W E I-Xing Huang

Junjie Zhang, Jiayu Liu, Wenbin Liu et al.

Existing LLM-based theorem provers have achieved impressive results on formal mathematics benchmarks, yet they remain confined to acting as autonomous agents that prove a stated proposition. In this paper, we propose MathCoPilot, a human-in-the-loop system that embodies a new human--AI symbiotic paradigm for mathematical research, in which the mathematician steers the high-level mathematical direction while AI agents carry out the detailed formalization and proof work under continuous human guidance. MathCoPilot unifies three core capabilities: (1) an interactive workbench where the mathematician and AI agents collaborate through a living proof blueprint that decomposes a proof into navigable steps the human can directly inspect, direct, and refine; (2) automated proving skill orchestration with adaptive knowledge base search and Lean-integrated iterative verification; and (3) topic-driven paper retrieval and automated formalization into a verified Lean knowledge base. Using MathCoPilot, we systematically compare four state-of-the-art LLMs, including Gemini~3.1~Pro, GPT-5.4, and Claude~Opus~4.7, on a FormalMATH subset and on two real PDE theorems requiring deep domain expertise, evaluating their ability to produce verified Lean~4 proofs and to identify errors in deliberately incorrect proofs. Our results show that while current models can handle undergraduate-level problems with high success rates under favorable autoformalization conditions, substantial challenges remain for domain-specific theorems requiring genuine mathematical understanding.

Shen Zhou, Jinghui Zhang, Wenbo Huang et al.

All-in-one image restoration aims to recover clean images degraded by multiple corruption types using a single unified model. Existing methods typically rely on image-level prompts or shared guidance to handle diverse degradations. However, such a paradigm becomes inadequate when degradations are spatially heterogeneous or even coexist in mixed forms within a single image. Yet spatially adaptive guidance alone is not sufficient, since accurate restoration also requires each spatial query to reliably aggregate complementary information from local neighborhoods and global contexts. To this end, we propose QuReC, a unified framework for all-in-one image restoration. QuReC consists of a Degradation-Guided Query Reconstruction Module (DQRM) and a Local-Global Response Calibration Module (LGRCM). Specifically, DQRM matches each spatial query against a degradation prototype space to reconstruct a query-specific degradation-aware representation, thereby providing fine-grained spatially adaptive restoration guidance. To further stabilize this query-wise matching process, we introduce a weakly supervised prototype matching learning strategy to improve optimization stability and degradation semantic consistency. Meanwhile, LGRCM performs local-global dual-branch aggregation and calibrates the aggregated responses with learnable priors, improving the reliability of feature aggregation and the coordination between local detail modeling and global context modeling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that QuReC achieves superior performance on multiple all-in-one image restoration benchmarks. The code is released at https://github.com/zhoushen1/QuReC.

Jek Huang, Jeffery Hsia, Jiayi Sun et al.

Autonomous coding agents increasingly execute multi-step software work, but lifecycle states such as reviewed, tested, DONE, and ready-to-merge remain claims unless supported by current evidence. We present Proof-or-Stop Lifecycle Control, a method that permits lifecycle transitions only when fresh, tracked-source-state-bound, mechanically verifiable evidence satisfies the relevant gate. The method treats agent outputs as claims rather than lifecycle state, and uses proof operationally to mean gate-admissible evidence under a stated trust model, not semantic program correctness. We evaluate an open-source implementation through mechanism tests, a powered control-policy ablation, and operated self-application evidence. The unattended-loop engine passed 10 of 10 scenarios with zero false-DONE, and local-key receipt bundles rejected 18 tamper classes with zero false accepts. In a 9,240-cell ablation, the pre-registered A4 versus A2-prime comparison reduced visible-pass/hidden-fail amplification from 31 of 1,800 injected cells under a compute-budgeted naive loop to 2 of 1,800 under the gated loop, a 1.6 percentage-point improvement in not-amplified rate with a 95 percent confidence interval of [0.8, 2.5]. A near-compute A3 versus A4 comparison, 14 of 1,800 versus 2 of 1,800, indicates that the gain is associated with enforcing review as a lifecycle gate rather than merely adding a reviewer. The self-application corpus contains 565 stories and 1,007 review findings, with 94.8 percent resolved, plus a 68-row high/critical cross-vendor exhibit. These results support Proof-or-Stop as a model-agnostic, host-neutral control layer for deciding which autonomous-agent claims a lifecycle may act on. The evaluation is limited to one model family, 24 ablation tasks, and a self-hosted corpus.

Wenqi Huang, Charley Lee, Leonard Tng et al.

DeepSWE is a benchmark of 113 original, long-horizon software engineering tasks for evaluating coding agents. Most public agentic coding benchmarks follow SWE-bench in mining merged fixes from public GitHub repositories, which creates two problems: the fixes and their discussion were likely seen during pretraining, so a high score can reflect recall rather than problem-solving; and each task is graded by the tests that shipped with its merged fix, which were written to confirm one specific fix rather than grade an arbitrary solution, so they can fail a correct alternative or pass an incomplete one. DeepSWE avoids both. Its tasks are written from scratch across 91 active open-source repositories and five languages and are never contributed back upstream, so their reference solutions stay out of the public record that model training scrapes; and each task is graded by a hand-written verifier that checks the requested functionality and accepts any implementation that provides it. When an independent LLM judge re-reviews graded runs, it disagrees with DeepSWE's verifier about an order of magnitude less often than with SWE-Bench Pro's inherited tests (1.4% versus 32.4%). Despite being about half the length of SWE-Bench Pro's prompts, DeepSWE's prompts describe tasks whose reference solutions touch 5.5x more code, and the benchmark separates frontier agents across a wider score band than the leaderboards on which they otherwise cluster. We release the benchmark, its verifiers, and the full record of evaluation trajectories.

Yuru Wang, Lejun Cheng, Yuxin Zuo et al.

