Y He

h-index2
70papers
14citations

70 Papers

5.6CVJul 16Code
Pretraining Multiple Instance Learning Networks with Multi-Teacher Distillation from Pathology Slide Foundation Models

Mingxi Fu, Jiawen Li, Renao Yan et al. · tsinghua

Multiple instance learning (MIL) has become the main paradigm for whole-slide image (WSI) analysis in computational pathology. However, existing MIL aggregators are still typically trained from scratch for each downstream task, relying on limited slide-level labels to learn both aggregation mechanisms and downstream discriminative representations simultaneously. As a result, they often suffer from unstable optimization, overfitting, and limited transferability. Similar to pretrained ResNet and Vision Transformer models in natural image learning, MIL also requires reusable pretrained initialization. However, high-quality slide-level pretraining data remain scarce, and MIL models are usually lightweight and weakly supervised, making large-scale pretraining difficult in practice. To address this challenge, we propose a distillation-based pretraining framework for MIL, which leverages two slide-level foundation models, TITAN and CARE, as teachers to transfer their representational knowledge into a diverse set of MIL architectures. To effectively balance supervision from different teachers, we further introduce an angular dispersion normalized distillation loss. The distilled weights are then used as initialization for downstream adaptation. We conduct systematic evaluations on 15 benchmark datasets under both linear probing and full-parameter fine-tuning, and further validate its advantages in few-shot scenarios. Experimental results show that pretraining generally improves MIL aggregators over from scratch training, especially in linear-probing and few-shot settings, while maintaining the computational efficiency of lightweight MIL models. Code is available at https://github.com/fu0201/MIL_Pretrained.

43.6CVJul 14Code
Boogu-Image-0.1: Boosting Open-Source Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation

Guoxuan Chen, Chufeng Xiao, Haoran Yang et al.

We introduce Boogu-Image-0.1, an open-source unified multimodal understanding and generation model family, comprising Base, Turbo, Edit, and Edit-Turbo variants. It delivers competitive performance in high-quality text-to-image generation, fast inference, instruction-based editing, and bilingual (Chinese-English) text rendering. Closed-source multimodal systems like Nano-Banana-Pro and GPT-Image-2 achieve strong performance through system-level integration rather than a single model, yet their internal practices remain largely undisclosed. In this work, we demonstrate that targeted improvements in model understanding, data quality, and training pipelines, coupled with agentic inference-time scaling, can substantially enhance generation and editing performance even under highly constrained compute budgets. Comprehensive evaluations show that Boogu-Image-0.1 consistently matches or surpasses other open-source models across standard benchmarks, and achieves results approaching leading closed-source systems. Notably, this is accomplished with only 208.62 million unique images. The base model's theoretical training cost is only approximately \$400K. We share practical discussions that we believe are valuable to the broader research community, and release weights, code, and recipes under Apache 2.0 to advance the open ecosystem for unified multimodal understanding and generation. Our code is available here: https://github.com/Boogu-Project/Boogu-Image.

23.0AIJul 15Code
ReasFlow: Assisting Reasoning-Centric Scientific Discovery in Applied Mathematics via a Knowledge-Based Multi-Agent System

Yutong He, Daibo Li, Guohong Li et al.

Recent advances in Large Language Models have fueled autonomous AI agents capable of tackling complex scientific tasks, yet existing automated research systems remain predominantly focused on empirically driven domains with quantitative benchmarks, leaving theory-driven discovery, particularly in mathematically grounded disciplines requiring rigorous proofs and synthesis of domain knowledge, largely underexplored. Key challenges include the difficulty of verifying theoretical reasoning at scale, insufficient reasoning ability for autonomous frontier exploration, and a scarcity of procedural heuristics in the literature. We introduce ReasFlow, an end-to-end autonomous agent system for reasoning-centric scientific discovery that operationalizes a collaborative paradigm where the human expert acts as Principal Investigator while the agent executes rigorous derivations as a capable graduate student. ReasFlow incorporates (i) a robust internal verification loop that audits logical coherence and corrects fundamental errors prior to human inspection, and (ii) an automated knowledge retrieval and self-improvement mechanism that proactively surfaces both declarative facts and overlooked procedural heuristics, substantially reducing expert intervention. The system unifies literature synthesis, algorithm design, theorem proving, experimentation, and manuscript preparation in a single system. Deployed to autonomously generate five complete research papers with rigorous theoretical and empirical content from minimal prompts, ReasFlow consistently achieves the highest evaluation scores among state-of-the-art open-access baselines under a curated LLM-based review rubric. ReasFlow is publicly accessible via the ReasLab platform, providing a collaborative workspace for AI-assisted theoretical research. Github repo: https://github.com/ReasLab/ReasFlow.git.

4.9NAJul 15
NGMRES convergence analysis and proof of acceleration for contractive and noncontractive iterations

Y. He, L. Rebholz, M. Xiao

This paper gives the first convergence analysis and proof of acceleration for nonlinear GMRES (NGMRES) applied to contractive and noncontractive fixed point iterations (FPIs) for solving general nonlinear systems. Our main results are that in both the contractive and noncontractive cases, the ratio gain of the optimization problem is the mechanism responsible for accelerating (or enabling) convergence. Our analysis also reveals a second important quantity related to the optimization problem, which directly predicts the linear convergence rate at each iteration and proves it is at most 1; hence only higher order terms are responsible for NGMRES non-convergence. Numerical results for several challenging nonlinear test problems are given that illustrate the theory, show how the acceleration improves convergence, show that the quantity predicting the linear convergence rate is remarkably accurate and moreover can be useful for adaptively choosing NGMRES depth, show how restarts can improve convergence in noncontractive iterations, show how NGMRES is naturally suited for finding distinct solutions of a multi-solution PDE, and that NGMRES can perform better than Anderson acceleration when applied to superlinear FPIs.

7.3ROJul 15
nuTruck: Benchmarking Autonomous Driving Planning for Distributed Electric-drive Trucks

Jinyu Miao, Pu Zhang, Yifei He et al.

The dominance of traditional rule-based methods in autonomous driving has gradually been replaced by learning-based approaches. While learning-based planners have achieved considerable success in passenger vehicles, their performance on heavy-duty trucks, particularly modern distributed electric-drive trucks (DETs), remains largely unexplored. To facilitate research and application of learning-based planners in DETs, this letter presents the first high-fidelity benchmark, called nuTruck, designed to support large-scale neural network training and closed-loop evaluation. Given the complex dynamics and high rollover susceptibility of DETs, we first incorporate a highly accurate nonlinear truck dynamical model into the simulation, which enables independent driving and steering of all wheels and captures dynamic load transfer caused by acceleration, deceleration, and cornering, thereby allowing quantitative assessment of rollover risk in closed-loop simulation. Second, we adapt several rule-based and learning-based planners as baselines for DETs and evaluate their performance in closed-loop simulation. Finally, using real-world driving scenarios from the nuPlan dataset, we conduct extensive closed-loop evaluations, analyzing not only conventional collision-free planning performance, but also the dynamical safety of the planned trajectories. The proposed nuTruck benchmark is expected to serve as a new standard for fair and realistic evaluation of autonomous driving planners on DETs.

