X . Wu

Ziheng Chen, Yue Song, Rui Wang et al.

Manifold-valued measurements are prevalent in various machine learning tasks. Recent advances have extended Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to operate on manifolds, accompanied by normalization techniques tailored to different geometries, collectively referred to as Riemannian normalization. However, most existing Riemannian normalization methods are either designed for specific manifolds or fail to effectively normalize manifold-valued sample distributions. To address these limitations, we propose LieBN, a framework for Riemannian Batch Normalization (RBN) over Lie groups. Our approach leverages the theoretically convenient left- and right-invariant metrics, which naturally exist in every Lie group, and provides theoretical guarantees for controlling the Riemannian mean and variance. We instantiate LieBN across nine distinct geometries: four on the Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) manifold, one on the group of rotation matrices, and four on the manifold of full-rank correlation matrices. Notably, among the SPD metrics, we introduce a novel right-invariant metric and extend three existing Lie group structures via matrix power deformation. Extensive experiments on different manifolds validate the effectiveness of our framework. The code is available at https://github.com/GitZH-Chen/LieBN.git.

Zhuoqun Li, Boxi Cao, Jiawei Chen et al.

Long-horizon behavior prediction aims to infer a user's next action based on a lengthy historical sequence, playing a crucial role in artificial intelligence field. The rise of large language models (LLMs) offers a promising direction for sequential behavior prediction, yet LLMs struggle with latent behavioral pattern induction and model-intrinsic cognitive biases when tackling long-horizon behavior prediction. Prior memory management methods follow a context-compression paradigm that attempts to address this task by alleviating the historical sequence burden, yet fail to resolve the core challenges. In this paper, we advocate a paradigm shift that reframes the lengthy historical sequence from a burden into a valuable resource to be exploited, and accordingly propose PraMem, which conducts beforehand practice over the lengthy historical sequence to build an experiential memory, thereby serving as the assisted input for accurate long-horizon behavior prediction. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks demonstrate that PraMem achieves superior performance than prior methods, and more in-depth analyses provide valuable insights into the mechanism and evolution of the experiential memory. Code: https://github.com/icip-cas/PraMem.

Xin-Jie Wu, Zhi-Hui You, Si-Bao Chen et al.

The core challenge of heterogeneous change detection in remote sensing imagery lies in effectively decoupling genuine land-cover changes from significant modal disparities caused by distinct imaging mechanisms. These intrinsic inconsistencies are prone to introducing pseudo-changes, thereby constraining detection accuracy. To address this, we propose a novel, end-to-end adversarial spatio-frequency refinement network (ASFR-Net). Initially, a modality-invariant representation learner (MIR-Learner) guides the backbone to extract modality-invariant features, effectively bridging the primary domain gap. Subsequently, to address persistent residual modal differences, we design an innovative spatio-frequency synergistic enhancement module (SFEM), which identifies and suppresses sensor-specific noise and artifacts that are difficult to discern in the spatial domain by leveraging frequency-domain processing. Multi-level difference features are then computed from these refined representations and fed into a decoder equipped with cascaded hierarchical guided fusion module (HGFM) blocks to generate precise change maps. To alleviate the data scarcity in heterogeneous tasks, we construct and release a new high-resolution benchmark specifically focused on building changes: the visible-near-infrared heterogeneous change detection (VisNIR-HCD) dataset. It presents unique scientific challenges arising from deceptive visual similarity and non-linear spectral inversions, providing a robust platform for evaluating model generalization. Extensive experiments on VisNIR-HCD and public datasets demonstrate that ASFR-Net achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, significantly outperforming existing methods. The source code and the VisNIR-HCD dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/LuoYang2024/ASFR-Net.

Runhan Shi, Quan Zhou, Yuqian Xu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in online medical consultation, yet existing benchmarks remain poorly aligned with real clinical practice. Many rely on synthetic conversations or patient simulators, omit patient-uploaded medical images, or evaluate open-ended clinical responses using multiple-choice or lexical-overlap metrics that poorly reflect clinical quality. We introduce \textbf{MedRealMM}, a large-scale benchmark for multimodal online medical consultation built from de-identified patient-doctor interactions collected from a nationwide Chinese internet hospital. MedRealMM uses a Multimodal Clinical Challenge Point (MCCP) extraction framework to identify clinically demanding moments in authentic consultation trajectories and converts each into a standardized next-response generation task while preserving the preceding text-image context. Each instance is paired with a case-specific rubric refined by physicians that rewards clinically desirable behaviors and penalizes unsafe, unsupported, or contradictory responses. The current release contains 5,620 real-world multimodal cases spanning 64 clinical departments. We evaluate 19 general-purpose and medical-specialized LLMs, including text-only and multimodal systems. Our results show that image information is critical for reliable clinical performance and that current frontier models remain below the online physician response. Although some frontier models satisfy as many or more positive clinical criteria than physicians, they trigger more negative criteria, indicating that safety-sensitive error avoidance remains a central bottleneck. MedRealMM offers a realistic and reproducible benchmark for evaluating multimodal medical reasoning in real-world online consultation. The dataset will be publicly available on Hugging Face at https://huggingface.co/datasets/jdh-algo/MedRealMM.

Mingyang Chen, Zhilu Zhang, Honglei Xu et al.

High-quality, large-scale paired data is essential for training learning-based image deblurring models. However, synthetic blurry images generally lack realism, while real-world captured images require complex and inflexible camera systems. In this work, we propose GS-RealBlur, a data acquisition framework for real-world image deblurring, achieving both blur realism and acquisition flexibility. Specifically, we use a handheld camera to capture blurry images, and deploy a gimbal to densely capture sharp images of the same scene. We reconstruct the 3D representation of sharp images and calibrate the camera pose of each blurry frame within this 3D. The image rendered from this 3D according to the pose serves as the sharp counterpart. To better align the rendered image with the blurry image, we introduce a Blur-aware Pose Refinement (BPR) module that refines the pose using appearance consistency and centroid alignment constraints. Leveraging GS-RealBlur, we construct a high-quality and diverse dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that a deblurring model trained on our dataset achieves superior generalization performance across various real-world deblurring benchmarks, consistently outperforming models trained on existing synthetic and real-world datasets. The code and dataset will be made publicly available.

Mingxin Li, Enge Song, Yueshang Zuo et al.

LLM agents increasingly rely on tool calling to act on external systems, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) has quickly become its de facto interface. Operating MCP at cloud scale, however, becomes difficult. On the tool provider side, legacy services are not directly callable through MCP; the rapid protocol development also creates ongoing compatibility cost. On the agent side, the number of accessible tool is limited by the LLM context window and inference overhead; mounting a large tool set increases token usage and inference latency and can reduce task success rate. Moreover, for stateful MCP backends with multiple replicas, preserving session affinity increases client-side complexity. We present a cloud-scale gateway system for MCP service. It breaks the direct-connect model on the data plane and offloads legacy service integration, consolidating incompatible MCP variants, access control, tool recommendation, and session-aware routing to the gateway. Hybrid retrieval sustains 98% Top-15 recall; it scales agent tool access to 3,000+ with high tool selection accuracy, and reduces tool selection time by $8.9\times$ and token usage by $23.8\times$, with low per-call overhead, stable under scale-out. Finally, we share the lessons learned from deploying the gateway system in production.

Haoru Tan, Wang Wang, Sitong Wu et al.