We introduce NatureBench, a cross-discipline benchmark of 90 tasks distilled from peer-reviewed Nature-family publications, designed to evaluate whether AI coding agents can move beyond reproduction toward discovery on real scientific problems. NatureBench is built on NatureGym, an automated pipeline that constructs a standardized, per-task containerized environment from a source paper, addressing the environment-fragmentation problem that has limited the credibility of prior agent-on-research benchmarks. Evaluating ten frontier agent configurations under a strict web-search-disabled protocol, we find that the strongest model surpasses SOTA on only 17.8% of tasks under the g>0.1 criterion. Analysis of method pathways reveals that agents succeed primarily through methodological translation, converting scientific tasks into familiar supervised prediction problems, rather than through genuine scientific invention. Failures are dominated by wrong method choice and insufficient compute budget, not by task misunderstanding. We release the benchmark, the NatureGym pipeline, and a public leaderboard with maintainer-side reproduction. Code: https://github.com/FrontisAI/NatureBench

Qiman Wu, Hanlin Chen, Lyujie Chen et al.

Modern VLMs and VLA systems commonly adopt off-the-shelf ViTs such as SigLIP2 as visual encoders, but diverse downstream requirements in latency, temporal modeling, and VLM integration often call for customized SOTA-level ViTs. Training such encoders remains beyond the reach of much of the community, as it requires massive image-text data, while standard softmax attention makes high-resolution or dynamic-resolution pretraining prohibitively costly and often forces low-resolution pretraining followed by post-hoc adaptation. TuringViT addresses these challenges with three key designs: Turing Linear Attention (TLA) for efficient sequence modeling, VISTA-Curation to construct supervision-rich image-video training data, and native dynamic-resolution pretraining that supports flexible inputs from the start and transfers seamlessly to downstream VLMs. As a result, TuringViT outperforms leading open-source ViT baselines with only 10% of the data, achieves stronger downstream VLM performance, and delivers substantially better latency scaling on high-resolution inputs. Our scaling-law analysis further shows that TuringViT continues to improve predictably with curated data scale, far from saturation. Its fast adaptation, hardware-friendly design, and efficient deployment have made it a unified visual foundation across XPeng's AI systems. More broadly, TuringViT provides a reproducible pipeline that dramatically lowers the cost for the community to train, customize, and deploy SOTA-level ViTs, moving toward making such Vision Transformers accessible to all.

Xianda Guo, Pinhan Fu, Ruilin Wang et al.

Stereo matching has advanced through foundation models trained on large-scale datasets, yet this paradigm suffers from a scalability bottleneck: incorporating new data requires costly joint retraining. Model merging offers a scalable post-hoc alternative by integrating knowledge from specialized models after source checkpoints are available. However, existing merging methods typically retain all available models or rely on greedy inclusion, which can preserve harmful task-vector interference. We propose StereoFactory, a coarse-to-fine evolutionary framework for adaptive model merging. Stage~1 employs a genetic algorithm to search the combinatorial space of model subsets, determining which models should participate. Stage~2 addresses module-level knowledge specialization (different functional modules exhibit distinct preferences for knowledge sources) through CMA-ES optimization of architecture-adaptive routing over the selected task vectors, with optional module-level scaling. Experiments across two architectures and four benchmarks demonstrate that StereoFactory consistently achieves the best four-benchmark average under the same checkpoint pool, reducing the average error from 3.80 to 3.30 on NMRF and from 2.88 to 2.19 on FoundationStereo relative to the strongest controlled baseline. The post-hoc search requires only 2.7--3.7\% of the corresponding joint-retraining wall-clock time. Analysis reveals that knowledge contributions are inherently module-specific, and selected subsets can transfer across architectures with minimal degradation. Code will be publicly released upon acceptance at: https://github.com/XiandaGuo/StereoFactory.

Wei-Jung Huang

Product data scientists often ask LLM-based agents to help with recurring execution tasks such as cleaning data, writing SQL, choosing statistical tests, and formatting results. Reusable skill files are meant to avoid prompting from scratch by packaging guidance for a task family. Expert-written skills can encode high-quality guidance, but writing and maintaining them across many data-science task families creates a manual bottleneck. We ask whether LLM-generated skills offer a useful low-curation alternative: do they improve performance over the task prompt alone? We test this question across four lifecycle stages: data preparation, data extraction, statistical analysis, and reporting, using one generated skill per stage. We find no reliable improvement from full generated skills over No-Skill prompting. We then ask whether any part of the skill is useful by ablating different skill components. The main ablation covers 56 tasks, nine model configurations, and three providers, yielding 7,560 runs. Compared with prompting using the task alone, neither the full generated skill nor any ablated skill variant significantly improves performance; all p-values are at least 0.396, and the total spread across variants is only 1.2 pp. A supplemental token-matched control adds 1,512 runs and finds that Full skills perform similarly to task-irrelevant skill-formatted content. The results caution against using one LLM-generated skill per data-science workflow as a default single-shot prompting strategy.

Yiyang Fang, Pei Fu, Jinjie Li et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often follow a fixed Think-then-Answer paradigm, which is inefficient in heterogeneous multitask settings because simple inputs may not require explicit reasoning while difficult ones can benefit substantially from it. Learning when to think is also unstable during post-training, where imbalanced rollouts can drive the model toward always-thinking or always-direct behavior. We propose Switch-Reasoner, a GRPO-based framework that learns to adaptively select reasoning modes for MLLMs. It treats thinking as a virtual tool invocation and allows the model to either answer directly or invoke explicit reasoning before answering. To stabilize this decision, we introduce a dual-level regulation mechanism that balances the overall use of Thinking Mode and Direct Mode while providing sample-level supervision based on the relative benefit of the two choices. Experiments on 11 multimodal tasks show that Switch-Reasoner reduces unnecessary reasoning while maintaining strong performance, achieving a better accuracy-efficiency trade-off.

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.

