Xi Zhu

Yuqi Tang, Tengfei Liu, Yizheng Lai et al.

Video generation increasingly relies on keyframe-based workflows, where creators specify a sequence of reference images to guide generation. Although recent models support multi-keyframe conditioning, it remains unclear whether they can faithfully reproduce the prescribed keyframes while maintaining overall video quality. We present KeyFrame-Compass, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating keyframe-conditioned video generation. The benchmark contains 386 carefully curated samples spanning three application domains, two video structures, two prompt granularities, two conditioning formats, and four keyframe densities, enabling controlled analysis under diverse generation settings. We further introduce an automated evaluation framework that jointly measures keyframe execution and overall video quality. Specifically, we decompose keyframe execution into six complementary metrics covering presence, fidelity, temporal ordering, localization, persistence, and uniqueness, while assessing overall video quality through evidence-grounded MLLM judgments augmented with specialized perception models. Experiments on nine representative video generation systems reveal several fundamental limitations. Current models exhibit a clear trade-off between faithful keyframe execution and natural video synthesis. Their performance further degrades as keyframe constraints become denser and most open-source models also fail to interpret storyboard-grid inputs as temporally ordered keyframe sequences.

Haotian Liang, Mingkang Chen, Yufei Huang et al.

Embodied cognition requires agents to connect high-level task reasoning with the physical states to be achieved. We introduce Hy-Embodied-RxBrain, an embodied cognition foundation model with joint language-visual reasoning and imagination. Unlike vision-language models that emphasize scene understanding and textual decision making, or generative world models that mainly predict future visual states, RxBrain represents embodied plans in a single planning sequence where language and visual imagination play complementary roles. Language provides the abstract structure of a plan, including task decomposition, planning primitives, constraints, temporal order, and decision logic, while visual imagination grounds this structure through world state prediction and joint subgoal planning, associating each planning step with intermediate and final physical states. RxBrain adopts a unified multimodal Mixture-of-Transformers architecture that supports language, image, and video understanding and generation within one model. To train this capability, we build an automatic pipeline that converts embodied videos into joint text-visual planning supervision by decomposing videos into planning steps and aligning them with visual state transitions. We further introduce RxBrain-Bench to evaluate whether models can represent embodied plans through joint textual and visual components rather than separate understanding or generation. Experiments show that RxBrain maintains embodied understanding and generation abilities, and produces plans with coupled textual reasoning, world state prediction, and joint subgoal planning. We also extend RxBrain to continuous robot action generation, where it shows promising real-robot performance without large-scale action-data pretraining. These results provide an initial step toward foundation models for embodied cognition.

Xinyu Zhu, Zhe Xu, Xiaohan Wei et al.

Long-context processing has become increasingly important for large language models (LLMs), but simply extending the context window does not guarantee effective utilization of long inputs. As input length grows, accuracy often degrades, indicating that models still struggle to identify and use the evidence most relevant to a question. A promising way to improve long-context utilization is test-time training (TTT), which treats the test context as a training example for instance-specific parameter adaptation. However, applying TTT to the entire long context is prohibitively expensive, while adapting on randomly sampled spans introduces severe noise. Because most spans in a long context are irrelevant to the specific question, training on them may even degrade the base model's performance. Our preliminary study shows that TTT is highly sensitive to training-span quality: on LongBench-v2, TTT on randomly sampled spans hurts performance, whereas TTT on oracle spans substantially improves it. Motivated by this, we propose a simple method, Self-Guided TTT (S-TTT): before adaptation, the model identifies the evidence spans it should learn from, and the standard language-modeling training objective is applied only to those selected spans. On two challenging long-context reasoning benchmarks, LongBench-v2 and LongBench-Pro, S-TTT improves accuracy for both Qwen3-4B-Thinking-2507 and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, achieving up to a 15% relative improvement.

Shuhuan Chen, Xiangyu Zhu, Weisong Zhao et al.