We revisit dataset distillation from an outcome-centric perspective. Rather than aligning process surrogates (per-step gradients or training trajectories), Influence Matching (Inf-Match) aligns the final outcome of training: it learns a compact synthetic set whose effect on the converged parameters matches that of the full dataset. Concretely, we introduce a fully differentiable, sample-level influence estimator that quantifies parameter shifts from adding or removing data, without time-consuming inverse-Hessian products or convexity assumptions. The estimator runs in linear time by unrolling the optimization dynamics and applying a first-order Taylor approximation. We then learn the synthetic set by minimizing the mismatch between its influence and that of the real dataset, yielding outcome alignment rather than heuristic process imitation. Inf-Match delivers the best accuracy across standard classification benchmarks. For instance, on Tiny-ImageNet (IPC=10), Inf-Match attains 31.5\%, a +4.7\% improvement over NCFM. Beyond classification, Inf-Match scales to vision-language distillation on Flickr30K, outperforming strong process-matching baselines. For instance, with 200 to 1000 synthetic samples, our method achieved a leading impressive average on image/text retrieval tasks, higher than NCFM by 2.5\%. The code will be released via https://github.com/hrtan/infmatch.

Yong Yang, Xing Zheng, Huiyu Wu et al.

The fast growth of open-source AI infrastructure, from model serving engines and agent platforms to the Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem and the language models themselves, has outpaced the security tooling available to defend it. We present AI-Infra-Guard, an open-source framework that organizes AI red teaming around a single observation: the attack surface of an AI agent is stratified across layers (infrastructure, protocol/tool, agent behavior, and model), and no single detection paradigm fits all of them. The framework therefore matches a paradigm to each layer, from deterministic rule matching over 75+ AI components and 1{,}400+ vulnerability rules, through LLM-driven agentic auditing of MCP servers and agent-skill packages and multi-turn black-box agent red teaming, to a jailbreak harness with 26+ attack operators over sixteen datasets. To our knowledge it is the only open-source framework to span all of these, including supply-chain auditing of the agent skills that increasingly extend AI agents. We release AI-Infra-Guard as open source so that \emph{layer-paradigm matching} can serve as a practical foundation for agent security and a shared base for the community to build on.

Shaocheng Jin, Tao Zhou, Rui Wang et al.

Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) based on electroencephalography (EEG) enables direct interaction between the brain and external environments and has significant applications in assistive technologies, medical rehabilitation, and entertainment. Recently, EEG decoding methods based on Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) learning have demonstrated superior performance. However, these methods typically employ basic network architectures and do not explicitly capture local relationships between EEG signals. This limitation is problematic for EEG signals due to their inherently low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR). Moreover, most existing Riemannian manifold-based methods are restricted to specific metrics. The most widely used is the Affine-Invariant Metric (AIM). However, it has a quadratic dependency on the SPD matrices and cannot handle ill-conditioned SPD matrices, which hinders the effectiveness of networks. In contrast, the Bures-Wasserstein Metric (BWM) exhibits linear dependence on SPD matrices and demonstrates superior performance for ill conditioning. To overcome these challenges, we propose a Riemannian self-attention network based on the BWM. Additionally, the recently introduced power-deformed generalized Bures-Wasserstein metric reveals a nonlinear relationship between SPD matrices and matrix power deformation. This metric provides a more nuanced representation of the geometric structure of the SPD manifold. Consequently, we extend our model to a learnable version. For simplicity, we refer to it as GBWAtt. Experimental results on three EEG benchmarking datasets validate the robustness and effectiveness of our proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/jissc/GBWAtt.

Xue Wu, Kang Zhao, Kafeng Wang et al.

Diffusion-based methods have achieved impressive performance in real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) by leveraging large pre-trained stable diffusion (SD) models as powerful generative priors. However, these methods still face two key limitations. First, existing SD-based one-step and multi-step Real-ISR approaches adopt a unified processing paradigm for all input samples, ignoring the varying restoration difficulty across images. Second, the aggressive resolution reduction of the VAE in SD models (e.g., 8x downsampling) leads to irreversible loss of fine-scale details, which cannot be recovered by the subsequent diffusion process. To address these limitations, we propose a Difficulty-aware Dynamic Routing (DDR) strategy that overcomes the rigid, one-size-fits-all processing paradigm. Specifically, we first design a difficulty estimator to predict the restoration cost of each input image, enabling automatic assignment to a network of appropriate capacity. Then, we construct a set of Real-ISR networks with varying model capacities by modulating the spatial downsampling ratio of the VAE in the SD backbone, thereby preserving more high-frequency information for challenging cases while maintaining efficiency for simpler inputs. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the superior efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed model compared to recent state-of-the-art methods.

Chuanming Yu, Jiaming Liu, Zihao Ge et al.

Quantum computing has emerged as a promising computational paradigm for machine learning (ML), with the potential to offer computational advantages over classical approaches. At this stage, the evidence supporting the performance and advantages of quantum machine learning (QML) models relative to classical models is insufficient.To address this gap, this paper presents an empirical study on the performance of QML models and their classical counterparts. We compare seven model pairs spanning supervised learning and reinforcement learning. Our results indicate that the evaluated quantum machine learning models do not yet surpass the classical baselines in overall prediction performance, policy stability, or training time. Nevertheless, QML remains a promising approach for filtering noise and controlling false positives. Our research findings summarize the challenges facing quantum machine learning across hardware environments, training efficiency, and convergence stability, providing a foundation for research into the robustness and parameter optimization of QML. This work is publicly available at https://github.com/Z-537-437/QML.

Zongxia Li, Zhongzhi Li, Yucheng Shi et al.

AI agents have become capable of autonomously completing short, well-specified tasks. However, existing terminal benchmarks largely focus on simple problems that finish within minutes and are evaluated only by their final outcome. This setup overlooks intermediate progress and partial solutions, yielding sparse reward signals and an incomplete picture of agent capability. We introduce Long-Horizon-Terminal-Bench, a terminal benchmark of 46 long-horizon tasks spanning nine categories, including experiment reproduction, software engineering, multimodal analysis, interactive games, and scientific computing. Each task follows a Terminal-Bench-style setup with a reference solution or simulation engine, but is further decomposed into fine-grained graded subtasks. This design enables dense intermediate rewards and partial credit, allowing evaluation to capture not only whether an agent reaches the final goal, but also how far it progresses on open-ended workflows. Tasks in Long-Horizon-Terminal-Bench typically require hundreds of episodes and minutes to hours of execution, stressing long-horizon planning, long-context management, and iterative debugging rather than one-shot problem solving. We evaluate 15 frontier models and find that agents consume on average 9.9M tokens per task, with roughly 231 episodes and 85.3 minutes of execution time per run, making Long-Horizon-Terminal-Bench more demanding than prior terminal-based benchmarks. Even the strongest tested model achieves 15.2% pass@1 at a partial-reward threshold of 0.95 and 10.9% at a perfect-reward threshold of 1.0, while the mean pass rate across models is 4.3% and 1.7% under the two thresholds, respectively. These results reveal headroom for improvement. We further analyze failure modes and error patterns, and release Long-Horizon-Terminal-Bench to support future progress on long-horizon terminal agents.

Ponhvoan Srey, Xiaobao Wu, Cong-Duy Nguyen et al.

