Yu Tian

Yinpeng Dong, Huanran Chen, Jiawei Chen et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that integrate text and other modalities (especially vision) have achieved unprecedented performance in various multimodal tasks. However, due to the unsolved adversarial robustness problem of vision models, MLLMs can have more severe safety and security risks by introducing the vision inputs. In this work, we study the adversarial robustness of Google's Bard, a competitive chatbot to ChatGPT that released its multimodal capability recently, to better understand the vulnerabilities of commercial MLLMs. By attacking white-box surrogate vision encoders or MLLMs, the generated adversarial examples can mislead Bard to output wrong image descriptions with a 22% success rate based solely on the transferability. We show that the adversarial examples can also attack other MLLMs, e.g., a 26% attack success rate against Bing Chat and a 86% attack success rate against ERNIE bot. Moreover, we identify two defense mechanisms of Bard, including face detection and toxicity detection of images. We design corresponding attacks to evade these defenses, demonstrating that the current defenses of Bard are also vulnerable. We hope this work can deepen our understanding on the robustness of MLLMs and facilitate future research on defenses. Our code is available at https://github.com/thu-ml/Attack-Bard. Update: GPT-4V is available at October 2023. We further evaluate its robustness under the same set of adversarial examples, achieving a 45% attack success rate.

Qihang Zhou, Guansong Pang, Yu Tian et al.

Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) requires detection models trained using auxiliary data to detect anomalies without any training sample in a target dataset. It is a crucial task when training data is not accessible due to various concerns, eg, data privacy, yet it is challenging since the models need to generalize to anomalies across different domains where the appearance of foreground objects, abnormal regions, and background features, such as defects/tumors on different products/organs, can vary significantly. Recently large pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated strong zero-shot recognition ability in various vision tasks, including anomaly detection. However, their ZSAD performance is weak since the VLMs focus more on modeling the class semantics of the foreground objects rather than the abnormality/normality in the images. In this paper we introduce a novel approach, namely AnomalyCLIP, to adapt CLIP for accurate ZSAD across different domains. The key insight of AnomalyCLIP is to learn object-agnostic text prompts that capture generic normality and abnormality in an image regardless of its foreground objects. This allows our model to focus on the abnormal image regions rather than the object semantics, enabling generalized normality and abnormality recognition on diverse types of objects. Large-scale experiments on 17 real-world anomaly detection datasets show that AnomalyCLIP achieves superior zero-shot performance of detecting and segmenting anomalies in datasets of highly diverse class semantics from various defect inspection and medical imaging domains. Code will be made available at https://github.com/zqhang/AnomalyCLIP.

Yuyuan Liu, Choubo Ding, Yu Tian et al.

Semantic segmentation models classify pixels into a set of known (``in-distribution'') visual classes. When deployed in an open world, the reliability of these models depends on their ability not only to classify in-distribution pixels but also to detect out-of-distribution (OoD) pixels. Historically, the poor OoD detection performance of these models has motivated the design of methods based on model re-training using synthetic training images that include OoD visual objects. Although successful, these re-trained methods have two issues: 1) their in-distribution segmentation accuracy may drop during re-training, and 2) their OoD detection accuracy does not generalise well to new contexts (e.g., country surroundings) outside the training set (e.g., city surroundings). In this paper, we mitigate these issues with: (i) a new residual pattern learning (RPL) module that assists the segmentation model to detect OoD pixels without affecting the inlier segmentation performance; and (ii) a novel context-robust contrastive learning (CoroCL) that enforces RPL to robustly detect OoD pixels among various contexts. Our approach improves by around 10\% FPR and 7\% AuPRC the previous state-of-the-art in Fishyscapes, Segment-Me-If-You-Can, and RoadAnomaly datasets. Our code is available at: https://github.com/yyliu01/RPL.

Yuxiao Chen, Long Zhao, Jianbo Yuan et al. · deepmind

Despite the success of fully-supervised human skeleton sequence modeling, utilizing self-supervised pre-training for skeleton sequence representation learning has been an active field because acquiring task-specific skeleton annotations at large scales is difficult. Recent studies focus on learning video-level temporal and discriminative information using contrastive learning, but overlook the hierarchical spatial-temporal nature of human skeletons. Different from such superficial supervision at the video level, we propose a self-supervised hierarchical pre-training scheme incorporated into a hierarchical Transformer-based skeleton sequence encoder (Hi-TRS), to explicitly capture spatial, short-term, and long-term temporal dependencies at frame, clip, and video levels, respectively. To evaluate the proposed self-supervised pre-training scheme with Hi-TRS, we conduct extensive experiments covering three skeleton-based downstream tasks including action recognition, action detection, and motion prediction. Under both supervised and semi-supervised evaluation protocols, our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance. Additionally, we demonstrate that the prior knowledge learned by our model in the pre-training stage has strong transfer capability for different downstream tasks.

Yu Tian, Xiao Yang, Jingyuan Zhang et al.

Rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have revitalized in LLM-based agents, exhibiting impressive human-like behaviors and cooperative capabilities in various scenarios. However, these agents also bring some exclusive risks, stemming from the complexity of interaction environments and the usability of tools. This paper delves into the safety of LLM-based agents from three perspectives: agent quantity, role definition, and attack level. Specifically, we initially propose to employ a template-based attack strategy on LLM-based agents to find the influence of agent quantity. In addition, to address interaction environment and role specificity issues, we introduce Evil Geniuses (EG), an effective attack method that autonomously generates prompts related to the original role to examine the impact across various role definitions and attack levels. EG leverages Red-Blue exercises, significantly improving the generated prompt aggressiveness and similarity to original roles. Our evaluations on CAMEL, Metagpt and ChatDev based on GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, demonstrate high success rates. Extensive evaluation and discussion reveal that these agents are less robust, prone to more harmful behaviors, and capable of generating stealthier content than LLMs, highlighting significant safety challenges and guiding future research. Our code is available at https://github.com/T1aNS1R/Evil-Geniuses.

Yuyuan Liu, Yu Tian, Chong Wang et al.

3D medical image segmentation methods have been successful, but their dependence on large amounts of voxel-level annotated data is a disadvantage that needs to be addressed given the high cost to obtain such annotation. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) solve this issue by training models with a large unlabelled and a small labelled dataset. The most successful SSL approaches are based on consistency learning that minimises the distance between model responses obtained from perturbed views of the unlabelled data. These perturbations usually keep the spatial input context between views fairly consistent, which may cause the model to learn segmentation patterns from the spatial input contexts instead of the segmented objects. In this paper, we introduce the Translation Consistent Co-training (TraCoCo) which is a consistency learning SSL method that perturbs the input data views by varying their spatial input context, allowing the model to learn segmentation patterns from visual objects. Furthermore, we propose the replacement of the commonly used mean squared error (MSE) semi-supervised loss by a new Cross-model confident Binary Cross entropy (CBC) loss, which improves training convergence and keeps the robustness to co-training pseudo-labelling mistakes. We also extend CutMix augmentation to 3D SSL to further improve generalisation. Our TraCoCo shows state-of-the-art results for the Left Atrium (LA) and Brain Tumor Segmentation (BRaTS19) datasets with different backbones. Our code is available at https://github.com/yyliu01/TraCoCo.

Jiawen Zhu, Choubo Ding, Yu Tian et al.

