range, these LDR images are often captured with different exposures, implicitly containing information about the underlying HDR image distribution. Inspired by this intuition, in this work we present, to the best of our knowledge, the first method for learning a generative model of HDR images from in-the-wild LDR image collections in a fully unsupervised manner. The key idea is to train a generative adversarial network (GAN) to generate HDR images which, when projected to LDR under various exposures, are indistinguishable from real LDR images. The projection from HDR to LDR is achieved via a camera model that captures the stochasticity in exposure and camera response function. Experiments show that our method GlowGAN can synthesize photorealistic HDR images in many challenging cases such as landscapes, lightning, or windows, where previous supervised generative models produce overexposed images. We further demonstrate the new application of unsupervised inverse tone mapping (ITM) enabled by GlowGAN. Our ITM method does not need HDR images or paired multi-exposure images for training, yet it reconstructs more plausible information for overexposed regions than state-of-the-art supervised learning models trained on such data.

Fengbin Zhu, Wenqiang Lei, Fuli Feng et al.

Document Visual Question Answering (VQA) aims to understand visually-rich documents to answer questions in natural language, which is an emerging research topic for both Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision. In this work, we introduce a new Document VQA dataset, named TAT-DQA, which consists of 3,067 document pages comprising semi-structured table(s) and unstructured text as well as 16,558 question-answer pairs by extending the TAT-QA dataset. These documents are sampled from real-world financial reports and contain lots of numbers, which means discrete reasoning capability is demanded to answer questions on this dataset. Based on TAT-DQA, we further develop a novel model named MHST that takes into account the information in multi-modalities, including text, layout and visual image, to intelligently address different types of questions with corresponding strategies, i.e., extraction or reasoning. Extensive experiments show that the MHST model significantly outperforms the baseline methods, demonstrating its effectiveness. However, the performance still lags far behind that of expert humans. We expect that our new TAT-DQA dataset would facilitate the research on deep understanding of visually-rich documents combining vision and language, especially for scenarios that require discrete reasoning. Also, we hope the proposed model would inspire researchers to design more advanced Document VQA models in future. Our dataset will be publicly available for non-commercial use at https://nextplusplus.github.io/TAT-DQA/.

Meituan LongCat Team, Bin Xiao, Chao Wang et al.

The prevailing Next-Token Prediction (NTP) paradigm has driven the success of large language models through discrete autoregressive modeling. However, contemporary multimodal systems remain language-centric, often treating non-linguistic modalities as external attachments, leading to fragmented architectures and suboptimal integration. To transcend this limitation, we introduce Discrete Native Autoregressive (DiNA), a unified framework that represents multimodal information within a shared discrete space, enabling a consistent and principled autoregressive modeling across modalities. A key innovation is the Discrete Native Any-resolution Visual Transformer (dNaViT), which performs tokenization and de-tokenization at arbitrary resolutions, transforming continuous visual signals into hierarchical discrete tokens. Building on this foundation, we develop LongCat-Next, a native multimodal model that processes text, vision, and audio under a single autoregressive objective with minimal modality-specific design. As an industrial-strength foundation model, it excels at seeing, painting, and talking within a single framework, achieving strong performance across a wide range of multimodal benchmarks. In particular, LongCat-Next addresses the long-standing performance ceiling of discrete vision modeling on understanding tasks and provides a unified approach to effectively reconcile the conflict between understanding and generation. As an attempt toward native multimodality, we open-source the LongCat-Next and its tokenizers, hoping to foster further research and development in the community. GitHub: https://github.com/meituan-longcat/LongCat-Next

Zhiheng Song, Jingshuai Zhang, Chuan Qin et al. · baidu

Route-planning agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for supporting everyday human mobility through natural language interaction and tool-mediated decision making. However, systematic evaluation in real-world mobility settings is hindered by diverse routing demands, non-deterministic mapping services, and limited reproducibility. In this study, we introduce MobilityBench, a scalable benchmark for evaluating LLM-based route-planning agents in real-world mobility scenarios. MobilityBench is constructed from large-scale, anonymized real user queries collected from Amap and covers a broad spectrum of route-planning intents across multiple cities worldwide. To enable reproducible, end-to-end evaluation, we design a deterministic API-replay sandbox that eliminates environmental variance from live services. We further propose a multi-dimensional evaluation protocol centered on outcome validity, complemented by assessments of instruction understanding, planning, tool use, and efficiency. Using MobilityBench, we evaluate multiple LLM-based route-planning agents across diverse real-world mobility scenarios and provide an in-depth analysis of their behaviors and performance. Our findings reveal that current models perform competently on Basic information retrieval and Route Planning tasks, yet struggle considerably with Preference-Constrained Route Planning, underscoring significant room for improvement in personalized mobility applications. We publicly release the benchmark data, evaluation toolkit, and documentation at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/MobilityBench .

Shuren Qi, Yushu Zhang, Chao Wang et al.

Image forensics is a rising topic as the trustworthy multimedia content is critical for modern society. Like other vision-related applications, forensic analysis relies heavily on the proper image representation. Despite the importance, current theoretical understanding for such representation remains limited, with varying degrees of neglect for its key role. For this gap, we attempt to investigate the forensic-oriented image representation as a distinct problem, from the perspectives of theory, implementation, and application. Our work starts from the abstraction of basic principles that the representation for forensics should satisfy, especially revealing the criticality of robustness, interpretability, and coverage. At the theoretical level, we propose a new representation framework for forensics, called Dense Invariant Representation (DIR), which is characterized by stable description with mathematical guarantees. At the implementation level, the discrete calculation problems of DIR are discussed, and the corresponding accurate and fast solutions are designed with generic nature and constant complexity. We demonstrate the above arguments on the dense-domain pattern detection and matching experiments, providing comparison results with state-of-the-art descriptors. Also, at the application level, the proposed DIR is initially explored in passive and active forensics, namely copy-move forgery detection and perceptual hashing, exhibiting the benefits in fulfilling the requirements of such forensic tasks.

Jingping Liu, Yuqiu Song, Kui Xue et al.

Prompt tuning is an emerging way of adapting pre-trained language models to downstream tasks. However, the existing studies are mainly to add prompts to the input sequence. This way would not work as expected due to the intermediate multi-head self-attention and feed-forward network computation, making model optimization not very smooth. Hence, we propose a novel tuning way called layer tuning, aiming to add learnable parameters in Transformer layers. Specifically, we focus on layer tuning for feed-forward network in the Transformer, namely FL-tuning. It introduces additional units into the hidden layer of each feed-forward network. We conduct extensive experiments on the public CLUE benchmark. The results show that: 1) Our FL-tuning outperforms prompt tuning methods under both full-data and few-shot settings in almost all cases. In particular, it improves accuracy by 17.93% (full-data setting) on WSC 1.0 and F1 by 16.142% (few-shot setting) on CLUENER over P-tuning v2. 2) Our FL-tuning is more stable and converges about 1.17 times faster than P-tuning v2. 3) With only about 3% of Transformer's parameters to be trained, FL-tuning is comparable with fine-tuning on most datasets, and significantly outperforms fine-tuning (e.g., accuracy improved by 12.9% on WSC 1.1) on several datasets. The source codes are available at https://github.com/genggui001/FL-Tuning.