Probe-based uncertainty estimation (UE) has emerged as a prominent approach to detect hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) by learning uncertainty from internal model signals. Yet, recent methods vary simultaneously across feature design, training data construction, and evaluation setting, obscuring what actually drives performance. To address this issue, we propose a factorised study of probe-based UE under matched conditions. Our results show that raw hidden states and attention features are difficult to outperform in-domain. However, under distribution shift, structured and compressed features are more robust, suggesting that in-domain performance alone is insufficient to measure progress. Furthermore, prompting and label construction significantly affect probe behaviour. Building on these best-practice findings, we train benchmark-based pretrained probes that transfer reasonably well to open-ended factual generation, providing a stable off-the-shelf baseline. Our work encourages more deployment-oriented evaluation of probe-based uncertainty estimators. The code repository is available at https://github.com/ponhvoan/ProbeUE.

Wenxuan Jiang, Zining Fan, Zijian Zhang et al.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has enabled LLMs to excel in objective reasoning tasks such as mathematics and code generation. However, applying RL to open-ended tasks, such as creative writing, remains challenging because LLM-as-a-judge reward models often exhibit stylistic biases and positional inconsistencies, leading to unstable supervision. To address this, we propose OPERA (Objective Perplexity-based Reflective Alignment), which replaces unreliable external judges with intrinsic rewards derived from perplexity dynamics. Specifically, we derive an intrinsic reward signal from perplexity dynamics, quantifying uncertainty reduction at critical reflective states. During the cold-start phase, we introduce a data synthesis method that leverages carefully designed guiding words to generate diverse reasoning traces, along with perplexity-prioritized rollouts that utilize internal log-probabilities to identify logically consistent reasoning branches. This pipeline yields a large-scale dataset comprising 20,000 high-quality reasoning trajectories. Empirical evaluations consistently demonstrate the scalability and efficacy of our approach in alignment for open-ended tasks. Implementing OPERA on Qwen3-8B establishes a new state-of-the-art among open-source models, achieving parity with or surpassing proprietary models like Gemini2.5 and MiniMax-M2.5 in some open-ended tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/pangpang-xuan/OPERA.

Jiahao Zhao, Junyi Liu, Lifeng Xu et al.

We present S1-Omni, a unified multimodal reasoning model for scientific understanding, prediction, and generation. AI for Science (AI4S) has advanced significantly through domain-specific models, tool-augmented LLMs, and scientific language models. However, model capabilities remain highly fragmented, limiting the joint modeling of heterogeneous data, scientific laws, and expert knowledge. S1-Omni addresses this gap by consolidating these capabilities into a single, coherent scientific reasoning model. The architecture of S1-Omni is built upon three core components: unified representation of scientific data, natural-world knowledge alignment, and decoding for domain-specific tasks. First, S1-Omni maps natural-language instructions and scientific objects, including CIF, SMILES, protein sequences, spectra, and scientific images, into a shared representation space. Second, it incorporates scientific laws and expert knowledge into data construction and training, enabling the model to reason from scientific evidence. Third, it performs task-specific decoding to support a broad range of applications, including property prediction, spectrum-to-molecular generation, protein site and structure prediction, and scientific image generation and editing. S1-Omni is trained on S1-Omni-Corpus, which covers 200 scientific tasks and contains millions of reasoning samples, and is evaluated on over 60 scientific benchmarks. It outperforms GPT-5.5 and Gemini-3.1-Pro on most benchmarks and matches or surpasses domain-specific models on several benchmarks. Overall, S1-Omni provides a practical path toward unified scientific modeling.

Ling Li, Zhizhen Cai, Xinkun Wu et al.

Grounding deictic gestures in natural images is fundamental to AR and human-robot collaboration, providing a basis for seamless spatial interaction. While Transformer-based visual models have achieved significant progress in general object detection, their global attention mechanisms often neglect micro-geometric relationships, degrading orientation accuracy. In pointing tasks, this deficiency manifests as an inability to accurately capture the pointing ray implied by finger poses, which results in pointing drift and localization ambiguity when dealing with distant or densely packed objects. To address this, we propose VistaRef, a framework designed to explicitly enhance spatial orientation awareness. First, we develop the Local Hand Entity Modeling (LHEM) module, which incorporates hand-pose embeddings to strengthen the model's capability to capture subtle finger deviations. Second, drawing inspiration from multi-view geometry, we construct the Geometric Ray Modeling (GRM) module to transform implicit orientation information into explicit spatial geometric features, guiding feature aggregation and deep fusion via attention mechanisms. Furthermore, we introduce a novel Orientation-Consistent Alignment Loss (OCAL) to synergistically supervise hand presence and pointing consistency, ensuring that all architectural improvements collectively serve the core objective of spatial localization. Experimental results demonstrate that VistaRef significantly outperforms the baseline, achieving a 14-point absolute gain in grounding accuracy. Qualitative analysis further confirms that VistaRef effectively models the geometric correlation from hand to target, bridging the spatial perception gap inherent in traditional Transformers for complex scenarios. Code: https://github.com/lingli1724/VistaRef.

Yinji Ge, Guixu Zheng, Wulong Guo et al.

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) have significantly advanced dense feature matching, yet severe in-plane rotation remains a critical challenge. Existing solutions face a fundamental dilemma: data-driven methods require inefficient parameter scaling to implicitly learn rotations, whereas strictly equivariant networks lack the semantic capacity of modern VFMs. Consequently, current frameworks typically freeze VFMs and shift the entire burden of rotation generalization to the downstream decoder. To break this architectural bottleneck, we propose REDI-Match, an efficient framework driven by a novel Rotation-Equivariant Distillation (REDI) paradigm. Instead of relying on rotation data augmentation to establish rotational correspondences, REDI distills the non-equivariant semantic representations of a VFM into a lightweight, strictly rotation-equivariant encoder, leveraging an equivariant geometric architecture to constrain robust high-dimensional semantics. To fully exploit these features, we equip the decoder with an entropy-driven spatial alignment module. By evaluating discrete rotation hypotheses, this mechanism explicitly locks onto the canonical coordinate system, eliminating global ambiguity before continuous refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that REDI-Match establishes a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) across multiple benchmarks. Notably, it achieves a 13.89% absolute pose accuracy improvement on the highly challenging SatAst dataset while operating 1.9x faster than the current SOTA (RoMa v2), enabling real-time inference (~41 FPS) on a single RTX 4090 GPU. Code: https://github.com/YinjiGe/REDI-Match.

Zhangyuan Yu, Wanran Sun, Guangjing Yang et al.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in multimodal reasoning. However, prevailing reinforcement learning (RL) paradigms lack explicit counterfactual enhancement and causal learning mechanisms. This fundamental deficiency results in severe grounding failures, manifesting as a tendency to ignore visual evidence in favor of language priors or exhibiting hallucination drift during long chain-of-thought reasoning. To address this root cause, we propose CounterFactual Policy Optimization (CFPO), a novel framework that enforces causal consistency between visual perception and textual reasoning. CFPO introduces a cross-modal counterfactual enhancement mechanism, which regularizes the policy by maximizing the discrepancy between the model's predictions and those from a counterfactual state where critical visual cues are suppressed. This approach seamlessly integrates with standard algorithms like GRPO and DAPO without requiring external reward models or additional supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CFPO significantly improves reasoning fidelity, achieving consistent gains of 3.17%-6.25% over standard RL baselines and 1.32%-2.13% over the state-of-the-art perception-aware method (PAPO). Code is available at https://github.com/Raven-July/CFPO.

Huan Kang, Hui Li, Tianyang Xu et al.