Open-set supervised anomaly detection (OSAD) - a recently emerging anomaly detection area - aims at utilizing a few samples of anomaly classes seen during training to detect unseen anomalies (i.e., samples from open-set anomaly classes), while effectively identifying the seen anomalies. Benefiting from the prior knowledge illustrated by the seen anomalies, current OSAD methods can often largely reduce false positive errors. However, these methods are trained in a closed-set setting and treat the anomaly examples as from a homogeneous distribution, rendering them less effective in generalizing to unseen anomalies that can be drawn from any distribution. This paper proposes to learn heterogeneous anomaly distributions using the limited anomaly examples to address this issue. To this end, we introduce a novel approach, namely Anomaly Heterogeneity Learning (AHL), that simulates a diverse set of heterogeneous anomaly distributions and then utilizes them to learn a unified heterogeneous abnormality model in surrogate open-set environments. Further, AHL is a generic framework that existing OSAD models can plug and play for enhancing their abnormality modeling. Extensive experiments on nine real-world anomaly detection datasets show that AHL can 1) substantially enhance different state-of-the-art OSAD models in detecting seen and unseen anomalies, and 2) effectively generalize to unseen anomalies in new domains. Code is available at https://github.com/mala-lab/AHL.

Cheng-En Wu, Yu Tian, Haichao Yu et al.

Vision-language models such as CLIP learn a generic text-image embedding from large-scale training data. A vision-language model can be adapted to a new classification task through few-shot prompt tuning. We find that such a prompt tuning process is highly robust to label noises. This intrigues us to study the key reasons contributing to the robustness of the prompt tuning paradigm. We conducted extensive experiments to explore this property and find the key factors are: 1) the fixed classname tokens provide a strong regularization to the optimization of the model, reducing gradients induced by the noisy samples; 2) the powerful pre-trained image-text embedding that is learned from diverse and generic web data provides strong prior knowledge for image classification. Further, we demonstrate that noisy zero-shot predictions from CLIP can be used to tune its own prompt, significantly enhancing prediction accuracy in the unsupervised setting. The code is available at https://github.com/CEWu/PTNL.

Lina Bariah, Qiyang Zhao, Hang Zou et al.

The evolution of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) constitutes a turning point in reshaping the future of technology in different aspects. Wireless networks in particular, with the blooming of self-evolving networks, represent a rich field for exploiting GenAI and reaping several benefits that can fundamentally change the way how wireless networks are designed and operated nowadays. To be specific, large GenAI models are envisioned to open up a new era of autonomous wireless networks, in which multi-modal GenAI models trained over various Telecom data, can be fine-tuned to perform several downstream tasks, eliminating the need for building and training dedicated AI models for each specific task and paving the way for the realization of artificial general intelligence (AGI)-empowered wireless networks. In this article, we aim to unfold the opportunities that can be reaped from integrating large GenAI models into the Telecom domain. In particular, we first highlight the applications of large GenAI models in future wireless networks, defining potential use-cases and revealing insights on the associated theoretical and practical challenges. Furthermore, we unveil how 6G can open up new opportunities through connecting multiple on-device large GenAI models, and hence, paves the way to the collective intelligence paradigm. Finally, we put a forward-looking vision on how large GenAI models will be the key to realize self-evolving networks.

Yuxiao Chen, Jianbo Yuan, Yu Tian et al.

Contrastive learning-based vision-language pre-training approaches, such as CLIP, have demonstrated great success in many vision-language tasks. These methods achieve cross-modal alignment by encoding a matched image-text pair with similar feature embeddings, which are generated by aggregating information from visual patches and language tokens. However, direct aligning cross-modal information using such representations is challenging, as visual patches and text tokens differ in semantic levels and granularities. To alleviate this issue, we propose a Finite Discrete Tokens (FDT) based multimodal representation. FDT is a set of learnable tokens representing certain visual-semantic concepts. Both images and texts are embedded using shared FDT by first grounding multimodal inputs to FDT space and then aggregating the activated FDT representations. The matched visual and semantic concepts are enforced to be represented by the same set of discrete tokens by a sparse activation constraint. As a result, the granularity gap between the two modalities is reduced. Through both quantitative and qualitative analyses, we demonstrate that using FDT representations in CLIP-style models improves cross-modal alignment and performance in visual recognition and vision-language downstream tasks. Furthermore, we show that our method can learn more comprehensive representations, and the learned FDT capture meaningful cross-modal correspondence, ranging from objects to actions and attributes.

Min Shi, Anagha Lokhande, Mojtaba S. Fazli et al. · harvard, stanford

Ophthalmic images and derivatives such as the retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) thickness map are crucial for detecting and monitoring ophthalmic diseases (e.g., glaucoma). For computer-aided diagnosis of eye diseases, the key technique is to automatically extract meaningful features from ophthalmic images that can reveal the biomarkers (e.g., RNFL thinning patterns) linked to functional vision loss. However, representation learning from ophthalmic images that links structural retinal damage with human vision loss is non-trivial mostly due to large anatomical variations between patients. The task becomes even more challenging in the presence of image artifacts, which are common due to issues with image acquisition and automated segmentation. In this paper, we propose an artifact-tolerant unsupervised learning framework termed EyeLearn for learning representations of ophthalmic images. EyeLearn has an artifact correction module to learn representations that can best predict artifact-free ophthalmic images. In addition, EyeLearn adopts a clustering-guided contrastive learning strategy to explicitly capture the intra- and inter-image affinities. During training, images are dynamically organized in clusters to form contrastive samples in which images in the same or different clusters are encouraged to learn similar or dissimilar representations, respectively. To evaluate EyeLearn, we use the learned representations for visual field prediction and glaucoma detection using a real-world ophthalmic image dataset of glaucoma patients. Extensive experiments and comparisons with state-of-the-art methods verified the effectiveness of EyeLearn for learning optimal feature representations from ophthalmic images.

Fanheng Kong, Jingyuan Zhang, Yang Yue et al.

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has catalyzed a paradigm shift in programming, giving rise to "vibe coding", where users can build complete projects and even control computers using natural language instructions. This paradigm has driven automated webpage development, but it introduces a new requirement about how to automatically verify whether the web functionalities are reliably implemented. Existing works struggle to adapt, relying on static visual similarity or predefined checklists that constrain their utility in open-ended environments. Furthermore, they overlook a vital aspect of software quality, namely latent logical constraints. To address these gaps, we introduce WebTestBench, a benchmark for evaluating end-to-end automated web testing. WebTestBench encompasses comprehensive dimensions across diverse web application categories. We decompose the testing process into two cascaded sub-tasks, checklist generation and defect detection, and propose WebTester, a baseline framework for this task. Evaluating popular LLMs with WebTester reveals severe challenges, including insufficient test completeness, detection bottlenecks, and long-horizon interaction unreliability. These findings expose a substantial gap between current computer-use agent capabilities and industrial-grade deployment demands. We hope that WebTestBench provides valuable insights and guidance for advancing end-to-end automated web testing. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/friedrichor/WebTestBench.

Chong Wang, Yuyuan Liu, Yuanhong Chen et al.