Bonan Shen, Wei-Jung Huang, Xin Liu et al.

Existing methods for testing deep neural networks (DNNs) primarily prioritize test inputs likely to reveal model faults under a fixed labeling budget. In practice, choosing that budget is difficult: too little testing misses failures, while too much incurs unnecessary labeling costs. This work studies the stopping problem in DNN testing. We formulate testing as a cost--benefit decision process in which labeling an input incurs cost $c$ and discovering a fault yields value $v$. Based on this formulation, we introduce \textit{AdaStop}, a framework that estimates the marginal fault discovery rate during testing and stops labeling when the estimated rate falls below the threshold $τ= c/v$. Experiments across multiple datasets, architectures, and selection strategies show that $65$--$84\%$ of faults can be discovered using only $9$--$31\%$ of the labeling budget.

Bonan Shen, Jiazhou Gao, Tao Ning et al.

CI/CD workflows have become executable operational policy: they decide what gets built, tested, released, and deployed, and they mediate how maintainers interact with delivery infrastructure. That makes them an important measurement point for cyber-systems engineering. Recent large language model (LLM) work shows that workflow stages can be recognized directly from configuration files, but stage labels alone do not tell us whether a workflow is brittle, unusual for its ecosystem, or worth revising first. We present an LLM-based CI/CD analysis pipeline that combines repository enrichment, anti-pattern detection, stage mining, and recommendation generation over a large GitHub corpus. Starting from 59,550 repositories with at least 1,000 stars, we identify 34,225 projects with CI/CD and collect 127,559 configuration files. Across 75,201 analyzed workflows, the anti-pattern detector reports 434,769 findings, dominated by reliability and maintainability issues. Across 59,906 configurations, stage usage differs significantly by language ($χ^2 = 4168.88$, $p < 0.001$, Cramer's $V = 0.063$), and domain analysis shows distinct operational profiles, including higher release and cache usage in mobile projects. For repository-level recommendation generation, few-shot prompting performs best overall, averaging 8.25 recommendations per repository with 96.1% YAML-valid snippets. Taken together, the results argue for CI/CD observability that combines diagnosis, context, and human review rather than treating workflow mining as a stage-classification problem alone.

Weijie Huang, Xinran Ruan

Pressure-driven tumor growth models describe the coupling between cell proliferation and mechanical pressure and naturally lead to moving free boundary problems. Their numerical approximation is challenging due to degenerate diffusion, pressure-dependent proliferation, and the stiffness of the pressure law \(p=n^γ\) for large \(γ\). In this paper, we propose a structure-preserving finite difference method for this class of pressure-driven tumor growth models with pressure-dependent proliferation. The method is derived from the Onsager variational principle. The key idea is to introduce a modified energy shifted by the homeostatic pressure, so that the growth term can be written in a dissipative form and incorporated together with the transport part into a unified Rayleighian formulation. This formulation leads to a time-discrete constrained minimization problem and a fully discrete scheme with explicit mobilities and an implicit pressure update. We prove that the scheme preserves nonnegativity and the homeostatic upper bound, satisfies a discrete modified energy dissipation law, and admits a fixed-grid stiff-pressure limiting structure. Numerical experiments in one and two spatial dimensions demonstrate the accuracy of the method, its convergence toward the Hele--Shaw limit for large \(γ\), and its ability to capture free boundary evolutions with topology changes.

Haotian Zhou, Weiran Huang, Siqi Liu et al.

Cross-lingual retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is often deployed in an English-evidence regime, where users query in diverse languages but retrieved passages remain English. In this setting, generation can fail despite strong base models: English evidence induces language drift (English or code-switching outputs) and models use evidence unreliably when producing non-English answers. We attribute these failures to two post-training challenges: (i) errors are prefix-dependent, so fixed-trajectory supervision suffers from prefix mismatch; and (ii) sequence-level (partly discrete / judge-based) rewards yield noisy credit assignment and high-variance updates. We propose TR-RAG, a teacher-regularized RL recipe that couples reward optimization with on-policy distillation on student-visited prefixes. A compact student samples on-policy answers, while a stronger frozen teacher is queried only on those prefixes and provides a prefix-wise student-to-teacher reverse-KL anchor. We further introduce a reward decomposition for English-evidence multilingual generation, combining language consistency, character 3-gram recall, and an LLM-judge score for evidence-grounded correctness. Across three benchmarks -- BioASQ-ENKB5, Hotpot-ENKB5, and naturally multilingual MKQA -- and two backbones, TR-RAG improves the composite of language adherence and evidence-grounded correctness over strong baselines. Crucially, the teacher anchor acts as a safety net: on in-domain languages it prevents the large language-consistency collapses (up to ~27 percentage points) that reward-only RL can suffer by drifting below even the base model, while on distant out-of-distribution languages -- where reward-only RL stalls at the base model's ceiling -- it still improves evidence grounding; and on character 3-gram recall the compact student sometimes surpasses its 70B teacher.

Yu Yao, Huanjian Zhou, Andi Han et al.

Discrete diffusion models are widely used for learning and generating discrete distributions. As the generation process is inherently sequential, the acceleration of sampling is of significant importance. In this work, we parallelize the mainstream $τ$-leaping algorithm for absorbing discrete diffusion in a Continuous-Time Markov Chain (CTMC) framework. By leveraging the continuous-time stochastic integral form of the $τ$-leaping algorithm and the Picard iteration method, we achieve parallel-in-time sampling acceleration and provide a proof of exponential-factorial convergence for our algorithm. We improve the overall time complexity of $τ$-leaping under absorbing settings from ${\mathcal{O}}(d \log S)$ to ${\mathcal{O}}(\log (d\log S)\cdot \log d)$ with respect to NFE. Empirically, our method shows consistent acceleration across synthetic and real-data settings. The new sampler achieves at most $7$--$9\times$ runtime speedup for synthetic distribution, and maintains the same quality with $50\%$ fewer NFE and $1.45$--$1.86\times$ runtime speedups in image/text tasks on a single GPU. Our research expands the potential of discrete diffusion models for efficient parallel inference, with broader implications for applications such as molecular structure and language generation.