Infrared and visible image fusion aims to integrate complementary modalities, while existing Euclidean methods impose rigid distance metrics that distort multi-modal interactions and parent-to-child semantic hierarchies. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a text-driven fusion framework empowered by hyperbolic manifold learning. During training, BLIP-extracted text prompts serve as topological anchors within the hyperbolic space, guiding vision-attribute alignment through hyperbolic embeddings that naturally accommodate varying semantic granularities. By exploiting the exponential volume growth dictated by the Poincaré ball's negative curvature, this approach seamlessly embeds hierarchical trees to encode coarse-to-fine semantics without metric saturation, while the vast peripheral space prevents texture distortion during cross-modal fusion. At inference, the fusion process autonomously adapts to input content using the learned text-attribute priors, completely eliminating the need for textual input. Experimental results show our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on benchmark datasets, with code available at https://github.com/Shaoyun2023/TEDFusion.

Cheng Zhang, Qing Cai, Xingzheng Wu et al.

Foundation models have demonstrated impressive performance in enhancing healthcare efficiency across a wide range of medical applications. Nevertheless, their limited ability to perceive, understand, and interact with the physical world significantly constrains their effectiveness in real-world clinical workflows, where safety-critical decision-making and physical execution are tightly coupled. Recently, embodied artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a promising physical-interactive paradigm for intelligent healthcare, enabling agents to operate in complex medical environments. As research in this area rapidly expands, understanding how intelligent agents function as integrated, end-to-end systems in clinical environments becomes increasingly critical. However, existing surveys on medical embodied AI largely emphasize individual aspects or functional components, lacking a unified system-level organization of the field. To support and consolidate recent advances, we systematically survey the core components of medical embodied AI, with a particular emphasis on the coordinated integration of perception, decision-making, and action. We further review representative medical applications and relevant datasets, and we analyze the major challenges encountered in real-world clinical practice. Finally, we discuss key directions for future research in this rapidly evolving field. The associated project can be found at https://github.com/VMVLab/Medical_Embodied_AI_Paper_List.

Xinzheng Wu, Junyi Chen, Shaolingfeng Ye et al.

Defensive driving is widely recognized as an advanced driving skill. However, whether and how defensive driving affects driving safety remains insufficiently investigated. This study examines the behavioral characteristics of defensive driving, its impact on driving safety, and the underlying mechanisms. First, defensive driving is defined regarding operational timing and application scenario. Then, 82 participants are recruited for driving simulator experiments, with their behavioral and eye movement data being collected. Following the experiments, participants are categorized into groups based on the frequency of defensive driving behaviors exhibited. Finally, both inter-group and inter trial comparisons are performed on the experimental data. Experimental results demonstrate that in the inter-group comparison, the high defensive driving capability group exhibits higher acceleration and deceleration magnitudes, lower average speeds, and larger average absolute yaw angles compared to the low capability group, alongside shorter fixation durations and reduced fixation frequencies. Moreover, we observe that these participants tend to initiate defensive or evasive actions earlier, resulting in lower scenario risk. Regarding the inter-trial comparison, we observe similar trends exclusively in the low capability group, whereas most metrics show no significant differences between Trial 1 and Trial 2 in the high capability group. These results reveal that drivers possessing defensive driving capabilities tend to execute more intense driving maneuvers and identify risks and take action earlier, thereby enhancing driving safety. Findings support the promotion of defensive driving and provide a basis for relevant training programs. Meanwhile, they offer insights for the training of autonomous driving algorithms with defensive driving capabilities.

Ruohan Li, Weiyu Luo, Xin Wu et al.

Human mobility data have become fundamental to research across transportation, public health, urban science, and disaster resilience. However, existing mobility datasets typically capture only isolated aspects of travel behavior and rarely provide linked multimodal journeys together with network-level route representations and population-level inference. Here we present Complete Trip, a mobility dataset that reconstructs linked multimodal travel behavior from passively collected smartphone location-based services (LBS) data. The first released implementation covers six counties in Utah throughout 2020 and represents journeys across car, bus, rail, and active transportation through a four-stage workflow consisting of trip identification, mode imputation, route reconstruction, and trip linking. Complete Trip preserves journey-level relationships by linking sequential travel segments where multiple segments belong to the same travel episode, provides network-based route representations on digital transportation networks, and supports population-level analyses through statistically calibrated expansion weights. By providing a representation of linked multimodal human mobility, Complete Trip enables reproducible research across transportation, public health, urban science, disaster resilience, and related fields.

Tianzhu Ye, Li Dong, Guanheng Chen et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) on open-ended tasks compresses an LLM's rubric-based evaluation into a scalar reward, discarding rich textual feedback and conflating responses with distinct quality profiles. We propose Experiential Learning (EL), which repurposes the feedback model from an LLM-as-a-Judge into an LLM-as-a-Coach. The coach distills its assessment of each on-policy response into transferable experiential knowledge, which conditions a teacher model and is internalized by the policy through on-policy context distillation. Compared with scalar rewards, this higher-bandwidth feedback channel provides dense supervision and preserves fine-grained preferences among high-quality responses. Across two policy families, with feedback from the policy itself or a proprietary model, EL consistently outperforms rubric-based RL on held-out and unseen open-ended tasks. Notably, EL generalizes better beyond the training distribution, and mitigates reward hacking. These findings establish experiential knowledge as a richer and more generalizable learning signal for post-training on non-verifiable tasks.

Hanqing Zhu, Wenyan Cong, Zhizhou Sha et al.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is rapidly advancing the reasoning capabilities of language models, yet the optimization layer that converts reward feedback into weight-space updates remains poorly understood. Building on our prior analysis (Zhu et al., 2025), we study this missing layer through the singular structure of model weights and identify spectral inheritance: RLVR can reuse the base model's weight spectra while acquiring new behavior through changes in the associated input and output singular frames. We operationalize spectral inheritance as Isospectral Optimization (ISO), an RLVR-native, fixed-spectrum optimization framework with complementary offline and online instantiations. Offline, ISO-Merger combines the frame changes of shared-base specialists into a single fixed-spectrum model, requiring no post-merge data, rollouts, gradient updates, or on-policy distillation (OPD). It recovers complementary specialist capabilities and achieves the strongest aggregate performance among the compared data-free merging methods. Online, ISO-Optimizer applies a chosen base optimizer, including AdamW and Muon, to the frame variables while keeping the base spectra fixed. Across reasoning and coding tasks ranging from 1.5B to 8B parameters, ISO-Optimizer improves accuracy in the reported runs and reaches matched scores with substantially fewer training steps. On Qwen3-8B-Base, AdamW reaches an aggregate accuracy of 0.495 after 270 training steps. ISO-AdamW reaches the same accuracy after only 100 training steps and improves further to 0.509 after 210 training steps. Together, ISO offers a concrete answer to RLVR's missing optimization layer: rather than inheriting pre-training optimization wholesale, design post-training around the structure of reward-driven adaptation: inherit the spectrum, optimize the frames.

Jingjing Cai, Zhihui Liu, Xiaoming Wu

For a class of superlinear SPDEs driven by multiplicative noise, we prove an (essentially) sharp uniform-in-time (UIT) weak convergence rate for the nonlinearity-explicit Galerkin tamed Euler method (GTEM). Under standard monotonicity assumptions, the proof combines Malliavin calculus with regularity theory for the associated backward Kolmogorov equation (BKE), leading to UIT moment, Hölder, and Malliavin estimates, along with regularity estimates for the BKE solution. These estimates, together with a weak error decomposition and Malliavin integration by parts (IBP) formula, then yield a UIT weak convergence rate $τ^ρ+λ_N^{-ρ}$ for any $ρ\in (0,1)$. Consequently, we obtain a sharp ergodic error estimate between the exact and numerical invariant measures. Numerical experiments support the theory.

