H. Wu

Heng Wu, Changjiang Zhan, Jiacheng Li et al.

Grid-forming (GFM) energy storage system (ESS) is a key enabler for stabilizing future power systems with high penetration of converter-based resources (CBRs). To get a better overview of the state-of-the-art and challenges for implementing and deploying GFM-ESS, a global survey has been initiated by Cigre Working Group B4.101 - industrial implementation and application of grid forming energy storage systems. Feedback was collected from universities, transmission system operators (TSOs), power plant developers, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), research institutes, as well as consultants. It is interesting to note that while many common understandings have been established in practice, certain gaps persist among different stakeholders. This article intends to bridge this gap by presenting a summary of the survey, including the questionnaire, responses from various stakeholders, and in-depth analysis of the survey results. The key challenges faced by different stakeholders in deploying GFM-ESS are identified, shedding light on future research in this direction.

Fan Zhang, Vireo Zhang, Shengju Qian et al.

The recent success of agent swarms has shifted the paradigm of large language model (LLM)-based agents from single-agent workflows to multi-agent systems, highlighting the importance of agent orchestration for task decomposition and collaboration. However, existing orchestration frameworks are limited to a narrow set of modalities and struggle to generalize to more complex settings where heterogeneous modalities coexist and interact. This limitation becomes particularly pronounced in omnimodal scenarios, where tasks require the unified understanding and coordination of diverse inputs such as text, image, audio, and video. In this work, we propose Orchestra-o1, an omnimodal agent orchestration framework designed to support efficient agent collaboration across multiple modalities. Orchestra-o1 introduces a unified orchestration mechanism that enables modality-aware task decomposition, online sub-agent specialization, and parallel sub-task execution. This scalable design allows agent systems to effectively tackle complex real-world tasks involving heterogeneous information sources, surpassing the second-best approach by 10.3% accuracy on the OmniGAIA benchmark. Furthermore, we introduce decision-aligned group relative policy optimization (DA-GRPO), an efficient agentic reinforcement learning approach for training Orchestra-o1-8B, which also achieves state-of-the-art performance against all existing open-source omnimodal agents.

Pei Deng, Wenqian Zhou, Hanlin Wu

Remote sensing (RS) change analysis is vital for monitoring Earth's dynamic processes by detecting alterations in images over time. Traditional change detection excels at identifying pixel-level changes but lacks the ability to contextualize these alterations. While recent advancements in change captioning offer natural language descriptions of changes, they do not support interactive, user-specific queries. To address these limitations, we introduce ChangeChat, the first bitemporal vision-language model (VLM) designed specifically for RS change analysis. ChangeChat utilizes multimodal instruction tuning, allowing it to handle complex queries such as change captioning, category-specific quantification, and change localization. To enhance the model's performance, we developed the ChangeChat-87k dataset, which was generated using a combination of rule-based methods and GPT-assisted techniques. Experiments show that ChangeChat offers a comprehensive, interactive solution for RS change analysis, achieving performance comparable to or even better than state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on specific tasks, and significantly surpassing the latest general-domain model, GPT-4. Code and pre-trained weights are available at https://github.com/hanlinwu/ChangeChat.

Xinhao Li, Yuhan Zhu, Xiangyu Zeng et al.

Recent advances in video understanding have spanned motion, long video, and streaming interaction, driving this field toward real-world applications. Despite this progress, current open-source models remain limited in several ways. They often struggle to generalize across diverse video types, making them effective only in specific domains. High computational demands further restrict their efficiency and scalability. Moreover, most models are only partially open, with key components such as training code, strategy, or datasets unavailable, which hinders reproducibility and slows community-driven development. To address these issues, we introduce VideoChat3, a fully open, efficient, and generalist video-centric MLLM. VideoChat3 advances video understanding through two complementary designs. For efficiency, we introduce Inflated 3D Vision Transformer (I3D-ViT) and Adaptive Frame Resolution for Streaming Video Perception, which enables efficient spatiotemporal representation and reduces the cost of processing video inputs during training and inference. For effectiveness, we develop a scalable video data synthesis pipeline that curates three diverse, high-quality training datasets: VideoChat3-Academic2M, VideoChat3-LV116K, and VideoChat3-OL617K, covering general, long-form, and streaming video scenarios, improving the model's generalization across domains. By integrating these designs, VideoChat3 achieves a rare balance of broad generalization and computational efficiency. Experiments across general, long-form, and streaming benchmarks demonstrate that VideoChat3 surpasses prior open-source models with equal or larger parameter counts with only 4B parameters and higher efficiency.

Huan Wu, Ali Emami, Muhammad Furquan Hassan et al.

African American English (AAE), a rule-governed dialect spoken by over 30 million people, is routinely misinterpreted and "corrected" by large language models (LLMs). Across six instruction-tuned LLMs (14B to 70B), we show that state-of-the-art models systematically prefer Standard American English (SAE) continuations even when the preceding context is in AAE, effectively rewriting AAE into SAE. We present an end-to-end framework to audit and mitigate this bias. For auditing, we introduce conditional Dialect Group Invariance (cDGI), which isolates true model bias from translator-induced artifacts, and a feature-level localization analysis that identifies which AAE markers most strongly trigger bias; we find that syntactic constructions, especially negative concord (e.g., "ain't nobody"), are universal triggers across all models. For mitigation, we introduce, to our knowledge, the first application of activation steering to dialect bias: a training-free, test-time method that extracts dialect directions via causal tracing and injects them into bias-relevant layers. Activation steering reduces bias 5 to 20 times more than prompting while preserving SAE fluency. To enable this work, we release REAL-AAE , the largest real-AAE parallel corpus to date: 17,479 AAE/SAE/ AAE_back triplets from natural tweets (2 to 6 times larger than prior real-AAE resources), validated automatically (BERTScore F1 = 0.95) and by three native AAE speakers (83.0% semantic agreement).

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.

Jianyuan Guo, Zhiwei Hao, Chengcheng Wang et al.

LLM-based agents mark a shift from passive question answering to active task completion: they perceive environments, invoke tools, maintain state, and act over extended horizons. As agent systems have evolved from prompt engineering to workflows and context engineering, harness engineering, and agent-native training with co-evolution, a central question has become increasingly important: where does the bottleneck in agent performance reside, in the foundation model, in the execution harness, or in the coupling between them? This survey examines LLM-based agents through a model-harness lens. We first clarify the functional definition of agents and the implementation view of an LLM-based agent as a foundation model coupled with an execution harness. We then analyze the limits of model-centric scaling, trace four paradigms of agent engineering, and decompose the execution harness into six coupled runtime responsibilities: observation, context, control, action, state, and verification. Using this decomposition, we map task properties and domain pressures to harness configurations, review benchmark and evaluation practices, and synthesize model-harness evidence on how runtime design affects long-horizon task completion, efficiency, and reliability. Finally, we identify open challenges in value-aware evaluation, safety, harness generalization, and model-harness co-evolution. Rather than treating agents as models with auxiliary tools, this survey argues that agent quality -- including success, efficiency, safety, and generalization -- emerges from the interaction between model capability, runtime infrastructure, task structure, and evaluation design. A collection of papers discussed in this survey is provided in https://github.com/ggjy/Awesome-Agent-Engineering.

Yin Wu, Yixuan Liu, Yi Li et al.