Inferring apparent personality from facial images is important in social scenarios for embodied agents in human-robot interaction. Unlike inferring intrinsic personality traits via conversation, this task models first-impression personality perception based solely on facial appearance before interaction begins. Existing studies mainly focus on the Big Five personality model and often rely on language or multimodal inputs. As a result, it remains unclear whether facial cues alone can support meaningful associations with perceived personality traits. This question is particularly relevant for MBTI types, which are widely used in practice and more readily interpretable by large language models. To this end, we propose \textbf{GlanceFace}, an end-to-end framework for apparent personality inference leveraging vision-language models to introduce semantic priors and a semantic-enhanced facial representation module to capture subtle personality-related cues, together with an uncertainty-aware learning strategy to handle noisy and subjective annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong performance on MBTI-based apparent personality benchmarks and reveal relationships between facial characteristics and perceived personality traits, highlighting its potential to support adaptive initial interaction strategies for embodied agents. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/MrHuan3/GlanceFace.

Yubo Wang, Qiuyu Zhao, Zenghui Sun et al.

Memory Manager models are pivotal in agent systems. Existing methods rely predominantly on LLM-judged synthetic question-answer (QA) pairs, making memory valuation dependent on sampled queries and the downstream reader. To address this limitation, we propose \textbf{CMI-Mem}, a reinforcement learning(RL)-based lightweight memory manager model with a hybrid reward that combines downstream QA correctness and intrinsic Conditional Mutual Information (CMI). CMI evaluates the information contributed by new conversational inputs relative to the current memory state without conditioning on a sampled QA query, thereby complementing rather than replacing QA grounding. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/Wyb0627/CMIMem , and the CMI-Mem-4B model checkpoint is available at: https://www.modelscope.cn/models/wyb0627/CMIMem-4B

Shuailei Ma, Jiaqi Liao, Xinyang Wang et al.

Despite the recent promise in robot control, video generative models suffer from a domain mismatch due to their primary focus on content creation. For example, their design inherently prioritizes visual fidelity and creativity over computational efficiency and physical realism. In this work, we present LingBot-Video, a DiT-based video pretraining paradigm specifically tailored for embodied intelligence. From the architecture perspective, we adopt the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), instead of dense, framework to achieve a better trade-off between modeling capacity and inference efficiency, and manage to scale it up from scratch. From the data perspective, we construct a data profiling engine that augments standard internet videos with extensive robot-oriented footage, encompassing manipulation, navigation, and egocentric perspectives, to equip the base model with an intrinsic understanding of actions and world dynamics. From the training perspective, we develop a multi-dimensional reward system to enforce the alignment regarding physical rationality and task completion, going beyond standard criteria such as aesthetics, prompt-following, and motion consistency. Comprehensive evaluations validate its performance and efficiency as a video foundation model. We contribute LingBot-Video as the inaugural large-scale, open-source MoE video foundation model to the community, in a pioneering effort to bridge digital creativity and physical actuation.

Xingyu Zhu, Huanshen Wu, Shuo Wang et al.

Pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP achieve strong zero-shot generalization, but their performance degrades sharply under adversarial perturbations. Existing test-time adaptation methods typically rely on sample-level confidence heuristics, overlooking the intrinsic distributional structure of the data. This sample-centric approach limits robustness, as it fails to distinguish confident adversarial mispredictions from true semantic consistency. In this work, we observe that adversarial distortion is structurally brittle: while holistic representations are corrupted, semantic integrity is often preserved in the distribution of augmented views. Motivated by this insight, we propose RITA, a Robust test-tIme prompt-TAdaptation framework that shifts from sample-level estimates to distribution-level alignment. Specifically, RITA employs optimal transport to align the distribution of augmented visual features with textual prototypes, mitigating adversarial outliers and rectifying cross-modal semantic misalignment. Furthermore, we introduce a dynamic cache to progressively accumulate reliable cues from the test stream for online refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RITA significantly improves adversarial robustness without compromising clean accuracy.

Lijie Zheng, Xudong Zhong, Baoquan Ren et al.

Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) is moving from proof-of-concept demonstrations to system-level deployment in sixth-generation (6G) networks. Because sensing and communication share hardware, spectrum, and waveform resources, ISAC design now involves many tightly coupled choices, including waveform selection, sensing algorithm setup, resource scheduling, and deployment planning. This design space is already too large to manage well through manual tuning or isolated optimizers. This article introduces the \textit{Agent Compiler}, a large language model (LLM)-enabled compilation layer that translates high-level engineering intent into complete and executable ISAC system configurations. The Agent Compiler works in four stages: intent parsing, task decomposition, policy graph synthesis, and infrastructure mapping. It produces a verifiable intermediate representation called the ISAC Policy Graph (IPG). A runtime engine then deploys the compiled configuration and supports closed-loop adaptation at three levels: fast parameter updates, partial recompilation of affected subgraphs, and full workflow recompilation. The core design principle is strict time-scale separation: the LLM handles slow-loop strategic decisions, while proven algorithms retain real-time control in the fast loop. A UAV-assisted disaster rescue example illustrates the full compilation process. We also discuss open issues, including compilation latency, output reliability, constraint verification, and pipeline security, to guide future research.

Wei Sun, Xingwei Liu, Dandan Zhu et al.

This report presents our solutions to the QoMEX 2026 Grand Challenge on Video Quality Assessment for Asymmetric Encoded Videos, comprising a full-reference (FR) model, CompressedVQA-AEV-FR, and a no-reference (NR) model, CompressedVQA-AEV-NR. The FR approach leverages a Swin-B backbone to extract multi-stage similarity statistics between reference and distorted videos for quality prediction. For the NR setting, our model employs complementary frame-level encoders based on SigLIP2 and Swin-B, followed by temporal mean pooling and cross-fold ensembling to estimate perceptual quality without reference data. Our CompressedVQA-AEV-FR achieves first place in the FR track of QoMEX 2026 Grand Challenge, while CompressedVQA-AEV-NR secures fourth place in the NR track, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed models. The code is available at https://github.com/sunwei925/CompressedVQA-AEV.

Xiaopei Zhu, Zeyuan Li, Jun Zhu et al.

Mirror Illusion Art is a novel reflection-conditioned 3D illusion where one object yields two target appearances (front and mirror). The task is formulated as inverse design from two target 2D images (front and mirror) to a printable 3D object with geometry and texture. Prior topology-driven and shadow-based approaches demand substantial manual effort, optimize shape only, and often yield non-smooth or incomplete geometry. To address these challenges, we propose AutoMIA, an automated Mirror Illusion Art design pipeline that jointly optimizes shape and color. To stabilize optimization and suppress artifacts, four mechanisms are introduced: (1) projection-alignment component (PAC) selection to reduce surface noise, (2) position-weighted adaptive (PWA) suppression for background noise, (3) internal voxel preservation (IVP) to prevent internal fractures, and (4) shape-color decoupled (SCD) optimization that balance shape and color optimization. AutoMIA generate diverse smooth Mirror Illusion artworks successfully both in the digital and physical world, with only around 76s design time and 2.6 GB memory on average using a single RTX 3090, advancing inverse graphics and computational design. Our code is available at https://github.com/zxp555/AutoMIA.

Ziyang Cai, Xingyu Zhu, Yihe Dong et al.

Transformer reasoning is limited by autoregressive decoding, which repeat edly compresses rich hidden computation through token space and makes it difficult for intermediate reasoning states to persist across time. We in troduce Transformers with Temporal Middle-Layer Recurrence (T2MLR), a transformers-based latent reasoning architecture that fuses a cached middle layer representation from the previous token directly into an earlier layer of the current token position, enabling abstract intermediate computation to persist across decoding steps with little inference overhead. Across natural-language pretraining and multi-hop reasoning finetuning, T2MLR consistently outperforms data- and parameter-matched Transformer base lines. Moreover, applying recurrence to only a localized middle-layer block (as little as 20% of the network) often outperforms full-layer recurrence. Im portantly, T2MLR does not require pretraining from scratch: retrofitting the recurrent pathway into an existing pretrained 1.7B Transformer and briefly finetuning substantially improves math reasoning, lowering the barrier to practical adoption. These results suggest that effective latent reasoning in Transformers does not require looping over all layers as in previous works, but can instead emerge more strongly from targeted middle-layer recurrence.