Xianru Chen, Yukai Huang, Mingxiang Chen et al.

Multilingual fluency often invites a stronger assumption: a model that can speak a user's language must also understand the culture encoded by that language. We call this the Illusion of Cultural Alignment. To test this assumption directly, we introduce MSQA, a benchmark of 1,064 natively sourced questions across 11 language groups, five cultural dimensions, and three difficulty tiers. Unlike translated benchmarks, MSQA targets locally grounded knowledge and reduces shortcuts from English-centric cross-lingual transfer. Evaluating 18 LLMs, we find substantial cultural degradation and a pronounced Locality Effect: cultural competence tracks pre-training exposure more closely than general reasoning ability. We further show that common inference-time remedies do not dissolve the illusion. Models remain overconfident on unfamiliar cultural questions, repeated sampling yields unstable rather than reliable correctness, and retrieval augmentation helps unevenly on long-tail facts. These findings indicate that cultural alignment cannot be inferred from multilingual ability alone and requires deeper intervention than calibration, sampling, or retrieval at inference time

Wenqi Huang, Zhitao Li, Nan Wang et al.

Echo Planar Imaging (EPI) is the standard acquisition technique for diffusion and functional neuroimaging, enabling rapid imaging but suffering from geometric distortions caused by B0 field inhomogeneities. Existing correction methods first reconstruct distorted images using parallel imaging, then estimate the B0 field and correct the distortion in the image domain. In this sequential process, reconstruction artifacts at high acceleration factors and low SNR at high diffusion b-values degrade B0 estimation and limit the overall correction quality. We propose a physics-informed framework that jointly estimates the B0 field and distortion-free image directly from k-space data, without depending on an intermediate parallel-imaging reconstruction for the correction. The image and the B0 field are each represented as a superposition of Gaussian primitives embedded within an MRI physics forward model. The explicit, continuous parameterization captures both smooth regions and tissue boundaries and supports rotated-view EPI acquisitions without interpolation. The diffusion-weighted image is modeled as real and non-negative, with the image phase absorbed into a per-shot phase factor. Rotated views distribute distortions across multiple phase-encoding orientations, improving point spread function isotropy and providing stronger constraints for B0 estimation. On in vivo brain diffusion EPI, the proposed method attains the closest brain-boundary agreement with a distortion-free structural reference, with the largest improvement over sequential methods at high b-value and high acceleration. Extensive visual comparisons further show improved detail fidelity and noise suppression.

Wen-Chin Huang, Tomoki Toda

UTMOS has become one of the most commonly used deep neural network-based speech quality assessment (SQA) metrics in speech processing research. In this paper, we attack UTMOS to probe its robustness. Starting from high-quality speech samples, we optimize the input in two directions: a score-preserving attack, which degrades perceived quality while maintaining the predicted score, and a quality-preserving attack, which lowers the predicted score while maintaining perceived quality. We consider three input spaces: raw waveform, mel spectrogram with a HiFi-GAN vocoder, and the latent space of EnCodec, a neural audio codec. Experimental results show that score-preserving attacks are effective against UTMOS. Although perfect quality-preserving attacks are more difficult, optimization in the EnCodec latent space provides the best chance of success. These results reveal failure modes of UTMOS and highlight the importance of robustness analysis for DNN-based SQA metrics.

Wenjie Qian, Bin Yang, Xiao Wang et al.

Text-to-image person re-identification (TIPR) retrieves target persons using natural language descriptions. However, existing methods largely overlook resolution variance in real-world surveillance. They characterize cross-resolution TIPR through two coupled failure modes: Evidence Reliability Collapse (ERC), where degraded visual tokens become unreliable for grounding fine-grained text, and Ranking Distribution Drift (RDD), where mixed-resolution galleries distort similarity neighborhoods and destabilize retrieval rankings. To address this challenge, we propose Cross-Resolution Semantic Transfer (CRST), a CLIP-style framework with three modules: resolution-conditioned reasoning, text-guided refinement and CR-RDA. Resolution-conditioned reasoning estimates token reliability to suppress corrupted evidence. Text-guided refinement injects semantic priors to recover discriminative cues. CR-RDA transfers HR neighborhood geometry to stabilize LR ranking under mixed resolutions. Experiments on CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES, and RSTPReid show that CRST improves ultra-low-resolution Rank-1 and mAP on average by 5.7% and 5.3%, while stabilizing mixed-resolution retrieval without sacrificing high-resolution accuracy.The code will be made publicly available.

Oxygen AIIC, Chan Long, Chao Liu et al.

JD.com, one of the world's largest e-commerce platforms, serves over 700 million active users and millions of merchants, with a catalog of tens of billions of SKUs. At this scale, high-quality, structured item knowledge underpins a better consumer experience, lower management costs, and higher operational efficiency-yet producing and serving it poses three industrial-scale challenges: fast-emerging concepts, high-quality knowledge production for massive SKUs, and diverse downstream requirements. To address these challenges, we present the JD Oxygen AI Item Center (Oxygen AIIC), an industrial-scale platform built on LLMs/VLMs for item-knowledge production and service. Oxygen AIIC is built around four core pillars: (i) ontology engineering driven by efficient human-AI collaboration, which supports the dynamic evolution and agile expansion of an ontology with millions of entries; (ii) a "Semantic Search then Discrimination"(S2D) knowledge identification architecture that, combined with throughput improvement strategies, enables scalable, extensible, and high-throughput AI Item Library production for tens of billions of SKUs; (iii) self-evolving item-understanding LLMs/VLMs that improve in a stable and controllable manner, enabling knowledge production with 94.2% precision and 82.8% recall; and (iv) a unified item tunnel that serves as the data and service hub. Oxygen AIIC now covers tens of thousands of JD categories and processes hundreds of millions of item updates per day on Huawei Ascend NPUs. It has accumulated hundreds of billions of item-knowledge assets. Deployed across core business scenarios-including search, recommendation, operations, category planning-Oxygen AIIC has delivered measurable gains at scale. Search-traffic coverage reaches 80.4%, item-information quality issues drop by 37%, the automated fill rate of core attributes during item listing exceeds 80%.