31.9CVJul 16Code
VideoChat3: Fully Open Video MLLM for Efficient and Generalist Video Understanding

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.

20.6CVJul 15
MultiRef-Compass: Towards Comprehensive Evaluation of Multi-Reference-to-Audio-Video Generation

Xiaohan Zhang, Yuqing Wen, Junlin Chen et al.

Multi-reference-to-audio-video (MR2AV) generation aims to generate coherent audio-video content conditioned on multiple references and textual instructions. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on text-driven generation, single-reference subject preservation, or isolated audio-video alignment, leaving the emerging MR2AV setting largely unexplored. Compared with these settings, MR2AV requires models to jointly reason over multiple references while generating synchronized visual and audio content. Models must not only preserve each reference faithfully but also correctly bind and compose multiple referenced entities into coherent audio-visual events. To address this gap, we introduce MultiRef-Compass, a unified benchmark for MR2AV generation. It comprises $350$ carefully curated samples constructed through a scalable and controllable asset-composition pipeline, covering multi-view subject preservation, multi-entity binding, and human-object-scene composition. To provide interpretable assessment, MultiRef-Compass defines an evaluation protocol with four dimensions: Basic Quality, Reference Consistency, Audio-Visual Consistency, and Instruction Following, using 14 sub-metrics. MultiRef-Compass integrates automatic metrics with a rejudging-enhanced MLLM-as-a-Judge framework, enabling scalable and auditable evaluation of both perceptual fidelity and reference-conditioned composition. Extensive experiments on eight representative MR2AV systems reveal substantial room for improvement across multiple evaluation dimensions, underscoring the need for a comprehensive benchmark and positioning MultiRef-Compass as a foundation for future MR2AV research.

15.3AIJul 23Code
HiMe: Real-Time Self-Hosted Personal Agent Platform for Health Insights with Wearable Devices

Wei Liu, Siya Qi, Linhai Zhang et al.

Traditional approaches to wearable health signal analysis, such as smartwatches, are constrained by rigid analytical frameworks and limited personalisation. The emergence of LLM agents creates a new opportunity for Personal Health Agentic Analysis, where health insights can be generated adaptively and in context. However, currently there is no open-source locally deployable platform capable of processing personal health data in real time while preserving privacy. We present HiMe, a locally deployable, privacy-first agent platform that is fully compatible with real-time health data ecosystems across a wide range of wearable devices. HiMe is guided by three design principles. The database is treated as a first-class component. Effectiveness and efficiency are jointly optimised to achieve a low-cost Pareto-optimal balance. Data are processed in real time while the user is modelled over the long term. Together, these principles make it practical for individuals to harness Personal Health Agents for continuous, personalised health monitoring for better wellbeing.

20.4LGJul 22Code
Auto-Fill: Learning to Predict Missing Values Accurately with Specialist Language Models

Yurong Liu, Yeye He, Haoyu Dong et al.

Predicting missing cell values in tabular data is a fundamental problem in data cleaning. While state-of-the-art reasoning models show great promise in predicting missing values in tables, by reasoning holistically across rows and columns, they are costly to deploy at scale and tend to be overconfident, often generating hallucinated or false-positive predictions. In this paper, we observe that achieving high-precision missing-value prediction in tables requires a distinct combination of three capabilities: (1) world knowledge, (2) text-based reasoning, and (3) code-based reasoning. We systematically explore design choices for combining these capabilities, and propose an Auto-Fill approach that post-trains three specialist small language models (SLMs), each optimized for one capability. We develop a calibrated ensemble mechanism that either dynamically selects the most confident specialist or abstains, ensuring high accuracy. Extensive experiments on 11 benchmarks with 2200 real tables drawn from diverse domains show that Auto-Fill achieves superior accuracy compared to state-of-the-art reasoning models (e.g., o3-pro, Gemini 3 Pro, and DeepSeek R1), while operating at a fraction (less than 1%) of the cost of these frontier models. Our results highlight the effectiveness of specialization and calibrated abstention in the important domain of tabular data. Auto-Fill is publicly available at https://github.com/lyrain2001/auto-fill.

22.2CVJul 20Code
Consistent Feature Transport for Image Relighting

Bohan Zhang, Huanwei Liang, Yuhan He et al.

Image relighting modifies illumination while preserving non-lighting content such as identity and geometry. Existing diffusion-based methods often suffer from unstable illumination changes or inconsistent content preservation under complex lighting, as they lack an explicit mechanism to learn feature transformations between images. We reformulate relighting as an illumination feature transport problem and introduce Consistent Feature Transport (CFT), a training principle that explicitly enforces illumination-consistent transport between source and target image distributions. Built upon rectified flow, CFT jointly models noise-to-image generation and illumination-consistent source-to-target transport through trajectory-level supervision. This dual-transport formulation encourages isolation of illumination-specific variations while preserving content-aligned features. To support complex lighting scenarios, we construct a large-scale portrait relighting dataset with diverse relighting effects. Experiments show consistent improvements over existing state-of-the-art relighting approaches and demonstrate that CFT can generalize to other editing tasks, including style transfer. Code is available at https://github.com/Dixin-Lab/CFT.

17.2CVJul 19Code
Understanding From Human Perspective: A Multi-agent System for Interactive Egocentric Medical Image Segmentation

Rongjun Ge, Dongyang Wang, Heng Zhu et al.

Interactive egocentric medical image segmentation (IEMIS) plays an important role in smart-glasses-assisted medical image review, segmenting the medical targets a clinician refers to from their egocentric view. Once it succeeds, the object-level visual evidence it provides strengthens the review and underpins fine-grained analysis and clinical decision-making. However, the instruction and the video both come from the user's egocentric perspective, which poses two challenges. (1) Semantic ambiguity leaves the model unable to confirm the user-intended target. (2) Visual variability makes the segmentation jump from frame to frame. In this paper, we propose EgoMed-Agent, a multi-agent system that understands the target from the human perspective through two workflows. (1) The \textit{Target Confirmation Workflow} grounds the instruction against candidate targets with a reliability score, confirming the target when the grounding is reliable and asking the user to clarify when it is not, thereby confirming the segmentation target. (2) The \textit{Localization-Guided Propagation Workflow} couples mask propagation with per-frame target localization, using the localized target to correct the propagated mask whenever the two diverge, so the segmentation stays on the target across the egocentric video. Extensive experiments show that EgoMed-Agent reaches 71.34\% average Dice, far above the best text-prompted baseline (11.70\%). Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/wdyyyyyy/EgoMed-Agent}{our project page}.

19.2AIJul 17Code
CRAFT: Clustering Rubrics to Diagnose Weak LLM Capabilities and Generate Targeted Fine-Tuning Data

Vipul Gupta, Zihao Wang, Razvan-Gabriel Dumitru et al.