Xiao Wang, Chao wang, Shiao Wang et al.

Event camera-based visual tracking has drawn more and more attention in recent years due to the unique imaging principle and advantages of low energy consumption, high dynamic range, and dense temporal resolution. Current event-based tracking algorithms are gradually hitting their performance bottlenecks, due to the utilization of vision Transformer and the static template for target object localization. In this paper, we propose a novel Mamba-based visual tracking framework that adopts the state space model with linear complexity as a backbone network. The search regions and target template are fed into the vision Mamba network for simultaneous feature extraction and interaction. The output tokens of search regions will be fed into the tracking head for target localization. More importantly, we consider introducing a dynamic template update strategy into the tracking framework using the Memory Mamba network. By considering the diversity of samples in the target template library and making appropriate adjustments to the template memory module, a more effective dynamic template can be integrated. The effective combination of dynamic and static templates allows our Mamba-based tracking algorithm to achieve a good balance between accuracy and computational cost on multiple large-scale datasets, including EventVOT, VisEvent, and FE240hz. The source code will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/MambaEVT

Frank Joublin, Antonello Ceravola, Pavel Smirnov et al.

In the pursuit of fully autonomous robotic systems capable of taking over tasks traditionally performed by humans, the complexity of open-world environments poses a considerable challenge. Addressing this imperative, this study contributes to the field of Large Language Models (LLMs) applied to task and motion planning for robots. We propose a system architecture that orchestrates a seamless interplay between multiple cognitive levels, encompassing reasoning, planning, and motion generation. At its core lies a novel replanning strategy that handles physically grounded, logical, and semantic errors in the generated plans. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed feedback architecture, particularly its impact on executability, correctness, and time complexity via empirical evaluation in the context of a simulation and two intricate real-world scenarios: blocks world, barman and pizza preparation.

Xingping Xian, Tao Wu, Xiaoke Ma et al.

Inferring missing links or detecting spurious ones based on observed graphs, known as link prediction, is a long-standing challenge in graph data analysis. With the recent advances in deep learning, graph neural networks have been used for link prediction and have achieved state-of-the-art performance. Nevertheless, existing methods developed for this purpose are typically discriminative, computing features of local subgraphs around two neighboring nodes and predicting potential links between them from the perspective of subgraph classification. In this formalism, the selection of enclosing subgraphs and heuristic structural features for subgraph classification significantly affects the performance of the methods. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes a novel and radically different link prediction algorithm based on the network reconstruction theory, called GraphLP. Instead of sampling positive and negative links and heuristically computing the features of their enclosing subgraphs, GraphLP utilizes the feature learning ability of deep-learning models to automatically extract the structural patterns of graphs for link prediction under the assumption that real-world graphs are not locally isolated. Moreover, GraphLP explores high-order connectivity patterns to utilize the hierarchical organizational structures of graphs for link prediction. Our experimental results on all common benchmark datasets from different applications demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. Unlike the discriminative neural network models used for link prediction, GraphLP is generative, which provides a new paradigm for neural-network-based link prediction.

Yuanshuo Cheng, Mingwen Shao, Yecong Wan et al.

Existing All-In-One image restoration (IR) methods usually lack flexible modeling on various types of degradation, thus impeding the restoration performance. To achieve All-In-One IR with higher task dexterity, this work proposes an efficient Dynamic Reference Modeling paradigm (DRM-IR), which consists of task-adaptive degradation modeling and model-based image restoring. Specifically, these two subtasks are formalized as a pair of entangled reference-based maximum a posteriori (MAP) inferences, which are optimized synchronously in an unfolding-based manner. With the two cascaded subtasks, DRM-IR first dynamically models the task-specific degradation based on a reference image pair and further restores the image with the collected degradation statistics. Besides, to bridge the semantic gap between the reference and target degraded images, we further devise a Degradation Prior Transmitter (DPT) that restrains the instance-specific feature differences. DRM-IR explicitly provides superior flexibility for All-in-One IR while being interpretable. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets show that our DRM-IR achieves state-of-the-art in All-In-One IR.

Chengan Che, Chao Wang, Jiayuan Huang et al.

Recent advancements in self-supervised learning have led to powerful surgical vision encoders capable of spatiotemporal understanding. However, extending these visual foundations to multi-modal reasoning tasks is severely bottlenecked by the prohibitive cost of expert textual annotations. To overcome this scalability limitation, we introduce \textbf{LIME}, a large-scale multi-modal dataset derived from open-access surgical videos using human-free, Large Language Model (LLM)-generated narratives. While LIME offers immense scalability, unverified generated texts may contain errors, including hallucinations, that could potentially lead to catastrophically degraded pre-trained medical priors in standard contrastive pipelines. To mitigate this, we propose \textbf{SurgLIME}, a parameter-efficient Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) framework designed to learn reliable cross-modal alignments using noisy narratives. SurgLIME preserves foundational medical priors using a LoRA-adapted dual-encoder architecture and introduces an automated confidence estimation mechanism that dynamically down-weights uncertain text during contrastive alignment. Evaluations on the AutoLaparo and Cholec80 benchmarks show that SurgLIME achieves competitive zero-shot cross-modal alignment while preserving the robust linear probing performance of the visual foundation model. Dataset, code, and models are publicly available at \href{https://github.com/visurg-ai/SurgLIME}{https://github.com/visurg-ai/SurgLIME}.

Chao Wang, Zijin Yang, Yaofei Wang et al.

Recent advancements in video generation technologies have been significant, resulting in their widespread application across multiple domains. However, concerns have been mounting over the potential misuse of generated content. Tracing the origin of generated videos has become crucial to mitigate potential misuse and identify responsible parties. Existing video attribution methods require additional operations or the training of source attribution models, which may degrade video quality or necessitate large amounts of training samples. To address these challenges, we define for the first time the "few-shot training-free generated video attribution" task and propose SWIFT, which is tightly integrated with the temporal characteristics of the video. By leveraging the "Pixel Frames(many) to Latent Frame(one)" temporal mapping within each video chunk, SWIFT applies a fixed-length sliding window to perform two distinct reconstructions: normal and corrupted. The variation in the losses between two reconstructions is then used as an attribution signal. We conducted an extensive evaluation of five state-of-the-art (SOTA) video generation models. Experimental results show that SWIFT achieves over 90% average attribution accuracy with merely 20 video samples across all models and even enables zero-shot attribution for HunyuanVideo, EasyAnimate, and Wan2.2. Our source code is available at https://github.com/wangchao0708/SWIFT.