Zhaowei Liu, Long Jin, Andrew McBride et al.

Electroelastic shells are widely used in soft actuators, sensors, and energy harvesters owing to their large electrically induced deformations. However, the accurate simulation of their complex nonlinear multiphysics coupling, including bifurcation and post-buckling responses, remains challenging. This work presents an isogeometric Kirchhoff-Love shell formulation for the nonlinear analysis of electroelastic thin structures undergoing finite deformations. The formulation incorporates geometrically nonlinear kinematics, Maxwell-stress-induced electromechanical coupling, material incompressibility, and initial prestretch. Catmull--Clark subdivision surfaces are employed to ensure the C1 continuity required by Kirchhoff--Love shell theory. Consistent tangent operators are derived analytically, and a static condensation procedure is introduced to satisfy the plane-stress constraint. To trace bifurcation and post-buckling equilibrium paths, a staged Newton--Raphson algorithm with arc-length continuation and eigenmode perturbation is adopted. Numerical examples involving spherical membranes, prestretched circular plates, and toroidal membranes demonstrate the capability of the proposed framework to accurately capture large deformations, symmetry-breaking instabilities, and post-buckling responses under coupled electromechanical loading.

Enze Ma, Yufan Zhou, Wei-Chieh Huang et al.

Long-term memory promises LLM agents that grow more capable across sessions, maintaining an accurate, evolving understanding of the user that interaction forms. In practice, however, this memory is evaluated mostly through downstream behavior, such as later answers, personalization quality, or task success, which tests that understanding only indirectly and leaves the memory artifact itself largely unaudited. We argue that long-term memory should instead be evaluated as an auditable post-interaction artifact: after ordinary assistance, what structured user state can be reconstructed from the memory the agent leaves behind? We instantiate this view in MEMPROBE, a benchmark in which a memory-equipped agent assists simulated users, each carrying a hidden, taxonomy-anchored user-state bank, across a trajectory of leak-controlled tasks, after which that bank is reconstructed from the agent's resulting memory under both full-store and top-k access. Built on synthetic ground truth for efficient, scalable measurement, MEMPROBE spans 50 simulated users with 31 hidden dimensions each (1,550 recovery targets) and tests 5 representative memory systems. Testing state-of-the-art memory agents, we find that successful assistance and recoverable memory behave as distinct capabilities. Task completion nearly saturates, even for a memoryless baseline, while category-balanced recovery stays moderate (about 0.6) and drops further under top-k retrieval. MEMPROBE is the first benchmark to study memory recovery directly, reconstructing the user state a system retains and scoring it against ground truth. We see recovery as a concrete objective for future memory agents to optimize, and MEMPROBE as a step toward an environment where agents are trained to remember their users, growing more faithful the longer they know them.

Wenjie Huang, Yang Li, Jingjia Teng et al.

Transfer learning improves policy learning efficiency by reusing knowledge from source tasks, providing a feasible paradigm for safe and efficient autonomous highway lane changing decision-making. Existing methods frequently encounter transfer mismatch induced by distribution shifts between source and target domains, leading to training oscillation and performance decline. Besides, target domain adaptation depends on exploratory interactions, which struggles to guarantee training safety in safety-critical lane changing cases. To tackle these limitations, this paper proposes a safe transfer reinforcement learning framework for autonomous highway lane changing. First, we design an adaptive teacher intervention mechanism based on instantaneous safety cost to restrain risky exploration and fade intervention strength progressively, with theoretical analysis on return bounds for mixed behavior policy. This intervention also produces dual-source samples for joint training. Second, a teacher-guided safe transfer module embeds action evaluation information of teacher policy into student learning via reward shaping to boost training safety and efficiency, with teacher guidance decaying as policy safety rises. Third, a teacher-guided weighted optimization mechanism adjusts sample weights in policy optimization using a likelihood ratio factor to stabilize transfer performance. Experiments under varied traffic densities and validations on real-world NGSIM dataset reveal that our method surpasses baseline approaches by over 52.2% in safety and 5.0% in learning efficiency. Results verify the efficacy and robustness of our safety-aware transfer strategy for autonomous highway lane changing under various traffic conditions.

Pengfei Zhang, Hoang H Nguyen, Kazi Shaharair Sharif et al.

Recent Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) have achieved remarkable progress in audio perceptual tasks across individual acoustic layers, including speech, sound, and music. However, existing benchmarks predominantly evaluate these layers in isolation, overlooking the complex contextual relationships that arise when multiple acoustic sources co-occur in real-world auditory scenes. Real-world auditory interpretation requires Context-Aware Auditory Scene Understanding (CASU): the ability to comprehend the holistic scene by integrating sound layers. To evaluate this capability, we introduce the CASU benchmark, which assesses whether Audio LLMs can interpret auditory scenes composed of speech, acoustic events (e.g., announcements), and background environments (e.g., traffic), and reason about the logical relationships between these layers. We propose a scalable pipeline for constructing time-accurate, semi-synthetic audio streams by composing real-world scene sounds with synthetic speech. Building on this data, we design four tasks that probe scene understanding: contextual question answering, entity extraction from the scene, speaker role inference, and counterfactual reasoning where scene is manipulated. Experiments across multiple LALMs demonstrate that effective auditory scene understanding requires integration over all auditory layers, rather than reliance on speech or sound alone, underscoring the necessity of CASU for advancing complex audio understanding in LALMs.

Haonan Chen, Yuxiang Ma, Stephen Tian et al.

