Zhenyu Liu

Dongfang Li, Zetian Sun, Xinshuo Hu et al.

Open-domain generative systems have gained significant attention in the field of conversational AI (e.g., generative search engines). This paper presents a comprehensive review of the attribution mechanisms employed by these systems, particularly large language models. Though attribution or citation improve the factuality and verifiability, issues like ambiguous knowledge reservoirs, inherent biases, and the drawbacks of excessive attribution can hinder the effectiveness of these systems. The aim of this survey is to provide valuable insights for researchers, aiding in the refinement of attribution methodologies to enhance the reliability and veracity of responses generated by open-domain generative systems. We believe that this field is still in its early stages; hence, we maintain a repository to keep track of ongoing studies at https://github.com/HITsz-TMG/awesome-llm-attributions.

Xinshuo Hu, Dongfang Li, Baotian Hu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely used in various applications but are known to suffer from issues related to untruthfulness and toxicity. While parameter-efficient modules (PEMs) have demonstrated their effectiveness in equipping models with new skills, leveraging PEMs for deficiency unlearning remains underexplored. In this work, we propose a PEMs operation approach, namely Extraction-before-Subtraction (Ext-Sub), to enhance the truthfulness and detoxification of LLMs through the integration of ``expert'' PEM and ``anti-expert'' PEM. Remarkably, even anti-expert PEM possess valuable capabilities due to their proficiency in generating fabricated content, which necessitates language modeling and logical narrative competence. Rather than merely negating the parameters, our approach involves extracting and eliminating solely the deficiency capability within anti-expert PEM while preserving the general capabilities. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach in terms of truthfulness and detoxification, we conduct extensive experiments on LLMs, encompassing additional abilities such as language modeling and mathematical reasoning. Our empirical results demonstrate that our approach effectively improves truthfulness and detoxification, while largely preserving the fundamental abilities of LLMs.

Yunxin Li, Zhenyu Liu, Baotian Hu et al.

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved significant multimodal generation capabilities, akin to GPT-4. These models predominantly map visual information into language representation space, leveraging the vast knowledge and powerful text generation abilities of LLMs to produce multimodal instruction-following responses. We could term this method as LLMs for Vision because of its employing LLMs for visual understanding and reasoning, yet observe that these MLLMs neglect the potential of harnessing visual knowledge to enhance the overall capabilities of LLMs, which could be regarded as Vision Enhancing LLMs. In this paper, we propose an approach called MKS2, aimed at enhancing LLMs through empowering Multimodal Knowledge Storage and Sharing in LLMs. Specifically, we introduce Modular Visual Memory (MVM), a component integrated into the internal blocks of LLMs, designed to store open-world visual information efficiently. Additionally, we present a soft Mixture of Multimodal Experts (MoMEs) architecture in LLMs to invoke multimodal knowledge collaboration during text generation. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MKS2 substantially augments the reasoning capabilities of LLMs in contexts necessitating physical or commonsense knowledge. It also delivers competitive results on image-text understanding multimodal benchmarks. The codes will be available at: https://github.com/HITsz-TMG/MKS2-Multimodal-Knowledge-Storage-and-Sharing

Ruining Tang, Zhenyu Liu, Yangguang Li et al.

Mainstream object detectors are commonly constituted of two sub-tasks, including classification and regression tasks, implemented by two parallel heads. This classic design paradigm inevitably leads to inconsistent spatial distributions between classification score and localization quality (IOU). Therefore, this paper alleviates this misalignment in the view of knowledge distillation. First, we observe that the massive teacher achieves a higher proportion of harmonious predictions than the lightweight student. Based on this intriguing observation, a novel Harmony Score (HS) is devised to estimate the alignment of classification and regression qualities. HS models the relationship between two sub-tasks and is seen as prior knowledge to promote harmonious predictions for the student. Second, this spatial misalignment will result in inharmonious region selection when distilling features. To alleviate this problem, a novel Task-decoupled Feature Distillation (TFD) is proposed by flexibly balancing the contributions of classification and regression tasks. Eventually, HD and TFD constitute the proposed method, named Task-Balanced Distillation (TBD). Extensive experiments demonstrate the considerable potential and generalization of the proposed method. Specifically, when equipped with TBD, RetinaNet with ResNet-50 achieves 41.0 mAP under the COCO benchmark, outperforming the recent FGD and FRS.

Huilin Zhou, Huijie Tang, Mingjie Li et al.

The AI model has surpassed human players in the game of Go, and it is widely believed that the AI model has encoded new knowledge about the Go game beyond human players. In this way, explaining the knowledge encoded by the AI model and using it to teach human players represent a promising-yet-challenging issue in explainable AI. To this end, mathematical supports are required to ensure that human players can learn accurate and verifiable knowledge, rather than specious intuitive analysis. Thus, in this paper, we extract interaction primitives between stones encoded by the value network for the Go game, so as to enable people to learn from the value network. Experiments show the effectiveness of our method.

Ruiwen Gu, Yahao Liu, Zhenyu Liu et al.

As a core task in intelligent transportation systems, traffic forecasting plays a critical role in urban traffic management. Accurate traffic forecasting relies on modeling complex spatiotemporal dependencies, which is inherently challenging due to spatial heterogeneity in traffic systems.Despite significant progress, most existing methods are still limited to pairwise spatial dependency modeling, making it difficult to capture dynamic high-order interactions among nodes with similar traffic patterns. To address this issue, we propose PHGNet, a novel spatiotemporal forecasting framework based on prototype-guided hypergraph construction. At the core of PHGNet, a prototype learning mechanism is designed to adaptively assign pattern-similar nodes to hyperedges, thereby capturing high-order interactions with time-varying structures. To improve the reliability of dynamic hypergraph construction, we further develop a global-local node representation module to extract time-consistent features. For forecasting, iterative residual refinement and Temporal Query Attention are introduced to improve forecasting accuracy while supporting efficient parallel decoding. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that PHGNet achieves superior predictive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Wenxin Tang, Xiang Zhang, Junliang Liu et al.

Automated vulnerability detection is a fundamental task in software security, yet existing learning-based methods still struggle to capture the structural dependencies, domain-specific vulnerability knowledge, and complex program semantics required for accurate detection. Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong code understanding ability, but directly prompting them with raw source code often leads to missed vulnerabilities or false alarms, especially when vulnerable and benign functions differ only in subtle semantic details. To address this, we propose VulTriage, a triple-path context augmentation framework for LLM-based vulnerability detection. VulTriage enhances the LLM input through three complementary paths: a Control Path that extracts and verbalizes AST, CFG, and DFG information to expose control and data dependencies; a Knowledge Path that retrieves relevant CWE-derived vulnerability patterns and examples through hybrid dense--sparse retrieval; and a Semantic Path that summarizes the functional behavior of the code before the final judgment. These contexts are integrated into a unified instruction to guide the LLM toward more reliable vulnerability reasoning. Experiments on the PrimeVul pair test set show that VulTriage achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing deep learning and LLM-based baselines on key pair-wise and classification metrics. Further ablation studies verify the effectiveness of each path, and additional experiments on the Kotlin dataset demonstrate the generalization ability of VulTriage under low-resource and class-imbalanced settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/vinsontang1/VulTriage

Zhenyu Liu, Haoran Duan, Huizhi Liang et al.