Chao Wang, Licheng Jiao, Jiaxuan Zhao et al.

The construction of machine learning models involves many bi-level multi-objective optimization problems (BL-MOPs), where upper level (UL) candidate solutions must be evaluated via training weights of a model in the lower level (LL). Due to the Pareto optimality of sub-problems and the complex dependency across UL solutions and LL weights, an UL solution is feasible if and only if the LL weight is Pareto optimal. It is computationally expensive to determine which LL Pareto weight in the LL Pareto weight set is the most appropriate for each UL solution. This paper proposes a bi-level multi-objective learning framework (BLMOL), coupling the above decision-making process with the optimization process of the UL-MOP by introducing LL preference $r$. Specifically, the UL variable and $r$ are simultaneously searched to minimize multiple UL objectives by evolutionary multi-objective algorithms. The LL weight with respect to $r$ is trained to minimize multiple LL objectives via gradient-based preference multi-objective algorithms. In addition, the preference surrogate model is constructed to replace the expensive evaluation process of the UL-MOP. We consider a novel case study on multi-task graph neural topology search. It aims to find a set of Pareto topologies and their Pareto weights, representing different trade-offs across tasks at UL and LL, respectively. The found graph neural network is employed to solve multiple tasks simultaneously, including graph classification, node classification, and link prediction. Experimental results demonstrate that BLMOL can outperform some state-of-the-art algorithms and generate well-representative UL solutions and LL weights.

Yulong Huang, Jianxiong Tang, Chao Wang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across tasks but remain energy-intensive due to dense matrix operations. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) improve energy efficiency by replacing dense matrix multiplications with sparse accumulations. Their sparse spike activity enables efficient LLMs deployment on edge devices. However, prior SNN-based LLMs often sacrifice performance for efficiency, and recovering accuracy typically requires full pretraining, which is costly and impractical. To address this, we propose SpikingMamba, an energy-efficient SNN-based LLMs distilled from Mamba that improves energy efficiency with minimal accuracy sacrifice. SpikingMamba integrates two key components: (a) SI-LIF, a signed-integer spiking neuron that preserves semantic polarity through signed multi-level spike representations. (b) A training-exclusive Smoothed Gradient Compensation (SGC) path mitigating quantization loss while preserving spike-driven efficiency. We employ a single-stage distillation strategy to transfer the zero-shot ability of pretrained Mamba and further enhance it via reinforcement learning (RL). Experiments show that SpikingMamba-1.3B achieves a 4.76$\times$ energy benefit, with only a 4.78\% zero-shot accuracy gap compared to the original Mamba. The model achieves a further 2.55\% accuracy improvement after RL, narrowing the performance gap from 4.78\% to 2.23\%. Code is available at: https://github.com/HuuYuLong/SpikingMamba .

Shenggui Li, Chao Wang, Yikai Zhu et al.

Large language models incur high inference latency due to sequential autoregressive decoding. Speculative decoding alleviates this bottleneck by using a lightweight draft model to propose multiple tokens for batched verification. However, its adoption has been limited by the lack of high-quality draft models and scalable training infrastructure. We introduce SpecForge, an open-source, production-oriented framework for training speculative decoding models with full support for EAGLE-3. SpecForge incorporates target-draft decoupling, hybrid parallelism, optimized training kernels, and integration with production-grade inference engines, enabling up to 9.9x faster EAGLE-3 training for Qwen3-235B-A22B. In addition, we release SpecBundle, a suite of production-grade EAGLE-3 draft models trained with SpecForge for mainstream open-source LLMs. Through a systematic study of speculative decoding training recipes, SpecBundle addresses the scarcity of high-quality drafts in the community, and our draft models achieve up to 4.48x end-to-end inference speedup on SGLang, establishing SpecForge as a practical foundation for real-world speculative decoding deployment.

Kuan-Po Huang, Bo-Ru Lu, Byeonggeun Kim et al.

Autoregressive (AR) models with diffusion heads have recently achieved strong text-to-audio performance, yet their iterative decoding and multi-step sampling process introduce high-latency issues. To address this bottleneck, we propose a one-step sampling framework that combines an energy-distance training objective with representation-level distillation. An energy-scoring head maps Gaussian noise directly to audio latents in one step, eliminating the need for a costly recursive diffusion sampling process, while distillation from a masked autoregressive (MAR) text-to-audio model preserves the strong conditioning learned during diffusion training. On the AudioCaps benchmark, our method consistently outperforms prior one-step baselines such as ConsistencyTTA, SoundCTM, AudioLCM and AudioTurbo, on both objective and subjective metrics, while substantially narrowing the quality gap to AR diffusion systems with multi-step sampling. Compared to the state-of-the-art AR diffusion system, IMPACT, our approach achieves up to $8.5$x faster batch inference with highly competitive audio quality. These results demonstrate that combining energy-distance training with representation-level distillation provides an effective recipe for fast, high-quality text-to-audio synthesis.

Joerg Deigmoeller, Nakul Agarwal, Stephan Hasler et al.

We introduce MERGE, a system for situational grounding of actors, objects, and events in dynamic human-robot group interactions. Effective collaboration in such settings requires consistent situational awareness, built on persistent representations of people and objects and an episodic abstraction of events. MERGE achieves this by uniquely identifying physical instances of actors (humans or robots) and objects and structuring them into actor-action-object relations, ensuring temporal consistency across interactions. Central to MERGE is the integration of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) guided with a perception pipeline: a lightweight streaming module continuously processes visual input to detect changes and selectively invokes the VLM only when necessary. This decoupled design preserves the reasoning power and zero-shot generalization of VLMs while improving efficiency, avoiding both the high monetary cost and the latency of frame-by-frame captioning that leads to fragmented and delayed outputs. To address the absence of suitable benchmarks for multi-actor collaboration, we introduce the GROUND dataset, which offers fine-grained situational annotations of multi-person and human-robot interactions. On this dataset, our approach improves the average grounding score by a factor of 2 compared to the performance of VLM-only baselines - including GPT-4o, GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Flash - while also reducing run-time by a factor of 4. The code and data are available at www.github.com/HRI-EU/merge.

Chao Wang, Zhiqiu Huang, Shuren Qi et al.