Long-horizon, contact-rich complex manipulation tasks, such as seating a GPU into a PCIe slot, demand both millimeter high precision and out-of-the-box generalization to new tasks. Existing paradigms struggle to satisfy both: classical pipelines use brittle, task-specific interfaces to achieve high-precision control but require costly pipeline redesigns to adapt to new tasks, whereas monolithic end-to-end policies provide better generalization but lack high precision on complex, out-of-distribution tasks unless retrained with new data. Both paradigms share an implicit assumption: once a manipulation capability is acquired, it must be deployed as a rigid pipeline or monolithic whole, rather than being freely decomposed and recomposed. In this paper, we show that complex manipulation capabilities can emerge naturally from the composition of simple, independent behaviors. Rather than deploying a monolithic policy or a rigid pipeline, we propose \ourshort, a framework orchestrating foundation models and diverse sensing modalities into multiple composable core behaviors: a semantic behavior extracting spatial constraints via foundation models; a predictive behavior forecasting trajectories by tracking keypoints in imagined videos; and a reactive behavior providing high-frequency tactile and force corrections. On a shared $SE(3)$ interface, these outputs compose by right-multiplication into a single pose command at each control step, executed by a compliant controller. We demonstrate \ourshort on 8 real-world tasks spanning everyday manipulation and precision assembly, with the strongest gains in contact-rich assembly and object transfer, and show robust recovery from manual perturbations during execution. {Website:} https://costream-simple.github.io

Jinghan Zhang, Zerui Cheng, Shiqi Chen et al.

Traditional evaluations measure a learning algorithm's final performance on an i.i.d. test set, reducing learning to a single aggregate score. This approach obscures a fundamental question: to what extent does learning from a specific example generalize to others? Such per-sample generalization, akin to learning by analogy in human cognition, captures how far the knowledge extracted from one example can transfer, yet remains invisible to standard benchmarks. We introduce the Generalization Spectrum, an evaluation framework designed to expose this hidden dimension. For each training example, we construct a controlled suite of test variants arranged by increasing transfer distance, from exact recall to implementation transfer across languages, context transfer under complete narrative re-framing, category-matched in-domain problems, and an unpaired baseline. By tracking performance across these distances, we reveal not just whether an algorithm learns, but how far that learning extends. We instantiate this framework on competitive programming, using a selection-and-synthesis pipeline seeded with recent problems to mitigate contamination. We first compare three canonical learning paradigms under matched memorization. RL converts memorization into near-transfer more efficiently than SFT-family baselines, while ICL exhibits strong but correspondence-dependent transfer. We then use the Spectrum to diagnose within-family variants. The resulting profiles show that local gains need not expand the generalization radius: abstractions and hints mainly lift local transfer, RFT preserves a stronger far-transfer tail than reference SFT, and self-distillation or hint-assisted RL can reduce far transfer even when local transfer or optimization improves.

Shaowen Wang, Bingrui Li, Ge Zhang et al.

Looped (weight-tied) Transformers apply a shared residual block $N$ times ($h \leftarrow h + \varepsilon\,f(h)$, same $f$ at each step), increasing effective depth without adding parameters. Prior depth-scaling analyses prescribe $\varepsilon = 1/\!\sqrt{L}$ for depth-$L$ residual networks. We show that this is insufficient for looped architectures: weight sharing makes residual updates correlated across iterations, requiring the stronger scaling $\varepsilon = 1/N$. For multi-layer blocks ($L$ unique layers looped $N$ times), we derive a factored parameterization $\varepsilon = λ/(N\!\sqrt{L})$ that separates the two sources of growth: $1/N$ controls the within-layer loop correlation, and $1/\!\sqrt{L}$ controls the across-layer variance. A key consequence is that the optimal learning rate depends only on the number of unique layers $L$, not on the loop count $N$, enabling direct hyperparameter transfer from small to large $N$ without retuning. Experiments on looped Transformers confirm that $1/N$ scaling improves trainability and yields better loss than $1/\!\sqrt{N}$ scaling across loop counts.

JiongHan Wang, WenChao Huang

As a prevalent analytical technique for stateful protocol implementations, state machine learning suffers from a core bottleneck stemming from handcrafted input alphabets. Manual alphabet definition inherently limits the completeness of input exploration, making it difficult to capture anomalous non-conformant messages and consequently missing latent semantic defects. In this paper, we target automatic input alphabet generation to break the above limitation for state machine learning. We adopt large language models to parse protocol message layouts and produce candidate input symbols following structured mutation rules, which automatically covers valid and invalid message spaces and eliminates reliance on manual protocol expertise. Considering the rising overhead brought by continuously growing alphabets, we introduce a mini-batch incremental learning strategy to reuse existing learned automata when incorporating new alphabet entries. Comprehensive experiments on practical protocol stacks indicate our approach can reproduce existing security vulnerabilities and identify novel semantic bugs. A subset of these newly discovered issues has been confirmed and patched by developers, proving the practicability and effectiveness of our proposed method.

Weijie Huang, Xinran Ruan

The evolution of dispersal traits is a fundamental topic in evolutionary ecology, where natural selection may drive the trait distribution toward concentration in the rare-mutation regime. This singular behavior poses a serious numerical difficulty, since direct discretizations of the population density require very fine trait grids to identify the fittest trait and to resolve the concentrated profile accurately. In this paper, we develop a WKB-based numerical framework for a dispersal evolution model. By separating the exponentially concentrated trait dependence from a smoother amplitude variable and combining this WKB representation with dual trait-grid implementation and other specially designed techniques, the method recovers the selected trait and the associated concentration structure accurately and efficiently on fixed trait grids. We establish a semi-discrete stationary fixed-grid asymptotic-preserving structure for the rare-mutation limit of the steady-state problem. Numerical experiments compare the proposed method with direct density discretizations and confirm its advantage in the small-mutation regime.