Prototypical part network (ProtoPNet) methods have been designed to achieve interpretable classification by associating predictions with a set of training prototypes, which we refer to as trivial prototypes because they are trained to lie far from the classification boundary in the feature space. Note that it is possible to make an analogy between ProtoPNet and support vector machine (SVM) given that the classification from both methods relies on computing similarity with a set of training points (i.e., trivial prototypes in ProtoPNet, and support vectors in SVM). However, while trivial prototypes are located far from the classification boundary, support vectors are located close to this boundary, and we argue that this discrepancy with the well-established SVM theory can result in ProtoPNet models with inferior classification accuracy. In this paper, we aim to improve the classification of ProtoPNet with a new method to learn support prototypes that lie near the classification boundary in the feature space, as suggested by the SVM theory. In addition, we target the improvement of classification results with a new model, named ST-ProtoPNet, which exploits our support prototypes and the trivial prototypes to provide more effective classification. Experimental results on CUB-200-2011, Stanford Cars, and Stanford Dogs datasets demonstrate that ST-ProtoPNet achieves state-of-the-art classification accuracy and interpretability results. We also show that the proposed support prototypes tend to be better localised in the object of interest rather than in the background region.

Yu Tian, Guansong Pang, Fengbei Liu et al.

Current polyp detection methods from colonoscopy videos use exclusively normal (i.e., healthy) training images, which i) ignore the importance of temporal information in consecutive video frames, and ii) lack knowledge about the polyps. Consequently, they often have high detection errors, especially on challenging polyp cases (e.g., small, flat, or partially visible polyps). In this work, we formulate polyp detection as a weakly-supervised anomaly detection task that uses video-level labelled training data to detect frame-level polyps. In particular, we propose a novel convolutional transformer-based multiple instance learning method designed to identify abnormal frames (i.e., frames with polyps) from anomalous videos (i.e., videos containing at least one frame with polyp). In our method, local and global temporal dependencies are seamlessly captured while we simultaneously optimise video and snippet-level anomaly scores. A contrastive snippet mining method is also proposed to enable an effective modelling of the challenging polyp cases. The resulting method achieves a detection accuracy that is substantially better than current state-of-the-art approaches on a new large-scale colonoscopy video dataset introduced in this work.

Yu Tian, Guansong Pang, Yuyuan Liu et al.

Unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) aims to find anomalous images by optimising a detector using a training set that contains only normal images. UAD approaches can be based on reconstruction methods, self-supervised approaches, and Imagenet pre-trained models. Reconstruction methods, which detect anomalies from image reconstruction errors, are advantageous because they do not rely on the design of problem-specific pretext tasks needed by self-supervised approaches, and on the unreliable translation of models pre-trained from non-medical datasets. However, reconstruction methods may fail because they can have low reconstruction errors even for anomalous images. In this paper, we introduce a new reconstruction-based UAD approach that addresses this low-reconstruction error issue for anomalous images. Our UAD approach, the memory-augmented multi-level cross-attentional masked autoencoder (MemMC-MAE), is a transformer-based approach, consisting of a novel memory-augmented self-attention operator for the encoder and a new multi-level cross-attention operator for the decoder. MemMCMAE masks large parts of the input image during its reconstruction, reducing the risk that it will produce low reconstruction errors because anomalies are likely to be masked and cannot be reconstructed. However, when the anomaly is not masked, then the normal patterns stored in the encoder's memory combined with the decoder's multi-level cross attention will constrain the accurate reconstruction of the anomaly. We show that our method achieves SOTA anomaly detection and localisation on colonoscopy, pneumonia, and covid-19 chest x-ray datasets.

Yuanhong Chen, Hu Wang, Chong Wang et al.

When analysing screening mammograms, radiologists can naturally process information across two ipsilateral views of each breast, namely the cranio-caudal (CC) and mediolateral-oblique (MLO) views. These multiple related images provide complementary diagnostic information and can improve the radiologist's classification accuracy. Unfortunately, most existing deep learning systems, trained with globally-labelled images, lack the ability to jointly analyse and integrate global and local information from these multiple views. By ignoring the potentially valuable information present in multiple images of a screening episode, one limits the potential accuracy of these systems. Here, we propose a new multi-view global-local analysis method that mimics the radiologist's reading procedure, based on a global consistency learning and local co-occurrence learning of ipsilateral views in mammograms. Extensive experiments show that our model outperforms competing methods, in terms of classification accuracy and generalisation, on a large-scale private dataset and two publicly available datasets, where models are exclusively trained and tested with global labels.

Chong Wang, Yuanhong Chen, Yuyuan Liu et al.

State-of-the-art (SOTA) deep learning mammogram classifiers, trained with weakly-labelled images, often rely on global models that produce predictions with limited interpretability, which is a key barrier to their successful translation into clinical practice. On the other hand, prototype-based models improve interpretability by associating predictions with training image prototypes, but they are less accurate than global models and their prototypes tend to have poor diversity. We address these two issues with the proposal of BRAIxProtoPNet++, which adds interpretability to a global model by ensembling it with a prototype-based model. BRAIxProtoPNet++ distills the knowledge of the global model when training the prototype-based model with the goal of increasing the classification accuracy of the ensemble. Moreover, we propose an approach to increase prototype diversity by guaranteeing that all prototypes are associated with different training images. Experiments on weakly-labelled private and public datasets show that BRAIxProtoPNet++ has higher classification accuracy than SOTA global and prototype-based models. Using lesion localisation to assess model interpretability, we show BRAIxProtoPNet++ is more effective than other prototype-based models and post-hoc explanation of global models. Finally, we show that the diversity of the prototypes learned by BRAIxProtoPNet++ is superior to SOTA prototype-based approaches.

Yuanhong Chen, Fengbei Liu, Hu Wang et al.

Deep learning methods have shown outstanding classification accuracy in medical imaging problems, which is largely attributed to the availability of large-scale datasets manually annotated with clean labels. However, given the high cost of such manual annotation, new medical imaging classification problems may need to rely on machine-generated noisy labels extracted from radiology reports. Indeed, many Chest X-ray (CXR) classifiers have already been modelled from datasets with noisy labels, but their training procedure is in general not robust to noisy-label samples, leading to sub-optimal models. Furthermore, CXR datasets are mostly multi-label, so current noisy-label learning methods designed for multi-class problems cannot be easily adapted. In this paper, we propose a new method designed for the noisy multi-label CXR learning, which detects and smoothly re-labels samples from the dataset, which is then used to train common multi-label classifiers. The proposed method optimises a bag of multi-label descriptors (BoMD) to promote their similarity with the semantic descriptors produced by BERT models from the multi-label image annotation. Our experiments on diverse noisy multi-label training sets and clean testing sets show that our model has state-of-the-art accuracy and robustness in many CXR multi-label classification benchmarks.

Yu Tian, Renaud Lambiotte

Complex numbers define the relationship between entities in many situations. A canonical example would be the off-diagonal terms in a Hamiltonian matrix in quantum physics. Recent years have seen an increasing interest to extend the tools of network science when the weight of edges are complex numbers. Here, we focus on the case when the weight matrix is Hermitian, a reasonable assumption in many applications, and investigate both structural and dynamical properties of the complex-weighted networks. Building on concepts from signed graphs, we introduce a classification of complex-weighted networks based on the notion of structural balance, and illustrate the shared spectral properties within each type. We then apply the results to characterise the dynamics of random walks on complex-weighted networks, where local consensus can be achieved asymptotically when the graph is structurally balanced, while global consensus will be obtained when it is strictly unbalanced. Finally, we explore potential applications of our findings by generalising the notion of cut, and propose an associated spectral clustering algorithm. We also provide further characteristics of the magnetic Laplacian, associating directed networks to complex-weighted ones. The performance of the algorithm is verified on both synthetic and real networks.

Shijie Geng, Jianbo Yuan, Yu Tian et al.