Standardized token contracts (e.g., ERC-20) form the foundation of digital assets. However, attackers increasingly abuse this standardization to disguise malicious trap tokens. Unlike obvious violations, these contracts employ a strategy of "deceptive adherence": they strictly adhere to standard protocols to evade detection while embedding covert logic to defraud users. To address this, we first systematize the trap landscape by proposing a novel taxonomy derived from the intrinsic functional lifecycle of tokens (Generation, Circulation, Persistence, and Observation). We then propose TrapHunter, a framework designed to identify these traps and expose covert pathways within these deceptive contracts via intent deviation analysis. Specifically, TrapHunter introduces a unified semantic representation combining Abstract Behavior Trees (ABTs) and Augmented Path Graphs (APGs) to normalize intra-procedural syntax and reveal hidden execution paths driven by inter-procedural state dependencies. Crucially, it bridges the semantic gap by leveraging LLMs to reason about the behavioral intent of deviations from reference implementations, followed by fork-based dynamic validation to confirm exploitability. Experimental evaluation on 269 real-world contracts with three LLMs (DeepSeek, GPT, and Gemini) demonstrates that TrapHunter effectively detects all six categories of traps, achieving an average precision of 81.8% and recall of 85.4%, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art tools.

Hao Wu, Haijun Wang, Shangwang Li et al.

With the rapid advancement of decentralized finance (DeFi), security incidents related to cryptocurrency have become increasingly prevalent. After such incidents, attackers typically attempt to rapidly move stolen assets, concealing the origin of illicit funds and ultimately converting them into fiat currency. However, existing anti-money laundering (AML) methods struggle to cope with the semantic complexity of DeFi transactions. They either rely heavily on low-level token transfers, or perform protocol-agnostic money flow analysis, failing to capture the high-level intent of transactions. In this paper, we propose AMLGuard, a semantic-aware AML framework for account-based blockchains. AMLGuard tracks illicit fund flows from known malicious addresses by performing semantic analysis on complex DeFi transactions, enabling accurate and continuous laundering tracking. Given a complex transaction, AMLGuard combines static rule-based analysis with retrieval-augmented large language model (LLM) reasoning to infer implicit DeFi semantics, transforming raw transaction data into high-level semantic representations. Furthermore, for cross-chain transactions where laundering intent is not explicitly exposed, AMLGuard parses transaction parameters and performs argument parsing to recover cross-chain semantics, enabling seamless tracking across ledgers. Based on the inferred semantics, AMLGuard abstracts each transaction into a DeFi Semantic Unit (DSU). We evaluate the effectiveness of AMLGuard on 82 real-world laundering cases, involving illicit assets worth over $1 billion. Specifically, AMLGuard reconstructs compact illicit fund-flow topologies with destination precision of 94.4% and 87.6%, while achieving the highest address recall of 98.4% and 95.8% and destination recall of 94.1% and 93.8% on single-chain and cross-chain datasets.

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.

SciForge Team, Zhangyang Gao, Minghao Fang et al.

Scientific work increasingly spans heterogeneous artifacts -- papers, code, datasets, scientific file formats, model outputs, figures, manuscripts, and team decisions -- yet general-purpose AI assistants rarely preserve these objects as a coherent, auditable research state. We present SciForge, a multimodal research-native AI workbench that reserves the graphical interface for human judgment while search, parsing, model routing, workflow execution, plotting, writing, and presentation generation run as modular agent-accessible services. SciForge is built around five pillars: (i) \emph{goal-scoped scientific decision governance} for \textbf{goal-oriented} research, with review gates and shared review surfaces; (ii) \emph{translate-then-reason} for \textbf{multimodal} input, routing scientific objects through domain translators before the agent reasons; (iii) \emph{evidence governance} for \textbf{auditable} traceability, linking claims to provenance chains and audit findings; (iv) \emph{collaborative team science} for \textbf{collaborative} research, enabling multi-role decision governance, with shared team workspaces planned for future releases; and (v) \emph{real-world application scenarios} for \textbf{practical} impact, demonstrated through eight end-to-end user cases, with flagship demonstrations including multi-day agentic research sprints for gene discovery, AI-guided de novo protein design, molecular optimization, and genome-to-BGC discovery. The system combines a thin interaction layer, contextual research capability patterns, an Agent Runtime and Workflow Engine, an Evidence-DAG audit sidecar and a Scientific Model Router. SciForge currently runs as a desktop application, with mobile supervision support; future releases will deepen team collaboration. The system is open-source and available at https://github.com/AGI4Sci/SciForge

Yongheng Zhang, Guang Yang, Ruihan Hou et al.

Recent advances in world models and video generation have given rise to an emerging reasoning paradigm that leverages video generative models to simulate, predict, and reason about real-world dynamics. We redefine this paradigm as Thinking in Video, where video is not merely an output artifact but a medium for constructing, extending, and verifying causal thought. However, this promise remains unverified: convincing rollouts may reflect memorized appearances rather than causal understanding, while existing metrics separate perceptual fidelity from semantic logic. To evaluate whether video generators support such reasoning, we introduce the Causal-Generative Dual-Judge (CGDJ), auditing World Model Consistency from two perspectives. Explicit Causal Perception tests whether a generator reads a video scenario as a reasoning problem through spatio-temporal flattened visual question answering, while Implicit Generative Perception-Prediction Gap evaluates whether it renders the causal consequence as a consistent future video. Applying CGDJ to representative open- and closed-source generators reveals a clear Perception-Prediction Gap: open-source models produce plausible dynamics despite near-zero explicit causal perception, whereas advanced closed-source systems show stronger but still limited alignment between reasoning and generation. Further analysis exposes audio-visual misalignment, where models verbalize correct causal logic more reliably than they render it, challenging the "world simulator" narrative.

Liam Davis, Duo Zhou, Huan Zhang et al.

In this work, we investigate the effect of lookahead branching strategies in neural network verification. We present a general recipe to integrate lookahead into any branch-and-bound verifier and demonstrate how one of the current state-of-the-art branching heuristics, FSB, can be viewed as a special instantiation of the lookahead branching strategy. We also describe how, in addition to improving the quality of branching decisions, lookahead can generate additional lemmas that accelerate verification. We instantiate the method in two representative branch-and-bound-based verifiers (Marabou and $α$-$β$-CROWN), and demonstrate that lookahead leads to consistent speedups in verification time and up to $57\%$ more solved instances. Code is available at https://github.com/ai-ar-research/lookahead-branching.

Ye Yuan, Weien Li, Rui Song et al.

Discrete denoising diffusion models (DDMs) have recently emerged as a compelling alternative to autoregressive (AR) modeling for discrete data, offering parallel generation and iterative global refinement capabilities. Unlike continuous diffusion, where the state space is fixed, DDMs are fundamentally shaped by how the discrete state space is constructed: the tokenization scheme, the vocabulary topology, and domain-specific structural alphabets. This work introduces a unified conceptual framework that views discrete diffusion models through the construction of the underlying discrete state space. Within this framework, existing formulations, including transition-matrix, masking/absorbing-state, and score/ratio-based approaches, emerge as different instantiations of a common design space. The framework further exposes common design trade-offs across training objectives, inference algorithms, scaling behavior, systems optimization, and evaluation protocols, suggesting several promising directions for future research.

Kahim Wong, Kemou Li, Yiming Chen et al.

AI-assisted image editing threatens trust in financial, legal, and identity records. The GenText-Forensics Challenge at ACM MM 2026 addresses this by requiring structured forensic reports, in which integrating detection, pixel-level localization, and natural language explanation for multilingual text-centric forgery images. We present SEED, a modular system with three components. First, a similarity-guided pipeline augments training with diverse synthetic forgeries. Second, a single ViT, built on DINOv3 with LoRA adaptation, jointly performs detection and pixel-level localization while preserving pre-trained priors with minimal trainable parameters. Third, an evolving harness takes the detector's predictions and generates a complete forensic report via an MLLM, iteratively improved through a proposer-evaluator loop optimizing report quality. SEED ranked 3rd in the GenText-Forensics Challenge. Code and data are available at https://github.com/KahimWong/GenText-Forensics-3rd-Place.