Adversarial training is one of the most effective methods for enhancing model robustness. Recent approaches incorporate adversarial distillation in adversarial training architectures. However, we notice two scenarios of defense methods that limit their performance: (1) Previous methods primarily use static ground truth for adversarial training, but this often causes robust overfitting; (2) The loss functions are either Mean Squared Error or KL-divergence leading to a sub-optimal performance on clean accuracy. To solve those problems, we propose a dynamic label adversarial training (DYNAT) algorithm that enables the target model to gradually and dynamically gain robustness from the guide model's decisions. Additionally, we found that a budgeted dimension of inner optimization for the target model may contribute to the trade-off between clean accuracy and robust accuracy. Therefore, we propose a novel inner optimization method to be incorporated into the adversarial training. This will enable the target model to adaptively search for adversarial examples based on dynamic labels from the guiding model, contributing to the robustness of the target model. Extensive experiments validate the superior performance of our approach.

Shilong Fan, Zhenyu Liu, Xinyu Gu et al.

Downlink channel temporal prediction is a critical technology in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. However, existing methods that rely on fixed-step historical sequences significantly limit the accuracy, practicality, and scalability of channel prediction. Recent advances have shown that large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong pattern recognition and reasoning abilities over complex sequences. The challenge lies in effectively aligning wireless communication data with the modalities used in natural language processing to fully harness these capabilities. In this work, we introduce Csi-LLM, a novel LLM-powered downlink channel prediction technique that models variable-step historical sequences. To ensure effective cross-modality application, we align the design and training of Csi-LLM with the processing of natural language tasks, leveraging the LLM's next-token generation capability for predicting the next step in channel state information (CSI). Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of this alignment strategy, with Csi-LLM consistently delivering stable performance improvements across various scenarios and showing significant potential in continuous multi-step prediction.

Zhenyu Liu, Yi Ma, Rahim Tafazolli

Classical information theory typically assumes reliable receiver-side processing. We study remote inference when communication is noisy and the receiver itself is built from unreliable components under a finite redundancy budget. Under a committed/no-bypass receiver closure, task-relevant information can affect the final estimate only by passing through a budgeted collection of vulnerable primitives unless an explicit protected bypass is modeled. Modeling each vulnerable primitive as a memoryless noisy channel yields a baseline supply--demand converse: the task-relevant information needed to attain a target distortion cannot exceed the smaller of the total information supplied by the communication channel and the total information supplied by the vulnerable compute budget. Our main converse shows that committed intermediate interfaces create additional first-order serial cuts and receiver-internal computation-graph cuts, captured in general by a receiver-internal compute min-cut converse. In particular, the twofold loss in the symmetric two-stage hard-separation special case is not inherent to unreliable receiver computation but induced by hard-separation under the committed/no-bypass closure. This extra first-order tax is therefore closure-dependent rather than universal. On the converse side, if downstream modules retain soft visibility to the raw channel output, the converse reduces to the single-bottleneck supply, up to any explicitly reserved soft-path budget. Under a separate stronger protected-support closure with reliable decoder and control support, we establish achievability results for task-direct and serial hard-separation constructions. For the fully noisy-logic regime, we obtain only a conservative depth-dependent converse, and matched achievability remains open.

Zehao Fan, Zhenyu Liu, Yunzhen Liu et al.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale large language models through conditional computation, but inference becomes memory-bound once expert weights exceed the capacity of GPU memory. In this case, weights must be offloaded to external memory, and fetching them incurs costly and repeated transfers. We address this by adopting CXL-attached near-data processing (CXL-NDP) as the offloading tier to execute cold experts in place, converting expensive parameter movement into cheaper activation movement. Unlike prior GPU-NDP systems that are largely context-agnostic and reactive, we develop a context-aware MoE system that uses prefill-stage activation statistics to guide decoding-stage expert placement, dynamically pins hot experts in GPU-side HBM, and maps the remainder to CXL-NDP. To meet NDP's limited compute throughput, we introduce context-aware mixed-precision quantization that allocates per-expert bitwidths (1-4 bit) based on prefill stage. The resulting MoE inference system overlaps GPU and NDP execution while minimizing cross-device movement. The evaluation on the GPU-NDP system shows that our approach achieves up to an 8.7-fold decoding throughput improvement over the state-of-the-art method, while incurring only a 0.13% average accuracy drop.

Dongfang Li, Zhenyu Liu, Xinshuo Hu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited an impressive ability to perform In-Context Learning (ICL) from only a few examples. Recent works have indicated that the functions learned by ICL can be represented through compressed vectors derived from the transformer. However, the working mechanisms and optimization of these vectors are yet to be thoroughly explored. In this paper, we address this gap by presenting a comprehensive analysis of these compressed vectors, drawing parallels to the parameters trained with gradient descent, and introduce the concept of state vector. Inspired by the works on model soup and momentum-based gradient descent, we propose inner and momentum optimization methods that are applied to refine the state vector progressively as test-time adaptation. Moreover, we simulate state vector aggregation in the multiple example setting, where demonstrations comprising numerous examples are usually too lengthy for regular ICL, and further propose a divide-and-conquer aggregation method to address this challenge. We conduct extensive experiments using Llama-2 and GPT-J in both zero-shot setting and few-shot setting. The experimental results show that our optimization method effectively enhances the state vector and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on diverse tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/HITsz-TMG/ICL-State-Vector

Jirong Zha, Chenyu Zhao, Nan Zhou et al.

The growing relevance of multi-agent systems has drawn increasing focus on communication-efficient filters for collaborative perception to alleviate the system's communication burden. While the event-triggered (ET) mechanism can improve communication efficiency in collaborative state estimation, an inevitable trade-off exists between estimation accuracy and communication cost in ET filters. This paper proposes a fast and accurate ET diffusion-based filter for real-time multi-agent collaborative target tracking, aiming to reduce the system's data transmission without compromise in tracking performance. The proposed filter achieves improved tracking accuracy, reduced data transmission, and accelerated convergence using an error-minimized ET cubature information filter (CIF) for local estimation, and a correlation-aware diffusion strategy for global fusion. The experimental results confirm the scalability of the proposed EDC-CIF algorithm and demonstrate its efficacy in simultaneously reducing estimation error and computation time while significantly enhancing communication efficiency.

Zhentao Yang, Yixiang Luomei, Zhuoyang Liu et al.

Wideband spectrum sensing for low-altitude monitoring is critical yet challenging due to heterogeneous protocols,large bandwidths, and non-stationary SNR. Existing data-driven approaches treat spectrograms as natural images,suffering from domain mismatch: they neglect time-frequency resolution constraints and spectral leakage, leading topoor narrowband visibility. This paper proposes ZoomSpec, a physics-guided coarse-to-fine framework integrating signal processing priors with deep learning. We introduce a Log-Space STFT (LS-STFT) to overcome the geometric bottleneck of linear spectrograms, sharpening narrowband structures while maintaining constant relative resolution. A lightweight Coarse Proposal Net (CPN) rapidly screens the full band. To bridge coarse detection and fine recognition, we design an Adaptive Heterodyne Low-Pass (AHLP) module that executes center-frequency aligning, bandwidth-matched filtering, and safe decimation, purifying signals of out-of-band interference. A Fine Recognition Net (FRN) fuses purified time-domain I/Q with spectral magnitude via dual-domain attention to jointly refine temporal boundaries and modulation classification. Evaluations on the SpaceNet real-world dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art 78.1 mAP@0.5:0.95, surpassing existing leaderboard systems with superior stability across diverse modulation bandwidths.