Evaluations should do more than measure a models current performance. They should tell us what to fix for the next model iteration and provide a way to generate targeted post training data. Most evaluation pipelines identify weak examples, topics, or categories, but they leave the underlying capability failure implicit: they say where a model fails, not why. We introduce CRAFT, a method that converts any rubric based evaluation dataset into a model specific diagnosis of weak capabilities. CRAFT treats each grading criterion as a capability probe: it extracts a capability description from every prompt rubric pair, clusters these descriptions into a hierarchical capability tree, scores the target model at every node, and selects low performing nodes dynamically across tree levels, at the granularity where each failure is clearest. The selected weak capabilities then direct the generation of targeted supervised finetuning data. Holding the data generation, finetuning, and evaluation setup fixed, we compare CRAFT against prompt level EvalTree clustering and untargeted random generation on four open source models, two professional domains (finance and legal), and 13 held out benchmarks disjoint from the diagnostic data. CRAFT achieves the strongest finance domain average for all four models under repeated temperature decoding; on legal domain, it is strongest for three of four models and remains within the decoding variance bands of the best baseline on the fourth. Diagnosing weaknesses at the level of rubric criteria, rather than prompts or categories, thus yields both a sharper picture of what a model cannot do and measurably better models after finetuning on that diagnosis.

23.6CLJun 30Code
SeKV: Resolution-Adaptive KV Cache with Hierarchical Semantic Memory for Long-Context LLM Inference

Amirhossein Abaskohi, Giuseppe Carenini, Peter West et al.

Large language models increasingly operate over long contexts, where the KV cache becomes a dominant memory bottleneck: its size grows linearly with sequence length and must be retained throughout decoding, making full GPU caching prohibitively expensive without compression. Existing KV cache compression methods struggle to balance efficiency with faithful context preservation. Token eviction discards information, while semantic grouping fixes compression decisions at prefill time; neither can recover token-level detail from a compressed span once it becomes relevant during generation. As a solution, we propose SeKV, a resolution-adaptive semantic KV cache that organizes context into entropy-guided semantic spans and stores them across a GPU-CPU memory hierarchy without discarding information. Each span keeps a lightweight summary vector on GPU for coarse routing and a low-rank SVD basis on CPU for on-demand token-level reconstruction. A trained zoom-in mechanism selectively expands query-relevant spans during decoding, enabling precise retrieval without materializing the full KV cache on GPU. SeKV enables adaptive token-level reconstruction while keeping the base LLM fully frozen and adding fewer than 0.05% trainable parameters. Across four benchmarks, SeKV improves over the strongest semantic compression baseline by 5.9% on average while reducing GPU memory by 53.3% versus full KV caching at 128K context. Code is available on https://github.com/AmirAbaskohi/SeKV.

14.5CVJul 10Code
ALICE: Learning a General-Purpose Pathology Foundation Model from Vision, Vision-Language, and Slide-Level Experts

Jiawen Li, Tian Guan, Huijuan Shi et al.

Foundation models are reshaping computational pathology, yet their capabilities remain shaped by pretraining objectives, data sources, and spatial scales, fragmenting complementary expertise across separate backbones. Here we present ALICE, a unified foundation model trained through multi-stage agglomerative distillation that sequentially distills eight vision-only, vision-language, and slide-level teacher models into dedicated modules of a single backbone. ALICE is pretrained on 24,985,184 tile-level pathology images and 155,604 high-resolution images, and evaluated across 21 task scenarios, 96 downstream tasks, and 48 data sources, spanning region-of-interest tissue analysis, vision-language multimodal evaluation, and whole-slide clinical assessment. In all three evaluation settings, ALICE achieved the best average rank among task-matched pathology foundation models. These results demonstrate that agglomerative distillation can consolidate complementary capabilities from specialized models into a unified backbone for broad computational pathology applications. The model is available at https://github.com/WonderLandxD/ALICE.

21.8CVJun 23Code
TuringViT: Making SOTA Vision Transformers Accessible to All

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.

27.1CLJul 7Code
Spider 2.0-AIFunc: Extending Real-World Text-to-SQL to AI-Native SQL Workflows

Tianyang Liu, Canwen Xu, Fangyu Lei et al.

Major cloud data platforms now expose large language model capabilities as native SQL functions, enabling analysts to perform classification, filtering, sentiment analysis, extraction, similarity search, and aggregation within ordinary SQL queries. Yet existing text-to-SQL benchmarks evaluate only conventional SQL and provide no signal on whether models can generate such AI-native SQL. We introduce Spider 2.0-AIFunc, a benchmark of 465 verified instances across 125 real-world databases covering six types of AI functions on the Snowflake platform. Starting from an existing enterprise text-to-SQL benchmark, we construct Spider 2.0-AIFunc through an agent-based pipeline that rewrites source tasks into AI-native form, simultaneously transforming target queries and refining natural language instructions to make the intended AI-native solution explicit and reduce ambiguity. All instances pass a multi-round repeated execution protocol across temporally separated windows to confirm result stability before release. Evaluating ten state-of-the-art language models, we find that the strongest proprietary models reach 67-70% execution accuracy while the best open-source model achieves 58.1%, a gap driven primarily by errors in predicate specification, schema grounding, and AI function parameterization. Agent frameworks designed for traditional text-to-SQL challenges, such as schema retrieval and relevant table selection, do not transfer effectively to AI-native SQL: a minimal agent setup consistently matches or outperforms more elaborate alternatives, suggesting that the strategies these frameworks employ are less critical in this setting. Data are available at https://github.com/Leolty/Spider2-AIFunc .

14.7CVJul 2Code
Interpretation-Oriented Cloud Removal via Observation-Anchored Residual Flow with Geo-Contextual Alignment

Ziyao Wang, Maonan Wang, Yucheng He et al.

Cloud removal (CR) is essential for optical remote sensing, serving as a prerequisite for reliable downstream interpretation, such as semantic segmentation and change detection. However, existing CR approaches often prioritize visual realism while overlooking their impact on subsequent analytical tasks, leading to semantic drift and degraded downstream performance. To address this issue, we propose Geo-Anchored Cloud Removal (GACR), a unified framework that jointly ensures faithful reconstruction and robust interpretability. At its core, GACR incorporates Observation-Anchored Residual Flow (OAR-Flow), which reformulates CR as a physically grounded residual inversion process. By anchoring the generative trajectory to the cloudy observation rather than pure noise, OAR-Flow enables fast, stable, and faithful reconstruction. To further preserve semantic structures critical for downstream interpretation, GACR integrates Geo-Contextual Prior Alignment (GCPA) to constrain the reconstruction within a semantic manifold induced by a Vision Foundation Model (VFM). Consequently, GACR strictly maintains the spatial-semantic integrity of complex landscapes. Extensive experiments across six CR datasets and twelve downstream tasks demonstrate that GACR produces superior reconstruction quality while consistently improving downstream task accuracy. The code is available at https://github.com/wzy6055/GACR.