Copy-move forgery is a manipulation of copying and pasting specific patches from and to an image, with potentially illegal or unethical uses. Recent advances in the forensic methods for copy-move forgery have shown increasing success in detection accuracy and robustness. However, for images with high self-similarity or strong signal corruption, the existing algorithms often exhibit inefficient processes and unreliable results. This is mainly due to the inherent semantic gap between low-level visual representation and high-level semantic concept. In this paper, we present a very first study of trying to mitigate the semantic gap problem in copy-move forgery detection, with spatial pooling of local moment invariants for midlevel image representation. Our detection method expands the traditional works on two aspects: 1) we introduce the bag-of-visual-words model into this field for the first time, may meaning a new perspective of forensic study; 2) we propose a word-to-phrase feature description and matching pipeline, covering the spatial structure and visual saliency information of digital images. Extensive experimental results show the superior performance of our framework over state-of-the-art algorithms in overcoming the related problems caused by the semantic gap.

Yannan Li, Jingbo Wang, Chao Wang

We propose a method for certifying the fairness of the classification result of a widely used supervised learning algorithm, the k-nearest neighbors (KNN), under the assumption that the training data may have historical bias caused by systematic mislabeling of samples from a protected minority group. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first certification method for KNN based on three variants of the fairness definition: individual fairness, $ε$-fairness, and label-flipping fairness. We first define the fairness certification problem for KNN and then propose sound approximations of the complex arithmetic computations used in the state-of-the-art KNN algorithm. This is meant to lift the computation results from the concrete domain to an abstract domain, to reduce the computational cost. We show effectiveness of this abstract interpretation based technique through experimental evaluation on six datasets widely used in the fairness research literature. We also show that the method is accurate enough to obtain fairness certifications for a large number of test inputs, despite the presence of historical bias in the datasets.

Alessandro Finamore, Chao Wang, Jonatan Krolikowski et al.

Over the last years we witnessed a renewed interest toward Traffic Classification (TC) captivated by the rise of Deep Learning (DL). Yet, the vast majority of TC literature lacks code artifacts, performance assessments across datasets and reference comparisons against Machine Learning (ML) methods. Among those works, a recent study from IMC22 [16] is worth of attention since it adopts recent DL methodologies (namely, few-shot learning, self-supervision via contrastive learning and data augmentation) appealing for networking as they enable to learn from a few samples and transfer across datasets. The main result of [16] on the UCDAVIS19, ISCX-VPN and ISCX-Tor datasets is that, with such DL methodologies, 100 input samples are enough to achieve very high accuracy using an input representation called "flowpic" (i.e., a per-flow 2d histograms of the packets size evolution over time). In this paper (i) we reproduce [16] on the same datasets and (ii) we replicate its most salient aspect (the importance of data augmentation) on three additional public datasets (MIRAGE19, MIRAGE22 and UTMOBILENET21). While we confirm most of the original results, we also found a 20% accuracy drop on some of the investigated scenarios due to a data shift in the original dataset that we uncovered. Additionally, our study validates that the data augmentation strategies studied in [16] perform well on other datasets too. In the spirit of reproducibility and replicability we make all artifacts (code and data) available to the research community at https://tcbenchstack.github.io/tcbench/

Fengbin Zhu, Chao Wang, Wenqiang Lei et al.

Key Information Extraction (KIE) is aimed at extracting structured information (e.g. key-value pairs) from form-style documents (e.g. invoices), which makes an important step towards intelligent document understanding. Previous approaches generally tackle KIE by sequence tagging, which faces difficulty to process non-flatten sequences, especially for table-text mixed documents. These approaches also suffer from the trouble of pre-defining a fixed set of labels for each type of documents, as well as the label imbalance issue. In this work, we assume Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has been applied to input documents, and reformulate the KIE task as a region prediction problem in the two-dimensional (2D) space given a target field. Following this new setup, we develop a new KIE model named Region-based Document Understanding (RDU) that takes as input the text content and corresponding coordinates of a document, and tries to predict the result by localizing a bounding-box-like region. Our RDU first applies a layout-aware BERT equipped with a soft layout attention masking and bias mechanism to incorporate layout information into the representations. Then, a list of candidate regions is generated from the representations via a Region Proposal Module inspired by computer vision models widely applied for object detection. Finally, a Region Categorization Module and a Region Selection Module are adopted to judge whether a proposed region is valid and select the one with the largest probability from all proposed regions respectively. Experiments on four types of form-style documents show that our proposed method can achieve impressive results. In addition, our RDU model can be trained with different document types seamlessly, which is especially helpful over low-resource documents.

Rahil Parikh, Harshavardhan Sundar, Ming Sun et al. · amazon-science

Acoustic events are sounds with well-defined spectro-temporal characteristics which can be associated with the physical objects generating them. Acoustic scenes are collections of such acoustic events in no specific temporal order. Given this natural linkage between events and scenes, a common belief is that the ability to classify events must help in the classification of scenes. This has led to several efforts attempting to do well on Acoustic Event Tagging (AET) and Acoustic Scene Classification (ASC) using a multi-task network. However, in these efforts, improvement in one task does not guarantee an improvement in the other, suggesting a tension between ASC and AET. It is unclear if improvements in AET translates to improvements in ASC. We explore this conundrum through an extensive empirical study and show that under certain conditions, using AET as an auxiliary task in the multi-task network consistently improves ASC performance. Additionally, ASC performance further improves with the AET data-set size and is not sensitive to the choice of events or the number of events in the AET data-set. We conclude that this improvement in ASC performance comes from the regularization effect of using AET and not from the network's improved ability to discern between acoustic events.

Chengmin Zhou, Chao Wang, Haseeb Hassan et al.

Bayesian inference has many advantages in robotic motion planning over four perspectives: The uncertainty quantification of the policy, safety (risk-aware) and optimum guarantees of robot motions, data-efficiency in training of reinforcement learning, and reducing the sim2real gap when the robot is applied to real-world tasks. However, the application of Bayesian inference in robotic motion planning is lagging behind the comprehensive theory of Bayesian inference. Further, there are no comprehensive reviews to summarize the progress of Bayesian inference to give researchers a systematic understanding in robotic motion planning. This paper first provides the probabilistic theories of Bayesian inference which are the preliminary of Bayesian inference for complex cases. Second, the Bayesian estimation is given to estimate the posterior of policies or unknown functions which are used to compute the policy. Third, the classical model-based Bayesian RL and model-free Bayesian RL algorithms for robotic motion planning are summarized, while these algorithms in complex cases are also analyzed. Fourth, the analysis of Bayesian inference in inverse RL is given to infer the reward functions in a data-efficient manner. Fifth, we systematically present the hybridization of Bayesian inference and RL which is a promising direction to improve the convergence of RL for better motion planning. Sixth, given the Bayesian inference, we present the interpretable and safe robotic motion plannings which are the hot research topic recently. Finally, all algorithms reviewed in this paper are summarized analytically as the knowledge graphs, and the future of Bayesian inference for robotic motion planning is also discussed, to pave the way for data-efficient, explainable, and safe robotic motion planning strategies for practical applications.