Zhenyu Liu, Dongfang Li, Xinshuo Hu et al.

Recent studies have explored the working mechanisms of In-Context Learning (ICL). However, they mainly focus on classification and simple generation tasks, limiting their broader application to more complex generation tasks in practice. To address this gap, we investigate the impact of demonstrations on token representations within the practical alignment tasks. We find that the transformer embeds the task function learned from demonstrations into the separator token representation, which plays an important role in the generation of prior response tokens. Once the prior response tokens are determined, the demonstrations become redundant.Motivated by this finding, we propose an efficient Progressive In-Context Alignment (PICA) method consisting of two stages. In the first few-shot stage, the model generates several prior response tokens via standard ICL while concurrently extracting the ICL vector that stores the task function from the separator token representation. In the following zero-shot stage, this ICL vector guides the model to generate responses without further demonstrations.Extensive experiments demonstrate that our PICA not only surpasses vanilla ICL but also achieves comparable performance to other alignment tuning methods. The proposed training-free method reduces the time cost (e.g., 5.45+) with improved alignment performance (e.g., 6.57+). Consequently, our work highlights the application of ICL for alignment and calls for a deeper understanding of ICL for complex generations. The code will be available at https://github.com/HITsz-TMG/PICA.

Mengyu Wang, Zhenyu Liu, Kun Li et al.

Multimodal Image Fusion (MMIF) aims to integrate complementary information from different imaging modalities to overcome the limitations of individual sensors. It enhances image quality and facilitates downstream applications such as remote sensing, medical diagnostics, and robotics. Despite significant advancements, current MMIF methods still face challenges such as modality misalignment, high-frequency detail destruction, and task-specific limitations. To address these challenges, we propose AdaSFFuse, a novel framework for task-generalized MMIF through adaptive cross-domain co-fusion learning. AdaSFFuse introduces two key innovations: the Adaptive Approximate Wavelet Transform (AdaWAT) for frequency decoupling, and the Spatial-Frequency Mamba Blocks for efficient multimodal fusion. AdaWAT adaptively separates the high- and low-frequency components of multimodal images from different scenes, enabling fine-grained extraction and alignment of distinct frequency characteristics for each modality. The Spatial-Frequency Mamba Blocks facilitate cross-domain fusion in both spatial and frequency domains, enhancing this process. These blocks dynamically adjust through learnable mappings to ensure robust fusion across diverse modalities. By combining these components, AdaSFFuse improves the alignment and integration of multimodal features, reduces frequency loss, and preserves critical details. Extensive experiments on four MMIF tasks -- Infrared-Visible Image Fusion (IVF), Multi-Focus Image Fusion (MFF), Multi-Exposure Image Fusion (MEF), and Medical Image Fusion (MIF) -- demonstrate AdaSFFuse's superior fusion performance, ensuring both low computational cost and a compact network, offering a strong balance between performance and efficiency. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/Zhen-yu-Liu/AdaSFFuse.

Wang YuHang, Junkang Guo, Aolei Liu et al.

Adversarial robustness is a critical challenge in deploying deep neural networks for real-world applications. While adversarial training is a widely recognized defense strategy, most existing studies focus on balanced datasets, overlooking the prevalence of long-tailed distributions in real-world data, which significantly complicates robustness. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of adversarial training under long-tailed distributions and identifies limitations in the current state-of-the-art method, AT-BSL, in achieving robust performance under such conditions. To address these challenges, we propose a novel training framework, TAET, which integrates an initial stabilization phase followed by a stratified equalization adversarial training phase. Additionally, prior work on long-tailed robustness has largely ignored the crucial evaluation metric of balanced accuracy. To bridge this gap, we introduce the concept of balanced robustness, a comprehensive metric tailored for assessing robustness under long-tailed distributions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses existing advanced defenses, achieving significant improvements in both memory and computational efficiency. This work represents a substantial advancement in addressing robustness challenges in real-world applications. Our code is available at: https://github.com/BuhuiOK/TAET-Two-Stage-Adversarial-Equalization-Training-on-Long-Tailed-Distributions.

Keyi Chen, Mingze Sun, Zhenyu Liu et al.

Motion generation is fundamental to computer animation and widely used across entertainment, robotics, and virtual environments. While recent methods achieve impressive results, most rely on fixed skeletal templates, which prevent them from generalizing to skeletons with different or perturbed topologies. We address the core limitation of current motion generation methods - the combined lack of large-scale heterogeneous animal motion data and unified generative frameworks capable of jointly modeling arbitrary skeletal topologies and textual conditions. To this end, we introduce OmniZoo, a large-scale animal motion dataset spanning 140 species and 32,979 sequences, enriched with multimodal annotations. Building on OmniZoo, we propose a generalized autoregressive motion generation framework capable of producing text-driven motions for arbitrary skeletal topologies. Central to our model is a Topology-aware Skeleton Embedding Module that encodes geometric and structural properties of any skeleton into a shared token space, enabling seamless fusion with textual semantics. Given a text prompt and a target skeleton, our method generates temporally coherent, physically plausible, and semantically aligned motions, and further enables cross-species motion style transfer.

Yunxin Li, Xinyu Chen, Shenyuan Jiang et al.

We present Uni-MoE 2.0 from the Lychee family. As a fully open-source omnimodal large model (OLM), it substantially advances Lychee's Uni-MoE series in language-centric multimodal understanding, reasoning, and generating. Based on the Qwen2.5-7B dense architecture, we build Uni-MoE-2.0-Omni from scratch through three core contributions: dynamic-capacity Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) design, a progressive training strategy enhanced with an iterative reinforcement strategy, and a carefully curated multimodal data matching technique. It is capable of omnimodal understanding, as well as generating images, text, and speech. Architecturally, our new MoE framework balances computational efficiency and capability for 10 cross-modal inputs using shared, routed, and null experts, while our Omni-Modality 3D RoPE ensures spatio-temporal cross-modality alignment in the self-attention layer. For training, following cross-modal pretraining, we use a progressive supervised fine-tuning strategy that activates modality-specific experts and is enhanced by balanced data composition and an iterative GSPO-DPO method to stabilise RL training and improve reasoning. Data-wise, the base model, trained on approximately 75B tokens of open-source multimodal data, is equipped with special speech and image generation tokens, allowing it to learn these generative tasks by conditioning its outputs on linguistic cues. Extensive evaluation across 85 benchmarks demonstrates that our model achieves SOTA or highly competitive performance against leading OLMs, surpassing Qwen2.5-Omni (trained with 1.2T tokens) on over 50 of 76 benchmarks. Key strengths include video understanding (+7% avg. of 8), omnimodallity understanding (+7% avg. of 4), and audiovisual reasoning (+4%). It also advances long-form speech processing (reducing WER by 4.2%) and leads in low-level image processing and controllable generation across 5 metrics.