Ang Li, Ben Liu, Bin Han et al.

Efficient and scalable agentic intelligence requires models that can deliver both low-latency responses and strong reasoning capabilities while remaining practical to train, serve, and deploy. In this report, we present Ling-2.6 and Ring-2.6, a family of models designed to address this challenge at scale. Ling-2.6 is optimized for instant response generation and high capability per output token, whereas Ring-2.6 is tailored for deeper reasoning and more advanced agentic workflows. Instead of training from scratch, we upgrade the Ling-2.0 base model through architectural migration pre-training and large-scale post-training. This upgrade is guided by a unified co-design of model architecture, optimization objectives, serving systems, and agent training environments, enabling improvements in both model capability and deployment efficiency. At the architectural level, we introduce a hybrid linear attention design that integrates Lightning Attention with MLA, improving the efficiency of long-context training and decoding. To further enhance token efficiency, we optimize capability per output token through Evolutionary Chain-of-Thought, Linguistic Unit Policy Optimization, bidirectional preference alignment, and shortest-correct-response distillation. For agentic capabilities, we propose KPop, a reinforcement learning framework designed to support stable training of Ring-2.6-1T on large-scale environment-grounded data. KPop improves training efficiency through asynchronous scheduling across coding, search, tool use, and workflow execution, enabling scalable learning from complex agent-environment interactions. Together, Ling-2.6 and Ring-2.6 provide a practical pathway toward efficient, scalable, and open agentic systems. We open-source all checkpoints in the 2.6 family to support further research and development in practical agentic intelligence.

Xiangdong Zhang, Xiaohan Qin, Sunan Zou et al.

Hyper-Connections (HC) expand the residual stream of Transformers into $N$ parallel streams, providing a form of memory scaling beyond model width and depth. Manifold-Constrained HC (mHC) stabilizes this formulation at scale. The large gains from $N{=}1$ to $N{=}4$ suggest residual-stream expansion as a promising scaling axis. However, existing HC-family methods typically stop at $N{=}4$. Our experiments reveal why: scaling mHC beyond this point yields diminishing performance gains and rapidly increasing training cost. We attribute this limitation to two bottlenecks: insufficient write-back information for an expanding number of streams and residual-mixing generation whose cost scales cubically with $N$. To address both bottlenecks, we propose xHC (Expanded Hyper-Connections), the first HC-family method to achieve meaningful expansion beyond $N{=}4$. xHC combines temporal feature augmentation for richer write-back with a sparse residual-stream architecture that updates only $k=4$ of the $N=16$ streams while retaining dense access to the full residual state. Across 18B and 28B MoE models, xHC delivers strong and consistent downstream improvements. On an 18B MoE model, xHC improves the average downstream score by 4.0 points over mHC, while adding only modest training FLOPs over the vanilla baseline. Scaling-law experiments show that the vanilla and mHC require $1.50\times$ and $1.19\times$ the compute of xHC, respectively, to reach the same loss. Practical large-$N$ training also requires controlling memory traffic from the expanded residual state. We therefore introduce xHC-Flash, which reduces the per-sublayer memory traffic from $73.5C$ to $40C$, comparable to the $34C$ required by mHC at $N{=}4$, while retaining the gains of full xHC. Together, xHC and xHC-Flash make large-$N$ residual-stream expansion effective and practical for LLM pre-training.

Haitao Wu, Qirui Zhang, Zhouheng Yao et al.

Modeling the bidirectional correspondence between external sensory stimuli and internal neural activity has emerged as a critical frontier in neuroscience. However, existing approaches predominantly treat brain encoding and decoding as isolated tasks, relying heavily on unimodal alignment and external priors while overlooking the brain's intrinsic nature as a multimodal integration system. To address these limitations, we propose BrainJanus, the first unified brain model that integrates brain, vision, and language within a single framework. Specifically, we introduce a Unified Brain Tokenizer to quantize continuous neural dynamics into discrete tokens aligned with visual and linguistic representations in a shared Omni space. Building on this, we utilize an All-in-One autoregressive architecture that leverages next-token prediction to enable seamless any-to-any generation, which encompasses image-to-brain and text-to-brain encoding, and brain-to-image and brain-to-text decoding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BrainJanus achieves superior performance across diverse benchmarks. Furthermore, our framework exhibits zero-shot generalization and preserves interpretable biological topography, highlighting its potential as a general-purpose brain modeling paradigm. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/HaitaoWuTJU/BrainJanus}{GitHub}.

Shangxuan Xie, Haifeng Wu, Yuhang Wang et al.

Homography estimation, as one of the fundamental problems in computer vision, remains challenged by scale variation scenarios where image pairs potentially exhibit significant scale discrepancies. Existing deep learning frameworks frequently suffer from a significant performance degradation in such cases, as they rely on limited displacement assumptions and local feature consistency that might not hold under large scale gaps. In this paper, we propose SA-Homo, a novel scale-adaptive homography estimation framework designed to achieve robust alignment across a wide range of scale discrepancy ratios. We adopt a hierarchical scale alignment strategy that transitions from the global perspective with a heavy module to a local perspective with a light module. Specifically, we introduce the Scale-aware Discrepancy Bridging Module (SDBM) for initial alignment, which utilizes a Multi-scale Linear Attention Cascade (MLAC) to capture long-range dependencies and mitigate feature inconsistencies, along with a global Cross-scale Similarity Matrix Block (CSMB) for scale robust correlation representation. Once the initial scale gap is bridged, a lightweight Iterative Homography Estimation Refinement Module (IHERM) progressively polishes the result using local correlations. To facilitate this research, we contribute the HMSA dataset, a high-resolution, multi-modal satellite benchmark specifically tailored for scale-variant challenges. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SA-Homo maintains high precision even under 8$\times$ scale discrepancies, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in both conventional scale-similar scenarios and challenging scale variation scenarios. Code and collected datasets are available at https://github.com/shangxuanx330/SA_Homo

Haichao Chen, Songchi Zhou, Zhengyun Zhao et al.

Rare diseases affect millions of individuals worldwide, yet timely diagnosis remains a major public health challenge due to scarcity of specialized clinical expertise. While large language models (LLMs) show promise to support rare disease diagnosis, current models are constrained by insufficient clinical deployability, limited clinically grounded evidence, and scarcity of training data. Here we present RaDaR (Rare Disease navigatoR), an open-source, compact reasoning LLM (32B parameters) for rare disease diagnosis. RaDaR was trained with 49,170 publicly available free-text cases and 104,666 synthetic cases with reasoning-enhanced training. RaDaR showed the strongest performance among evaluated open-source models, including the 671B DeepSeek-R1, across public benchmarks and four external validation centers. In a retrospective cohort, RaDaR prioritized the final diagnosis before documented clinical suspicion in 61.06 percent of cases, corresponding to a potential lead time of 1.87 months and 50.18 percent of the within-center interval. In a randomized physician-assistance trial, RaDaR assistance improved physicians' rare-disease diagnostic accuracy by 21.44 percentage points compared with internet search alone. Synthetic-data ablations suggested that phenotype-anchored narratives provide useful training signal for long-tail rare diseases, with a monotonic scaling trend within the tested data range. Together, RaDaR and its development and validation framework provide a deployable rare-disease reasoning model and a reproducible development framework for diagnostic AI under data scarcity.

Haifeng Wu, Srinivasan Manoharan, Fangbo Tu et al.