Yuting Li, Weihang Fang, Haoyuan Gao et al.

The rapid deployment of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in dynamic environments necessitates the ability to learn continuously without forgetting. However, traditional continual learning (CL) settings often rely on white-box paradigms, which is increasingly invalidated by the shift toward cloud-hosted models. In this paper, we introduce Black-CL, a more realistic benchmark for VLMs that enforces three primary real-world challenges: weight and architecture inaccessibility, constrained computation, and task-agnostic inference. The learner can query only output embeddings or logits, with no gradient flow through or structural modification of the backbone. Current CL methodologies, which rely on backbone backpropagation or complex parameter expansion, are fundamentally incompatible with these constraints. Under this setting, we propose BETA, a simple yet effective baseline built on the key insight that solely optimizing textual prototypes can navigate the complexities of CL. BETA integrates three core components: Semantic Projection Accumulation (SPA) for incremental knowledge acquisition, Latent Distribution Replay (LDR) for anchoring the embedding space against catastrophic forgetting, and Test-Time Prototype Adaptation (TTPA) for dynamic, instance-aware boundary refinement. Extensive experiments across ten diverse datasets and various backbones demonstrate that BETA significantly outperforms existing black-box tuners. Remarkably, with only 0.05 M trainable parameters, a 180--3000$\times$ reduction compared to competitive methods, BETA achieves performance on par with or even exceeding white-box CL methods. We believe Black-CL and BETA provide a foundational framework for future advancements in continual learning and accelerates the transition of continual learning from academia to real-world systems.

Xuetao Li, Wenke Huang, Mang Ye et al.

Art has long stood as a pivotal expression of human creativity. Embodied artificial intelligence offers a route for generative models to participate in that creativity through physical action rather than disembodied digital content. In robotic music co-creation, it is challenging to connect semantic musical understanding with real-time and physically executable performance. We present Co-policy, a framework for human-robot musical co-creation that separates semantic intent grounding, constrained musical variation, and visuomotor execution. To ground musical semantics, Co-policy uses pre-inference semantic anchors and a fine-tuned Qwen-vl planner (F-Qwen) to transform speech, live musical seeds, and visual observations into structured co-creation plans. To support low-latency execution, Co-policy introduces a Gaussian-Mixture Visuomotor Policy (GMP), implemented as a conditional mixture-density policy that maps target notes and visual context to multimodal robot actions in a single forward pass. Unlike robotic playback systems that merely reproduce user-specified notes, Co-policy generates complementary musical responses under both musical and physical constraints. Real-robot chime experiments, ablations, and expert evaluation show improved intent alignment, execution accuracy, and response frequency over diffusion-policy and ablated baselines, supporting physically grounded action generation as a key requirement for embodied human-AI co-creation.

Yunfei Zhong, Jun Yang, Wei Huang et al.

Deployable multilingual rerankers must generalize across languages, domains, and target ranking tasks while remaining efficient enough for second-stage reranking. However, adapting them to new target distributions typically requires extensive task-specific relevance annotations, which are costly to obtain. We present Querit-Reranker, a family of multilingual cross-encoder rerankers trained with a data-centric pipeline for label-efficient adaptation. We instantiate it as Querit-Reranker-A0.4B, initialized from an in-house MoE backbone with 0.4B activated parameters, and Querit-Reranker-4B, initialized from Qwen3-Embedding-4B. Our pipeline first learns general relevance modeling from large-scale ranking-oriented data, then adapts to target distributions through synthetic-query mining with teacher scores as continuous soft labels. To consolidate complementary task-adapted strengths, we further merge checkpoints via spherical linear interpolation, obtaining a single deployable model without runtime ensembling overhead. Using Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B as the shared first-stage retriever, Querit-Reranker-A0.4B improves average nDCG@10 from 54.11 to 59.28 on BEIR and from 59.87 to 67.70 on MIRACL. On MTEB Multilingual v2 Reranking, it also substantially outperforms larger embedding-based baselines, while Querit-Reranker-4B further achieves state-of-the-art performance among publicly available models. We release both models on Hugging Face.

Yatai Ji, An-Chieh Cheng, Yang Fu et al.

Spatial VLMs have made substantial progress in geometric perception, yet complex spatial reasoning requiring multi-step inference over depth, distance, and scene relations remains challenging. Moreover, different spatial queries call for fundamentally different strategies: some are best addressed through purely linguistic, step-by-step deduction, while others require explicit 3D grounding before quantitative inference. We present Dual-Path Spatial Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning for Spatial VLMs (SR-REAL), a unified framework that equips a spatial VLM with two complementary reasoning paths: Language-Only Reasoning (LOR), which performs step-by-step linguistic deduction, and Detect-Then-Reason (DTR), which detects 3D geometric cues (e.g., centers or bounding boxes) via region tokens before explicit geometric inference. SR-REAL begins with a cold-start supervised fine-tuning stage that constructs LOR and DTR chain-of-thought supervision and exposes a region-to-3D interface, followed by RL that optimizes the policy model with accuracy and format rewards; for DTR, a discrete center-based detection reward further refines geometric alignment. Across diverse spatial benchmarks, SR-REAL significantly outperforms spatial VLM baselines: (i) a single RL-trained model supports both reasoning paths, with DTR excelling in region-aware tasks through precise 3D localization and LOR enhancing general spatial reasoning; (ii) jointly training both paths fosters mutual reinforcement; (iii) high-quality, blended cold-start data is crucial for stable RL optimization; and (iv) the model generalizes across datasets and domains without per-task tuning, demonstrating positive transfer between LOR and DTR.

Chongru Fan, Wei Wang, Wentao Huang et al.