Zhenyu Liu, Yunxin Li, Baotian Hu et al.

To improve Multimodal Large Language Models' (MLLMs) ability to process images and complex instructions, researchers predominantly curate large-scale visual instruction tuning datasets, which are either sourced from existing vision tasks or synthetically generated using LLMs and image descriptions. However, they often suffer from critical flaws, including misaligned instruction-image pairs and low-quality images. Such issues hinder training efficiency and limit performance improvements, as models waste resources on noisy or irrelevant data with minimal benefit to overall capability. To address this issue, we propose a \textbf{Vi}sual-Centric \textbf{S}election approach via \textbf{A}gents Collaboration (ViSA), which centers on image quality assessment and image-instruction relevance evaluation. Specifically, our approach consists of 1) an image information quantification method via visual agents collaboration to select images with rich visual information, and 2) a visual-centric instruction quality assessment method to select high-quality instruction data related to high-quality images. Finally, we reorganize 80K instruction data from large open-source datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ViSA outperforms or is comparable to current state-of-the-art models on seven benchmarks, using only 2.5\% of the original data, highlighting the efficiency of our data selection approach. Moreover, we conduct ablation studies to validate the effectiveness of each component of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/HITsz-TMG/ViSA.

Shucong Li, Xiaoluo Zhou, Yuqian He et al.

3-D object detection based on 4-D radar-vision is an important part in Internet of Vehicles (IoV). However, there are two challenges which need to be faced. First, the 4-D radar point clouds are sparse, leading to poor 3-D representation. Second, vision datas exhibit representation degradation under low-light, long distance detection and dense occlusion scenes, which provides unreliable texture information during fusion stage. To address these issues, a framework named SDCM is proposed, which contains Simulated Densifying and Compensatory Modeling Fusion for radar-vision 3-D object detection in IoV. Firstly, considering point generation based on Gaussian simulation of key points obtained from 3-D Kernel Density Estimation (3-D KDE), and outline generation based on curvature simulation, Simulated Densifying (SimDen) module is designed to generate dense radar point clouds. Secondly, considering that radar data could provide more real time information than vision data, due to the all-weather property of 4-D radar. Radar Compensatory Mapping (RCM) module is designed to reduce the affects of vision datas' representation degradation. Thirdly, considering that feature tensor difference values contain the effective information of every modality, which could be extracted and modeled for heterogeneity reduction and modalities interaction, Mamba Modeling Interactive Fusion (MMIF) module is designed for reducing heterogeneous and achieving interactive Fusion. Experiment results on the VoD, TJ4DRadSet and Astyx HiRes 2019 dataset show that SDCM achieves best performance with lower parameter quantity and faster inference speed. Our code will be available.

Cong Liu, Chengyue Gong, Zhenyu Liu et al.

Generative models hold great promise for accelerating material discovery but are often limited by their inflexible single-stage generative process in designing valid and diverse materials. To address this, we propose a two-stage generative framework, Lang2Str, that combines the strengths of large language models (LLMs) and flow-based models for flexible and precise material generation. Our method frames the generative process as a conditional generative task, where an LLM provides high-level conditions by generating descriptions of material unit cells' geometric layouts and properties. These descriptions, informed by the LLM's extensive background knowledge, ensure reasonable structure designs. A conditioned flow model then decodes these textual conditions into precise continuous coordinates and unit cell parameters. This staged approach combines the structured reasoning of LLMs and the distribution modeling capabilities of flow models. Experimental results show that our method achieves competitive performance on \textit{ab initio} material generation and crystal structure prediction tasks, with generated structures exhibiting closer alignment to ground truth in both geometry and energy levels, surpassing state-of-the-art models. The flexibility and modularity of our framework further enable fine-grained control over the generation process, potentially leading to more efficient and customizable material design.

Yunxin Li, Zhenyu Liu, Zitao Li et al.

Reasoning lies at the heart of intelligence, shaping the ability to make decisions, draw conclusions, and generalize across domains. In artificial intelligence, as systems increasingly operate in open, uncertain, and multimodal environments, reasoning becomes essential for enabling robust and adaptive behavior. Large Multimodal Reasoning Models (LMRMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm, integrating modalities such as text, images, audio, and video to support complex reasoning capabilities and aiming to achieve comprehensive perception, precise understanding, and deep reasoning. As research advances, multimodal reasoning has rapidly evolved from modular, perception-driven pipelines to unified, language-centric frameworks that offer more coherent cross-modal understanding. While instruction tuning and reinforcement learning have improved model reasoning, significant challenges remain in omni-modal generalization, reasoning depth, and agentic behavior. To address these issues, we present a comprehensive and structured survey of multimodal reasoning research, organized around a four-stage developmental roadmap that reflects the field's shifting design philosophies and emerging capabilities. First, we review early efforts based on task-specific modules, where reasoning was implicitly embedded across stages of representation, alignment, and fusion. Next, we examine recent approaches that unify reasoning into multimodal LLMs, with advances such as Multimodal Chain-of-Thought (MCoT) and multimodal reinforcement learning enabling richer and more structured reasoning chains. Finally, drawing on empirical insights from challenging benchmarks and experimental cases of OpenAI O3 and O4-mini, we discuss the conceptual direction of native large multimodal reasoning models (N-LMRMs), which aim to support scalable, agentic, and adaptive reasoning and planning in complex, real-world environments.

Zhenyu Liu, Yi Ma, Rahim Tafazolli

Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) shows promise for automating O-RAN wireless supervisory control, but translated intents still require an executor-side decision before live network actuation. Existing control flows lack explicit semantics for whether an intent should commit, gate for evidence, or reject under stale telemetry, concurrent policies, deadline and bandwidth limits, and rollback constraints. We propose Progressive Risk-Gated Actuation (PRGA), an executor-side contract for risk-gated wireless intent execution. PRGA structures each intent into executable local triage (C0), on-demand coordination evidence (C1), and post-hoc provenance support (C2), with C2 kept off the online safety path. A deterministic two-stage policy checks expiry, freshness, rollback-handle validity, local conflict, blocking preconditions, and planner-executor risk divergence from C0, then retrieves C1 only for gated intents when deadline and bandwidth budgets allow; evidence-mandatory gates reject when required C1 is unavailable. On two 3GPP-parameterized energy-saving and slice-SLA benchmarks, PRGA reduces time-to-first-safe-action by 23.3-27.4% and per-commit control-plane bytes by 52.7-54.2% against a decision-identical eager full-evidence cost-overlay comparator, thereby isolating retrieval-cost accounting; remains non-inferior within a pre-declared 0.5 percentage-point unsafe-action margin against an invariant-respecting static-threshold comparator; and rejects 100% of injected over-threshold stale inputs in the stale-state fault campaign. On these benchmarks, PRGA improves supervisory responsiveness and control-plane efficiency within the evaluated unsafe-action boundary.

Dongfang Li, Zetian Sun, Baotian Hu et al.