We present RLM-Cascade, a proxy-layer system that applies speculative decoding at the response level to reduce LLM API costs without requiring model architecture access or a shared vocabulary. A fast, inexpensive draft model generates a candidate response; a capable verify model accepts, enhances, or is bypassed entirely depending on a lightweight complexity router. On a real-world agentic coding workload (Claude Code), RLM-Cascade achieves a draft-use rate of 88.8% across 125 production requests, reducing API cost by 45.8% relative to a direct Opus baseline. Counter-intuitively, the proxy also reduces end-to-end latency: median response time is 2,026 ms versus 3,698 ms for Native Opus -- a 1.83X speedup at p50 -- because the SKIPPED path (DeepSeek only, no Opus call) dominates the workload distribution. Quality matches or exceeds the Opus baseline: 100% pass rate on a 20-task Code/Math/Instruct benchmark versus 95% for Native Opus. We further describe a rule-based complexity router that selects the SKIPPED path for simple agentic turns and a hybrid tool-call strategy that bypasses the speculative pipeline for schema-critical tool-selection turns. RLM-Cascade is deployed in production as an enterprise AI infrastructure component and published as open source with a live metrics dashboard and Prometheus endpoint.

Chaoyue Li, Boxue Yang, Shengyao Zhou et al.

4D dynamic scene understanding requires grounding language to a persistent worldline that binds identity, metric 3D motion, and synchronized multi-view 2D projections. Existing paradigms capture only part of this structure: large multimodal models reason over rich visual evidence but rarely preserve metric topology, while vision-language tracking remains tied to fragmented 2D or 3D outputs and local continuation. We therefore introduce \textbf{4DVLT}, a worldline-centered task for instruction-conditioned 4D dynamic scene understanding in fully observed multi-view video, and \textbf{Instruct-4D}, a benchmark with 129.4K question-answer pairs, 64.7K target entities, 851 scenes, and 9 reasoning-oriented query types. To address this setting, we present \textbf{4DTrack}, which casts instruction-conditioned tracking as graph-conditioned worldline inference through an object-centric 4D state graph, metric-guided routing, bidirectional decoding, and kinematic calibration. On Instruct-4D, 4DTrack-Qwen3.5-9B reaches 62.68 $\mathrm{TGA}_{\mathrm{Top1}}$ and surpasses the best adapted VLT baseline by 19.62 points. These results show that worldline-centered modeling improves both target grounding and recovered worldline quality. The project page is available at https://github.com/mikubaka88/4DVLT.

Bo Gou, Jicheng Zhang, Jianlong Xiong et al.

Automated classification of standard echocardiographic views is crucial for efficient clinical workflow but faces three main challenges. First, publicly available datasets are scarce and limited in scale and view coverage. Second, the performance of some modern video-level architectures for echocardiographic view classification remains underexplored. Third, some view categories exhibit highly similar spatial appearances, making single-frame features insufficient for discrimination, while heterogeneous frame quality complicates robust temporal information fusion. To address these challenges, we release the Echocardiographic Videos of Nine Views (EV9V) dataset, comprising 5,138 videos, 910,579 frames, and 9 standard views, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the largest publicly available echocardiography video dataset. Using EV9V, we systematically benchmark representative video classification architectures, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and Transformers. Furthermore, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Fusion Model (STFM), an efficient dual-stream CNN-LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) framework that jointly captures spatial anatomical structures and temporal cardiac dynamics. The proposed framework leverages uncertainty-aware learning to preferentially sample representative video segments during training and evidence-based fusion during inference, improving robustness to variations in frame quality across echocardiographic videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance across diverse video classification models, validating the effectiveness of uncertainty-aware spatio-temporal learning for echocardiographic view classification. The code is available at https://github.com/bgx666/stfm.

Feng Lyu, Jinfeng Cen, Sijing Duan et al.

Text-to-SQL aims to translate natural language questions into executable SQL queries over structured databases, enabling non-expert users to access data intuitively. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in this task, existing LLM-based approaches often struggle to strike a balance between strong reasoning capabilities and robust generalization. To address these limitations, we propose CoTE-SQL to enhance the LLM-based text-to-SQL generation with three key innovations: (i) self-enhanced reasoning traces distilled from LLMs without human annotation, (ii) structured chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting with modular decomposition and examples retrieval, and (iii) error-aware revision based on SQL execution feedback. Extensive experiments on the Spider and Bird benchmarks demonstrate that CoTE-SQL achieves new state-of-the-art performance among methods built on open-source LLMs with comparable model sizes on Bird (53.39% EX / 59.02 VES) and strong results on Spider (79.60% EX / 77.19 VES), with especially significant gains on complex queries. Results highlight the effectiveness of combining self-enhancement, structured reasoning, and execution-time feedback within an LLM-based framework for text-to-SQL design.

Wenbo Yu, Bohua Wang, Hao Fang et al.

Malicious content generated from large language models (LLMs) could pose severe safety risks and ethical concerns. While existing LLM safety guardrails excel in English or multilingual settings, they lack adaptation to Chinese-specific regulatory policies, cultural context and linguistic nuances, failing to support fine-grained risk classification for diverse deployment needs. In this paper, we introduce a 5-macro, 31-micro category fine-grained risk taxonomy for Chinese scenarios, and build CHILLGuard: a dedicated Chinese LLM content safety guardrail. To address the critical scarcity of high-quality annotated Chinese safety data, we propose a scalable multi-stage data construction pipeline: we expand multi-source corpus via retrieval-augmented generation, generate implicit harmful samples through prompt engineering rewriting, and refine high-quality data via multi-model voting-based label calibration. Based on this, we build CHILLGuardTrain, a large-scale training set with 405,007 samples, and CHILLGuardTest, a rigorously curated annotated test set with 51,745 samples. We then train CHILLGuard on CHILLGuardTrain under a generator-classifier collaborative framework via Model-aware Direct Preference Optimization. Extensive experiments under multiple settings demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of CHILLGuard, e.g., a 15.92% improvement of F1 score over Qwen3Guard-8B-Strict on our benchmark. We will release our resources at https://github.com/cswbyu/CHILLGuard.

Renwei Meng, Bowen Zhang, Jian Wang et al.

Reliable evaluation of large language models should separate supported answering from unsupported guessing without conflating either with data contamination, prompt idiosyncrasy, or generic refusal behavior. We present a contamination-aware, multi-zone benchmark for measuring the transition from answerable knowledge to abstention-expected unknowns under frozen build-time labels. The benchmark contains 1,200 items across five domains, explicit abstention expectations, contamination-risk metadata, and dual parsing with an official strict parser plus a normalized robustness parser. We evaluate FLAN-T5, Qwen2.5-Instruct, and Llama-3-Instruct models under locked answer-or-abstain prompts, answer-only controls, and prompt-template variants. The benchmark is not solved by generic non-answer behavior: FLAN baselines remain weak on productive abstention, while stronger instruction-tuned models expose a selective but incomplete transition from answering to abstaining. Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct achieves the best overall reliability, but answer-expected zones remain difficult, calibration remains poor, and benign-item refusal persists. Prompt and parser robustness analyses preserve the main ranking and qualitative conclusions. The benchmark therefore provides a reproducible protocol for auditing answerability, abstention, refusal, and contamination as distinct but interacting dimensions of LLM reliability.The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/renweimeng/Know2Guess-A-Contamination-Aware-Multi-Zone-Benchmark.

Feng Lyu, Huiqin Yan, Sijing Duan et al.