Chen Liu, Chao Wang, Minh-Ngoc Tran et al.

We propose a new approach to volatility modeling by combining deep learning (LSTM) and realized volatility measures. This LSTM-enhanced realized GARCH framework incorporates and distills modeling advances from financial econometrics, high frequency trading data and deep learning. Bayesian inference via the Sequential Monte Carlo method is employed for statistical inference and forecasting. The new framework can jointly model the returns and realized volatility measures, has an excellent in-sample fit and superior predictive performance compared to several benchmark models, while being able to adapt well to the stylized facts in volatility. The performance of the new framework is tested using a wide range of metrics, from marginal likelihood, volatility forecasting, to tail risk forecasting and option pricing. We report on a comprehensive empirical study using 31 widely traded stock indices over a time period that includes COVID-19 pandemic.

Junyu Zhang, Feihong Yang, Jian Wang et al.

The Policy-Space Response Oracles (PSRO) framework scales equilibrium computation to large zero-sum games by iteratively expanding a restricted strategy set using deep reinforcement learning (DRL). A central challenge is to construct, under limited computational budgets, a small strategy population whose induced game well approximates the full game. Existing PSRO variants typically expand the population using best responses to meta-strategies computed from restricted-game payoffs, which can lead to inefficient expansions that provide limited global improvement. We propose to guide population expansion by directly evaluating the post-expansion population quality. Specifically, we adopt Population Exploitability (PE) to measure how well a restricted strategy set represents the full game, and introduce a two-phase exploration--selection framework that explicitly minimizes PE during expansion. We instantiate this framework as Global PSRO, a practical DRL-based algorithm that efficiently generates candidate responses and estimates PE via parameter-sharing conditional neural networks. Experiments across multiple two-player zero-sum games show that Global PSRO achieves lower exploitability and approximates Nash equilibria with significantly fewer policy iterations than prior PSRO methods.

Shuo Nie, Hexuan Deng, Chao Wang et al.

As large language models become smaller and more efficient, small reasoning models (SRMs) are crucial for enabling chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in resource-constrained settings. However, they are prone to faithfulness hallucinations, especially in intermediate reasoning steps. Existing mitigation methods based on online reinforcement learning rely on outcome-based rewards or coarse-grained CoT evaluation, which can inadvertently reinforce unfaithful reasoning when the final answer is correct. To address these limitations, we propose Faithfulness-Aware Step-Level Reinforcement Learning (FaithRL), introducing step-level supervision via explicit faithfulness rewards from a process reward model, together with an implicit truncated resampling strategy that generates contrastive signals from faithful prefixes. Experiments across multiple SRMs and Open-Book QA benchmarks demonstrate that FaithRL consistently reduces hallucinations in both the CoT and final answers, leading to more faithful and reliable reasoning. Code is available at https://github.com/Easy195/FaithRL.

MiniMax, Aili Chen, Aonian Li et al.

We introduce the MiniMax-M2 series, a family of Mixture-of-Experts language models built around the principle that mini activations can unleash maximum real-world intelligence. The flagship M2 contains 229.9B total parameters with only 9.8B activated per token. Designed end-to-end for agentic deployment, the M2 series rests on three components: (i) agent-driven data pipelines producing large-scale, verifiable trajectories across agentic coding and agentic cowork, each grounded in an executable workspace and an artifact-aligned reward; (ii) Forge, a scalable agent-native RL system that adapts to long-horizon agent trajectories, paired with windowed-FIFO scheduling, prefix-tree merging, inference optimization, and a clean training-inference-agent decoupling that supports both white-box and black-box agents; (iii) the latest M2.7 checkpoint takes an early step toward self-evolution -- autonomously debugging training runs and modifying its own scaffold. Across M2 through M2.7, this combination translates a mini-activation footprint into frontier-tier performance on agentic coding, deep search, office-task, and reasoning benchmarks.

Chao Wang, Licheng Jiao, Lingling Li et al.

Handcrafted optimizers become prohibitively inefficient for complex black-box optimization (BBO) tasks. MetaBBO addresses this challenge by meta-learning to automatically configure optimizers for low-level BBO tasks, thereby eliminating heuristic dependencies. However, existing methods typically require extensive handcrafted training tasks to learn meta-strategies that generalize to target tasks, which poses a critical limitation for realistic applications with unknown task distributions. To overcome the issue, we propose the Adaptive meta Black-box Optimization Model (ABOM), which performs online parameter adaptation using solely optimization data from the target task, obviating the need for predefined task distributions. Unlike conventional metaBBO frameworks that decouple meta-training and optimization phases, ABOM introduces a closed-loop adaptive parameter learning mechanism, where parameterized evolutionary operators continuously self-update by leveraging generated populations during optimization. This paradigm shift enables zero-shot optimization: ABOM achieves competitive performance on synthetic BBO benchmarks and realistic unmanned aerial vehicle path planning problems without any handcrafted training tasks. Visualization studies reveal that parameterized evolutionary operators exhibit statistically significant search patterns, including natural selection and genetic recombination.

Ming Xie, Zizheng Huang, Xudong Tan et al.

While streaming omni-video understanding demands continuous perception and proactive, real-time interaction, this crucial area remains largely under-explored. Current omni-modal methods are inherently designed for offline settings, limiting their applicability in streaming scenarios due to two fundamental flaws. First, they lack robust mechanisms to manage continuously growing audio-visual context over long horizons and cannot autonomously initiate responses at opportune moments. Second, existing benchmarks are predominantly confined to offline, single-turn question answering, failing to capture continuous, multi-turn streaming interactions. To bridge these gaps, we propose StreamOV, a novel Streaming Omni-Video understanding framework for efficient online audio-visual reasoning with bounded memory and proactive response triggering. Specifically, StreamOV introduces a multimodal evidence-guided long-short term memory that condenses historical audio-visual context into compact informative evidence under a fixed budget. It further employs a hidden-state-driven trigger to decide when to respond, avoiding explicit silence-token generation and external routers. We also curate SOVBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for online, multi-turn omni-modal evaluation. Extensive experiments show that StreamOV achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse streaming and omni-video benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness for both online and offline video understanding.

Qiaomu Miao, Sinhwa Kang, Stacy Marsella et al.