Large language models have been widely adopted in natural language processing, yet they face the challenge of generating unreliable content. Recent works aim to reduce misinformation and hallucinations by resorting to attribution as a means to provide evidence (i.e., citations). However, current attribution methods usually focus on the retrieval stage and automatic evaluation that neglect mirroring the citation mechanisms in human scholarly writing to bolster credibility. In this paper, we address these challenges by modelling the attribution task as preference learning and introducing an Automatic Preference Optimization (APO) framework. First, we create a curated collection for post-training with 6,330 examples by collecting and filtering from existing datasets. Second, considering the high cost of labelling preference data, we further propose an automatic method to synthesize attribution preference data resulting in 95,263 pairs. Moreover, inspired by the human citation process, we further propose a progressive preference optimization method by leveraging fine-grained information. Extensive experiments on three datasets (i.e., ASQA, StrategyQA, and ELI5) demonstrate that APO achieves state-of-the-art citation F1 with higher answer quality.

Enming Zhang, Jiayang Li, Yanru Wu et al.

The adaptation of large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) to downstream tasks with limited labeled data remains a significant challenge. While parameter-efficient prompt learning methods offer a promising path, they often suffer from catastrophic forgetting of pre-trained knowledge. Toward addressing this limitation, our work is grounded in the insight that governing the evolutionary path of prompts is essential for forgetting-free adaptation. To this end, we propose EvoPrompt, a novel framework designed to explicitly steer the prompt trajectory for stable, knowledge-preserving fine-tuning. Specifically, our approach employs a Modality-Shared Prompt Projector (MPP) to generate hierarchical prompts from a unified embedding space. Critically, an evolutionary training strategy decouples low-rank updates into directional and magnitude components, preserving early-learned semantic directions while only adapting their magnitude, thus enabling prompts to evolve without discarding foundational knowledge. This process is further stabilized by Feature Geometric Regularization (FGR), which enforces feature decorrelation to prevent representation collapse. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EvoPrompt achieves state-of-the-art performance in few-shot learning while robustly preserving the original zero-shot capabilities of pre-trained VLMs.

Xinshuo Hu, Zifei Shan, Xinping Zhao et al.

As retrieval-augmented generation prevails in large language models, embedding models are becoming increasingly crucial. Despite the growing number of general embedding models, prior work often overlooks the critical role of training data quality. In this work, we introduce KaLM-Embedding, a general multilingual embedding model that leverages a large quantity of cleaner, more diverse, and domain-specific training data. Our model has been trained with key techniques proven to enhance performance: (1) persona-based synthetic data to create diversified examples distilled from LLMs, (2) ranking consistency filtering to remove less informative samples, and (3) semi-homogeneous task batch sampling to improve training efficacy. Departing from traditional BERT-like architectures, we adopt Qwen2-0.5B as the pre-trained model, facilitating the adaptation of auto-regressive language models for general embedding tasks. Extensive evaluations of the MTEB benchmark across multiple languages show that our model outperforms others of comparable size, setting a new standard for multilingual embedding models with <1B parameters.

Xinping Zhao, Yan Zhong, Zetian Sun et al.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) prevails in Large Language Models. It mainly consists of retrieval and generation. The retrieval modules (a.k.a. retrievers) aim to find useful information used to facilitate the generation modules (a.k.a. generators). As such, generators' performance largely depends on the effectiveness and efficiency of retrievers. However, the widely used retrieval paradigm remains flat. It treats retrieval procedures as a one-off deal with constant granularity. Despite effectiveness, we argue that they suffer from two limitations: (1) flat retrieval exerts a significant burden on one retriever; (2) constant granularity limits the ceiling of retrieval performance. In this work, we propose a progressive retrieval paradigm with coarse-to-fine granularity for RAG, termed FunnelRAG, so as to balance effectiveness and efficiency. Specifically, FunnelRAG establishes a progressive retrieval pipeline by collaborating coarse-to-fine granularity, large-to-small quantity, and low-to-high capacity, which can relieve the burden on one retriever and also promote the ceiling of retrieval performance. Extensive experiments manifest that FunnelRAG achieves comparable retrieval performance while the time overhead is reduced by nearly 40 percent.

Bao Li, Zhenyu Liu, Lizhi Shao et al.

Directly predicting human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) status from widely available hematoxylin and eosin (HE)-stained whole slide images (WSIs) can reduce technical costs and expedite treatment selection. Accurately predicting HER2 requires large collections of multi-site WSIs. Federated learning enables collaborative training of these WSIs without gigabyte-size WSIs transportation and data privacy concerns. However, federated learning encounters challenges in addressing label imbalance in multi-site WSIs from the real world. Moreover, existing WSI classification methods cannot simultaneously exploit local context information and long-range dependencies in the site-end feature representation of federated learning. To address these issues, we present a point transformer with federated learning for multi-site HER2 status prediction from HE-stained WSIs. Our approach incorporates two novel designs. We propose a dynamic label distribution strategy and an auxiliary classifier, which helps to establish a well-initialized model and mitigate label distribution variations across sites. Additionally, we propose a farthest cosine sampling based on cosine distance. It can sample the most distinctive features and capture the long-range dependencies. Extensive experiments and analysis show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance at four sites with a total of 2687 WSIs. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our model can generalize to two unseen sites with 229 WSIs.

Yunxin Li, Xinyu Chen, Zitao Li et al.

Applying Reinforcement Learning (RL) to Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) shows significant promise for complex video reasoning. However, popular Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) methods, such as outcome-based Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), are limited by data preparation bottlenecks (e.g., noise or high cost) and exhibit unstable improvements in the quality of long chain-of-thoughts (CoTs) and downstream performance.To address these limitations, we propose VerIPO, a Verifier-guided Iterative Policy Optimization method designed to gradually improve video LLMs' capacity for generating deep, long-term reasoning chains. The core component is Rollout-Aware Verifier, positioned between the GRPO and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) training phases to form the GRPO-Verifier-DPO training loop. This verifier leverages small LLMs as a judge to assess the reasoning logic of rollouts, enabling the construction of high-quality contrastive data, including reflective and contextually consistent CoTs. These curated preference samples drive the efficient DPO stage (7x faster than GRPO), leading to marked improvements in reasoning chain quality, especially in terms of length and contextual consistency. This training loop benefits from GRPO's expansive search and DPO's targeted optimization. Experimental results demonstrate: 1) Significantly faster and more effective optimization compared to standard GRPO variants, yielding superior performance; 2) Our trained models exceed the direct inference of large-scale instruction-tuned Video-LLMs, producing long and contextually consistent CoTs on diverse video reasoning tasks; and 3) Our model with one iteration outperforms powerful LMMs (e.g., Kimi-VL) and long reasoning models (e.g., Video-R1), highlighting its effectiveness and stability.

Zhenyu Liu, Yunzhen Liu, Zehao Fan et al.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale capacity via sparse activation but stress memory and bandwidth. Offloading alleviates GPU memory by fetching experts on demand, yet token-level routing causes irregular transfers that make inference I/O-bound. Static uniform quantization reduces traffic but degrades accuracy under aggressive compression by ignoring expert heterogeneity. We present Bandwidth-Efficient Adaptive Mixture-of-Experts via Low-Rank Compensation, which performs router-guided precision restoration using precomputed low-rank compensators. At inference time, our method transfers compact low-rank factors with Top-n (n<k) experts per token and applies compensation to them, keeping others low-bit. Integrated with offloading on GPU and GPU-NDP systems, our method delivers a superior bandwidth-accuracy trade-off and improved throughput.

Jianfei He, Lilin Wang, Jiaying Wang et al.