The rapid updates of online news make tracking event developments challenging, highlighting the need for timeline summarization (TLS). Hallucinations, where LLM-generated content deviates from source news, still remain a critical issue in LLM-based TLS and are not well studied in existing works. To bridge this gap, we identify two primary types of hallucinations: unfaithful content during news summarization and information omission in date-event summarization. Then, we propose NTS-CoT, a novel framework that leverages Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to mitigate hallucinations in TLS. The framework consists of three key modules: i) Element-CoT to capture essential news elements for faithful summarization, ii) Date Selection to combine temporal saliency and event prominence for timestamp selection, and iii) Causal-CoT to infer causal relationships and reduce omissions in date-event summarization. Extensive experiments, including quantitative analysis on three TLS benchmarks and human evaluation, demonstrate that NTS-CoT outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, effectively mitigating hallucinations and improving LLM-based TLS performance. Our source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/NTS-CoT .

Xiuyuan Zhu, Ke Lu, Hao Wu et al.

Visual grounding with multimodal large language models is commonly formulated as autoregressive coordinate generation, where a model outputs bounding-box coordinates as text given an image and a referring-expression prompt. While this interface is simple and compatible with instruction following, it introduces a mismatch between training and evaluation: training optimizes token-level likelihood over coordinate strings, whereas grounding quality is measured by geometric overlap. We propose IoUPD, an IoU-aware privileged distillation method for coordinate-generating multimodal large language models. IoUPD uses ground-truth boxes not only as coordinate targets, but also as privileged training-time guidance. During training, the student receives the original image and prompt, while a frozen teacher receives a box-marked image and an augmented prompt that indicates the marked region. The student is trained with a supervised fine-tuning anchor and a privileged distillation loss whose token weights reflect both geometric importance and teacher reliability. At inference time, IoUPD requires no box overlay, privileged hint, teacher branch, or additional prediction module. Experiments on standard referring-expression grounding benchmarks show consistent region-level improvements over strong coordinate-generating baselines, demonstrating that ground-truth boxes can provide useful privileged guidance beyond serving as coordinate labels.

Ronghan Chen, Yandan Yang, Zuojin Tang et al.

Mobile manipulation is a key capability for general-purpose robots, yet remains challenging for current embodied learning methods. VLA policies are typically reactive and lack explicit world modeling, while existing World Action Models (WAMs) are still poorly aligned with the structure of mobile manipulation: they operate on coarse video chunks, model entangled navigation-manipulation actions, and train inverse dynamics under supervision that does not match autoregressive inference. As a result, they often miss fine-grained contact dynamics, suffer from action-distribution conflicts, and accumulate errors over long-horizon rollouts. We propose ABot-M0.5, a new WAM built on the insight that mobile manipulation requires alignment at three levels: temporal granularity, action space, and train-test consistency. To align temporal granularity, we introduce intermediate latent actions that capture local visual state transitions and serve as an bridging action space between video latents and embodiment-specific controls. To align action space, we design a dual-level Mixture-of-Transformers architecture that disentangles both modality representations and heterogeneous action subspaces such as base movement and arm manipulation. To align inference conditions, we propose the dream-forcing training strategy that progressively trains inverse dynamics on model-predicted videos, improving train-test alignment and robustness during autoregressive prediction. Experiments on challenging mobile and fine-grained manipulation benchmarks demonstrate that ABot-M0.5 achieves state-of-the-art performance in both long-horizon task success and finegrained control accuracy. These results highlight the critical importance of granularity-aligned, action-disentangled, and inference-consistent world-action modeling.

Mengqi Yuan, Zilong Zhou, Xinzhuang Xiong et al.

Existing computer-use benchmarks fail to capture the realism, complexity, and long-horizon demands of real-world computer use, limiting their ability to reveal the limitations of frontier agents. We introduce OSWorld 2.0, a benchmark of 108 long-horizon computer-use workflows across everyday and professional tasks, designed to capture complex and challenging real-world phenomena. Each task represents a realistic end-to-end workflow that takes human users a median of about 1.6 hours to complete and requires an average of 318 tool calls with Claude Opus 4.7 using maximum thinking, compared with about 30 in OSWorld 1.0. OSWorld 2.0 targets challenge phenomena that are common in real workflows yet underrepresented in prior benchmarks, spanning interaction-design challenges such as streaming interaction and dynamic environments, as well as agent-pattern challenges such as cross-source reasoning, implicit-state inference, and visual-spatial precision. Tasks are grounded in authentic input artifacts and cross-referenced against realistic stateful user profile data, and include separate safety reports auditing safety-sensitive execution. Under our primary binary-completion metric at 500 steps, Claude Opus 4.8 with maximum thinking and batched tool calls scores best but still completes only 20.6% of tasks at a 54.8% partial score; GPT-5.5 is far more token-efficient yet plateaus near 13%. These results show that current agents are still far from professional-level computer use: rather than stumbling on basic GUI control or coding, they lose track of constraints, miss information that arrives mid-task, guess rather than ask the user, and skip verification, struggling most when a task hinges on hidden state they must recover.

Yang Shen, Kai Lu, Min Xie et al.

Large-buffer reads increasingly connect data-intensive applications to high-speed storage. They amortize system-call overhead and create a larger in-kernel window for organizing page-cache work and submitting I/O. However, Linux buffered read primarily exploits only the former benefit. Within a large read, its conventional interleaved path repeatedly switches among fine-grained page-cache operations, amplifying metadata and serial orchestration overheads and failing to consistently expose enough in-flight requests to modern parallel SSDs. We present MARS, a multi-stage accelerated read stack for synchronous large-buffer buffered reads. MARS treats each large-range read as one unit of work and stages page-cache operations by data structure and dependency. During I/O waits, it handles user-buffer page faults and performs reorderable data copies early. Opportunistic kernel workers then copy remaining data in parallel and, when the backend provides sufficient parallelism, optionally submit I/O in parallel. We implement MARS in Linux 6.6.58. For MiB-scale fio reads, MARS improves bandwidth by up to 6.56 times over Linux. On five NVMe SSDs in RAID0, it reaches 36.87 GiB/s for 128 MiB random reads, 4.44 times Linux. MARS also accelerates DuckDB/Parquet queries by 1.80--2.15 times and ExecuTorch model loading by 3.17--3.61 times.

Shiyuan Feng, Huan-ang Gao, Haohan Chi et al.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a powerful recipe for improving language-model reasoning, but it is expensive to repeat on every new strong model because the target model must generate many rollouts during training. As models scale, post-training itself becomes a bottleneck. We study a weak-to-strong alternative: run RL on a smaller model where rollouts are cheaper, then reuse what that RL run learned to improve a stronger target model. Directly distilling the post-RL weak teacher is not enough, because the teacher's final policy mixes useful RL gains with the limitations of the smaller model. We propose Direct On-Policy Distillation (Direct-OPD), which transfers the teacher's RL-induced policy shift instead. Direct-OPD compares the post-RL teacher with its own pre-RL reference and treats their log-ratio as a dense implicit reward for the student. In plain terms, the checkpoint pair tells us which actions RL made the weak model more or less likely to take, and Direct-OPD applies that signal on the stronger student's own on-policy states. This directly reuses the weak model's RL supervision signal without training an explicit reward model or running sparse-reward RL on the target model. Empirically, Direct-OPD consistently leverages weaker teachers to improve stronger target models; notably, it boosts Qwen3-1.7B from 48.3% to 62.4% on AIME 2024 in just 4 hours on 8 A100 GPUs. It outperforms step-matched direct RL and enables the sequential composition of multiple policy shifts. Our results show that RL outcomes can be reused across model scales as implicit reward signals, not merely as final models to imitate.

Laiba Khan, Hung-Mao Wu, Wei Lin et al.