There is strong interest in the generation of synthetic video imagery of people talking for various purposes, including entertainment, communication, training, and advertisement. With the development of deep fake generation models, synthetic video imagery will soon be visually indistinguishable to the naked eye from a naturally capture video. In addition, many methods are continuing to improve to avoid more careful, forensic visual analysis. Some deep fake videos are produced through the use of facial puppetry, which directly controls the head and face of the synthetic image through the movements of the actor, allow the actor to 'puppet' the image of another. In this paper, we address the question of whether one person's movements can be distinguished from the original speaker by controlling the visual appearance of the speaker but transferring the behavior signals from another source. We conduct a study by comparing synthetic imagery that: 1) originates from a different person speaking a different utterance, 2) originates from the same person speaking a different utterance, and 3) originates from a different person speaking the same utterance. Our study shows that synthetic videos in all three cases are seen as less real and less engaging than the original source video. Our results indicate that there could be a behavioral signature that is detectable from a person's movements that is separate from their visual appearance, and that this behavioral signature could be used to distinguish a deep fake from a properly captured video.

Yangyang Xu, Junbo Ke, You-Wei Wen et al.

Tensor Ring (TR) decomposition is a powerful tool for high-order data modeling, but is inherently restricted to discrete forms defined on fixed meshgrids. In this work, we propose a TR functional decomposition for both meshgrid and non-meshgrid data, where factors are parameterized by Implicit Neural Representations (INRs). However, optimizing this continuous framework to capture fine-scale details is intrinsically difficult. Through a frequency-domain analysis, we demonstrate that the spectral structure of TR factors determines the frequency composition of the reconstructed tensor and limits the high-frequency modeling capacity. To mitigate this, we propose a reparameterized TR functional decomposition, in which each TR factor is a structured combination of a learnable latent tensor and a fixed basis. This reparameterization is theoretically shown to improve the training dynamics of TR factor learning. We further derive a principled initialization scheme for the fixed basis and prove the Lipschitz continuity of our proposed model. Extensive experiments on image inpainting, denoising, super-resolution, and point cloud recovery demonstrate that our method achieves consistently superior performance over existing approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/YangyangXu2002/RepTRFD.

Junbo Ke, Yangyang Xu, You-Wei Wen et al.

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for various signal processing tasks, but their inherent spectral bias limits the ability to capture high-frequency details. Existing methods partially mitigate this issue by using Fourier-based features, which usually rely on fixed frequency bases. This forces multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) to inefficiently compose the required frequencies, thereby constraining their representational capacity. To address this limitation, we propose Content-Aware Frequency Encoding (CAFE), which builds upon Fourier features through multiple parallel linear layers combined via a Hadamard product. CAFE can explicitly and efficiently synthesize a broader range of frequency bases, while the learned weights enable the selection of task-relevant frequencies. Furthermore, we extend this framework to CAFE+, which incorporates Chebyshev features as a complementary component to Fourier bases. This combination provides a stronger and more stable frequency representation. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach, consistently achieving superior performance over existing methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/JunboKe0619/CAFE.

Fengrui Zuo, Zhiwei Ke, Yiming Liu et al.

Diffusion language models (DLMs) generate text through iterative denoising, but inference requires full-sequence attention at every iteration, resulting in substantial redundant computation on masked tokens. Block-wise diffusion can reduce this cost, yet it typically relies on retraining and constrained update orders, limiting its direct applicability to pretrained DLMs. Our token-level analysis reveals pronounced structural locality in DLM inference. Decoding is driven by a small set of prefix-localized active tokens; the influence of distant undecoded context diminishes rapidly, and decoded tokens exhibit stage-wise temporal stability, enabling reuse of intermediate representations except for a brief post-decode transient. Motivated by these observations, we propose \textbf{\placeholder}\footnote{The source code is available at https://github.com/vhicrgit/Window-Diffusion.}, a window-based token pruning and caching method for inference. We maintain a local computation window that slides rightward as denoising progresses, and partition undecoded tokens into: (i) \textit{active tokens} that are computed online, (ii) \textit{buffer tokens} whose KV states are cached and periodically refreshed, and (iii) \textit{far-field tokens} that are pruned outside the window. Computation is restricted to active and buffer tokens within the window, while far-field tokens are omitted at each stage. Experiments on LLaDA and Dream show that, under matched compute budgets, our method achieves up to $99\times$ inference speedup while largely preserving generation performance.

Shuaijie Shen, Chao Wang, Renzhuo Huang et al.

Known as low energy consumption networks, spiking neural networks (SNNs) have gained a lot of attention within the past decades. While SNNs are increasing competitive with artificial neural networks (ANNs) for vision tasks, they are rarely used for long sequence tasks, despite their intrinsic temporal dynamics. In this work, we develop spiking state space models (SpikingSSMs) for long sequence learning by leveraging on the sequence learning abilities of state space models (SSMs). Inspired by dendritic neuron structure, we hierarchically integrate neuronal dynamics with the original SSM block, meanwhile realizing sparse synaptic computation. Furthermore, to solve the conflict of event-driven neuronal dynamics with parallel computing, we propose a light-weight surrogate dynamic network which accurately predicts the after-reset membrane potential and compatible to learnable thresholds, enabling orders of acceleration in training speed compared with conventional iterative methods. On the long range arena benchmark task, SpikingSSM achieves competitive performance to state-of-the-art SSMs meanwhile realizing on average 90\% of network sparsity. On language modeling, our network significantly surpasses existing spiking large language models (spikingLLMs) on the WikiText-103 dataset with only a third of the model size, demonstrating its potential as backbone architecture for low computation cost LLMs.

Meng Feng, Chieh-Chi Kao, Qingming Tang et al.

Standard acoustic event classification (AEC) solutions require large-scale collection of data from client devices for model optimization. Federated learning (FL) is a compelling framework that decouples data collection and model training to enhance customer privacy. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of applying FL to improve AEC performance while no customer data can be directly uploaded to the server. We assume no pseudo labels can be inferred from on-device user inputs, aligning with the typical use cases of AEC. We adapt self-supervised learning to the FL framework for on-device continual learning of representations, and it results in improved performance of the downstream AEC classifiers without labeled/pseudo-labeled data available. Compared to the baseline w/o FL, the proposed method improves precision up to 20.3\% relatively while maintaining the recall. Our work differs from prior work in FL in that our approach does not require user-generated learning targets, and the data we use is collected from our Beta program and is de-identified, to maximally simulate the production settings.