Identifying offensive language is essential for maintaining safety and sustainability in the social media era. Though large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated encouraging potential in social media analytics, they lack thorough evaluation when in offensive language detection, particularly in multilingual environments. We for the first time evaluate multilingual offensive language detection of LLMs in three languages: English, Spanish, and German with three LLMs, GPT-3.5, Flan-T5, and Mistral, in both monolingual and multilingual settings. We further examine the impact of different prompt languages and augmented translation data for the task in non-English contexts. Furthermore, we discuss the impact of the inherent bias in LLMs and the datasets in the mispredictions related to sensitive topics.

Anjie Le, Henan Liu, Yue Wang et al.

Ultrasound is a widely-used imaging modality critical to global healthcare, yet its interpretation remains challenging due to its varying image quality on operators, noises, and anatomical structures. Although large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive multimodal capabilities across natural and medical domains, their performance on ultrasound remains largely unexplored. We introduce U2-BENCH, the first comprehensive benchmark to evaluate LVLMs on ultrasound understanding across classification, detection, regression, and text generation tasks. U2-BENCH aggregates 7,241 cases spanning 15 anatomical regions and defines 8 clinically inspired tasks, such as diagnosis, view recognition, lesion localization, clinical value estimation, and report generation, across 50 ultrasound application scenarios. We evaluate 20 state-of-the-art LVLMs, both open- and closed-source, general-purpose and medical-specific. Our results reveal strong performance on image-level classification, but persistent challenges in spatial reasoning and clinical language generation. U2-BENCH establishes a rigorous and unified testbed to assess and accelerate LVLM research in the uniquely multimodal domain of medical ultrasound imaging.

Xinping Zhao, Xinshuo Hu, Zifei Shan et al.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs)-based text embedding models primarily focus on data scaling or synthesis, yet limited exploration of training techniques and data quality, thereby constraining performance. In this work, we propose KaLM-Embedding-V2, a series of versatile and compact embedding models, systematically incentivizing advanced embedding capability in LLMs by superior training techniques and high-quality data. For model architecture, we implement the models on a 0.5B compact size with simple mean-pooling to produce fixed-length embeddings and remove the causal attention mask to enable fully bidirectional representation learning. For training techniques, we propose a progressive multi-stage training pipeline: pre-training on weakly supervised large-scale datasets, fine-tuning with supervised high-quality datasets, and contrastive distillation with fine-grained soft signals, integrated with focal-style reweighting and online hard-negative mixing to emphasize difficult samples and enrich hard negatives, respectively. For training data, we curate over 20 categories for pre-training and 100 categories for fine-tuning and contrastive distillation, to improve both performance and generalization, leveraging task-specific instructions, hard-negative mining, and example-based multi-class labeling to ensure high quality. Combining these techniques, our KaLM-Embedding-V2 series achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark, outperforming models of comparable size and rivaling models 3-26x larger, setting a new standard for versatile and compact embedding models under 1B parameters.

Xinping Zhao, Jindi Yu, Zhenyu Liu et al.

As we all know, hallucinations prevail in Large Language Models (LLMs), where the generated content is coherent but factually incorrect, which inflicts a heavy blow on the widespread application of LLMs. Previous studies have shown that LLMs could confidently state non-existent facts rather than answering ``I don't know''. Therefore, it is necessary to resort to external knowledge to detect and correct the hallucinated content. Since manual detection and correction of factual errors is labor-intensive, developing an automatic end-to-end hallucination-checking approach is indeed a needful thing. To this end, we present Medico, a Multi-source evidence fusion enhanced hallucination detection and correction framework. It fuses diverse evidence from multiple sources, detects whether the generated content contains factual errors, provides the rationale behind the judgment, and iteratively revises the hallucinated content. Experimental results on evidence retrieval (0.964 HR@5, 0.908 MRR@5), hallucination detection (0.927-0.951 F1), and hallucination correction (0.973-0.979 approval rate) manifest the great potential of Medico. A video demo of Medico can be found at https://youtu.be/RtsO6CSesBI.

Fangzhi Fei, Jiaxin Hu, Qiaofeng Li et al.

Transformer-based neural operators have emerged as promising surrogate solvers for partial differential equations, by leveraging the effectiveness of Transformers for capturing long-range dependencies and global correlations, profoundly proven in language modeling. However, existing methodologies overlook the coordinated learning of interdependencies between local physical details and global features, which are essential for tackling multiscale problems, preserving physical consistency and numerical stability in long-term rollouts, and accurately capturing transitional dynamics. In this work, we propose GFocal, a Transformer-based neural operator method that enforces simultaneous global and local feature learning and fusion. Global correlations and local features are harnessed through Nyström attention-based \textbf{g}lobal blocks and slices-based \textbf{focal} blocks to generate physics-aware tokens, subsequently modulated and integrated via convolution-based gating blocks, enabling dynamic fusion of multiscale information. GFocal achieves accurate modeling and prediction of physical features given arbitrary geometries and initial conditions. Experiments show that GFocal achieves state-of-the-art performance with an average 15.2\% relative gain in five out of six benchmarks and also excels in industry-scale simulations such as aerodynamics simulation of automotives and airfoils.

Zhenyu Liu, Huizhi Liang, Rajiv Ranjan et al.

The robustness of Deep Neural Network models is crucial for defending models against adversarial attacks. Recent defense methods have employed collaborative learning frameworks to enhance model robustness. Two key limitations of existing methods are (i) insufficient guidance of the target model via loss functions and (ii) non-collaborative adversarial generation. We, therefore, propose a dual regularization loss (D2R Loss) method and a collaborative adversarial generation (CAG) strategy for adversarial training. D2R loss includes two optimization steps. The adversarial distribution and clean distribution optimizations enhance the target model's robustness by leveraging the strengths of different loss functions obtained via a suitable function space exploration to focus more precisely on the target model's distribution. CAG generates adversarial samples using a gradient-based collaboration between guidance and target models. We conducted extensive experiments on three benchmark databases, including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny ImageNet, and two popular target models, WideResNet34-10 and PreActResNet18. Our results show that D2R loss with CAG produces highly robust models.

Zhenyu Liu, Garrett Gagnon, Swagath Venkataramani et al.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have revolutionized a wide range of industries, from healthcare and finance to automotive, by offering unparalleled capabilities in data analysis and decision-making. Despite their transforming impact, DNNs face two critical challenges: the vulnerability to adversarial attacks and the increasing computational costs associated with more complex and larger models. In this paper, we introduce an effective method designed to simultaneously enhance adversarial robustness and execution efficiency. Unlike prior studies that enhance robustness via uniformly injecting noise, we introduce a non-uniform noise injection algorithm, strategically applied at each DNN layer to disrupt adversarial perturbations introduced in attacks. By employing approximation techniques, our approach identifies and protects essential neurons while strategically introducing noise into non-essential neurons. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method successfully enhances both robustness and efficiency across several attack scenarios, model architectures, and datasets.

Zhenyu Liu, Yi Ma, Rahim Tafazolli et al.