The increasing accessibility of artificial intelligence has led to a rapid rise in AI-generated videos, making it more difficult to distinguish between real and manipulated content. Many existing detection methods rely on a single model and often struggle to generalize across different types of deepfakes. In this work, we developed a multimodal deepfake detection system that combines both audio and visual analysis using an ensemble of models. The system includes AASIST for audio-based detection, and EfficientNet, XceptionNet, and MesoNet for analyzing visual features in video frames. The pipeline takes a video as input, separates the audio, and extracts face frames using MTCNN. Each model produces a score indicating the likelihood of the input being fake. These scores are then combined using ensemble strategies, including mean averaging and stacking. Mean fusion provides a simple and stable baseline, while stacking uses a trained meta-model to learn how to combine predictions more effectively. Results show that while individual models perform well on the datasets they were trained on, their performance drops when tested on more diverse datasets. The ensemble approach helps improve overall robustness by combining predictions from multiple models, leading to more consistent performance across different types of deepfakes. This suggests that using both audio and visual information together is a more reliable approach for deepfake detection. Our results highlight generalization to unseen manipulations as the central open challenge, with average accuracy around 70%.

Yongheng Zhang, Ziang Liu, Jiaxuan Zhu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are undergoing a fundamental transformation from conversational generators into integrated AI systems capable of reasoning, action, memory, and self-improvement. We conceptualize this transition as a shift from Chatbot to Digital Colleague: from conversational answers to persistent work. We organize this transition along two tightly coupled dimensions. First, at the cognitive core level, LLMs are advancing from Chatbot-era "fast thinking" systems driven by next-token prediction toward Thinking LLMs that leverage inference-time computation, Chain-of-Thought reasoning, reflection, process supervision, and reinforcement learning to support more deliberate and reliable cognition. Second, at the tool-augmented task execution level, LLMs are progressing from tool-calling Agents that invoke external resources in an ad hoc manner toward OpenClaw-style workstation systems (OpenClaw) equipped with persistent Workspaces, skills, verification loops, and governance. The "Workspace + Skill" paradigm makes episodic tool use colleague-like via state persistence, reusable procedures, task closure, and experience reuse. We examine data construction shifts from instruction-response pairs to State-Action-Observation trajectories and evaluation from static benchmarks to sandboxed, auditable, self-evolving AI ecosystems.

Yongheng Zhang, Zhipeng Xu, Hao Wu et al.

Video reasoning requires Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to remain grounded in dense evidence, yet existing systems largely adopt "read-once, generate-many" paradigm, in which visual grounding weakens during generation. This phenomenon has been widely observed and is known as Visual Anchoring Decay. To fill this gap, we introduce Latent Video Cache (Latent-VC), a recurrent latent visual cache inserted into the decoder to preserve compact visual memories throughout reasoning. The cache is trained with supervised contrastive cache alignment and vision-grounded GRPO with a latent grounding reward, while maintaining strict train-inference alignment through native decoder hidden states. Built on Qwen3.5-9B, Latent-VC consistently outperforms strong CoT and SFT+GRPO baselines across six video benchmarks, with especially clear gains on grounding-intensive and long-video tasks. In addition, it also achieves higher accuracy with substantially shorter responses, suggesting that latent visual caching improves video reasoning by preserving visual evidence rather than relying on longer textual chains.

Haonan Ge, Yiwei Wang, Hang Wu et al.

Streaming video understanding models must answer queries at any moment during an ongoing stream, using only what they have observed so far and under fixed memory and computation budgets. Existing methods address this by adding memory banks, retrieval modules, or visual token compression to preserve long-range history. However, strong recent-window baselines show that indiscriminate history injection can dilute current-scene perception, suggesting that the key challenge is not whether to use memory, but how to allocate it selectively. We formulate this as budgeted online latent evidence allocation and propose \textbf{SelectStream}, a selective latent-memory framework that keeps the current observation directly visible to a frozen VLM while exposing historical information only through a compact, query-conditioned evidence budget. Three coordinated mechanisms govern when to write, what to preserve, and how to retrieve: surprise-driven adaptive windowing, priority-preserving consolidation, and query-conditioned graph reasoning over a fixed-capacity latent memory graph. Retrieved evidence is calibrated and injected as latent tokens for answer generation, without replaying frames or growing the context with stream length. Experimental results show that SelectStream achieves strong online streaming performance and preserves general video understanding, reaching 82.67\% on StreamingBench, 67.03\% on OVO-Bench, and 74.4\% average accuracy on offline video benchmarks, while outperforming strong recent-window baselines and prior streaming memory methods.

Hao Wu, Jinjing Zhu, Nanyu Wu et al.

Edit-conditioned 3D scene retrieval pairs a reference 3D room with a natural-language modification and retrieves rooms from a corpus that satisfy the edit. Three lines of prior work each fall short on this task. 2D composed image retrieval reasons over pixel-level edits and has no primitive for 3D object sets. 3D foundation encoders embed individual objects but cannot compose at the scene level. 3D scene-grounding methods localize references inside a static scene rather than rank modified rooms across a corpus. We present CR-Refiner, a training-free reranker that wraps any base retriever's top-K candidates with three components. A frozen LLM parses the edit into a structured query entity, and each candidate is scored by an unbalanced optimal-transport problem over a 1xG cost matrix coupling category, style, material, and geometry. The unbalanced solver lets the single-entity query drop mass on irrelevant objects, modelling the asymmetry directly. An axis-conditional structural prior adds size-keyword cues for geometric edits and subject-anchor direction cues for spatial edits. An LLM verifier refines the top three candidates with continuous confidence. Because no benchmark evaluates compositional matching over 3D object sets, we additionally release 3D-CER, 4,963 edit-conditioned queries over a 23,381-room indoor corpus across five edit axes, with multi-positive ground truth, CIRR-style hard subsets, and zero-target adversarials. Across three qualitatively distinct base retrievers, CR-Refiner consistently improves hard-subset R@1 and mAP@10 on every edit axis.

Hao Wu, Heyi Lin, Zilin Wang et al.

Large pretrained vision models have substantially improved appearance-based 3D shape retrieval, but they still confuse shapes that look similar while differing in geometry. Although geometry-aware features can reduce these errors, naive fusion of geometry and appearance may hurt retrieval when the two modalities are already well aligned. We propose GATE-3D, a lightweight query-adaptive reranking method that incorporates geometry without retraining the retrieval backbone. For each query, GATE-3D predicts how much a geometry-aware score should adjust the appearance-based ranking using features that capture disagreement between the two modalities. This selective design lets geometry contribute where it helps and stay silent where it would hurt. Experiments on three open-set 3D retrieval benchmarks show that GATE-3D improves over appearance-only retrieval and is more robust than always-on fusion. On the primary benchmark, it improves mAP@10 by 2.00 points over appearance-only retrieval (p=0.041); it also improves leave-one-category-out generalization and reduces geometric false positives by 10.8%. GATE-3D achieves competitive zero-shot results against DAC-based baselines. We further find that simple linear routing is more effective than a small MLP in the low-data regime, suggesting that cross-modal disagreement features matter more than model capacity for adaptive routing.

HONOR Agentic Search Team, Zhengzong Chen, Lei Tang et al.