Chao Wang, Xudong Tan, Jianjian Cao et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models have achieved significant success in offline video understanding, yet their application to streaming videos is severely limited by the linear explosion of visual tokens, which often leads to Out-of-Memory (OOM) errors or catastrophic forgetting. Existing visual retention and memory management methods typically rely on uniform sampling, low-level physical metrics, or passive cache eviction. However, these strategies often lack intrinsic semantic awareness, potentially disrupting contextual coherence and blurring transient yet critical semantic transitions. To address these limitations, we propose CurveStream, a training-free, curvature-aware hierarchical visual memory management framework. Our approach is motivated by the key observation that high-curvature regions along continuous feature trajectories closely align with critical global semantic transitions. Based on this geometric insight, CurveStream evaluates real-time semantic intensity via a Curvature Score and integrates an online K-Sigma dynamic threshold to adaptively route frames into clear and fuzzy memory states under a strict token budget. Evaluations across diverse temporal scales confirm that this lightweight framework, CurveStream, consistently yields absolute performance gains of over 10% (e.g., 10.69% on StreamingBench and 13.58% on OVOBench) over respective baselines, establishing new state-of-the-art results for streaming video perception.The code will be released at https://github.com/streamingvideos/CurveStream.

Yannan Li, Jingbo Wang, Chao Wang

Data poisoning aims to compromise a machine learning based software component by contaminating its training set to change its prediction results for test inputs. Existing methods for deciding data-poisoning robustness have either poor accuracy or long running time and, more importantly, they can only certify some of the truly-robust cases, but remain inconclusive when certification fails. In other words, they cannot falsify the truly-non-robust cases. To overcome this limitation, we propose a systematic testing based method, which can falsify as well as certify data-poisoning robustness for a widely used supervised-learning technique named k-nearest neighbors (KNN). Our method is faster and more accurate than the baseline enumeration method, due to a novel over-approximate analysis in the abstract domain, to quickly narrow down the search space, and systematic testing in the concrete domain, to find the actual violations. We have evaluated our method on a set of supervised-learning datasets. Our results show that the method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art techniques, and can decide data-poisoning robustness of KNN prediction results for most of the test inputs.

Yunqin Zhu, Chao Wang, Qi Zhang et al.

Collaborative filtering is a critical technique in recommender systems. It has been increasingly viewed as a conditional generative task for user feedback data, where newly developed diffusion model shows great potential. However, existing studies on diffusion model lack effective solutions for modeling implicit feedback. Particularly, the standard isotropic diffusion process overlooks correlation between items, misaligned with the graphical structure of the interaction space. Meanwhile, Gaussian noise destroys personalized information in a user's interaction vector, causing difficulty in its reconstruction. In this paper, we adapt standard diffusion model and propose a novel Graph Signal Diffusion Model for Collaborative Filtering (named GiffCF). To better represent the correlated distribution of user-item interactions, we define a generalized diffusion process using heat equation on the item-item similarity graph. Our forward process smooths interaction signals with an advanced family of graph filters, introducing the graph adjacency as beneficial prior knowledge for recommendation. Our reverse process iteratively refines and sharpens latent signals in a noise-free manner, where the updates are conditioned on the user's history and computed from a carefully designed two-stage denoiser, leading to high-quality reconstruction. Finally, through extensive experiments, we show that GiffCF effectively leverages the advantages of both diffusion model and graph signal processing, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets.

Jun Zhang, Chao Yi, Mingxi Ma et al.

Hyperspectral image super-resolution (HSI-SR) has emerged as a challenging yet critical problem in remote sensing. Existing approaches primarily focus on regularization techniques that leverage low-rankness and local smoothness priors. Recently, correlated total variation has been introduced for tensor recovery, integrating these priors into a single regularization framework. Direct application to HSI-SR, however, is hindered by the high spectral dimensionality of hyperspectral data. In this paper, we propose a unified tensor regularizer, called JLRST, which jointly encodes low-rankness and local smoothness priors under a subspace framework. Specifically, we compute the gradients of the clustered coefficient tensors along all three tensor modes to fully exploit spectral correlations and nonlocal similarities in HSI. By enforcing priors on subspace coefficients rather than the entire HR-HSI data, the proposed method achieves improved computational efficiency and accuracy. Furthermore, to mitigate the bias introduced by the tensor nuclear norm (TNN), we introduce the mode-3 logarithmic TNN to process gradient tensors. An alternating direction method of multipliers with proven convergence is developed to solve the proposed model. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art model-based methods in HSI-SR.

Ranxu zhang, zeyang li, Jiacheng Huang et al.

Agentic reinforcement learning (Agentic RL) has achieved strong progress in tasks with clear success signals. However, many real-world agent applications require user-conditioned behavior: the same query may call for different planning strategies and tool-use decisions across users. This setting raises key challenges: generic rewards cannot capture heterogeneous user preferences, observed behaviors are entangled with conformity effects, and flat memories cannot support personalized skill retrieval. To this end, we propose a unified personalized Agentic RL framework that embeds personalization into training-time optimization. At its core is \emph{Personalized Anchor Reward-Decoupled Policy Optimization} (\textbf{PARPO}), which decouples generic task-quality rewards from personalized preference rewards and uses user-specific anchors to stabilize learning under heterogeneous reward scales. We further introduce a two-stage preference-disentangled reward model and \emph{Preference-Aligned Skill Evolution Graph Memory} (\textbf{PSGM}) for personalized supervision and preference-aligned skill retrieval. Together, they form a closed loop of preference identification, policy optimization, and structured skill accumulation. Experiments on ETAPP, ETAPP-Hard, and SJAgent show that our framework consistently outperforms strong memory and RL baselines. Code and data are included in the supplementary materials.

Ranxu Zhang, Junjie Meng, Ying Sun et al.

Multi-Behavior Recommendation (MBR) leverages multiple user interaction types (e.g., views, clicks, purchases) to enrich preference modeling and alleviate data sparsity issues in traditional single-behavior approaches. However, existing MBR methods face fundamental challenges: they lack principled frameworks to model complex confounding effects from user behavioral habits and item multi-behavior distributions, struggle with effective aggregation of heterogeneous auxiliary behaviors, and fail to align behavioral representations across semantic gaps while accounting for bias distortions. To address these limitations, we propose MCLMR, a novel model-agnostic causal learning framework that can be seamlessly integrated into various MBR architectures. MCLMR first constructs a causal graph to model confounding effects and performs interventions for unbiased preference estimation. Under this causal framework, it employs an Adaptive Aggregation module based on Mixture-of-Experts to dynamically fuse auxiliary behavior information and a Bias-aware Contrastive Learning module to align cross-behavior representations in a bias-aware manner. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that MCLMR achieves significant performance improvements across various baseline models, validating its effectiveness and generality. All data and code will be made publicly available. For anonymous review, our code is available at the following the link: https://github.com/gitrxh/MCLMR.

MiniMax, Aili Chen, Aonian Li et al.