Real-time transmission of video over wireless networks remains highly challenging, even with advanced deep models, particularly under severe channel conditions such as limited bandwidth and weak connectivity. In this paper, we propose Resi-VidTok, a Resilient Tokenization-Enabled framework designed for ultra-low-rate and lightweight video transmission that delivers strong robustness while preserving perceptual and semantic fidelity on commodity digital hardware. By reorganizing spatio--temporal content into a discrete, importance-ordered token stream composed of key tokens and refinement tokens, Resi-VidTok enables progressive encoding, prefix-decodable reconstruction, and graceful quality degradation under constrained channels. A key contribution is a resilient 1D tokenization pipeline for video that integrates differential temporal token coding, explicitly supporting reliable recovery from incomplete token sets using a single shared framewise decoder--without auxiliary temporal extractors or heavy generative models. Furthermore, stride-controlled frame sparsification combined with a lightweight decoder-side interpolator reduces transmission load while maintaining motion continuity. Finally, a channel-adaptive source--channel coding and modulation scheme dynamically allocates rate and protection according to token importance and channel condition, yielding stable quality across adverse SNRs. Evaluation results indicate robust visual and semantic consistency at channel bandwidth ratios (CBR) as low as 0.0004 and real-time reconstruction at over 30 fps, demonstrating the practicality of Resi-VidTok for energy-efficient, latency-sensitive, and reliability-critical wireless applications.

Jiale Zhao, Cong Liu, Yuxuan Zhang et al.

Determining crystal structures from X-ray diffraction data is fundamental across diverse scientific fields, yet remains a significant challenge when data is limited to low resolution. While recent deep learning models have made breakthroughs in solving the crystallographic phase problem, the resulting low-resolution electron density maps are often ambiguous and difficult to interpret. To overcome this critical bottleneck, we introduce XDXD, to our knowledge, the first end-to-end deep learning framework to determine a complete atomic model directly from low-resolution single-crystal X-ray diffraction data. Our diffusion-based generative model bypasses the need for manual map interpretation, producing chemically plausible crystal structures conditioned on the diffraction pattern. We demonstrate that XDXD achieves a 70.4\% match rate for structures with data limited to 2.0~Å resolution, with a root-mean-square error (RMSE) below 0.05. Evaluated on a benchmark of 24,000 experimental structures, our model proves to be robust and accurate. Furthermore, a case study on small peptides highlights the model's potential for extension to more complex systems, paving the way for automated structure solution in previously intractable cases.

Zhenyu Liu, Yunxin Li, Xuanyu Zhang et al.

Recent advances in unified multimodal models indicate a clear trend towards comprehensive content generation. However, the auditory domain remains a significant challenge, with music and speech often developed in isolation, hindering progress towards universal audio synthesis. This separation stems from inherent task conflicts and severe data imbalances, which impede the development of a truly unified audio generation model. To address this challenge, we propose UniMoE-Audio, a unified speech and music generation model within a novel Dynamic-Capacity Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework. Architecturally, UniMoE-Audio introduces a Top-P routing strategy for dynamic expert number allocation, and a hybrid expert design comprising routed experts for domain-specific knowledge, shared experts for domain-agnostic features, and null experts for adaptive computation skipping. To tackle data imbalance, we introduce a three-stage training curriculum: 1) Independent Specialist Training leverages original datasets to instill domain-specific knowledge into each "proto-expert" without interference; 2) MoE Integration and Warmup incorporates these specialists into the UniMoE-Audio architecture, warming up the gate module and shared expert using a subset of balanced dataset; and 3) Synergistic Joint Training trains the entire model end-to-end on the fully balanced dataset, fostering enhanced cross-domain synergy. Extensive experiments show that UniMoE-Audio not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on major speech and music generation benchmarks, but also demonstrates superior synergistic learning, mitigating the performance degradation typically seen in naive joint training. Our findings highlight the substantial potential of specialized MoE architecture and curated training strategies in advancing the field of universal audio generation. Homepage: https://mukioxun.github.io/Uni-MoE-site/home.html

Zhenyu Liu, Varun Ojha

Adversarial training is the most effective defense against adversarial attacks. The effectiveness of the adversarial attacks has been on the design of its loss function and regularization term. The most widely used loss function in adversarial training is cross-entropy and mean squared error (MSE) as its regularization objective. However, MSE enforces overly uniform optimization between two output distributions during training, which limits its robustness in adversarial training scenarios. To address this issue, we revisit the idea of mutual learning (originally designed for knowledge distillation) and propose two novel regularization strategies tailored for adversarial training: (i) weighted adversarial mutual regularization and (ii) adversarial generalization regularization. In the former, we formulate a decomposed adversarial mutual Kullback-Leibler divergence (KL-divergence) loss, which allows flexible control over the optimization process by assigning unequal weights to the main and auxiliary objectives. In the latter, we introduce an additional clean target distribution into the adversarial training objective, improving generalization and enhancing model robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed methods significantly improve adversarial robustness compared to existing regularization-based approaches.

Taohan Weng, Kaibing Hu, Henan Liu et al.

Ultrasound is crucial in modern medicine but faces challenges like operator dependence, image noise, and real-time scanning, hindering AI integration. While large multimodal models excel in other medical imaging areas, they struggle with ultrasound's complexities. To address this, we introduce Dolphin v1.0 (V1) and its reasoning-augmented version, Dolphin R1-the first large-scale multimodal ultrasound foundation models unifying diverse clinical tasks in a single vision-language framework.To tackle ultrasound variability and noise, we curated a 2-million-scale multimodal dataset, combining textbook knowledge, public data, synthetic samples, and general corpora. This ensures robust perception, generalization, and clinical adaptability.The Dolphin series employs a three-stage training strategy: domain-specialized pretraining, instruction-driven alignment, and reinforcement-based refinement. Dolphin v1.0 delivers reliable performance in classification, detection, regression, and report generation. Dolphin R1 enhances diagnostic inference, reasoning transparency, and interpretability through reinforcement learning with ultrasound-specific rewards.Evaluated on U2-Bench across eight ultrasound tasks, Dolphin R1 achieves a U2-score of 0.5835-over twice the second-best model (0.2968) setting a new state of the art. Dolphin v1.0 also performs competitively, validating the unified framework. Comparisons show reasoning-enhanced training significantly improves diagnostic accuracy, consistency, and interpretability, highlighting its importance for high-stakes medical AI.

Shucong Li, Zhenyu Liu, Zijie Hong et al.

Multispectral object detection is an important application for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, it faces several challenges. First, low-light RGB images weaken the multispectral fusion due to details loss. Second, the interference information is introduced to local target modeling during multispectral fusion. Third, computational cost poses deployment challenge on UAV platforms, such as transformer-based methods with quadratic complexity. To address these issues, a framework named DEPFusion consisting of two designed modules, Dual-Domain Enhancement (DDE) and Priority-Guided Mamba Fusion (PGMF) , is proposed for UAV multispectral object detection. Firstly, considering the adoption of low-frequency component for global brightness enhancement and frequency spectra features for texture-details recovery, DDE module is designed with Cross-Scale Wavelet Mamba (CSWM) block and Fourier Details Recovery (FDR) block. Secondly, considering guiding the scanning of Mamba from high priority score tokens, which contain local target feature, a novel Priority-Guided Serialization is proposed with theoretical proof. Based on it, PGMF module is designed for multispectral feature fusion, which enhance local modeling and reduce interference information. Experiments on DroneVehicle and VEDAI datasets demonstrate that DEPFusion achieves good performance with state-of-the-art methods.