We present MagicSelector, a joint optimization framework integrating Counterfactual task decomposition, Progressive reranking, and Dynamic Top-K, designed to address the fundamental challenges of tool retrieval in agents. MagicSelector is a specialized framework capable of translating ambiguous user instructions into executable atomic subtasks and guiding high-precision tool retrieval, effectively mitigating redundant noise and severe context distraction in out-of-domain (OOD) scenarios.We empower MagicSelector with these capabilities through three key contributions: (1) a preferenceguided counterfactual task decomposition mechanism that utilizes a counterfactual reward to quantify the marginal causal gain of decomposition on retrieval ranking, effectively imposing fine-grained structural supervision on logical coherence; (2) a progressive tool reranking method driven by self-distillation hard negative mining, which optimizes both point-wise and list-wise relevance to enhance fine-grained discrimination among highly similar tools; and (3) a dual semantic boundary-aware dynamic Top-K strategy that adaptively monitors reranking score cliffs and inter-tool semantic shifts to dynamically truncate the candidate list, maximizing relevant tool recall while filtering long-tail noise. Evaluated on MTDTool, the first task decomposition benchmark we constructed tailored for mobile multi-turn interactions with process-level annotations, MagicSelector yields promising performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MagicSelector significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of tool retrieval accuracy, OOD generalization capability, and overall token efficiency, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

Jijun Chi, Zhenghan Tai, Hanwei Wu et al.

Financial question answering over U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings requires retrieving and synthesizing heterogeneous evidence dispersed across long, standardized, and highly redundant disclosures. Existing retrieval-augmented and multi-agent systems typically derive retrieval queries directly from the user's question and rank candidates by semantic similarity. Together, these choices create prior-corpus misalignment: a mismatch between model priors and the target filings' structure, terminology, and evidence standards. As a result, query generation misses corpus-specific evidence, while semantic reranking favors topically similar but evidentially invalid false-positive chunks. We propose FinSAgent, an evidence-grounded multi-agent framework that reframes SEC filing QA as corpus-aligned retrieval planning and corrects both ends with a single principle: inject corpus-side conditioning wherever model priors would otherwise dominate. FinSAgent combines (1) role-specialized agents anchored to the mandated 10-K item structure, (2) database-aware query decomposition that conditions each agent's sub-queries on a lightweight, summary-level view of the local corpus, and (3) multi-path retrieval with a learned feature-gated reranker that separates evidential validity from semantic similarity. Across five offline financial QA benchmarks, FinSAgent improves retrieval coverage and answer correctness over strong single-agent and multi-agent baselines; in a three-arm randomized online experiment with 1,000 anonymous user ratings, it also receives higher scores than baselines.

Yubo Gao, Haotian Wu, Xiaoyu Xu et al.

Existing methods for multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) under missing modalities usually follow a repair-first paradigm. We revisit this assumption and ask: \emph{should every missing modality be repaired?} A per-sample oracle analysis shows the answer is not always: full-modality input is optimal for only a small fraction of samples, and every modality subset is preferred by some samples. These results suggest that adding or repairing modalities may not always improve prediction, and that the utility of each modality is sample-dependent. Building on this finding, we propose \textbf{S}ufficiency-\textbf{I}nformed \textbf{E}vidential \textbf{V}al\textbf{vE} (\textbf{SIEVE}) that turns ``whether to repair'' into an explicit, learnable decision at the sample level. SIEVE compares a direct prediction branch with a repair branch, derives an empirical sufficiency signal from their per-sample loss gap, and routes each input through an evidential gate that jointly models sufficiency and its epistemic uncertainty. SIEVE is repair-agnostic: it operates as a plug-and-play decision on top of any explicit or implicit repair module, without modifying its internal design. Experiments on CMU-MOSI and IEMOCAP show that SIEVE consistently improves representative repair backbones across evaluated missing rates, and approaches the per-sample dual-branch achievable optimum.

Zhaoyang Jiang, Zhizhong Fu, Zicheng Li et al.

AI systems increasingly retrieve from records that revise themselves: issue threads, encyclopedic histories, policy logs, and long conversations. The challenge is not only finding relevant evidence, but deciding which claims remain in force, which were superseded, and when to abstain. Structured memories promise to solve this with typed edges, temporal updates, and conflict status, yet evaluations often change mechanism and prompt presentation together. We study this as Evidence-State Revision, comparing flat retrieval, coarse edge invalidation, and fine-grained RevisionLedger on 2,907 high-agreement questions from GitHub, multi-repo issue histories, Wikipedia, and DyKnow-style temporal streams. A render-matched control (same layout, deprecation disabled) reveals the central confound: when a value is changed and later restored, RevisionLedger appears to beat a flat baseline by +0.182, but almost all the gain comes from easier presentation; the fine-grained mechanism residual is indistinguishable from zero (+0.021 to +0.025 across two judge families). After presentation is controlled, coarse invalidation is the only mechanism that pays for current-state queries, beating the fine ledger by 0.084; the same query-sufficiency principle says provenance mainly needs retained invalidated evidence, not richer typing. Memory evaluations should hold render fixed, and deprecation-aware systems should deploy the coarsest retained state that covers their queries.

Hao Wu, Yanzhe Wang, Yu Feng et al.

Dexterous robotic hands face a longstanding trade-off among dexterity, compactness, and affordability. Particularly, high-degree-of-freedom designs typically demand complex actuation and transmission, hindering integration into human-scale forms. To address these challenges, this work presents a compact, low-cost linkage-driven anthropomorphic hand that achieves high dexterity, structural integration, and human-hand-like functionality. The hand integrates 20 joints driven by 16 independent actuators, with all actuation, sensing, and transmission components compactly embedded within a human-hand-sized structure. The resulting prototype weighs only 320g at a total cost below USD 400. To meet these objectives, a hybrid mechanical architecture combining planar and spatial linkage mechanisms is proposed, enabling decoupled multidirectional motion, biomimetic joint synergies, and high passive load-bearing capability. The thumb further incorporates biomimetic features supporting human-like reconfiguration and opposition movements. Through the coordinated integration of these mechanisms and structural layout, the prototype achieves a highly integrated design with anthropomorphic dexterity. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the hand achieves the maximum Kapandji score, reproduces all 33 Feix grasp types, and performs stable grasping and dexterous manipulation across a wide variety of daily objects and tools. These results validate the proposed hand as an affordable, compact, and mechanically efficient platform for dexterous manipulation, teleoperation, and robot learning in human-centered environments.

Hao Wu, Yanzhe Wang, Yu Feng et al.

Designing anthropomorphic robotic hands that balance functional dexterity with mechanical simplicity remains a significant challenge. Inspired by human hand synergies, this paper presents the SyLink Hand, an anthropomorphic dexterous hand that integrates biomechanical synergy principles with linkage-driven transmission mechanisms to achieve a high degree of anthropomorphism in appearance, kinematics, and functionality within a compact and cost-effective architecture. Biomechanical analysis of natural hand motions using motion capture gloves reveals strong kinematic correlations among hand joints, providing the basis for a simplified yet functional degree-of-freedom (DOF) configuration. Guided by these synergistic characteristics, optimized linkage mechanisms are employed to coordinate multiple joint motions and reproduce natural finger trajectories. A novel spherical four-bar linkage is further proposed to achieve decoupled flexion/extension (Flex/Ext) and abduction/adduction (Abd/Add) at the metacarpophalangeal joint within a compact form factor. The resulting prototype integrates 19 joints driven by 11 actuators, with a total mass of 520g and a manufacturing cost of approximately USD 400. Experimental evaluations demonstrate its human-like kinematic performance, high load-bearing capability, and versatile grasping and manipulation skills. These results validate that the synergy-inspired, linkage-based design effectively balances anthropomorphism, mechanical simplicity, and functional versatility, highlighting its potential for practical deployment in dexterity-demanding robotic applications.

Ling Xu, Chuyu Han, Borui Li et al.