We introduce MiniMax-M1, the world's first open-weight, large-scale hybrid-attention reasoning model. MiniMax-M1 is powered by a hybrid Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture combined with a lightning attention mechanism. The model is developed based on our previous MiniMax-Text-01 model, which contains a total of 456 billion parameters with 45.9 billion parameters activated per token. The M1 model natively supports a context length of 1 million tokens, 8x the context size of DeepSeek R1. Furthermore, the lightning attention mechanism in MiniMax-M1 enables efficient scaling of test-time compute. These properties make M1 particularly suitable for complex tasks that require processing long inputs and thinking extensively. MiniMax-M1 is trained using large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) on diverse problems including sandbox-based, real-world software engineering environments. In addition to M1's inherent efficiency advantage for RL training, we propose CISPO, a novel RL algorithm to further enhance RL efficiency. CISPO clips importance sampling weights rather than token updates, outperforming other competitive RL variants. Combining hybrid-attention and CISPO enables MiniMax-M1's full RL training on 512 H800 GPUs to complete in only three weeks, with a rental cost of just $534,700. We release two versions of MiniMax-M1 models with 40K and 80K thinking budgets respectively, where the 40K model represents an intermediate phase of the 80K training. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that our models are comparable or superior to strong open-weight models such as the original DeepSeek-R1 and Qwen3-235B, with particular strengths in complex software engineering, tool utilization, and long-context tasks. We publicly release MiniMax-M1 at https://github.com/MiniMax-AI/MiniMax-M1.

Kling Team, Jialu Chen, Yuanzheng Ci et al.

We present Kling-Omni, a generalist generative framework designed to synthesize high-fidelity videos directly from multimodal visual language inputs. Adopting an end-to-end perspective, Kling-Omni bridges the functional separation among diverse video generation, editing, and intelligent reasoning tasks, integrating them into a holistic system. Unlike disjointed pipeline approaches, Kling-Omni supports a diverse range of user inputs, including text instructions, reference images, and video contexts, processing them into a unified multimodal representation to deliver cinematic-quality and highly-intelligent video content creation. To support these capabilities, we constructed a comprehensive data system that serves as the foundation for multimodal video creation. The framework is further empowered by efficient large-scale pre-training strategies and infrastructure optimizations for inference. Comprehensive evaluations reveal that Kling-Omni demonstrates exceptional capabilities in in-context generation, reasoning-based editing, and multimodal instruction following. Moving beyond a content creation tool, we believe Kling-Omni is a pivotal advancement toward multimodal world simulators capable of perceiving, reasoning, generating and interacting with the dynamic and complex worlds.

Laifa Tao, Shangyu Li, Haifei Liu et al.

Prognosis and Health Management (PHM), critical for ensuring task completion by complex systems and preventing unexpected failures, is widely adopted in aerospace, manufacturing, maritime, rail, energy, etc. However, PHM's development is constrained by bottlenecks like generalization, interpretation and verification abilities. Presently, generative artificial intelligence (AI), represented by Large Model, heralds a technological revolution with the potential to fundamentally reshape traditional technological fields and human production methods. Its capabilities, including strong generalization, reasoning, and generative attributes, present opportunities to address PHM's bottlenecks. To this end, based on a systematic analysis of the current challenges and bottlenecks in PHM, as well as the research status and advantages of Large Model, we propose a novel concept and three progressive paradigms of Prognosis and Health Management Large Model (PHM-LM) through the integration of the Large Model with PHM. Subsequently, we provide feasible technical approaches for PHM-LM to bolster PHM's core capabilities within the framework of the three paradigms. Moreover, to address core issues confronting PHM, we discuss a series of technical challenges of PHM-LM throughout the entire process of construction and application. This comprehensive effort offers a holistic PHM-LM technical framework, and provides avenues for new PHM technologies, methodologies, tools, platforms and applications, which also potentially innovates design, research & development, verification and application mode of PHM. And furthermore, a new generation of PHM with AI will also capably be realized, i.e., from custom to generalized, from discriminative to generative, and from theoretical conditions to practical applications.

Chen Liu, Minh-Ngoc Tran, Chao Wang et al.

Neural networks have revolutionized many empirical fields, yet their application to financial time series forecasting remains controversial. In this study, we demonstrate that the conventional practice of estimating models locally in data-scarce environments may underlie the mixed empirical performance observed in prior work. By focusing on volatility forecasting, we employ a dataset comprising over 10,000 global stocks and implement a global estimation strategy that pools information across cross-sections. Our econometric analysis reveals that forecasting accuracy improves markedly as the training dataset becomes larger and more heterogeneous. Notably, even with as little as 12 months of data, globally trained networks deliver robust predictions for individual stocks and portfolios that are not even in the training dataset. Furthermore, our interpretation of the model dynamics shows that these networks not only capture key stylized facts of volatility but also exhibit resilience to outliers and rapid adaptation to market regime changes. These findings underscore the importance of leveraging extensive and diverse datasets in financial forecasting and advocate for a shift from traditional local training approaches to integrated global estimation methods.

Yanguang Sun, Chao Wang, Jian Yang et al.

Accurately localizing and segmenting relevant objects from optical remote sensing images (ORSIs) is critical for advancing remote sensing applications. Existing methods are typically built upon moderate-scale pre-trained models and employ diverse optimization strategies to achieve promising performance under full-parameter fine-tuning. In fact, deeper and larger-scale foundation models can provide stronger support for performance improvement. However, due to their massive number of parameters, directly adopting full-parameter fine-tuning leads to pronounced training difficulties, such as excessive GPU memory consumption and high computational costs, which result in extremely limited exploration of large-scale models in existing works. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic wavelet expert-guided fine-tuning paradigm with fewer trainable parameters, dubbed WEFT, which efficiently adapts large-scale foundation models to ORSIs segmentation tasks by leveraging the guidance of wavelet experts. Specifically, we introduce a task-specific wavelet expert extractor to model wavelet experts from different perspectives and dynamically regulate their outputs, thereby generating trainable features enriched with task-specific information for subsequent fine-tuning. Furthermore, we construct an expert-guided conditional adapter that first enhances the fine-grained perception of frozen features for specific tasks by injecting trainable features, and then iteratively updates the information of both types of feature, allowing for efficient fine-tuning. Extensive experiments show that our WEFT not only outperforms 21 state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on three ORSIs datasets, but also achieves optimal results in camouflage, natural, and medical scenarios. The source code is available at: https://github.com/CSYSI/WEFT.

Chao Wang, Alessandro Finamore, Pietro Michiardi et al.

Data Augmentation (DA)-augmenting training data with synthetic samples-is wildly adopted in Computer Vision (CV) to improve models performance. Conversely, DA has not been yet popularized in networking use cases, including Traffic Classification (TC). In this work, we present a preliminary study of 14 hand-crafted DAs applied on the MIRAGE19 dataset. Our results (i) show that DA can reap benefits previously unexplored in TC and (ii) foster a research agenda on the use of generative models to automate DA design.