While Website Fingerprinting (WF) attacks achieve high accuracy in controlled laboratory settings, they often degrade substantially in real-world environments due to spatio-temporal drift, browser heterogeneity, proxy obfuscation and etc. This limitation stems from their sole reliance on low-level traffic features that are noisy and highly sensitive to environmental perturbations. To address this problem, we propose \textbf{ResAware}, a cross-environment resource-aware distillation framework under a \textit{training-rich/inference-poor} asymmetric setting. Specifically, ResAware trains a teacher model on resource-level features, and then distills the resulting privileged knowledge into a student model through heterogeneous knowledge distillation. At deployment time, the student model performs inference using only encrypted traffic, incurring zero additional cost. We evaluate ResAware on a large-scale dataset collected over five months from six globally distributed vantage points, comprising more than $160{,}000$ paired samples. The results show that ResAware significantly enhances the cross-environment robustness of diverse WF baselines. Under a 150-day temporal drift, for example, ResAware improves the F1-score of Var-CNN from $72.77\%$ to $81.49\%$ and the open-world $TPR@1\%FPR$ from $22.40\%$ to $27.20\%$. Our results demonstrate that resource-level supervision improves WF robustness without expanding online observation capabilities.

Pengfei Zhang, Hoang H Nguyen, Yutong Song et al.

Pathological speech from patients with neurodegenerative and neuromotor disorders is often acoustically distorted and linguistically fragmented, making pathological speech reconstruction necessary to recover intended textual content from distorted and incomplete speech recordings. Crucially, such recordings are rarely uniformly degraded: some words or short phrases remain reliable and can serve as audible anchors for reconstructing the corrupted surrounding content. We introduce Anchor-gated Phonetic Group Relative Policy Optimization (AP-GRPO), a GRPO framework with phonetic reward that aligns speech language models (SLMs) through audible-anchor preservation and inter-anchor phonetic compatibility to the original speech signal. AP-GRPO consists of: (i) an anchor-gated reward that matches reliable audible anchors in clear regions; and (ii) an inter-anchor phonetic alignment reward that evaluates whether recovered contents are phonetically supported by the corresponding corrupted inter-anchor speech span. Across four disease conditions, AP-GRPO improves faithful speech reconstruction, and the learned anchor constraint automatically adapts to each condition and thus reveals interpretable disease-specific profiles: conditions with severe articulatory degradation require stronger anchor enforcement, whereas milder impairment or linguistically impaired conditions rely more on phonetic alignment for inter-anchor recovery.

Yu Li, Liqi Zhuang, Dong Wei et al.

Air fingerprinting infers application activity by sniffing metadata from cellular control channels. 5G encrypts these channels, breaking the attack chain that prior attacks depend on. This paper reveals a physical-layer side channel that bypasses encryption: under the link adaptation mandated by the cellular communication standard, the uplink Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) remains stable, so the number of Physical Resource Blocks (PRBs) occupied by a transmission accurately reflects the IP packet length. Combined with the uplink control channel that carries downlink information, an attacker can reconstruct a bidirectional traffic profile. This bidirectional information recovery can be achieved simply by observing the uplink spectrum, without decoding any channel. Building on this side channel, we design Crosshair, a passive three-step attack. First, a blind extraction stage recovers the uplink physical channel occupancy from raw IQ samples via energy detection, reconstructing bidirectional traffic from uplink spectrum. Second, we design a data augmentation method that synthesizes spectral profiles across diverse channel conditions, eliminating the need for prior knowledge of the communication environment. Third, cross-modal alignment embeds the spectral and IP domains into a shared space, enabling new applications to be enrolled from a collected IP trace alone. Extensive experiments on a 5G NR testbed demonstrate the robustness and precision of Crosshair: it outperforms the State-of-the-Art (SOTA) physical layer fingerprinting method in application recognition accuracy, and maintains high accuracy in cross-MCS scenarios.

Weiqi Huang, Shuangyi Dong, Jiaxin Li et al.

Floor plans encapsulate compact spatial priors, enabling agents to navigate unseen scenes more efficiently. While prior work has explored floor plan-guided navigation, it has focused mainly on PointNav and a limited set of environments. To bridge this gap, we introduce FloVerse, a new task for floor plan-guided embodied navigation that unifies PointNav, ObjectNav, and ImageNav. To support FloVerse, we assemble FloVerse-1.6K, a large-scale dataset of 1.6K scenes from HM3D and Gibson 4+, paired with corresponding floor plans, comprising 240K expert trajectories and 12M RGBD frames. We further propose ThreeDiff, a two-stage imitation learning policy comprising a planner, a diffusion-based multimodal goal-reasoning module trained via masked-modality modeling, and a refiner, a depth-based trajectory-refinement module for safe execution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that (1) floor-plan priors improve navigation performance across all goal modalities, and (2) ThreeDiff implicitly captures spatial information from floor plans. These results underscore the effectiveness of spatial priors and validate our proposed unified approach for floor plan-guided embodied navigation.

Wanaiu Huang

Semantic information is vital for human interaction, and decoding it from brain activity enables non-invasive clinical augmentative and alternative communication. While there has been significant progress in reconstructing visual images, few studies have focused on the language aspect. To address this gap, leveraging the powerful capabilities of the decoder-based vision-language pretrained model CoCa, this paper proposes BrainChat, a simple yet effective generative framework aimed at rapidly accomplishing semantic information decoding tasks from brain activity, including fMRI question answering and fMRI captioning. BrainChat employs the self-supervised approach of Masked Brain Modeling to encode sparse fMRI data, obtaining a more compact embedding representation in the latent space. Subsequently, BrainChat bridges the gap between modalities by applying contrastive loss, resulting in aligned representations of fMRI, image, and text embeddings. Furthermore, the fMRI embeddings are mapped to the generative Brain Decoder via cross-attention layers, where they guide the generation of textual content about fMRI in a regressive manner by minimizing caption loss. Empirically, BrainChat exceeds the performance of existing state-of-the-art methods in the fMRI captioning task and, for the first time, implements fMRI question answering. Additionally, BrainChat is highly flexible and can achieve high performance without image data, making it better suited for real-world scenarios with limited data.