Qihang Zhang, Lin Li, Luyao Zhang et al.

The advent of video-action models offers a promising path for robot control. Nevertheless, we argue that repurposing video generative models designed for digital content creation is inherently inadequate for physical environments. To bridge this gap, we present LingBot-VA 2.0, a video-action foundation model built from the ground up for embodiment. Four core design principles showcase its evolution from LingBot-VA. (1) Departing from traditional reconstruction-focused VAEs, we introduce a semantic visual-action tokenizer, which aligns visual representations with both semantics and actions, improving instruction following and action precision in subsequent policy learning. (2) Given the strictly causal nature of temporal dynamics, we adopt a causal pretraining paradigm, training from scratch to circumvent the catastrophic forgetting that frequently occurs when adapting bidirectional architectures. (3) To meet the demands of high-frequency inference, our model employs a sparse MoE backbone, expanding model capacity without compromising efficiency. (4) Real-time closed-loop control is realized through an enhanced asynchronous inference scheme, which predicts future latents in parallel with action execution while re-grounding each rollout on the latest observation via learned forward dynamics. Real-world deployment validates LingBot-VA 2.0 as a robust foundation model, as evidenced by its few-shot generalization across complex manipulation tasks.

Wei Wu, Fangjing Wang, Fan Lu et al.

Despite recent progress of VLA foundation models, the disparity between laboratory conditions and real-world applications continues to impede their practical implementation. To bridge this gap, we present LingBot-VLA 2.0, which advances LingBot-VLA through improvements in three functional domains. (1) Generalization across tasks and embodiments. Compared to the previous version, we revamp the data processing pipeline and curate around 60,000 hours of data for pretraining, including 50,000 hours of robot trajectories spanning 20 robot configurations and 10,000 hours of egocentric human videos. (2) Expanded action space in addition to dual-arm hardware platforms. In particular, our system accommodates degrees of freedom for the heads, waists, mobile bases, and dexterous hands, thereby empowering the robots to tackle more complex tasks in practical scenarios. (3) Predictive dynamics modeling for improved temporal reasoning. Specifically, we formulate future prediction as a proxy task, facilitated by a video representation model for semantic priors and a depth estimation model for geometric cues. Evaluations on the GM-100 benchmark, conducted in a generalist setting, validate the beneficial impact of these proposed modifications. Furthermore, benefiting from the expanded pretraining data that covers whole-body degrees of freedom, LingBot-VLA-2.0 demonstrates strong cross-embodiment long-horizon mobile manipulation capability across the two robotic platforms.

Zelin Gao, Qiuyu Wang, Jiapeng Zhu et al.

We present LingBot-World 2.0 (also known as LingBot-World-Infinity), an advanced iteration of LingBot-World featuring four distinct upgrades. (1) Our model achieves an unbounded interaction horizon while maintaining consistent output quality, benefiting from a carefully crafted causal pretraining paradigm. (2) Through distilling a real-time variant from the base model, our system guarantees rapid response time, sufficient to drive 720p video streams at 60 fps. (3) Compared to the previous version, this update introduces highly diverse interactive elements, comprising a broader spectrum of actions (e.g., attacking, archery, spell-casting, and shooting) alongside a richer variety of text-driven events. (4) We pioneer the integration of an agentic harness within the domain of world modeling, wherein a pilot agent is tasked with planning and executing character behaviors, while a director agent is responsible for synthesizing novel environmental elements as the scene progresses. Additionally, to facilitate a shared experience, we develop an interface that permits multiple players to simultaneously immerse themselves in this vivid world simulator. We pair our primary 14B model with a lightweight 1.3B counterpart, which supports effortless deployment on a single GPU.

Deyao Zhu, Xin Zhou, Shengling Qin et al.