Feifei Li, Haoliang Ming, Zihan Li et al.

LLM-curated hierarchical knowledge bases, namely a tree-structured wiki whose nodes summarize an underlying corpus, have become a dominant substrate for retrieval-augmented applications, yet their storage layer is still treated as an implementation detail. This workload is hierarchical, query-intensive, and continuously evolving, and no existing storage model natively captures all three properties at once. We present WikiKV, a path-indexed key-value storage model purpose-built for this workload, comprising three components: (i) a data-driven schema that bootstraps the hierarchy via Intent-Anchored Schema Induction and refines it through Continuous Evolution Operators; (ii) a consistency protocol for the path-indexed storage model that precludes partial-read observations under concurrent offline rewrites without read-path locking; and (iii) a budgeted navigation operator whose search-accelerated routing reduces the expected number of LLM-assisted descent steps from d to O(1) while preserving anytime semantics with progressively refined answers. We evaluate WikiKV through real-world deployment for the WeChat Official Account AI Assistant and benchmark it against diverse baselines on the AuthTrace dataset, where it achieves balanced low per-operator latency across four query operators against relational, graph, and FS backends, and reaches 63.2% end-to-end answer correctness, exceeding multiple RAG baselines, with the gap widening on low- and high-fan-in multi-document questions. Ablation study further confirms the effectiveness of WikiKV's components.

Kai Xiong, Xingyu Wu, Ba Zhang et al.

The rapid scaling of advanced air mobility (AAM) makes corridor-based structured airspace a promising infrastructure for high-density unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) traffic. Formation flight can improve corridor capacity by suppressing shockwave propagation, but rigid formations become inefficient or unsafe during ramp branching, merging, and congestion. To address this problem, this paper proposes a task-driven diverge-merge control framework for UAV formations in structured airspace. At the beginning, a corridor-ramp branching structured airspace model is established to characterize the traffic dynamics and spatial constraints. Building upon this, a fast task-driven clustering mechanism integrates spatial connectivity, flight intent, and aerial task interactions to enable real-time diverge and merge for ramp branching and traffic reshaping. To make the diverge-merge reconfigurations executable at the media access control (MAC) layer of the formation, a cluster-aware distributed time division multiple access (CAD-TDMA) protocol is further designed. It protects intra-cluster control synchronization while conservatively reusing low-risk inter-cluster slots. Simulation results show that the proposed diverge-merge algorithm maintains near-zero geometrical misclassification under severe physical overlapping and congestion. With the formation diverge-merge traces, CAD-TDMA achieves the best delay--loss--throughput tradeoff over fixed TDMA and WiFi MAC. It shows that the proposed formation control framework can jointly support real-time formation reconfiguration and reliable communication in corridor-ramp structured airspace.

Zongxia Li, Dawei Liu, Fuxiao Liu et al.

Agents are increasingly used to construct workflows and assist humans in completing recurring tasks more efficiently. As these workflows become repeated and domain-specific, agent memory and reusable skills become increasingly important: agents should be able to recall workflow patterns, execution constraints, and user preferences from previous runs. We study this problem in workflow-based image generation and introduce COMFYCLAW, an agentic skill evolution harness for controlling ComfyUI workflows. COMFYCLAW formulates workflow construction as typed graph editing, exposes tools organized by construction stage, automatically reverts invalid edits, and uses a region-level vision-language model (VLM) verifier to translate visual failures into actionable repair suggestions. The framework further evolves a progressively disclosed skill library, where trajectories, execution errors, and verifier feedback from previous runs are distilled into reusable Agent Skills. Across four benchmark splits, three agent models, and two image backbones, COMFYCLAW achieves the best average image-generation evaluation score across all six agent configurations, outperforming a verifier-only baseline without skill evolution. Human annotations further show that annotators prefer COMFYCLAW over variants without skill evolution. Our results suggest that skill evolution is an effective mechanism for improving agent reliability and performance in recurring visual workflow construction.

Xuening Wu, Shan Yu, Shenqin Yin

Feedback-driven loops support iterative improvement in large language models, reinforcement learning, and autonomous discovery, yet their gains often diminish under repeated internal feedback. We study why closed-loop knowledge systems saturate and what external information can move them beyond their current attractors. We introduce a three-level operational framework in which knowledge states $x_t$ evolve through transition kernels $K_θ$ indexed by a structural parameter $θ$. The governing structure is defined as the observational equivalence class of $θ$ induced by these kernels, while attractors and basins are properties of the fixed-$θ$ dynamics. A structural intervention changes $θ$ and produces a detectable kernel discrepancy on pre-specified probe states, making structural change falsifiable. Using a Lyapunov drift condition, we show that stable internal dynamics approach bounded stability regions with exponentially attenuated transients and a noise-controlled residual floor. We characterize escape through a metric condition on intervention-induced attractor displacement and a baseline-relative KL lower bound for increasing escape probability. This analysis also explains why conditional mutual information alone cannot certify escape: it measures variation among intervention-conditioned updates rather than departure from the no-intervention law. Case studies in LLM code repair, sparse-reward reinforcement learning, and Bayesian optimization use matched continuation controls to illustrate how feedback strength and alignment affect quality-improving escape. Our contribution is an operational connection among stability tools, measurable intervention effects, and cross-domain diagnostics.

Yuhan Wang, Chaoda Peng, Xingyu Wu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have made automated heuristic design (AHD) increasingly practical by generating executable heuristic code from task descriptions and evaluator feedback. Yet under a limited query and evaluation budget, search efficiency depends critically on a pre-generation decision. Before each LLM query and black-box evaluation, the system must choose which archived heuristics to reuse as parents and which generation operator should transform them. Existing methods typically choose such actions with predefined rules, leaving the expected outcome of each concrete operator-parent action only indirectly modeled. Therefore, we propose \emph{\fullmethod{}} (\method{}), a surrogate-guided action-selection module for operator-parent selection in LLM-based AHD. \method{} guides the LLM code-generation process by scoring pre-generation actions with two complementary surrogates. Specifically, a transition surrogate is proposed to predict the latent distribution of the child representation induced by an operator-parent action, while an instance-conditioned utility surrogate is proposed to estimate the expected performance of sampled child latents. Moreover, we propose an uncertainty-aware acquisition rule that combines predicted utility, utility uncertainty, and transition uncertainty to select the next LLM generation action. Across a diverse heuristic-design suite, \method{} is competitive with strong LLM-AHD baselines, and ablation and action-selection analyses suggest that its behavior goes beyond simple archive ranking or fixed operator preferences.

Ruiliang Zhou, Xuecheng Wu, Kang He et al.

While Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have revolutionized high-fidelity video generation, their reliance on 3D full attention creates a quadratic computational bottleneck. Existing sparse methods face a dilemma: dynamic pruning suffers from prohibitive runtime overhead and memory fragmentation, while static heuristics fail to capture fine-grained dependencies. In this work, we propose ScalingAttention, a training-free framework grounded in a key inductive bias: while individual activations are input-dependent, the high-mass attention regions for each head rapidly converge to a stable, prompt-agnostic Intrinsic Sparse Topology. This topology is weight-encoded, scale-invariant, and efficient to extract. ScalingAttention decouples topology discovery from sparsity control via: (1) WEST (Weight-Encoded Sparse Topology), which extracts a robust block-sparse prior mask offline to eliminate runtime search; (2) FAST (Fidelity-Aware Sensitivity Tuning), which adaptively tunes head-wise sparsity based on diffusion fidelity requirements. To ensure practical acceleration, we co-design a hardware-aligned bit-wise block-sparse kernel. Experiments on Wan2.1 show up to 1.90X end-to-end speedup with superior fidelity, establishing a new Pareto frontier over state-of-the-art baselines.