The success of large-scale contrastive vision-language pretraining (CLIP) has benefited both visual recognition and multimodal content understanding. The concise design brings CLIP the advantage in inference efficiency against other vision-language models with heavier cross-attention fusion layers, making it a popular choice for a wide spectrum of downstream tasks. However, CLIP does not explicitly capture the hierarchical nature of high-level and fine-grained semantics conveyed in images and texts, which is arguably critical to vision-language understanding and reasoning. To this end, we equip both the visual and language branches in CLIP with hierarchy-aware attentions, namely Hierarchy-aware CLIP (HiCLIP), to progressively discover semantic hierarchies layer-by-layer from both images and texts in an unsupervised manner. As a result, such hierarchical aggregation significantly improves the cross-modal alignment. To demonstrate the advantages of HiCLIP, we conduct qualitative analysis on its unsupervised hierarchy induction during inference, as well as extensive quantitative experiments on both visual recognition and vision-language downstream tasks.

Yu Tian, Bofang Li, Si Chen et al.

Recently, Multi-Scenario Learning (MSL) is widely used in recommendation and retrieval systems in the industry because it facilitates transfer learning from different scenarios, mitigating data sparsity and reducing maintenance cost. These efforts produce different MSL paradigms by searching more optimal network structure, such as Auxiliary Network, Expert Network, and Multi-Tower Network. It is intuitive that different scenarios could hold their specific characteristics, activating the user's intents quite differently. In other words, different kinds of auxiliary features would bear varying importance under different scenarios. With more discriminative feature representations refined in a scenario-aware manner, better ranking performance could be easily obtained without expensive search for the optimal network structure. Unfortunately, this simple idea is mainly overlooked but much desired in real-world systems.Further analysis also validates the rationality of adaptive feature learning under a multi-scenario scheme. Moreover, our A/B test results on the Alibaba search advertising platform also demonstrate that Maria is superior in production environments.

Chongcong Jiang, Tianxingjian Ding, Chuhan Song et al.

Promptable segmentation foundation models such as SAM3 have demonstrated strong generalization capabilities through interactive and concept-based prompting. However, their direct applicability to medical image segmentation remains limited by severe domain shifts, the absence of privileged spatial prompts, and the need to reason over complex anatomical and volumetric structures. Here we present Medical SAM3, a foundation model for universal prompt-driven medical image segmentation, obtained by fully fine-tuning SAM3 on large-scale, heterogeneous 2D and 3D medical imaging datasets with paired segmentation masks and text prompts. Through a systematic analysis of vanilla SAM3, we observe that its performance degrades substantially on medical data, with its apparent competitiveness largely relying on strong geometric priors such as ground-truth-derived bounding boxes. These findings motivate full model adaptation beyond prompt engineering alone. By fine-tuning SAM3's model parameters on 33 datasets spanning 10 medical imaging modalities, Medical SAM3 acquires robust domain-specific representations while preserving prompt-driven flexibility. Extensive experiments across organs, imaging modalities, and dimensionalities demonstrate consistent and significant performance gains, particularly in challenging scenarios characterized by semantic ambiguity, complex morphology, and long-range 3D context. Our results establish Medical SAM3 as a universal, text-guided segmentation foundation model for medical imaging and highlight the importance of holistic model adaptation for achieving robust prompt-driven segmentation under severe domain shift. Code and model will be made available at https://github.com/AIM-Research-Lab/Medical-SAM3.

Yan Luo, Yu Tian, Min Shi et al.

Fairness (also known as equity interchangeably) in machine learning is important for societal well-being, but limited public datasets hinder its progress. Currently, no dedicated public medical datasets with imaging data for fairness learning are available, though minority groups suffer from more health issues. To address this gap, we introduce Harvard Glaucoma Fairness (Harvard-GF), a retinal nerve disease dataset with both 2D and 3D imaging data and balanced racial groups for glaucoma detection. Glaucoma is the leading cause of irreversible blindness globally with Blacks having doubled glaucoma prevalence than other races. We also propose a fair identity normalization (FIN) approach to equalize the feature importance between different identity groups. Our FIN approach is compared with various the-state-of-the-art fairness learning methods with superior performance in the racial, gender, and ethnicity fairness tasks with 2D and 3D imaging data, which demonstrate the utilities of our dataset Harvard-GF for fairness learning. To facilitate fairness comparisons between different models, we propose an equity-scaled performance measure, which can be flexibly used to compare all kinds of performance metrics in the context of fairness. The dataset and code are publicly accessible via \url{https://ophai.hms.harvard.edu/datasets/harvard-glaucoma-fairness-3300-samples/}.

Yan Luo, Min Shi, Yu Tian et al.

Glaucoma is the number one cause of irreversible blindness globally. A major challenge for accurate glaucoma detection and progression forecasting is the bottleneck of limited labeled patients with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) 3D retinal imaging data of optical coherence tomography (OCT). To address the data scarcity issue, this paper proposes two solutions. First, we develop a novel generalization-reinforced semi-supervised learning (SSL) model called pseudo supervisor to optimally utilize unlabeled data. Compared with SOTA models, the proposed pseudo supervisor optimizes the policy of predicting pseudo labels with unlabeled samples to improve empirical generalization. Our pseudo supervisor model is evaluated with two clinical tasks consisting of glaucoma detection and progression forecasting. The progression forecasting task is evaluated both unimodally and multimodally. Our pseudo supervisor model demonstrates superior performance than SOTA SSL comparison models. Moreover, our model also achieves the best results on the publicly available LAG fundus dataset. Second, we introduce the Harvard Glaucoma Detection and Progression (Harvard-GDP) Dataset, a multimodal multitask dataset that includes data from 1,000 patients with OCT imaging data, as well as labels for glaucoma detection and progression. This is the largest glaucoma detection dataset with 3D OCT imaging data and the first glaucoma progression forecasting dataset that is publicly available. Detailed sex and racial analysis are provided, which can be used by interested researchers for fairness learning studies. Our released dataset is benchmarked with several SOTA supervised CNN and transformer deep learning models. The dataset and code are made publicly available via \url{https://ophai.hms.harvard.edu/datasets/harvard-gdp1000}.

Hang Zou, Qiyang Zhao, Yu Tian et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to revolutionize the Sixth Generation (6G) communication networks. However, current mainstream LLMs generally lack the specialized knowledge in telecom domain. In this paper, for the first time, we propose a pipeline to adapt any general purpose LLMs to a telecom-specific LLMs. We collect and build telecom-specific pre-train dataset, instruction dataset, preference dataset to perform continual pre-training, instruct tuning and alignment tuning respectively. Besides, due to the lack of widely accepted evaluation benchmarks in telecom domain, we extend existing evaluation benchmarks and proposed three new benchmarks, namely, Telecom Math Modeling, Telecom Open QnA and Telecom Code Tasks. These new benchmarks provide a holistic evaluation of the capabilities of LLMs including math modeling, Open-Ended question answering, code generation, infilling, summarization and analysis in telecom domain. Our fine-tuned LLM TelecomGPT outperforms state of the art (SOTA) LLMs including GPT-4, Llama-3 and Mistral in Telecom Math Modeling benchmark significantly and achieve comparable performance in various evaluation benchmarks such as TeleQnA, 3GPP technical documents classification, telecom code summary and generation and infilling.