Pretraining scaling laws reveal that model capability improves predictably with data and compute. But learning from real world environments after deployment remains far less understood. Analyzing roughly 38,000 hours of agent interaction with the environment across 134 real world tasks, we find, to the best of our knowledge, the first evidence that overall performance during environment learning follows a log-sigmoid scaling law with remarkably high precision, reaching R^2 = 0.998. Across model generations, we also find that agent learning speed roughly doubles every three months. This discovery stems from EdgeBench, a suite of 134 real world tasks with ultra-long horizons, spanning scientific discovery, software engineering, combinatorial optimization, professional knowledge work, formal mathematics, and interactive games. Each task sustains at least 12 hours of continuous agent operation under rich, multilevel feedback, and is built through substantial expert effort. We publicly release 51 tasks and our full evaluation framework to accelerate the study of how agents learn from real world experience.

Haocheng Wang, Baiyu Huang, Yingjia Wan et al.

The veracious semantic alignment in autoformalization is significant for formal mathematical reasoning. However, existing evaluations provide only opaque binary verdicts or scalar scores, offering no interpretable insight into where or why translations fail. This opacity severely limits both human understanding and automated system improvement. To bridge this gap, we introduce FormalRx, a comprehensive diagnostic evaluation framework that transforms autoformalization assessment from black-box judgments into actionable feedback. At its core is SCI Error Taxonomy, a hierarchical classification scheme decomposing autoformalization errors into 28 distinct categories with strict priority ordering. Building on this taxonomy, FormalRx provides four critical diagnostic capabilities: alignment verdicts, error categorization, error localization, and correction. We instantiate the framework with a diagnostic model FormalRx-8B, trained on 56,287 NL-FL pairs with fine-grained diagnostic annotations, and release FormalRx-Test as the first fine-grained diagnostic benchmark. FormalRx-8B achieves F1-scores of 0.88 (verdict) and 0.71 (categorization), along with accuracies of 0.75 (localization) and 0.73 (correction), substantially outperforming both general-purpose LLMs and specialized baselines. By connecting evaluation with actionable insights, FormalRx enables systematic diagnosis and improvement of autoformalization systems.

Zelin Fu, Bin Tan, Changjiang Sun et al.

Dense spatial perception is essential for physical intelligence, where visual systems are expected to recover structured, metric, and actionable representations from pixel observations. Modern visual foundation models tend to prioritize semantic invariance, often at the expense of detailed spatial understanding. In this work, we study vision pretraining through a boundary-centric lens, motivated by the premise that boundaries and shape discontinuities offer essential cues for perceiving geometric properties. Concretely, we propose masked boundary modeling, a self-supervised paradigm that dynamically learns sub-pixel boundary representations and subsequently leverages the discovered boundary-bearing tokens as masked targets to facilitate dense visual token learning. By scaling this framework, we develop LingBot-Vision and demonstrate its efficacy across a diverse set of downstream vision tasks with DINOv3 as a strong baseline. Remarkably, LingBot-Vision drives the progression from LingBot-Depth 1.0 to LingBot-Depth 2.0 for depth completion, and thereby yields enhanced depth estimation, a key pillar for embodied artificial intelligence. Our findings reveal that boundary modeling goes beyond simple line segments and instead serves as a scalable pretraining principle for learning spatially structured visual representations.

Yunzhong Si, Huiying Xu, Xinzhong Zhu et al.

Small object detection in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) imagery remains challenging under adverse conditions, including complex weather, low illumination, and sensor noise. These challenges mainly stem from severe background clutter, fine-grained detail degradation, and suboptimal semantic-spatial feature fusion, which jointly hinder robust small-object representation. To this end, we propose FRFDet, a lightweight yet effective single-stage detector tailored for UAV-based small object detection. FRFDet proposes two plug-and-play modules: Inverse Bidirectional Sampling (IBS) and Scale-Feature Relationship Cross-Fusion (SFRCF). IBS preserves critical spatial details via channel expansion-compression and bidirectional pattern reconstruction, improving feature alignment. SFRCF explicitly models scale-dependent fusion behaviors, revealing that inter-group element-wise multiplication favors compact models, while inter-group additive fusion benefits larger architectures. Extensive experiments on VisDrone, UAVDT, HazyDet, and MS COCO demonstrate that FRFDet achieves state-of-the-art performance among lightweight detectors with low computational cost, compact parameters, and fast inference, making it well suited for resource-constrained UAV platforms.