Xidong Zhang, Yichi Zhang, Jiaxin Shi et al.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have achieved strong performance in many robotic manipulation tasks, yet remain limited in contact-rich dexterous manipulation. To overcome this limitation, recent vision-tactile-language-action (VTLA) methods incorporate tactile sensing into VLA models to provide direct contact information. However, they typically treat tactile signals as passive auxiliary inputs, making it difficult to model tactile semantics and future physical interactions. To this end, we propose a unified tactile learning framework for contact-rich manipulation that models tactile signals as dynamic interaction cues for both contact understanding and prediction. Specifically, we construct a unified tactile latent space and jointly model current tactile states and future contact changes through tactile chain-of-thought reasoning and coarse-to-fine future tactile prediction, thereby forming a state-aware and dynamics-aware tactile prior. Based on this prior, we introduce a tactile-action mixed controller that combines real-time and predicted tactile feedback to refine low-frequency action chunks with high-frequency corrections. Real-world experiments on four categories of contact-rich tasks, including adjustment, insertion, wiping, and assembly, under both clean and externally perturbed settings, show that our method improves success rate, manipulation accuracy, and contact robustness over existing methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in dexterous physical interaction.

Xudong Wu, Pangpang Liu, Vaneet Aggarwal et al.

The Self-Improving Alignment (SAIL) algorithm addresses distribution shift by reducing a bilevel formulation of the problem to an efficient, single-level method. Empirically, SAIL has demonstrated strong performance on this task. However, a formal analysis of its convergence properties has been lacking. We identify a key theoretical challenge: the standard SAIL objective function is not guaranteed to be strongly concave due to unfavorable properties of its Hessian. To address this limitation, we propose a regularized objective, SAIL-RevKL, which incorporates a reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence penalty to improve the optimization landscape. Our central theoretical contribution is to prove that this regularized objective satisfies the Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) condition within a bounded parameter space. We establish global convergence guarantees, achieving a near-linear sample complexity. We further validate the effectiveness and stability of SAIL-RevKL through empirical evaluations, demonstrating that it outperforms the vanilla SAIL on both MuJoCo benchmarks and LLM alignment tasks.

Jingrong Zheng, Hongwei Ren, Xiangqian Wu

Event-based lip reading has recently emerged as a promising direction for visual speech recognition, benefiting from the high temporal resolution and motion sensitivity of event cameras. However, existing methods typically perform spatial compression before sufficient temporal modeling, which may suppress sparse and localized motion trajectories that are crucial for distinguishing similar lip movements. Moreover, most current approaches optimize temporal representations mainly at the word-classification level, leaving the underlying articulatory structure weakly constrained. To address these limitations, we propose a temporally enhanced framework for event-based lip reading. First, we introduce Trajectory-Aware Differential Aggregation (TDA), which performs local temporal modeling at each spatial location before adaptive spatial aggregation. Second, we propose Viseme-Guided Aggregation (VGA), a unified temporal module composed of a CTC decoder and a viseme-guided gated aggregation branch, which injects viseme-aware sequence supervision and improves final temporal aggregation for word recognition. Third, we incorporate an EMA teacher--student training strategy to enhance robustness under strong event perturbations. Experiments on the DVS-Lip benchmark verify the effectiveness of the proposed design, and extensive ablation studies further validate the contributions of TDA, VGA, and teacher--student consistency. Qualitative decoding results also demonstrate that the proposed CTC-based temporal modeling learns meaningful viseme-aware structure from event streams.

Kairos Team, Fei Wang, Shan You et al.

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

Xinyi Wu, Siyuan Liu, Ali Jadbabaie

Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) provide transformers with a fixed grid of positional frequencies, yet trained models use these frequencies highly non-uniformly. We study what determines this frequency usage and propose a data-centered explanation: RoPE frequencies are selected to match the relative-distance structure of the training data. Viewing each frequency as a positional lens, we formalize a field-resolution tradeoff and show that, for a data-induced dependency profile of width $W$, the optimal frequency scales as $1/W$. This frequency-matching principle explains controlled observations on synthetic and text-based data, and suggests that the mid-low frequency bands observed in language models arise from the multi-scale dependency structure of natural language. We further connect frequency selection to position-interpolation-based length generalization: scaling frequencies down expands the effective field while reducing resolution. This helps when longer-context dependencies are approximate dilations of those seen during training, but can fail when relevant dependencies do not scale with context length. Empirically, we show that natural language exhibits approximate self-similarity across positional scales, explaining why test-time frequency scaling can support long-context generalization. Overall, our results identify a data-driven mechanism behind emergent RoPE frequency usage and show that long-context generalization depends on two forms of scale matching: between learned frequencies and training-time dependencies, and between frequency scaling and how those dependencies extend to longer contexts.

Xiaopei Wu, Chenshu Hou, Liang Peng et al.

3D dense captioning, an emerging vision-language task, aims to generate descriptive sentences for each object in the 3D scene. Despite the impressive results achieved by previous methods, they suffer from two limitations. First, current research often employs global rigid transformations, such as rotation, to augment scenes without changing their spatial layouts. However, diverse spatial layouts are crucial for training a 3D dense captioning model to describe spatial relations between objects. Second, previous works mainly focus on the design of the caption generation pipeline while utilizing a simple network architecture for other components, i.e., backbone and detection head, which is crucial for extracting rich semantic information for captioning. In this paper, we propose PVCap to alleviate the aforementioned problems. Our PVCap consists of PseudoCap and VoxelCapNet. Specifically, PseudoCap employs a random mixing technique on instances within the dataset, generating numerous pseudo frames with diverse spatial layouts at the instance level. By utilizing a teacher-student framework, PseudoCap obtains pseudo caption labels for these pseudo frames. This data augmentation approach significantly increases the number of training samples and enhances the model's ability to describe the environment effectively. Regarding VoxelCapNet, we introduce a robust caption network that utilizes voxel features and adapts the caption head to the voxel-based network architecture. Our VoxelCapNet can serve as a competitive baseline for future research on 3D dense captioning. Extensive experiments are conducted on two prevalent benchmarks, i.e., ScanRefer and Nr3D. Notably, our method surpasses current state-of-the-art by 11.41% and 13.99% in CIDEr@0.5IoU, respectively. Codes will be made publicly available.

Yuanmin Xie, Xiangfan Wu, Wenhao Wu et al.