Embodied AI models now span vision-language-action (VLA) models and world-action models (WAMs), but practical deployment remains fragmented across model-specific Python stacks, backend assumptions, and robot-side glue code, especially on heterogeneous edge devices. Existing inference runtimes are designed mainly for request-response serving and therefore do not satisfy the runtime contract of embodied deployment: multi-rate execution inside closed-loop control, latency-first batch-1 inference on heterogeneous hardware, and extensible embodied interfaces beyond fixed token I/O. We present Embodied.cpp, a portable C++ inference runtime for embodied models. Based on an architectural analysis of representative VLA models and WAMs, Embodied.cpp captures a shared execution path and organizes it into five layers: input adapters, sequence builders, backbone execution, head plugins, and deployment adapters. The runtime provides modular multi-rate execution, latency-first fused inference, and extensible operator and I/O support, enabling deployment across heterogeneous devices, robots, and simulators through one backend abstraction. We evaluate Embodied.cpp on two VLA models, HY-VLA and pi0.5, and on a preliminary WAM benchmark using a LingBot-VA Transformer block. The VLA deployments achieve successful closed-loop execution with 100.0% and 91.0% task success rates, respectively. The WAM benchmark reduces block memory from 312.2 MiB to 88.1 MiB. These results show that Embodied.cpp improves deployment efficiency while preserving high accuracy across diverse embodied model architectures.

Lei Shi, Di Wang, Harry Tran et al.

Recommendation systems, from traditional multi-stage to recent unified generative architectures, face challenges in incorporating diverse contextual signals, such as trending topics, breaking news, cultural events, and cross-surface user activities, into their ranking pipelines. These systems are designed to consume structured behavioral signals with consistent schemas, and lack the reasoning capability to naturally process unstructured or heterogeneously formatted contextual information. Incorporating such signals typically requires feature engineering, bespoke data pipelines, and carefully tuned heuristics. In this paper, we present an LLM-powered agentic recommendation system designed for Connected TV (CTV) content discovery that addresses these limitations. Our system leverages the reasoning capabilities of large language models to naturally process and synthesize diverse signals across varying schemas and structures, eliminating much of the manual integration inherent in traditional ranking and retrieval systems. Recognizing that current LLM-based solutions still fall short of traditional machine learning models in several recommendation tasks, including retrieval efficiency, personalization precision, and scalability, we adopt an agentic architecture that orchestrates specialized components, allowing each sub-task to be handled by the most suitable method, whether LLM-based or traditional ML. The main contribution of this work is our engineering approach to successfully overcoming the practical limitations of enabling LLM for recommendation, particularly inference latency. We share insights from our work and discuss the trade-offs and lessons learned in building a hybrid system that combines the flexibility of LLMs with the performance of established recommendation techniques.

Hao Wu, RongQi Han, Zhen Wang et al.

This paper describes our self-designed system for Task 1 of the MLC-SLM 2026 Challenge for multilingual two-speaker conversational speech. The system combines a modular speaker diarization front end with a challenge-adapted Qwen3-ASR-1.7B recognizer. The diarization front end performs voice activity detection, subsegment generation, CAMPPlus speaker embedding extraction, two-speaker spectral clustering, and RTTM-based audio segmentation. The resulting speaker-attributed segments are grouped by language or region and decoded by the adapted ASR model. For ASR adaptation, we first perform supervised full fine-tuning on the official training data, then apply LoRA fine-tuning with synthetic speech generated by a three-pipeline TTS-based synthetic speech augmentation framework, and finally refine the model using GRPO reinforcement learning with rewards based on WER/CER and penalties for hallucination, repetition, and length deviation. On the official development set, the full system achieves an average tcpMER of 23.70, reducing the error rate by 6.83 absolute points relative to the released Qwen-ASR-1.7B performance. On the final evaluation set, the system achieves an average tcpMER of 17.97. Ablation results show that supervised fine-tuning provides the largest gain, while synthetic-speech LoRA adaptation and reinforcement learning further improve robustness.

Yige Wang, Shiqi Yi, Hanzhou Wu

Designing cost functions of adaptive steganography traditionally requires extensive manual tuning, while deep learning methods lack interpretability. Although large language models (LLMs) offer an automated alternative via evolutionary generation, they often violate domain specific mathematical constraints due to a lack of explicit domain knowledge. To address this problem, we propose a novel evolutionary system focused on exploiting Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhanced LLMs for the automatic code-level generation of spatial steganography cost functions. This system incorporates a core Self Evolving RAG (SE-RAG) module, wherein a Code Semantic Signature (CSS) translates procedural code into aligned queries, retrieving explicit guidance from static literature and dynamic experience knowledge bases to steer the LLM generation process. A dedicated feedback mechanism then continuously refines the dynamic knowledge base with successful optimization strategies. Extensive experiments on the BOSSBase and BOWS2 datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently achieves higher steganographic security than existing automatically designed methods, and increases the average code execution rate by 46.3% while reducing the search cost by 26.1%, thereby highlighting the effectiveness, efficiency, and potential of combining LLMs with domain-specific knowledge in the field of automatic steganographic algorithm generation.

Yingdong Yang, Haijian Wu

LongEval-Sci evaluates scientific retrieval under collection change, where a system should be effective on the current corpus and remain usable as documents accumulate over time. This paper reports both official Task 1 results and development diagnostics for LongEval-Sci 2026. We compare the official PyTerrier BM25 and Qwen3 dense baselines with full-text BM25, additive and router variants, temporal full-text retrieval, temporal+citation retrieval, RM3 query expansion, cross-encoder reranking, and reciprocal rank fusion (RRF). In the official DCTR evaluation, the temporalized full-text runs are our strongest submissions: FT BM25+temporal and FT BM25+temporal+citation obtain the best ARP on all three snapshots (0.285, 0.267, and 0.180 nDCG@10) and reduce snapshot-3 relative change from 0.481 for the BM25 pivot to 0.368. Citation features match the temporal-only variant but do not provide a measurable additional gain in the official summary. Our internal snapshot-1 diagnostics show a complementary pattern: full-text BM25 is the strongest single development retriever (DCTR nDCG@10 = 0.3302, MAP = 0.2853), RRF gives the best deep recall (Recall@1000 = 0.9667), and some uncalibrated overlays can sharply degrade top-rank quality. We therefore conclude that full-text retrieval is the strongest foundation, temporal integration can improve official longitudinal effectiveness when applied to that foundation, and citation evidence still requires cleaner ablation and calibration. Beyond ranking, we also report a qualitative weekly IR-system update-monitoring analysis based on ingestion velocity and stale-coverage drift.

Yingdong Yang, Haijian Wu

We present a candidate-constrained retrieval-augmented generation system for LongEval-RAG, where each query is associated with an organizer-provided candidate set and all retrieved evidence and final citations must remain within that set. The system combines deterministic provenance tracking with passage-based retrieval, deterministic query expansion, pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF), reciprocal rank fusion (RRF), lightweight evidence reranking, citation-aware evidence aggregation, and optional MiniLM sentence reranking. We evaluate ten pipeline variants using a primary organizer evaluation and a supplementary self-generated diagnostic protocol. The primary evaluation shows that the strongest balanced variant is rule-minilm: a rule-based chunking pipeline with query expansion, PRF, RRF, reranking, citation prior, and late MiniLM sentence selection. This variant obtains the highest BERTScore, retrieval precision, nugget coverage, and average grade among our submissions. The result suggests that the main gain does not come from more complex semantic or topic-shift chunking, but from pairing stable rule-based evidence units with sentence-level neural selection before generation. The supplementary LLM-judge evaluation remains useful for early diagnosis and additional analysis, but it emphasizes different systems than the primary gold-answer and nugget-based evaluation, highlighting the need for multi-metric RAG evaluation.