21.2CVJun 29Code
GeoEdit: Geometry-Aware Object Editing via Dual-Branch Denoising

Yi He, Jiangming Wang, Xinyu Wang et al.

Precisely manipulating objects in a single photograph (translation, rotation, scaling) while obeying 3D physical constraints remains unsolved for diffusion-based editors. Current 2D methods lack spatial awareness and produce perspective violations. Forcing structural proxies into the latent space also disrupts variance homogeneity, and the resulting self-attention leakage leads to ghosting and background blur. The core difficulty is asymmetric: the relocated object must follow a rigid geometry, yet the uncovered background needs freedom to synthesize plausible content. We present GeoEdit, a training-free Lift-Manipulate-Render-Denoise pipeline that satisfies both constraints. We decouple scene and object in 3D, align them through point correspondence, and render a geometry-aligned proxy with a structural depth map. A Dual-Branch Denoising stage then refines this proxy: a video diffusion backbone preserves object identity, while 3D constraints are injected into the foreground within a narrow denoising window at matching noise variance (variance-homogeneous injection). The background denoises freely. Because the injected signal matches the native latent statistics, self-attention stays undisturbed. We also introduce GeoEditBench, a pose-aware benchmark covering object translation, object rotation, and camera movement with pose-aware evaluation metrics. Experiments confirm consistent gains in geometric accuracy, identity fidelity, and background quality. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Heey731/GeoEdit.

15.3AIJun 28Code
SurgVLA-Bench: Towards Evaluating Vision-Language-Action Models for Laparoscopic Surgical Robotics

Jiashuo Sun, Yue He, Wenxuan Liu et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models represent a promising direction for embodied intelligence in surgical robotics. Despite the prevalence of VLA benchmarks for general robotics, standardized evaluation platforms specifically designed for surgical contexts remain absent. To address this limitation, we present SurgVLA-Bench, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating VLA models in laparoscopic surgical robotics. Leveraging the SurRoL simulation platform, we construct a hierarchical task taxonomy ranging from atomic actions to complete surgical procedures, complemented by a multi-dimensional evaluation framework assessing action accuracy and semantic consistency. We then systematically evaluate two representative paradigms, including autoregressive models such as OpenVLA, and flow matching models such as $π_{0}$, $π_{0.5}$, and SmolVLA. Our experiments show that autoregressive models tend to excel in semantic understanding, while flow matching models often achieve higher task precision but may face generalization trade-offs. However, even the best-performing models remain far from satisfactory, as the constrained endoscopic field of view, restricted viewing angles, and frequent occlusions persist as fundamental physical bottlenecks. The code and data are available at https://github.com/VCL-HNU/SurgVLA

23.0CVJun 25Code
Scaling Multi-Reference Image Generation with Dynamic Reward Optimization

Wenwang Huang, Yusen Fu, Junjie Wang et al.

While personalized image generation has achieved remarkable progress, multi-reference image generation (MRIG) remains a challenging task. Most existing benchmarks fail to adequately evaluate complex MRIG scenarios, hindering further progress in this area. To better assess model performance on complex MRIG tasks, we introduce OmniRef-Bench, a benchmark that covers complex combinations of reference image types and a large number of reference images. Evaluations on OmniRef-Bench show that mainstream open-source models struggle in complex MRIG scenarios, and their performance deteriorates significantly as the number of mixed-type reference images increases. To address this issue, we propose DyRef, a two-stage training framework. In the first stage, supervised fine-tuning equips the model with the basic capability to handle complex MRIG tasks. In the second stage, we introduce Difficulty-aware Advantage Reweighting (DAR) and Discriminative Reward Scaling (DRS). DAR dynamically adjusts the optimization objective to improve performance when handling a large number of mixed-type reference images. DRS enlarges intra-group reward differences for more effective policy optimization. Experiments demonstrate that DyRef significantly improves the performance of open-source models on OmniRef-Bench and single-image editing benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalization capability of our approach.

21.8CVJun 25Code
Confidence-Aware Tool Orchestration for Robust Video Understanding

Yangfan He, Yujin Choi, Jaehong Yoon

Video reasoning language models implicitly assume that every input frame is equally reliable. This leads to what we term the Blind Trust Problem: under realistic perturbations such as motion blur, glare, or occlusion, frontier video reasoning models can suffer 15-30%p accuracy drops on real-world embodied benchmarks, while remaining unaware that their visual evidence has been degraded. To address this challenge, we propose Robust-TO, an agentic video understanding framework that explicitly integrates per-frame trustworthiness into every stage of reasoning. Robust-TO organizes heterogeneous visual perception tools under a unified evidence interface. Each tool receives a sub-query derived from the original question and a set of trustworthy frames selected by the reliability-relevance score. It returns evidence in a shared format: a concrete prediction (e.g., a bounding box, motion trajectory, recognized text, or action label), temporal grounding, and a calibrated reliability score. During reasoning, these calibrated scores guide evidence weighting in a three-tier synthesis process (high/medium/low) and define a confidence-cost GRPO reward that jointly optimizes correctness, evidence reliability, and efficiency. On two video reasoning benchmarks spanning eight tasks, Robust-TO achieves 56.4% average accuracy on clean inputs, surpassing the strongest open-source baseline by 10.6%p and outperforming Gemini-2.5-Pro (46.2%). Under five realistic corruption types, Robust-TO maintains 54.3% average accuracy, 5.8%p above the strongest open-source baseline, while exhibiting the smallest clean-to-corrupted accuracy drop among all compared methods.

16.3CVJun 18Code
ARTEMIS: Agent-guided Reliability-aware Temporal Mask Evolution for Imperfectly Supervised Video Polyp Segmentation

Tong Wang, Siwen Wang, Yaolei Qi et al.

Imperfectly supervised video polyp segmentation (VPS) aims to learn dense, temporally consistent masks from inexpensive supervision, including weak annotations (points, scribbles) and semi-supervision with few densely labeled frames. This setting is clinically valuable but challenging due to weak contrast, ambiguous boundaries, motion blur, and specular highlights, compounded by sparse pixel-level guidance. While SAM2 can generate dense masks from sparse inputs, direct pseudo-labeling often yields geometry-degraded masks with boundary leakage, underutilizes temporal consistency, and ignores reliability. To address these issues, we propose ARTEMIS, a unified framework for imperfectly supervised VPS driven by agent-guided reliability-aware temporal mask evolution. ARTEMIS initializes coarse masks from available supervision: SAM2 converts points/scribbles, while dense labels serve as reliable anchors. A debate-and-judge vision-language agent selects reliable temporal anchors under weak supervision, which are propagated bidirectionally with SAM2 to refine unreliable or unlabeled frames. Finally, ARTEMIS trains the segmenter using temporal reliability-aware robust learning, incorporating reliability-guided reference selection, a Reference Prototype Transport Module, and reliability-aware robust loss. These components assess mask reliability, evolve anchors over time, transport target identity across frames, and down-weight noisy supervision instead of discarding difficult samples. Experiments on SUN-SEG and CVC-ClinicDB-612 under scribble, point, and limited-label settings demonstrate that ARTEMIS achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code will be released at https://github.com/wangtong627/ARTEMIS.