Algorithmic Complexity Vulnerabilities (ACVs) arise when adversarial inputs trigger worst-case execution behavior, causing severe performance degradation or Denial-of-Service conditions. A key but underexplored source is shadow complexity: non-trivial computational costs hidden inside seemingly benign standard library APIs. Because these costs are invisible at call sites, attackers can exploit them to induce unexpected superlinear runtime behavior. Existing ACV detectors often rely on fuzzing, symbolic execution, or hybrid analysis, but they are usually language-specific, require substantial manual effort to construct harnesses, and depend on heavy runtime instrumentation. We present ShadowProbe, a scalable and language-extensible framework for discovering ACVs through lightweight static analysis, automated reconstruction of execution contexts, and Large Language Model (LLM) assisted test generation. ShadowProbe uses a structured multi-stage pipeline: it statically screens for candidate functions guided by shadow-complexity signals, reconstructs minimal executable contexts from project-level symbols, and synthesizes size-controlled inputs to probe worst-case behavior. It then validates candidates using execution-time measurements and robust statistical growth inference, separating true algorithmic blowups from runtime noise such as garbage collection and JIT compilation effects. We evaluate ShadowProbe on the WISE benchmark, where it consistently improves analysis efficiency over existing approaches. We further apply it to large-scale systems including CPython, the JDK, Zig, Rustc, and vLLM, uncovering many previously unknown ACVs, many of which have been confirmed and partially remediated by maintainers. These results show that ShadowProbe can identify hidden algorithmic risks across diverse real-world codebases.

Yushuo Chen, Xiaoyu Shi, Xiaoshi Wu et al.

We present HandsOnWorld, a framework for hand-controlled egocentric video generation that forgoes multi-view and marker-based motion capture, learning instead from unconstrained monocular video. Such generality is bottlenecked by the scarcity of scalable 3D hand annotations: large egocentric corpora lack finger-level labels, whereas precise hand datasets are confined to narrow, instrumented settings, limiting prior hand-controlled generators to restricted scene distributions. We instead annotate 3D hands directly on in-the-wild egocentric video through monocular reconstruction, introducing a protagonist-centered annotation pipeline that filters the reconstructions at the action-semantic, image-quality, and 3D-geometric levels to build EgoVid-Pro, a dataset of clean, protagonist-only hand trajectories spanning 103K clips and roughly 12M frames across diverse everyday scenes. To resolve the camera-hand entanglement induced by large ego-motion, we further propose the Plücker Hand Map, a 3D-aware control signal that extends Plücker-ray representations from camera rays to the hand surface, disentangling camera and hand motion at the representation level. Experiments show that \method surpasses prior hand-controlled generators in reconstruction fidelity and control accuracy, and generalizes to out-of-distribution everyday scenes beyond the laboratory datasets on which prior methods rely.

Xinjian Wu, Jingzhi Gong, Gunel Jahangirova et al.

As Large Language Model (LLM) agents become integral to modern software systems, ``skills'' have emerged as a novel unit of software reuse, enabling developers to package workflows, decision procedures, and prompt-based policies. While skills are intended for reuse, downstream developers frequently modify published skills to fit local contexts, yet little is known about the nature of such adaptations. This paper presents the first empirical study of downstream skill adaptation in public forks, to understand how published skills are adapted, and to provide implications for researchers and engineers on improving skill design, evolution, and orchestration. Specifically, we analyze 1,126 skill-adaptation instances from six widely adopted skill repositories and develop a taxonomy comprising 46 adaptation patterns organized into 13 families. Our key findings reveal a reuse paradox: although skills are intended to be easily imported and reused, developers spend a lot of effort rewriting what the skills do, fixing skill discoverability, and translating them for different tools and languages, indicating a need for better abstractions, standardized interfaces, and automated support for skill adaptation. Furthermore, adaptations are highly interdependent, with changes in one component often requiring coordinated updates elsewhere, motivating automated support for detecting inconsistent modifications. We also find that nearly one-fifth of adaptations introduce security-sensitive content within the same instruction text that governs behavior.

Xudong Wu, Jian Qian, Pangpang Liu et al.

Existing robust preference optimization for language-model alignment mainly studies pairwise supervision and places robustness at the dataset, prompt, or preference-pair level. We instead study listwise preference optimization under ranking-label uncertainty: given a prompt and a candidate list, the observed ranking over that list may be ambiguous due to annotator inconsistency, near-ties, lossy rankwise feedback, or reward-model noise. We propose a pointwise total-variation robust Plackett--Luce objective that directly robustifies the ranking label conditional on the candidate list. The robust loss admits an exact decomposition into the nominal PL loss plus a worst-case PL correction, and the worst-case ranking is obtained by sorting current implicit scores in ascending order, reducing the inner maximization from $K!$ enumeration to $O(K\log K)$. This tractable structure yields strong offline and online optimization guarantees. In the offline fixed-list setting, the robust objective is convex and projected stochastic subgradient reaches global $ε$-suboptimality with $O(ε^{-2})$ sample complexity. In the online policy-induced setting, where candidate lists are generated by the current policy, we establish weak convexity and $\widetilde O(ε^{-2})$ Moreau-envelope stationarity. Experiments in offline LLM alignment show that the proposed robust correction largely preserves performance under clean labels and improves robustness under noise. In online alignment, it makes reward-model-ranked candidate expansion more reliable and improves both reward-model and external GPT-4 judge metrics.

Yingjie Dai, Tianyang Xu, Yanglin Deng et al.

Skeleton-based action recognition has achieved remarkable success by exploiting joint coordinates and their topological connections, yet prevailing methods overwhelmingly assume complete and clean skeleton inputs. In real-world deployments, such as egocentric vision, crowded surveillance, wearable devices, or edge robotics, limited field-of-view (FoV) frequently causes substantial joint visibility dropout, leading to severe performance degradation that existing models are largely unprepared to handle. To bridge this critical yet underexplored gap, we introduce PartialVisGraph, a novel hypergraph framework tailored for robust skeleton action recognition under constrained FoV. We first construct highly expressive hypergraphs by introducing learnable virtual hyperedges that form a soft incidence matrix, capturing flexible high-order dependencies beyond conventional pairwise graphs. We then propose the Single-Head Sample-Adaptive Transformer, which adaptively aggregates joint features onto hyperedges while explicitly incorporating a visibility prior. This prior selectively gates information flow, preventing occluded or out-of-view joints from corrupting reliable feature propagation. We further establish rigorous evaluation protocols with realistic FoV simulation benchmarks on NTU RGB+D 60 and 120. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PartialVisGraph consistently achieves state-of-the-art accuracy under partial visibility, with gains of up to 68.8\% on subsets with severe FoV restrictions compared to recent strong baselines, while remaining superior on full-visibility settings. Our approach offers a principled and practical pathway toward deployable skeleton-based action understanding in unconstrained environments.

Jisen Li, Bingxuan Li, Nanyi Jiang et al.

Scientific literature search often requires more than retrieving papers from a single query: users' intents are underspecified, preference-dependent, and evolve through interaction. Existing search agents typically rely on fixed pipelines or implicit language-only reasoning, making their search strategies difficult to control, inspect, and refine. We introduce PaperPilot, a multi-turn literature search agent that frames scientific search as workflow induction. Given an anchor paper and a user query, PaperPilot constructs an executable DAG of paper-search operators, including keyword search, citation expansion, filtering, scoring, reranking, and evidence extraction. User feedback is then used to refine both the query and the workflow itself. We train PaperPilot with supervised workflow imitation and preference optimization over controlled workflow corruptions. Experiments show that PaperPilot-9B improves over the base Qwen3.5-9B toolset agent under multi-turn interaction, increasing Hit@5 from 58.0 to 77.0, MRR from 47.5 to 59.4, and nDCG@10 from 26.8 to 32.5, while reducing workflow execution errors from 9.5% to 0%. These results show that explicit, editable search workflows provide an effective and controllable interface for aligning literature search agents with complex scientific intent.

Zesen Lin, Jian-Jian Jiang, Haoming Cen et al.