Yu Tian, Zachary Lubberts, Melanie Weber · princeton

Unsupervised node clustering (or community detection) is a classical graph learning task. In this paper, we study algorithms, which exploit the geometry of the graph to identify densely connected substructures, which form clusters or communities. Our method implements discrete Ricci curvatures and their associated geometric flows, under which the edge weights of the graph evolve to reveal its community structure. We consider several discrete curvature notions and analyze the utility of the resulting algorithms. In contrast to prior literature, we study not only single-membership community detection, where each node belongs to exactly one community, but also mixed-membership community detection, where communities may overlap. For the latter, we argue that it is beneficial to perform community detection on the line graph, i.e., the graph's dual. We provide both theoretical and empirical evidence for the utility of our curvature-based clustering algorithms. In addition, we give several results on the relationship between the curvature of a graph and that of its dual, which enable the efficient implementation of our proposed mixed-membership community detection approach and which may be of independent interest for curvature-based network analysis.

Dubai Li, Yuxiang He, Yan Hu et al.

Observational studies can yield clinically actionable evidence at scale, but executing them on real-world databases is open-ended and requires coherent decisions across cohort construction, analysis, and reporting. Prior evaluations of LLM agents emphasize isolated steps or single answers, missing the integrity and internal structure of the resulting evidence bundle. To address this gap, we introduce RWE-bench, a benchmark grounded in MIMIC-IV and derived from peer-reviewed observational studies. Each task provides the corresponding study protocol as the reference standard, requiring agents to execute experiments in a real database and iteratively generate tree-structured evidence bundles. We evaluate six LLMs (three open-source, three closed-source) under three agent scaffolds using both question-level correctness and end-to-end task metrics. Across 162 tasks, task success is low: the best agent reaches 39.9%, and the best open-source model reaches 30.4%. Agent scaffolds also matter substantially, causing over 30% variation in performance metrics. Furthermore, we implement an automated cohort evaluation method to rapidly localize errors and identify agent failure modes. Overall, the results highlight persistent limitations in agents' ability to produce end-to-end evidence bundles, and efficient validation remains an important direction for future work. Code and data are available at https://github.com/somewordstoolate/RWE-bench.

Jiawei Chen, Yang Yang, Chao Yu et al.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have emerged as a powerful advancement in multi-step reasoning tasks, offering enhanced transparency and logical consistency through explicit chains of thought (CoT). However, these models introduce novel safety and reliability risks, such as CoT-hijacking and prompt-induced inefficiencies, which are not fully captured by existing evaluation methods. To address this gap, we propose RT-LRM, a unified benchmark designed to assess the trustworthiness of LRMs. RT-LRM evaluates three core dimensions: truthfulness, safety and efficiency. Beyond metric-based evaluation, we further introduce the training paradigm as a key analytical perspective to investigate the systematic impact of different training strategies on model trustworthiness. We achieve this by designing a curated suite of 30 reasoning tasks from an observational standpoint. We conduct extensive experiments on 26 models and identify several valuable insights into the trustworthiness of LRMs. For example, LRMs generally face trustworthiness challenges and tend to be more fragile than Large Language Models (LLMs) when encountering reasoning-induced risks. These findings uncover previously underexplored vulnerabilities and highlight the need for more targeted evaluations. In addition, we release a scalable toolbox for standardized trustworthiness research to support future advancements in this important field. Our code and datasets will be open-sourced.

Yan Luo, Muhammad Osama Khan, Yu Tian et al.

Equity in AI for healthcare is crucial due to its direct impact on human well-being. Despite advancements in 2D medical imaging fairness, the fairness of 3D models remains underexplored, hindered by the small sizes of 3D fairness datasets. Since 3D imaging surpasses 2D imaging in SOTA clinical care, it is critical to understand the fairness of these 3D models. To address this research gap, we conduct the first comprehensive study on the fairness of 3D medical imaging models across multiple protected attributes. Our investigation spans both 2D and 3D models and evaluates fairness across five architectures on three common eye diseases, revealing significant biases across race, gender, and ethnicity. To alleviate these biases, we propose a novel fair identity scaling (FIS) method that improves both overall performance and fairness, outperforming various SOTA fairness methods. Moreover, we release Harvard-FairVision, the first large-scale medical fairness dataset with 30,000 subjects featuring both 2D and 3D imaging data and six demographic identity attributes. Harvard-FairVision provides labels for three major eye disorders affecting about 380 million people worldwide, serving as a valuable resource for both 2D and 3D fairness learning. Our code and dataset are publicly accessible at \url{https://ophai.hms.harvard.edu/datasets/harvard-fairvision30k}.

Yan-Bo Lin, Yu Tian, Linjie Yang et al.

We present a framework for learning to generate background music from video inputs. Unlike existing works that rely on symbolic musical annotations, which are limited in quantity and diversity, our method leverages large-scale web videos accompanied by background music. This enables our model to learn to generate realistic and diverse music. To accomplish this goal, we develop a generative video-music Transformer with a novel semantic video-music alignment scheme. Our model uses a joint autoregressive and contrastive learning objective, which encourages the generation of music aligned with high-level video content. We also introduce a novel video-beat alignment scheme to match the generated music beats with the low-level motions in the video. Lastly, to capture fine-grained visual cues in a video needed for realistic background music generation, we introduce a new temporal video encoder architecture, allowing us to efficiently process videos consisting of many densely sampled frames. We train our framework on our newly curated DISCO-MV dataset, consisting of 2.2M video-music samples, which is orders of magnitude larger than any prior datasets used for video music generation. Our method outperforms existing approaches on the DISCO-MV and MusicCaps datasets according to various music generation evaluation metrics, including human evaluation. Results are available at https://genjib.github.io/project_page/VMAs/index.html

Zhaoye Fei, Yu Tian, Yongkang Wu et al.

Generalized text representations are the foundation of many natural language understanding tasks. To fully utilize the different corpus, it is inevitable that models need to understand the relevance among them. However, many methods ignore the relevance and adopt a single-channel model (a coarse paradigm) directly for all tasks, which lacks enough rationality and interpretation. In addition, some existing works learn downstream tasks by stitches skill block(a fine paradigm), which might cause irrationalresults due to its redundancy and noise. Inthis work, we first analyze the task correlation through three different perspectives, i.e., data property, manual design, and model-based relevance, based on which the similar tasks are grouped together. Then, we propose a hierarchical framework with a coarse-to-fine paradigm, with the bottom level shared to all the tasks, the mid-level divided to different groups, and the top-level assigned to each of the tasks. This allows our model to learn basic language properties from all tasks, boost performance on relevant tasks, and reduce the negative impact from irrelevant tasks. Our experiments on 13 benchmark datasets across five natural language understanding tasks demonstrate the superiority of our method.

Yu Tian, Min Shi, Yan Luo et al.

Fairness in artificial intelligence models has gained significantly more attention in recent years, especially in the area of medicine, as fairness in medical models is critical to people's well-being and lives. High-quality medical fairness datasets are needed to promote fairness learning research. Existing medical fairness datasets are all for classification tasks, and no fairness datasets are available for medical segmentation, while medical segmentation is an equally important clinical task as classifications, which can provide detailed spatial information on organ abnormalities ready to be assessed by clinicians. In this paper, we propose the first fairness dataset for medical segmentation named Harvard-FairSeg with 10,000 subject samples. In addition, we propose a fair error-bound scaling approach to reweight the loss function with the upper error-bound in each identity group, using the segment anything model (SAM). We anticipate that the segmentation performance equity can be improved by explicitly tackling the hard cases with high training errors in each identity group. To facilitate fair comparisons, we utilize a novel equity-scaled segmentation performance metric to compare segmentation metrics in the context of fairness, such as the equity-scaled Dice coefficient. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that our fair error-bound scaling approach either has superior or comparable fairness performance to the state-of-the-art fairness learning models. The dataset and code are publicly accessible via https://ophai.hms.harvard.edu/datasets/harvard-fairseg10k.