Zhenyu Liu, Huizhi Liang, Xinrun Li et al.

Adversarial distillation (AD) is a knowledge distillation technique that facilitates the transfer of robustness from teacher deep neural network (DNN) models to lightweight target (student) DNN models, enabling the target models to perform better than only training the student model independently. Some previous works focus on using a small, learnable teacher (guide) model to improve the robustness of a student model. Since a learnable guide model starts learning from scratch, maintaining its optimal state for effective knowledge transfer during co-training is challenging. Therefore, we propose a novel Adaptive Guidance Adversarial Training (AdaGAT) method. Our method, AdaGAT, dynamically adjusts the training state of the guide model to install robustness to the target model. Specifically, we develop two separate loss functions as part of the AdaGAT method, allowing the guide model to participate more actively in backpropagation to achieve its optimal state. We evaluated our approach via extensive experiments on three datasets: CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and TinyImageNet, using the WideResNet-34-10 model as the target model. Our observations reveal that appropriately adjusting the guide model within a certain accuracy range enhances the target model's robustness across various adversarial attacks compared to a variety of baseline models.

Zhengcheng Lin, Zuobin Ying, Zhenyu Li et al.

Early diagnosis and accurate identification of lesion location and progression in prostate cancer (PCa) are critical for assisting clinicians in formulating effective treatment strategies. However, due to the high semantic homogeneity between lesion and non-lesion areas, existing medical image segmentation methods often struggle to accurately comprehend lesion semantics, resulting in the problem of semantic confusion. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Pixel Anchor Module, which guides the model to discover a sparse set of feature anchors that serve to capture and interpret global contextual information. This mechanism enhances the model's nonlinear representation capacity and improves segmentation accuracy within lesion regions. Moreover, we design a self-attention-based Top_k selection strategy to further refine the identification of these feature anchors, and incorporate a focal loss function to mitigate class imbalance, thereby facilitating more precise semantic interpretation across diverse regions. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the PI-CAI dataset, demonstrating 69.73% IoU and 74.32% Dice scores, and significantly improving prostate cancer lesion detection.

Zehao Fan, Garrett Gagnon, Zhenyu Liu et al.

Transformer-based models are the foundation of modern machine learning, but their execution, particularly during autoregressive decoding in large language models (LLMs), places significant pressure on memory systems due to frequent memory accesses and growing key-value (KV) caches. This creates a bottleneck in memory bandwidth, especially as context lengths increase. Processing-in-memory (PIM) architectures are a promising solution, offering high internal bandwidth and compute parallelism near memory. However, current PIM designs are primarily optimized for dense attention and struggle with the dynamic, irregular access patterns introduced by modern KV cache sparsity techniques. Consequently, they suffer from workload imbalance, reducing throughput and resource utilization. In this work, we propose STARC, a novel sparsity-optimized data mapping scheme tailored specifically for efficient LLM decoding on PIM architectures. STARC clusters KV pairs by semantic similarity and maps them to contiguous memory regions aligned with PIM bank structures. During decoding, queries retrieve relevant tokens at cluster granularity by matching against precomputed centroids, enabling selective attention and parallel processing without frequent reclustering or data movement overhead. Experiments on the HBM-PIM system show that, compared to common token-wise sparsity methods, STARC reduces attention-layer latency by 19%--31% and energy consumption by 19%--27%. Under a KV cache budget of 1024, it achieves up to 54%--74% latency reduction and 45%--67% energy reduction compared to full KV cache retrieval. Meanwhile, STARC maintains model accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art sparse attention methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in enabling efficient and hardware-friendly long-context LLM inference on PIM architectures.

Yipeng Li, Xinchen Lyu, Zhenyu Liu

We aim to provide a unified convergence analysis for permutation-based Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), where data examples are permuted before each epoch. By examining the relations among permutations, we categorize existing permutation-based SGD algorithms into four categories: Arbitrary Permutations, Independent Permutations (including Random Reshuffling), One Permutation (including Incremental Gradient, Shuffle One and Nice Permutation) and Dependent Permutations (including GraBs Lu et al., 2022; Cooper et al., 2023). Existing unified analyses failed to encompass the Dependent Permutations category due to the inter-epoch dependencies in its permutations. In this work, we propose a general assumption that captures the inter-epoch permutation dependencies. Using the general assumption, we develop a unified framework for permutation-based SGD with arbitrary permutations of examples, incorporating all the aforementioned representative algorithms. Furthermore, we adapt our framework on example ordering in SGD for client ordering in Federated Learning (FL). Specifically, we develop a unified framework for regularized-participation FL with arbitrary permutations of clients.

Zhuangzhuang Yan, Xinyu Gu, Shilong Fan et al.

Accurate and reliable link quality prediction (LQP) is crucial for optimizing network performance, ensuring communication stability, and enhancing user experience in wireless communications. However, LQP faces significant challenges due to the dynamic and lossy nature of wireless links, which are influenced by interference, multipath effects, fading, and blockage. In this paper, we propose GAT-LLM, a novel multivariate wireless link quality prediction model that combines Large Language Models (LLMs) with Graph Attention Networks (GAT) to enable accurate and reliable multivariate LQP of wireless communications. By framing LQP as a time series prediction task and appropriately preprocessing the input data, we leverage LLMs to improve the accuracy of link quality prediction. To address the limitations of LLMs in multivariate prediction due to typically handling one-dimensional data, we integrate GAT to model interdependencies among multiple variables across different protocol layers, enhancing the model's ability to handle complex dependencies. Experimental results demonstrate that GAT-LLM significantly improves the accuracy and robustness of link quality prediction, particularly in multi-step prediction scenarios.

Zhuangzhuang Yan, Xinyu Gu, Zhenyu Liu et al.

With the rapid development of various internet of things (IoT) applications, including industrial IoT (IIoT) and visual IoT (VIoT), the demand for direct device-to-device communication to support high data rates continues to grow. To address this demand, 5G-Advanced has introduced sidelink communication over the unlicensed spectrum (SL-U) to increase data rates. However, the primary challenge of SL-U in the unlicensed spectrum is ensuring fair coexistence with other incumbent systems, such as Wi-Fi. In this paper, we address the challenge by designing channel access mechanisms and power control strategies to mitigate interference and ensure fair coexistence. First, we propose a novel collaborative channel access (CCHA) mechanism that integrates channel access with resource allocation through collaborative interactions between base stations (BS) and SL-U users. This mechanism ensures fair coexistence with incumbent systems while improving resource utilization. Second, to further enhance the performance of the coexistence system, we develop a cooperative subgoal-based hierarchical deep reinforcement learning (C-GHDRL) algorithm framework. The framework enables SL-U users to make globally optimal decisions by leveraging cooperative operations between the BS and SL-U users, effectively overcoming the limitations of traditional optimization methods in solving joint optimization problems with nonlinear constraints. Finally, we mathematically model the joint channel access and power control problem and balance the trade-off between fairness and transmission rate in the coexistence system by defining a suitable reward function in the C-GHDRL algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly enhances the performance of the coexistence system while ensuring fair coexistence between SL-U and Wi-Fi users.