11.5CVJul 9
LightCrafter: PBR-Conditioned Video Diffusion Refinement for Controllable and Consistent Relighting

Zixin Guo, Yehonathan Litman, Yifeng He et al.

Video relighting requires balancing long-form temporal consistency with a physically grounded understanding of light transport, which depends on accurate estimation of intrinsic scene properties such as materials, geometry, and illumination. Existing methods follow two paradigms: (1) reconstruct a video's photometric properties via inverse rendering and relight them to a target illumination via forward rendering, using physically-based rendering (PBR) or a neural renderer; these suffer from noisy reconstructions and struggle with hard-to-model effects such as global illumination. (2) Frame the task as generative video-to-video translation conditioned on relighting targets (a target environment map or text); this limits relighting control and temporal stability, since diffusion models struggle to translate long-form videos, and is constrained by the availability of input/relit training pairs. We propose LightCrafter, a hybrid pipeline that reformulates video relighting as video translation of a proxy video: rather than translating the input video directly to the target, we translate a PBR rendering of the input under the target illumination to the final target. This bakes illumination targets into the PBR proxy, removing the need to teach the diffusion model illumination concepts like environment maps, and enables more intricate lighting control while naturally providing long-form temporal consistency. We show PBR renders alone already outperform some prior art but struggle with effects like global illumination; to capture these, we leverage photometric priors in video generation models by post-training CogVideoX on synthetic video pairs and real-world unpaired videos. We outperform prior state-of-the-art on existing real-world relighting benchmarks and contribute a synthetic benchmark for further analysis. We will release our dataset, benchmark, metrics, and code.

15.7ROJul 16
Towards Human-like Physical Intelligence: LifelongVision-Language-Action Learning for Robotic Manipulation

Yao He, Gan Sun, Wenqi Liang et al.

Similar to the natural capabilities of humans to sequentially learn new tasks, robots with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models should possess lifelong learning ability to learn a new task when deployed in open-world environments. However, most recently proposed lifelong learning models aim to effectively learn the current task (plasticity) or maintain high accuracy on previous tasks (stability), while the plasticity-stability trade-off remains largely unsolved in robotic manipulation models. To address this fundamental challenge, we propose a cache-efficient lifelong Vision-Language-Action learning framework for robotic manipulation (i.e., LifelongVLA), which alleviates the plasticity-stability trade-off with a dual-timescale adaptation mechanism while achieving low-cost robotic deployment with a cache-efficient replay strategy. More concretely, we propose a dual-timescale LoRA gating module to decompose VLA adaptation into two lightweight pathways: a short-term adapter for plasticity and a long-term adapter for stable consolidation. These pathways are integrated via a task-aware gate, enabling explicit control of the plasticity-stability trade-off. In the skill replay phase, a cache-efficient stochastic replay strategy is proposed to preserve more balanced retention signals without full-trajectory storage. Finally, experiments show that LifelongVLA outperforms existing baselines, demonstrating efficient skill expansion, robust retention of learned manipulation behaviors, and reduced reliance on retraining for real-world deployment on an xArm robot.

20.8CRJul 10
Malaika: Understanding Malware through Tri-Grounded Agentic Reasoning

Xingzhi Qian, Xinran Zheng, Yiling He et al.

Recent LLM-based systems have shown promising capabilities for security-focused code analysis. Malware understanding, however, poses a distinct challenge: analysts must reconstruct high-level malicious behaviors under partial observability from sparse, dispersed evidence intertwined with benign functionality. While static analysis can expose security-relevant signals, the central challenge is not merely identifying suspicious code, but determining whether the evidence sufficiently supports an auditable behavior-level conclusion. We formulate malware understanding as a grounded reasoning problem and argue that reliable behavior reconstruction requires three complementary forms of grounding. Domain grounding constrains how behavior hypotheses are generated and evaluated, semantics grounding localizes and connects supporting program evidence, and knowledge grounding supports behavioral attribution through externally verifiable threat knowledge. To study this hypothesis, we present Malaika, a multi-agent framework that operationalizes the three grounding mechanisms through analyst-inspired reasoning, tool-mediated evidence localization, and retrieval-based behavioral attribution. We instantiate Malaika for Android malware analysis and evaluate it on malware-understanding tasks. Results show that Malaika improves analysis quality over prior LLM-based malware-analysis frameworks and demonstrate that reliability depends not only on model capability but also on the reasoning process. In particular, comparisons against malware-analysis systems and frontier agentic frameworks show that grounding-aware reasoning produces more precise and auditable conclusions. Ablation studies further support the grounding hypothesis. These findings suggest that grounding-aware reasoning provides a principled foundation for reliable malware understanding and, more broadly, for evidence-grounded software analysis.

28.8AIJul 6
Rethinking On-Policy Self-Distillation for Thinking Models

Simran Kaur, Narutatsu Ri, Yinghui He et al.

Self-distillation is a promising recipe for self-improvement in language models. In this setting, a model can serve as its own teacher when given privileged information, such as a solution to a math problem. This seems especially appealing for thinking models, which can use test-time reasoning to absorb the privileged information. Surprisingly, we show that privileged self-distillation degrades thinking models on long reasoning traces: across five Qwen3 and OLMo thinking models evaluated on AIME24, AIME25, and HMMT25, privileged-context distillation causes a relative drop of up to 17% in avg@16 accuracy. The degradation scales with the amount of privileged context withheld from the student and is most pronounced at long rollout budgets, where thinking models otherwise obtain their largest gains. This failure mode is not specific to self-distillation: on-policy distillation (OPD) improves thinking models, but privileged OPD reverses these gains. Our diagnostics link this failure mode to how privileged teacher context reshapes learning at high-entropy forking positions, where multiple continuations remain plausible and may lead to different reasoning paths. Privileged context lowers fork rates in thinking-model rollouts but not in instruction-model rollouts. This leads to an interesting dichotomy, where privileged context can help instruction-tuned models but hurts stronger thinking models. The effect is visible when the student begins a self-correction branch, where privileged OPD penalizes sampled reconsideration tokens that vanilla OPD supports. Thinking models trained with a privileged teacher produce fewer verification, backtracking, and hedging markers, even after length normalization. These findings indicate that self-distillation for strong thinking models requires attention to token-level signal, especially around correction and reasoning steps.

32.7CLJul 16
T^2MLR: Transformer with Temporal Middle-Layer Recurrence

Ziyang Cai, Xingyu Zhu, Yihe Dong et al.

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

26.1LGJun 29
SWE-INTERACT: Reimagining SWE Benchmarks as User-Driven Long-Horizon Coding Sessions

Mohit Raghavendra, Anisha Gunjal, Aakash Sabharwal et al.