Chris Kelly, Luhui Hu, Cindy Yang et al.

In the current landscape of artificial intelligence, foundation models serve as the bedrock for advancements in both language and vision domains. OpenAI GPT-4 has emerged as the pinnacle in large language models (LLMs), while the computer vision (CV) domain boasts a plethora of state-of-the-art (SOTA) models such as Meta's SAM and DINO, and YOLOS. However, the financial and computational burdens of training new models from scratch remain a significant barrier to progress. In response to this challenge, we introduce UnifiedVisionGPT, a novel framework designed to consolidate and automate the integration of SOTA vision models, thereby facilitating the development of vision-oriented AI. UnifiedVisionGPT distinguishes itself through four key features: (1) provides a versatile multimodal framework adaptable to a wide range of applications, building upon the strengths of multimodal foundation models; (2) seamlessly integrates various SOTA vision models to create a comprehensive multimodal platform, capitalizing on the best components of each model; (3) prioritizes vision-oriented AI, ensuring a more rapid progression in the CV domain compared to the current trajectory of LLMs; and (4) introduces automation in the selection of SOTA vision models, generating optimal results based on diverse multimodal inputs such as text prompts and images. This paper outlines the architecture and capabilities of UnifiedVisionGPT, demonstrating its potential to revolutionize the field of computer vision through enhanced efficiency, versatility, generalization, and performance. Our implementation, along with the unified multimodal framework and comprehensive dataset, is made publicly available at https://github.com/LHBuilder/SA-Segment-Anything.

Open-H-Embodiment Consortium, Nigel Nelson, Juo-Tung Chen et al.

Autonomous medical robots hold promise to improve patient outcomes, reduce provider workload, democratize access to care, and enable superhuman precision. However, autonomous medical robotics has been limited by a fundamental data problem: existing medical robotic datasets are small, single-embodiment, and rarely shared openly, restricting the development of foundation models that the field needs to advance. We introduce Open-H-Embodiment, the largest open dataset of medical robotic video with synchronized kinematics to date, spanning more than 49 institutions and multiple robotic platforms including the CMR Versius, Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci, da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK), Rob Surgical BiTrack, Virtual Incision's MIRA, Moon Surgical Maestro, and a variety of custom systems, spanning surgical manipulation, robotic ultrasound, and endoscopy procedures. We demonstrate the research enabled by this dataset through two foundation models. GR00T-H is the first open foundation vision-language-action model for medical robotics, which is the only evaluated model to achieve full end-to-end task completion on a structured suturing benchmark (25% of trials vs. 0% for all others) and achieves 64% average success across a 29-step ex vivo suturing sequence. We also train Cosmos-H-Surgical-Simulator, the first action-conditioned world model to enable multi-embodiment surgical simulation from a single checkpoint, spanning nine robotic platforms and supporting in silico policy evaluation and synthetic data generation for the medical domain. These results suggest that open, large-scale medical robot data collection can serve as critical infrastructure for the research community, enabling advances in robot learning, world modeling, and beyond.

Ye Tian, Ling Yang, Jiongfan Yang et al.

While thinking-aware generation aims to improve performance on complex tasks, we identify a critical failure mode where existing sequential, autoregressive approaches can paradoxically degrade performance due to error propagation. To systematically analyze this issue, we propose ParaBench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate both text and image output modalities. Our analysis using ParaBench reveals that this performance degradation is strongly correlated with poor alignment between the generated reasoning and the final image. To resolve this, we propose a parallel multimodal diffusion framework, MMaDA-Parallel, that enables continuous, bidirectional interaction between text and images throughout the entire denoising trajectory. MMaDA-Parallel is trained with supervised finetuning and then further optimized by Parallel Reinforcement Learning (ParaRL), a novel strategy that applies semantic rewards along the trajectory to enforce cross-modal consistency. Experiments validate that our model significantly improves cross-modal alignment and semantic consistency, achieving a 6.9\% improvement in Output Alignment on ParaBench compared to the state-of-the-art model, Bagel, establishing a more robust paradigm for thinking-aware image synthesis. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/tyfeld/MMaDA-Parallel

Teer Song, Yue Zhang, Yu Tian et al.

To better preserve an individual's identity, face restoration has evolved from reference-free to reference-based approaches, which leverage high-quality reference images of the same identity to enhance identity fidelity in the restored outputs. However, most existing methods implicitly assume that the reference and degraded input are age-aligned, limiting their effectiveness in real-world scenarios where only cross-age references are available, such as historical photo restoration. This paper proposes MeInTime, a diffusion-based face restoration method that extends reference-based restoration from same-age to cross-age settings. Given one or few reference images along with an age prompt corresponding to the degraded input, MeInTime achieves faithful restoration with both identity fidelity and age consistency. Specifically, we decouple the modeling of identity and age conditions. During training, we focus solely on effectively injecting identity features through a newly introduced attention mechanism and introduce Gated Residual Fusion modules to facilitate the integration between degraded features and identity representations. At inference, we propose Age-Aware Gradient Guidance, a training-free sampling strategy, using an age-driven direction to iteratively nudge the identity-aware denoising latent toward the desired age semantic manifold. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MeInTime outperforms existing face restoration methods in both identity preservation and age consistency. Our code is available at: https://github.com/teer4/MeInTime

Yu Tian, Zhangkai Ni, Baoliang Chen et al.

High-quality face images are required to guarantee the stability and reliability of automatic face recognition (FR) systems in surveillance and security scenarios. However, a massive amount of face data is usually compressed before being analyzed due to limitations on transmission or storage. The compressed images may lose the powerful identity information, resulting in the performance degradation of the FR system. Herein, we make the first attempt to study just noticeable difference (JND) for the FR system, which can be defined as the maximum distortion that the FR system cannot notice. More specifically, we establish a JND dataset including 3530 original images and 137,670 compressed images generated by advanced reference encoding/decoding software based on the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard (VTM-15.0). Subsequently, we develop a novel JND prediction model to directly infer JND images for the FR system. In particular, in order to maximum redundancy removal without impairment of robust identity information, we apply the encoder with multiple feature extraction and attention-based feature decomposition modules to progressively decompose face features into two uncorrelated components, i.e., identity and residual features, via self-supervised learning. Then, the residual feature is fed into the decoder to generate the residual map. Finally, the predicted JND map is obtained by subtracting the residual map from the original image. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed model achieves higher accuracy of JND map prediction compared with the state-of-the-art JND models, and is capable of saving more bits while maintaining the performance of the FR system compared with VTM-15.0.

Yu Tian, Qiyang Zhao, Zine el abidine Kherroubi et al.

Wireless communications at high-frequency bands with large antenna arrays face challenges in beam management, which can potentially be improved by multimodality sensing information from cameras, LiDAR, radar, and GPS. In this paper, we present a multimodal transformer deep learning framework for sensing-assisted beam prediction. We employ a convolutional neural network to extract the features from a sequence of images, point clouds, and radar raw data sampled over time. At each convolutional layer, we use transformer encoders to learn the hidden relations between feature tokens from different modalities and time instances over abstraction space and produce encoded vectors for the next-level feature extraction. We train the model on a combination of different modalities with supervised learning. We try to enhance the model over imbalanced data by utilizing focal loss and exponential moving average. We also evaluate data processing and augmentation techniques such as image enhancement, segmentation, background filtering, multimodal data flipping, radar signal transformation, and GPS angle calibration. Experimental results show that our solution trained on image and GPS data produces the best distance-based accuracy of predicted beams at 78.44%, with effective generalization to unseen day scenarios near 73% and night scenarios over 84%. This outperforms using other modalities and arbitrary data processing techniques, which demonstrates the effectiveness of transformers with feature fusion in performing radio beam prediction from images and GPS. Furthermore, our solution could be pretrained from large sequences of multimodality wireless data, on fine-tuning for multiple downstream radio network tasks.