Xuanya Zhu, Linghao Shen

Single-Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD)-based Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) is emerging for autonomous vehicles due to its high sensitivity and precise depth sensing capabilities. However, flare caused by excessive photon returns or pile-up effects can lead to incorrect depth estimation and exaggerated boundaries in point clouds, resulting in severe distortions of geometric measurements, making flare suppression essential for safety-critical applications. Existing flare mitigation methods primarily operate at the hardware or signal-processing levels. While effective under specific configurations, they are largely rule-based and configuration-dependent, lacking learnable representations that generalize across diverse sensing scenarios. In this work, we reformulate flare suppression as a semantic segmentation problem, enabling data-driven learning of geometric and photometric cues directly from SPAD measurements. We first benchmark representative segmentation models on the newly introduced SPAD flare dataset and observe that they struggle to exploit the intrinsic multi-echo characteristics of SPAD signals. Motivated by this observation, we propose Physically-Informed segmentation for LiDAR Flare (PILF), a learning-based approach that treats the first and second echoes, together with ambient illumination, as distinct modalities, aggregating cross-echo information while jointly encoding geometric and photometric features. Experiments across multiple real-world scenes demonstrate that PILF significantly outperforms compared segmentation models, achieving up to 79.32% mIoU, and providing an effective solution for SPAD-based LiDAR flare suppression.

Bingcong Yan, Chunlei Li, Jingliang Hu et al.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have achieved strong performance across many medical imaging tasks, yet their application to ultrasound remains limited due to its inherent complexity and variability. In this work, we revisit what is truly needed to enable real-world ultrasound understanding. Instead of introducing complex architectures or elaborate training strategies, we show that data scale and clinically faithful data alignment are the key factors. We construct a large-scale dataset of 1.5M real-world ultrasound examinations, containing 17.7M images, multi-organ coverage, and paired uncurated clinical reports. Crucially, we organize the data at the examination level, aligning multiple images with their corresponding reports to reflect real clinical workflows. We then fine-tune a standard LVLM using low-rank adaptation (LoRA) on this dataset without task-specific modifications. Surprisingly, this simple recipe already leads to strong performance across diverse ultrasound understanding tasks, outperforming prior methods designed with more complex pipelines. Beyond these results, we present model and data scaling analyses that provide insights into the role of scale in ultrasound LVLMs.

Chuxi Nan, Di Wu, Hongming Guo et al.

Breast fibroadenoma (FA) and phyllodes tumor (PT) are fibroepithelial breast lesions with highly overlapping appearances on B-mode ultrasound, making benign and borderline PT prone to being misclassified as FA and complicating preoperative decision-making. Existing computer-aided diagnosis methods commonly rely on single-modal imaging features and insufficiently exploit complementary clinical and textual information. To address this limitation, we construct the FAPT-M Dataset, a pathology-confirmed multimodal dataset comprising 910 patients with strictly reviewed ultrasound images, structured clinical attributes, and ultrasound diagnostic descriptions. Based on this dataset, we propose a clinically guided multimodal framework that integrates DenseNet-based visual encoding, CLIP-inspired text encoding, and lightweight clinical encoding, and further introduces clinical-conditioned adaptive modulation, cross-modal Transformer fusion, and dual-path representation learning to improve feature alignment and multimodal interaction. Under patient-level five-fold cross-validation, the proposed method achieves an accuracy of 77.64%, F1-score of 73.38%, and AUC of 89.74%, outperforming representative CNN-, Transformer-, and vision-language-based baselines. Ablation studies and class-balanced evaluations further confirm the contribution of three-modality fusion and the key architectural components. Overall, this work provides an effective multimodal approach for fine-grained FA-PT classification and establishes a high-quality benchmark for multimodal breast ultrasound analysis.