We introduce SWE-Interact, a new testbed for evaluating coding agents on multi-turn, interactive, user-driven software engineering tasks. Existing frontier SWE benchmarks typically provide complete requirements upfront and evaluate agents on autonomous implementation. In contrast, SWE-Interact places agents in a realistic developer workflow: a carefully designed user simulator starts with vague or incomplete instructions, progressively reveals requirements, inspects the agent's workspace, and provides targeted feedback, revisions, and new constraints until the full task goal has been handed off. Grounded in large-scale studies of real coding-agent interactions, this setup tests whether agents can discover user intent, adapt to evolving requirements, and build on their own prior work. Across a suite of frontier and open-weight models, we find that strong performance on single-turn SWE tasks does not reliably transfer to multi-turn, user-driven workflows: the best-performing models solve roughly 50% of single-turn baseline tasks but only 25% of the corresponding SWE-Interact tasks. The strongest models in our evaluation, including Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5, start strong even in the face of vague initial instructions, persevere until all the requirements are surfaced by the user, integrate them better and write clean code. However, they still suffer from over-agentic coding, forgetting requirements and technical mistakes. Weaker models start poorly under ambiguity, give up early, forget or ignore instructions and rework their code more. Overall, SWE-Interact measures an orthogonal, real-world capability axis for frontier model development: interactive goal discovery and iterative refinement with a user in the loop.

10.6LGJun 10
Rubric-Guided Self-Distillation: Post-Training Without Rubric Verifiers

MohammadHossein Rezaei, Anas Mahmoud, Zihao Wang et al.

Rubrics have emerged as an alternative to RLVR in open-ended domains where a single ground-truth final answer is not available. Existing rubric-based training methods rely on an LLM verifier that scores each rollout against rubrics. This introduces substantial training-time overhead, exposes optimization to verifier-specific biases, and reduces rubric feedback to a sparse end-of-trajectory signal. We propose Rubric-Guided Self-Distillation (RGSD), a verifier-free training method in which the base policy, conditioned on the rubric, serves as the teacher for the unconditioned student. RGSD distills the rubric-conditioned teacher distribution into the student token-by-token, replacing sparse trajectory-level rewards with dense per-token learning signals and removing the LLM judge from the training loop entirely. Across Qwen-2.5 (3B, 7B) and Qwen3-Thinking (4B, 8B) models on medical and science domains, RGSD achieves rubric satisfaction comparable to judge-based GRPO while using one on-policy rollout per prompt and no training-time verifier calls. Ablations show that raw rubrics provide a stronger teacher enrichment signal than self-generated reference responses, while a stronger GRPO judge can outperform RGSD in some settings, positioning RGSD as a complementary verifier-free alternative when verifier cost or reliability is the bottleneck.

23.5AIJul 5
ResearchStudio-Idea: An Evidence-Grounded Research-Ideation Skill Suite from ML Conference Outcomes

Qihao Zhao, Yangyu Huang, Yalun Dai et al.

Large language models have made research ideation increasingly accessible, yet effective idea development requires more than generating candidate directions. Researchers must ground a problem in current literature, identify meaningful bottlenecks, differentiate from existing solutions, and evaluate risks before committing to implementation. We present ResearchStudio-Idea as a reusable skill suite for this first mile of research ideation. The suite includes Paper-Search, a standalone multi-source literature search skill; Scoop-Check, a standalone prior-art collision checker for novelty claims; and IdeaSpark, the end-to-end skill that composes evidence grounding, pattern-guided generation, collision retrieval, audit, and idea-card rendering into one workflow. IdeaSpark is constructed from a corpus of 1,947 machine learning conference papers collected from ICLR, ICML, and NeurIPS between 2021 and 2025, including Oral papers, a separately tracked high-citation subset, and rejected submissions. Analysis of these outcomes reveals 31 recurring ideation sub-patterns, consolidated into 15 reusable ideation patterns. Each pattern is operationalized as a structured card containing research contexts, bottleneck types, differentiation strategies, supporting precedents, and common failure modes. Given a research problem and an evidence bundle, IdeaSpark evaluates evidence readiness, reconstructs the surrounding research context, identifies unresolved bottlenecks, selects relevant patterns, instantiates one candidate direction, retrieves potentially conflicting prior work, and performs outcome-informed auditing. This workflow transforms reusable ideation patterns into traceable research proposals. Blind automated-judge evaluations show that IdeaSpark consistently produces stronger research proposals than no-skill and generic-skill baselines while maintaining competitive novelty.

11.9CVJul 23
FA-LAM: Focus-Aware Large Avatar Model for One-Shot 4D Animatable Gaussian Head

Yingdong Hu, Yisheng He, Yiming Jiang et al.

We propose FA-LAM, a Focus-Aware Large Avatar Model for one-shot animatable Gaussian head creation, while simultaneously enabling static 3D and dynamic 4D full-head recovery. The core of our method lies in a thorough analysis of the attention mechanisms and the entangled reconstruction and animation training pipeline adopted by prior state-of-the-art approaches. Our analysis identifies two main factors that compromise the quality of 3D full-head generation: (1) incorrect and noisy attention activations, and (2) conflicts between the tasks of reconstruction and animation. To address the first issue, we introduce a symmetric and semantic attention regularization strategy that leverages the inherent semantics and structural symmetry of human heads. To disentangle the objectives of reconstruction and animation, we develop a novel dual-phase training pipeline that separates the model's capabilities for large-view hallucination and animation into distinct modules. Moreover, we enhance our model to support multi-view and streaming 4D reconstruction in an efficient and memory-friendly manner through a core autoregressive modification with tailored visibility-aware token fusion. Collectively, these innovations enable FA-LAM to reconstruct animatable Gaussian full heads with superior quality, particularly in fine facial regions and large viewing angles.

CVJun 26
PixelU: A U-Shaped Transformer for Efficient End-to-End Pixel Diffusion

Zipeng Guo, Lichen Ma, Yu He et al.

End-to-end pixel-space diffusion models bypass the lossy compression of Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) but struggle to jointly model low-frequency semantics and high-frequency signals in high-dimensional space. Existing works heavily rely on complex pixel decoders to alleviate this issue. In this paper, we challenge this trend by revealing that these decoders primarily compensate for the optimization difficulties inherent to velocity prediction ($v$-prediction). Under the clean data paradigm ($x$-prediction), they are redundant. Motivated by this insight, we advocate for simplicity over complexity and introduce PixelU, a minimalist, single-stage U-shaped Diffusion Transformer tailored for pixel space. PixelU abandons auxiliary decoders in favor of zero-cost skip connections, which provide an "information highway" that directly routes uncorrupted high-frequency spatial details from shallow to deep layers. To further enable the backbone to focus exclusively on modeling low-frequency semantics, we introduce a constant-channel spatial down-sampling mechanism as a natural low-pass filter, which compresses deep features into a compact, low-frequency semantic manifold. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this decoupling of frequencies could outperform the strong baseline (JiT-G) with only about 1/3 of its computation cost. On ImageNet 256$\times$256 and 512$\times$512, PixelU achieves FID of 1.63 and 1.92 respectively, surpassing recent pixel-space methods and establishing a simple yet powerful new paradigm for end-to-end diffusion models.