Hang Zou, Yuzhi Yang, Lina Bariah et al.

The integration of machine learning tools into telecom networks, has led to two prevailing paradigms, namely, language-based systems, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), and physics-based systems, such as Digital Twins (DTs). While LLM-based approaches enable flexible interaction and automation, they lack explicit representations of network dynamics. DTs, in contrast, offer a high-fidelity network simulation, but remain scenario-specific and are not designed for learning or decision-making under uncertainty. This gap becomes critical for 6G systems, where decisions must take into account the evolving network states, uncertainty, and the cascading effects of control actions across multiple layers. In this article, we introduce the {Telecom World Model}~(TWM) concept, an architecture for learned, action-conditioned, uncertainty-aware modeling of telecom system dynamics. We decompose the problem into two interacting worlds, a controllable system world consisting of operator-configurable settings and an external world that captures propagation, mobility, traffic, and failures. We propose a three-layer architecture, comprising a field world model for spatial environment prediction, a control/dynamics world model for action-conditioned Key Performance Indicator (KPI) trajectory prediction, and a telecom foundation model layer for intent translation and orchestration. We showcase a comparative analysis between existing paradigms, which demonstrates that TWM jointly provides telecom state grounding, fast action-conditioned roll-outs, calibrated uncertainty, multi-timescale dynamics, model-based planning, and LLM-integrated guardrails. Furthermore, we present a proof-of-concept on network slicing to validate the proposed architecture, showing that the full three-layer pipeline outperforms single-world baselines and accurately predicts KPI trajectories.

Haoyun Yang, Xin Xiao, Jiang Zhong et al.

Audio Large Language Models (Audio LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in integrating speech perception with language understanding. However, whether their internal representations align with human neural dynamics during naturalistic listening remains largely unexplored. In this work, we systematically examine layer-wise representational alignment between 12 open-source Audio LLMs and Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals across 2 datasets. Specifically, we employ 8 similarity metrics, such as Spearman-based Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA), to characterize within-sentence representational geometry. Our analysis reveals 3 key findings: (1) we observe a rank-dependence split, in which model rankings vary substantially across different similarity metrics; (2) we identify spatio-temporal alignment patterns characterized by depth-dependent alignment peaks and a pronounced increase in RSA within the 250-500 ms time window, consistent with N400-related neural dynamics; (3) we find an affective dissociation whereby negative prosody, identified using a proposed Tri-modal Neighborhood Consistency (TNC) criterion, reduces geometric similarity while enhancing covariance-based dependence. These findings provide new neurobiological insights into the representational mechanisms of Audio LLMs.

Yu Tian, Congcong Wen, Min Shi et al.

Addressing fairness in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in medical AI, is crucial for ensuring equitable healthcare outcomes. Recent efforts to enhance fairness have introduced new methodologies and datasets in medical AI. However, the fairness issue under the setting of domain transfer is almost unexplored, while it is common that clinics rely on different imaging technologies (e.g., different retinal imaging modalities) for patient diagnosis. This paper presents FairDomain, a pioneering systemic study into algorithmic fairness under domain shifts, employing state-of-the-art domain adaptation (DA) and generalization (DG) algorithms for both medical segmentation and classification tasks to understand how biases are transferred between different domains. We also introduce a novel plug-and-play fair identity attention (FIA) module that adapts to various DA and DG algorithms to improve fairness by using self-attention to adjust feature importance based on demographic attributes. Additionally, we curate the first fairness-focused dataset with two paired imaging modalities for the same patient cohort on medical segmentation and classification tasks, to rigorously assess fairness in domain-shift scenarios. Excluding the confounding impact of demographic distribution variation between source and target domains will allow clearer quantification of the performance of domain transfer models. Our extensive evaluations reveal that the proposed FIA significantly enhances both model performance accounted for fairness across all domain shift settings (i.e., DA and DG) with respect to different demographics, which outperforms existing methods on both segmentation and classification. The code and data can be accessed at https://ophai.hms.harvard.edu/datasets/harvard-fairdomain20k.

Chaoyang Wang, Wenrui Bao, Sicheng Gao et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promising capabilities for embodied intelligence, but most existing approaches rely on text-based chain-of-thought reasoning where visual inputs are treated as static context. This limits the ability of the model to actively revisit the environment and resolve ambiguities during long-horizon tasks. We propose VLA-Thinker, a thinking-with-image reasoning framework that models perception as a dynamically invocable reasoning action. To train such a system, we introduce a two-stage training pipeline consisting of (1) an SFT cold-start phase with curated visual Chain-of-Thought data to activate structured reasoning and tool-use behaviors, and (2) GRPO-based reinforcement learning to align complete reasoning-action trajectories with task-level success. Extensive experiments on LIBERO and RoboTwin 2.0 benchmarks demonstrate that VLA-Thinker significantly improves manipulation performance, achieving 97.5% success rate on LIBERO and strong gains across long-horizon robotic tasks. Project and Codes: https://cywang735.github.io/VLA-Thinker/ .

Hang Zou, Yu Tian, Bohao Wang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) and multimodal models have become powerful general-purpose reasoning systems. However, radio-frequency (RF) signals, which underpin wireless systems, are still not natively supported by these models. Existing LLM-based approaches for telecom focus mainly on text and structured data, while conventional RF deep-learning models are built separately for specific signal-processing tasks, highlighting a clear gap between RF perception and high-level reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce RF-GPT, a radio-frequency language model (RFLM) that utilizes the visual encoders of multimodal LLMs to process and understand RF spectrograms. In this framework, complex in-phase/quadrature (IQ) waveforms are mapped to time-frequency spectrograms and then passed to pretrained visual encoders. The resulting representations are injected as RF tokens into a decoder-only LLM, which generates RF-grounded answers, explanations, and structured outputs. To train RF-GPT, we perform supervised instruction fine-tuning of a pretrained multimodal LLM using a fully synthetic RF corpus. Standards-compliant waveform generators produce wideband scenes for six wireless technologies, from which we derive time-frequency spectrograms, exact configuration metadata, and dense captions. A text-only LLM then converts these captions into RF-grounded instruction-answer pairs, yielding roughly 12,000 RF scenes and 0.625 million instruction examples without any manual labeling. Across benchmarks for wideband modulation classification, overlap analysis, wireless-technology recognition, WLAN user counting, and 5G NR information extraction, RF-GPT achieves strong multi-task performance, whereas general-purpose VLMs with no RF grounding largely fail.

Jiahuan Yan, Zhouyang Hong, Yu Zhao et al.

Imitation based robot learning has recently gained significant attention in the robotics field due to its theoretical potential for transferability and generalizability. However, it remains notoriously costly, both in terms of hardware and data collection, and deploying it in real-world environments demands meticulous setup of robots and precise experimental conditions. In this paper, we present a low-cost robot learning framework that is both easily reproducible and transferable to various robots and environments. We demonstrate that deployable imitation learning can be successfully applied even to industrial-grade robots, not just expensive collaborative robotic arms. Furthermore, our results show that multi-task robot learning is achievable with simple network architectures and fewer demonstrations than previously thought necessary. As the current evaluating method is almost subjective when it comes to real-world manipulation tasks, we propose Voting Positive Rate (VPR) - a novel evaluation strategy that provides a more objective assessment of performance. We conduct an extensive comparison of success rates across various self-designed tasks to validate our approach. To foster collaboration and support the robot learning community, we have open-sourced all relevant datasets and model checkpoints, available at huggingface.co/ZhiChengAI.