Many real-world manipulation scenarios, such as handling complex collaborative tasks and dealing with large workspaces, require coordination of more than two robotic arms. Consequently, an effective multi-arm teleoperation system is required to collect demonstrations for training coordinated multi-arm manipulation policies. However, existing teleoperation frameworks mainly focus on single-operator or multi-operator setups, facing a practical trade-off between the cognitive load placed on a single operator and the coordination cost incurred by multiple operators. To address this problem, we introduce HATS, a human-agent teleoperation system that enables a single human operator, assisted by an MLLM-based agent, to collect data for multi-arm manipulation tasks. Our system decouples the control space: two primary arms are directly teleoperated by the human, while two assistive arms are controlled by a training-free agent that handles sub-tasks. In addition, the human operator can use voice commands to prevent collisions and correct assistive arm behaviors during execution. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that HATS achieves data collection efficiency and success rates comparable to expert dual-human teams. Moreover, downstream policy evaluations demonstrate the efficacy and quality of the data collected through HATS.

Zekai Chen, Kairui Yang, Xuaner Chen et al.

Multimodal graph foundation models aim to learn reusable knowledge from graphs enriched with text, images, attributes, and relational topology, thereby supporting diverse graph-centric and modality-centric tasks. In practice, however, such multimodal graphs are often distributed across decentralized clients, where raw contents and local structures cannot be centrally shared due to privacy constraints. This motivates federated multimodal graph foundation learning, which requires not only transferable representation learning but also intrinsic semantic traceability under strict data isolation. Existing methods usually exchange or store knowledge through parameters, prototypes, embeddings, or compact codebooks, which support optimization and transfer but do not explicitly expose how modality evidence, node semantics, and topology context jointly support predictions. To bridge this gap, we propose FedLAB, a traceable semantic codebook framework that organizes multimodal graph knowledge into typed hierarchical codebooks for modality evidence, node semantics, and topology context. FedLAB further refines these trace units through federated semantic barycenter pre-training while keeping raw multimodal contents and graph structures local. Extensive experiments on 10 benchmarks and 6 downstream tasks show that FedLAB improves over state-of-the-art baselines by up to 7.53\%, while preserving a native semantic trace interface.

Xudong Shen, Li Yuan, Ye Chen et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong semantic capabilities, yet their resilience to manipulative linguistic patterns such as logical fallacies remains underexplored. Prior work has primarily examined whether LLMs can identify or classify fallacies, leaving their robustness against fallacious persuasion insufficiently studied. To address this gap, we introduce LoFa (Logical Fallacy), a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating LLM robustness against fallacies. LoFa is constructed through a multi-agent pipeline that pairs factual questions with fallacious arguments, and is accompanied by a multi-round debate framework for assessing model resilience under sustained adversarial persuasion. To disentangle fallacy robustness from a model's inherent knowledge limitations, we further propose Logical Fallacy Resistance at k (LFR@k), a metric that quantifies resistance to fallacious attacks. Experiments show that LLMs exhibit varying levels of robustness across different fallacy types, revealing distinct vulnerability profiles among models.

Zhiyao Zhang, Shenghao Wu, Xingyu Wu et al.

LLM-assisted evolutionary search (LES) has emerged as a promising paradigm for automated algorithm design. However, existing methods usually suffer from two inherent limitations when facing the automated design of real-world complex algorithms that usually consist of multiple components. The first limitation is that they either focus on modifying entire algorithms, making it difficult to reuse high-quality components, or concentrate on component refinement within a limited set of predefined multicomponent configurations. The second limitation is the insufficient explicit modeling and exploitation of algorithm semantics. These limitations severely degrade search efficiency and hinder effective exploration of complex design spaces. Therefore, this paper proposes STABLE (Semantics-Aware Bilevel Co-Evolution), an LES method purpose-built for automated multicomponent algorithm design that introduces structural algorithm formulation and semantics-driven evolution. In STABLE, complex algorithms are organized into hierarchical and modular architectures rooted in domain knowledge, aligning the search space with their intrinsic compositional traits. Based on this structured algorithm formulation, STABLE simultaneously optimizes high-level multicomponent configurations and low-level functional components, enabling coordinated cross-level updates while maintaining suitable granularities for design space exploration. At each level, STABLE establishes a multi-faceted semantic model to assist LLMs in capturing structural correlations, functional compatibilities, and inherent rationalities among algorithm components. This semantic model serves as the core guidance for evolutionary search, enabling principled algorithm generation and algorithm evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that STABLE outperform both human-designed baselines and those from advanced LES methods.

Chonghuinan Wang, Zhikai Chen, Chunwei Wang et al.

The advancement of generative AI models capable of producing text and image marks a critical step forward in the realm of multimodal intelligence, particularly for tasks involving the interleaving of both modalities. To advance this intelligence to the next stage, it is crucial for models to autonomously generate free-form interleaved text-image sequences. In this paper, we introduce ILLUME-X, an advanced unified multimodal paradigm that enables high-quality, free-form interleaved text-image generation by improving multimodal data efficiency and stabilizing the multimodal training process. ILLUME-X comprises three key components: (i) an expanded training data pipeline optimized for interleaved text-image generation, (ii) a progressive training strategy with self-adaptive objectives for free-length multimodal token sequences, and (iii) an objective and comprehensive evaluation method ILScore for interleaved text-image sequences. Notably, our ILLUME-X outperforms previous unified models across multiple interleaved text-image generation tasks like style transfer, image decomposition and storytelling.

Xuening Wu, Shan Yu, Qianya Xu et al.

Autonomous scientific discovery systems increasingly use large language models (LLMs) to propose new hypotheses, but many such systems condition primarily on experimental memory: archives of high-scoring candidates or heuristic summaries of recent trials. We argue that discovery agents should instead maintain explicit, uncertainty-aware beliefs about hypothesis quality. We introduce BayesEvolve, a belief-guided discovery framework that converts experimental evidence into a predictive belief state and uses this belief to guide future experimentation. As a controlled testbed for belief-guided discovery, we evaluate BayesEvolve on shifted BBOB-style black-box optimization tasks, leaving program and laboratory discovery domains to future work. BayesEvolve improves sample efficiency over memory- and archive-guided LLM baselines under a fixed evaluation budget. We further show that the belief state is predictive on held-out candidate pools, that controlled decision-rule ablations favor belief-guided selection with an annealed uncertainty bonus, and that BayesEvolve exhibits productive late-stage concentration rather than unfocused exploration.

Xinrui Wu, Lichen Huang

Degradation-aware prompts, conditions, and latent priors are increasingly used in image restoration, yet they are usually judged by a single endpoint: whether the restored image obtains higher PSNR. This is a weak test of semantics. A condition can help by adding capacity, acting as a global correction bias, or exploiting dataset shortcuts, without becoming an interpretable degradation prior. We propose BiDeMem, a bidirectional degradation memory for explainable image restoration. A query built from restoration features and input statistics retrieves a compact top-k subset of memory slots. The same selected slot identity supports the restoration path at inference time and a training-only forward-degradation explanation path. The study centers on verifiability in a controlled multi-degradation NAFNet setting. New controls separate the gain from a correction head alone, a dense query prior, and a static global prior: these variants are 0.2588, 0.2586, and 0.2839 dB below BiRank, respectively. Strong residual supervision and a wider degradation head also remain below the full bidirectional memory model. Intervention probes show that BiRank preserves restoration quality while increasing wrong-prior and native-prior sensitivity, framing degradation memory as both a restoration module and a falsifiable explanation mechanism.