12.1SEJul 21
LLM-Based Invariant Testing for Software Functional Bugs

Ruogu Yang, Yifeng He, Yundi Xu et al.

Manually writing unit tests to uncover functional bugs in software libraries is not only time-consuming but also requires a deep understanding of the intended semantics of the APIs. Heuristic-based test generation methods suffer from low usability because they cannot reason about program semantics or interpret source code and documentation as humans do. Traditional fuzzing techniques like OSS-Fuzz often rely on crashes to detect bugs, but functional bugs do not always cause crashes. To overcome these limitations, we present LISA, a novel LLM-based invariant testing framework for software functional bugs. LISA iteratively generates API sequences and program invariants guided by API n-gram feedback, achieving higher bug-detection rates and competitive code coverage compared with both fuzzing and prior LLM-based test generation approaches, and reporting each finding as a high-confidence bug candidate for developer confirmation.

26.7CVJun 23
IV-CoT: Implicit Visual Chain-of-Thought for Structure-Aware Text-to-Image Generation

Zixuan Li, Haokun Lin, Yicheng Xiao et al.

Unified multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved strong text-to-image generation quality, but still struggle with structure-aware prompt following, where object counts, spatial relations, attribute bindings, and coarse layouts must be preserved. We attribute this limitation in part to the entanglement of structural planning and appearance rendering within a single conditioning stream. To address this issue, we propose Implicit Visual Chain-of-Thought (IV-CoT), a latent visual reasoning framework for query-conditioned image generation. IV-CoT decomposes the visual conditioning queries into a structural-to-semantic cascade, where structural queries first form a latent visual plan and semantic queries then render appearance conditioned on this plan. To guide the structural queries, we introduce training-only sketch supervision, which encourages them to capture structure from sketches without requiring sketch extraction or intermediate decoding at inference time. IV-CoT performs implicit CoT reasoning in a single forward pass and achieves superior results on GenEval and T2I-CompBench. Visualizations and analyses demonstrate that the learned structural and semantic queries play complementary roles in structure-aware generation.

24.6CVJul 1
GMO-E$^2$DIT: Grounded Multi-Operation Editing for E-Commerce Images

Zipeng Guo, Xiaoan Liu, Lichen Ma et al.

Real-world e-commerce image editing often requires multiple, localized, and auditable operations rather than global restyling. This compositional nature poses a dual challenge: models must precisely apply all requested edits to the correct regions while preserving unmodified content, even under ambiguous instructions. Existing one-shot editors conflate intent resolution, spatial grounding, and synthesis into a single step, frequently resulting in partial execution failures, which is unacceptable for commercial scenarios. To address this, we introduce GMO-E$^2$DIT, an agentic editing framework that couples a Vision-Language Model (VLM) with a mask-conditioned image editor to tackle structured multi-turn task completion. Given an underspecified instruction, the VLM agent constructs a region-grounded edit agenda, effectively decoupling cognitive reasoning from generative rendering. The framework then executes sub-programs via operation-aware masks and references, utilizing a reflection-driven loop to inspect intermediate results and determine the subsequent state. This iterative mechanism reliably preserves safe partial progress, retries unfinished operations, and recovers from errors. Furthermore, we develop a unified data pipeline providing aligned supervision for planning, execution, and reflection, alongside EComEditBench, a comprehensive benchmark for instruction-driven evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GMO-E$^2$DIT achieves competitive performance compared to strong closed-source models, yielding superior instruction accuracy and edit fidelity over existing baselines.

15.6CVJul 7
CAIRN: Cross-Room 3D Scene Understanding with Topology-Aware Large Multimodal Models

He Liang, Chenyang Ma, Yiming Zhang et al.

Existing 3D scene-grounded Large Language Models (3D-LLMs) focus on answering questions grounded in simplified single-room 3D scenes, lacking the ability to reason over real-world household environments containing multiple interconnected rooms and diverse object categories. We introduce CAIRN, a topology-aware 3D-LLM for multi-room 3D scene understanding. CAIRN aligns transformer attention with scene hierarchy, giving the model explicit awareness of object-level relations and room-level connectivity. It enriches object tokens with room-local relational context via a graph neural network, introduces learned room tokens for room-level abstraction, and applies a hierarchical attention mask with geometric bias to route information according to scene topology. CAIRN is developed on CAIRN-MR, a benchmark we introduce on HM3D for multi-room 3D scene understanding, covering grounding, captioning, and four question-answering tasks that progressively evaluate from intra-room perception to cross-room reasoning. Experiments show that CAIRN outperforms prior 3D-LLMs by a large margin across all CAIRN-MR tasks while remaining competitive on five single-room benchmarks.

13.3AIJul 20
SR-Agent: An Experience-Driven Agentic Framework for Post-Ranking Strategies Refinement in E-Commerce Recommendation

Hanchen Yang, Kaiwen Yang, Junpeng Zhuang et al.

User experience is a first-class objective in industrial e-commerce recommender systems (RS). Post-ranking strategies, which govern diversity, similarity, and exposure over a ranked list, are widely deployed in industrial RS for their simplicity and low serving cost. However, as the online recommendation environment evolves continuously, these statically configured strategies gradually become stale, degrading the user experience. Refining them typically relies on manual inspection, diagnosis, and updates, a process that is slow, costly, and hard to reuse. Although recent LLM-based agents (e.g., RecUserSim, SimUSER, and Self-EvolveRec) offer promising directions, none of them close the full loop of automated, self-evolving strategy refinement. To bridge this gap, we introduce SR-Agent, a Strategy Refinement agentic framework that, to the best of our knowledge, is the first deployed for refining post-ranking strategies in industrial RS. SR-Agent unifies three components: (i) a UserSim agent that applies staged inspection skills to surface user-perceived bad cases; (ii) an Analysis agent that consolidates recurring bad cases into structured, reusable diagnoses; and (iii) a constrained Strategy Refinement Harness that maps diagnoses to typed and bounded actions, gated by a four-stage reward pipeline with reversible rollback. Deployed on the Kuaishou e-commerce platform, SR-Agent continuously runs this refinement loop and, in a one-month online A/B test, increases order volume by 0.71%, browsing depth by 0.34%, and clicked-category diversity by 0.48%, while markedly shortening the refinement cycle and lowering operational cost.

16.5AIJul 20
Is Progressive Disclosure All You Need for Long-Context Agents?

Yifeng He, Yinzhe Zhao, Jicheng Wang et al.