Haichao Yu, Yu Tian, Sateesh Kumar et al.

The quality of pre-training data plays a critical role in the performance of foundation models. Popular foundation models often design their own recipe for data filtering, which makes it hard to analyze and compare different data filtering approaches. DataComp is a new benchmark dedicated to evaluating different methods for data filtering. This paper describes our learning and solution when participating in the DataComp challenge. Our filtering strategy includes three stages: single-modality filtering, cross-modality filtering, and data distribution alignment. We integrate existing methods and propose new solutions, such as computing CLIP score on horizontally flipped images to mitigate the interference of scene text, using vision and language models to retrieve training samples for target downstream tasks, rebalancing the data distribution to improve the efficiency of allocating the computational budget, etc. We slice and dice our design choices, provide in-depth analysis, and discuss open questions. Our approach outperforms the best method from the DataComp paper by over 4% on the average performance of 38 tasks and by over 2% on ImageNet.

Zijie Li, Yichun Shi, Jingxiang Sun et al.

We present MMCORE, a unified framework designed for multimodal image generation and editing. MMCORE leverages a pre-trained Vision-Language Model (VLM) to predict semantic visual embeddings via learnable query tokens, which subsequently serve as conditioning signals for a diffusion model. This streamlined design effectively transfers the rich understanding and reasoning capabilities of VLMs into the visual generation process. By obviating the need for deep fusion between autoregressive and diffusion models or training from scratch, MMCORE significantly reduces computational overhead while maintaining high-fidelity synthesis. MMCORE seamlessly integrates text-to-image synthesis with interleaved image generation, demonstrating robust multimodal comprehension in complex scenarios such as spatial reasoning and visual grounding. Comprehensive evaluations indicate that MMCORE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across a broad spectrum of text-to-image and single/multi-image editing benchmarks.

Abdul Mohaimen Al Radi, Kunyang Li, Yuzhang Shang et al.

Foundation video models produce visually impressive results, but their use in embodied AI remains limited because they are primarily trained on natural language rather than low-level control signals. This limitation is especially pronounced for aerial flight, where motion occurs in unconstrained 6-DoF space and small errors in ego-motion can produce large trajectory drift. Generating aerial videos that follow fine-grained inertial actions can support scalable training and evaluation of aerial agents by providing a controllable proxy for real-world or expensive simulation data. To address this problem, we propose \textbf{Aero-World}, a method for converting a pretrained image-to-video diffusion model into a controllable aerial video generator. Aero-World injects sequences of translational acceleration and angular velocity into a pretrained latent diffusion transformer through an action-token stream. A frozen latent-space Physics Probe, trained independently on real video--IMU pairs, provides differentiable inertial-consistency supervision during LoRA finetuning while avoiding computationally expensive video decoding. We further propose \textbf{AeroBench}, a benchmark for evaluating whether generated drone videos adhere to low-level action signals. AeroBench uses Action Alignment Score (AAS) to measure agreement with commanded inertial actions and Physical Consistency Rate (PCR) to measure temporal motion stability. On AeroBench, Aero-World improves mean AAS from 57.7 to 63.6 over action-only finetuning and gives a stronger quality-control trade-off than AirScape, with lower FVD (596.5 vs. 1058.6), higher SSIM (0.595 vs. 0.505), and higher Flow-IMU correlation (0.44 vs. 0.20). These results suggest that frozen Physics Probe supervision is a practical mechanism for adapting pretrained video generators toward more action-aligned aerial motion.

Mingyu Zhao, Haoran Bai, Yu Tian et al.

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) prediction, a central problem in modern marketing, is characterized by a unique zero-inflated and long-tail data distribution. This distribution presents two fundamental challenges: (1) the vast majority of low-to-medium value users numerically overwhelm the small but critically important segment of high-value "whale" users, and (2) significant value heterogeneity exists even within the low-to-medium value user base. Common approaches either rely on rigid statistical assumptions or attempt to decouple ranking and regression using ordered buckets; however, they often enforce ordinality through loss-based constraints rather than inherent architectural design, failing to balance global accuracy with high-value precision. To address this gap, we propose \textbf{C}onditional \textbf{C}ascaded \textbf{O}rdinal-\textbf{R}esidual Networks \textbf{(CC-OR-Net)}, a novel unified framework that achieves a more robust decoupling through \textbf{structural decomposition}, where ranking is architecturally guaranteed. CC-OR-Net integrates three specialized components: a \textit{structural ordinal decomposition module} for robust ranking, an \textit{intra-bucket residual module} for fine-grained regression, and a \textit{targeted high-value augmentation module} for precision on top-tier users. Evaluated on real-world datasets with over 300M users, CC-OR-Net achieves a superior trade-off across all key business metrics, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in creating a holistic and commercially valuable LTV prediction solution.

Shi Qiu, Junyi Deng, Yiwei Deng et al.

AI agents powered by large language models exhibit strong reasoning and problem-solving capabilities, enabling them to assist scientific research tasks such as formula derivation and code generation. However, whether these agents can reliably perform end-to-end reproduction from real scientific papers remains an open question. We introduce PRBench, a benchmark of 30 expert-curated tasks spanning 11 subfields of physics. Each task requires an agent to comprehend the methodology of a published paper, implement the corresponding algorithms from scratch, and produce quantitative results matching the original publication. Agents are provided only with the task instruction and paper content, and operate in a sandboxed execution environment. All tasks are contributed by domain experts from over 20 research groups at the School of Physics, Peking University, each grounded in a real published paper and validated through end-to-end reproduction with verified ground-truth results and detailed scoring rubrics. Using an agentified assessment pipeline, we evaluate a set of coding agents on PRBench and analyze their capabilities across key dimensions of scientific reasoning and execution. The best-performing agent, OpenAI Codex powered by GPT-5.3-Codex, achieves a mean overall score of 34%. All agents exhibit a zero end-to-end callback success rate, with particularly poor performance in data accuracy and code correctness. We further identify systematic failure modes, including errors in formula implementation, inability to debug numerical simulations, and fabrication of output data. Overall, PRBench provides a rigorous benchmark for evaluating progress toward autonomous scientific research.

Xianya Fang, Xianying Luo, Yadong Wang et al.

Despite the intrinsic risk-awareness of Large Language Models (LLMs), current defenses often result in shallow safety alignment, rendering models vulnerable to disguised attacks (e.g., prefilling) while degrading utility. To bridge this gap, we propose SafeThinker, an adaptive framework that dynamically allocates defensive resources via a lightweight gateway classifier. Based on the gateway's risk assessment, inputs are routed through three distinct mechanisms: (i) a Standardized Refusal Mechanism for explicit threats to maximize efficiency; (ii) a Safety-Aware Twin Expert (SATE) module to intercept deceptive attacks masquerading as benign queries; and (iii) a Distribution-Guided Think (DDGT) component that adaptively intervenes during uncertain generation. Experiments show that SafeThinker significantly lowers attack success rates across diverse jailbreak strategies without compromising utility, demonstrating that coordinating intrinsic judgment throughout the generation process effectively balances robustness and practicality.