Pengyi Jiang, Xiaoguang Zhu, Quanyan Zhu

Contribution attribution has become a central problem in LLM-based multi-agent systems, where final outputs are produced through multiple agents, message exchanges, and ordered workflow dependencies. Existing attribution methods often rely on counterfactual valuation, such as removing agents or comparing score changes across altered agent subsets. In language-mediated workflows, these methods require repeated model calls, introduce high variance, and do not explicitly capture the intermediate semantic states through which agents produce, preserve, and transform task-relevant information. We propose Semantic Cooperative Games (SCG), a framework that represents a realized language flow as a semantic generation hypergraph and induces an agent-level semantic value function on this structure. We define the Semantic Shapley Value (SSV) to allocate contribution over semantic support logic, and introduce SLIC, a single-trajectory algorithm that constructs the semantic hypergraph, recovers minimal semantic supports, applies Boolean absorption, and computes SSV without rerunning agent subsets. We prove that SSV reduces to the classical Shapley value under standard set-based, fully observable, and no-order-dependence conditions. On a medical benchmark satisfying these conditions, SLIC reduces computation cost by 93.3% while remaining highly consistent with a Monte Carlo Shapley baseline. In more general multi-role workflows, SSV aligns with perturbation-induced score-drop profiles and exposes cases where semantic contribution and failure impact diverge. Overall, SLIC provides a fast, counterfactual-free, and interpretable attribution method for complex LLM-based multi-agent systems.

Haoyuan Zhang, Xiangyu Zhu, Li Gao et al.

Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) serves as a crucial safeguard for face recognition systems against presentation attacks such as printed photos, replayed videos, and 3D masks. Despite significant progress, existing PAD models still struggle to generalize across unseen domains due to variations in sensors, lighting, and attack materials. Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong generalization ability, yet their applications in PAD remain limited because learned prompts, typically optimized under class-label supervision, fail to explicitly align with fine-grained attack-relevant visual semantics. As a result, the learned representations often overfit domain-specific artifacts instead of capturing transferable attack cues. To address this, we propose Concept-Informed Prompts Guided Presentation Attack Detection (CPG-PAD), a framework that introduces model-level concept guidance into the prompt learning process. Specifically, we design a Visual Concept-driven Enhancement (VCE) module that employs eXplainable AI (XAI) techniques to automatically discover PAD-relevant visual concepts and generate concept-associated heatmaps providing localized fine-grained guidance. Guided by these heatmaps, a Prompt-based Concept Injection (PCI) mechanism integrates these concepts into the prompt space through a Visual-Prompt Decoder (VPD) and a concept-mapping loss, enabling prompts to align with the model's internal concept space. This design enables CPG-PAD to capture generalizable and domain-invariant attack cues while effectively suppressing dataset-specific biases. Extensive experiments across nine benchmark datasets demonstrate that CPG-PAD consistently achieves state-of-the-art cross-domain performance under multi-source, limited-source, and single-source settings.

Ali Asad, Stephen Obadinma, Anshul Pattoo et al.

Large language models (LLMs) can produce deceptive responses: outputs that mislead users in service of a contextually or experimentally induced goal. Yet it remains unclear how confidently models deceive and whether higher confidence makes deceptive responses more persuasive to end users. In this paper, we study these basic questions in various models and different deception datasets. We provide a comprehensive study measuring confidence through both verbalized self-reports and a range of logit-based estimators. We show that LLMs deliver deceptive responses with substantial verbalized confidence and that human annotators prefer the higher-confidence deceptive response 78% of the time in paired comparisons. Misalignment fine-tuning amplifies the problem. Confidence in deceptive responses rises across all three benchmarks, increasing the resulting potential risk, with effects generalizing beyond the training distribution. Strikingly, models classify their own deceptive outputs as deceptive at high rates (82.7% under misalignment) while still predicting they would produce them - recognition without avoidance. We argue that confident deception is a distinct alignment risk requiring evaluations that jointly measure deception, confidence, and awareness.