Long-document question answering usually forces a choice between loading the whole document into the context window and bolting on a separate retriever. Agentic AI suggests a broader option, giving the agent the document path and letting it decide how and what to read. Agent Skills, a standard for packaging expertise into folders an agent loads on demand, supply a ready mechanism: progressive disclosure, which exposes only what a query needs, from a short description down to the specific passages. Practitioners rapidly adopted this pattern for book-length understanding tasks, but the evidence to support such choices has been anecdotal. We run the first controlled study of the pattern, comparing raw-document navigation and several designs of Agent Skills packs against a classical hybrid retriever across three agent harnesses and three model families on InfiniteBench. On a single book, the gain depends on the harness, running large when the agent navigates the raw document poorly but near zero when a strong agent harness already divides and retrieves on its own. When scaling up to tasks that span many books, raw-document navigation collapses while one-level progressive disclosure degrades more slowly and pulls ahead. A second, deeper routing level never helps and sometimes breaks accuracy outright, so one level is enough. Progressive disclosure buys context, not intelligence: it is redundant while a strong agent can locate the right passages itself, and decisive once the corpus grows too large to navigate by reading.

10.7LGJun 19
DCD-PFN: A Decoupling-Aware Foundation Model for Causal Discovery

Zhengkang Guan, Yikang Chen, Yi He et al.

Causal discovery is critical for understanding complex data-generating mechanisms, yet traditional algorithms often struggle with highly non-linear and noisy systems, or suffer from severe computational bottlenecks. Recent tabular foundation models based on Prior-Data Fitted Networks (PFNs) have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot inference capabilities, but their potential for explicit structural causal discovery remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose DCD-PFN, a decoupling-aware foundation model for causal discovery. Instead of directly amortizing global graph reconstruction, DCD-PFN focuses on local causal discovery through a decoupling-based paradigm. Through pre-training on diverse synthetic Structural Causal Models (SCMs), the model learns sample-wise decoupling weights that enable Markov boundary (MB) identification. Furthermore, by leveraging parallelized local discovery, DCD-PFN efficiently reconstructs global causal graphs while remaining grounded in the theoretical foundations of decoupling-based causal discovery. Experiments demonstrate that our foundation model achieves robust zero-shot generalization.

26.4CVJul 5
ResearchStudio-Reel: Automate the Last Mile of Research from Paper to Poster, Video, and Blog

Lingao Xiao, Yalun Dai, Yangyu Huang et al.

Research dissemination, turning a paper into a poster, a talk video, and a blog post, is still a manual last mile. Prior automation treats each artifact in isolation that each re-extract the paper from scratch, usually ship one-way renders the author cannot reopen in PowerPoint or Word, and gates quality on soft VLM-preference scores that plateau while load-bearing sections still read as empty. We argue this last mile is best built as a composition of skills: thin agent-readable contracts that share one upstream extractor and wrap deterministic primitives in a measured-fill loop whose exits are hard pass/fail render gates. We instantiate this as ResearchStudio-Reel, five Claude Code and Codex skills organized into one shared extractor (Paper2Assets), three editable generators (Paper2Poster, Paper2Video, Paper2Blog), and one interactive convergence layer (Paper2Reel). Paper2Assets extracts each paper once into a shared bundle that can be reused by every downstream skill; The three generators produce a print-ready poster, a synchronized talk video, and a bilingual blog that stay factually consistent and round-trip through PowerPoint or Word; Paper2Reel then binds all three into a self-contained HTML viewer whose section-level clicks jump the video, slides, captions, and blog to matching content. On the Paper2Poster benchmark, our posters lead every aesthetic and information sub-criterion against both prior automated systems and single-shot frontier LLMs, surpassing the authors' own on aesthetics under two held-out VLM judges and winning overall on 84% to 93% of papers; capability audits further show that, by uniquely pairing narration-aligned on-slide highlights with a bilingual blog gated by layout-aware DOCX repair, ResearchStudio-Reel is the only pipeline to ship all three editable artifacts. Project is available at https://aka.ms/ResearchStudio

19.6AIJun 23
Transferability for General Reasoning: An Automated Curriculum for Multi-Domain RLVR

Yongjin Yang, Jiarui Liu, Yinghui He et al.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been extended from single-domain training to multi-domain reasoning suites spanning mathematics, programming, and science. However, the training curriculum (how often each domain is sampled) is typically fixed or hand-tuned, even though reasoning skills transfer unevenly across domains. Existing learnability-based curricula adapt to where the policy is currently improving, but are blind to whether a gradient step on the selected domain benefits the remaining domains. In this paper, we propose Transfer-Aware Curriculum (TAC), a bandit-style online curriculum that prioritizes domains whose updates broadly benefit the rest of the training suite. TAC repurposes signals already produced by RL training: per-domain advantages capture local learnability, and projected gradients, taken from the GRPO step being computed, estimate cross-domain transferability via gradient-geometry alignment, at negligible cost (<1% wall-clock overhead). Across a six-domain reasoning suite, TAC achieves the best macro-averaged accuracy on both Qwen3-1.7B and Llama3.2-3B, outperforming proportional random sampling, a hand-designed schedule, and a learnability-only bandit, and improving over the last of these by up to 2.8 points (10% relative). Ablations show performance degrades sharply when the transferability term is removed, and TAC remains robust on imbalanced training mixtures where learnability-only curricula over-commit to dominant domains. Our findings establish cross-domain transferability as a key signal for curriculum design in multi-domain RLVR.

14.4HCJun 29
Making Multimodal LLMs Reliable Chart Data Extractors: A Benchmark and Training Framework

Yuchen He, Peizhi Ying, Liqi Cheng et al.

Chart data extraction, which reverse-engineers data tables from chart images, is essential for reproducibility, analysis, retrieval, and redesign. Existing interactive tools are reliable but tedious, and mixed-initiative systems, while more efficient, lack generalizability. Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer a unified interface for chart interpretation, yet their ability to extract accurate data tables, especially without visible labels, remains unclear. We build a benchmark featuring diverse real-world charts without data labels to evaluate this capability. Results show that, while current MLLMs reliably reconstruct table structures, they struggle with precise value recovery. To address this, we revisit chart data extraction from a human-centered perspective and argue that extraction should follow a progressive learning process similar to how people read charts. Our training framework substantially improves numerical accuracy, achieving state-of-the-art performance with a 7B-parameter model. A user study further shows that our model effectively supports mixed-initiative workflows for reliable chart data extraction.

6.7CVJul 15
Detector Confidence Signals Presence Rather Than Occlusion in Cluttered Manipulation

Yuanzhi He

Occlude a named object until about an eighth of it remains visible, and an open-vocabulary detector's confidence that the object is present barely changes; as the clutter around it grows the confidence can even rise. On real video the detector still reports the object present in 99% of occluded frames, on another instance of the same category. This matters because that confidence is widely read as a visibility signal, used to threshold detections, evaluate open-vocabulary detectors, ground language, retrieve instances, and gate active perception. We audit whether it reflects occlusion by pairing every view with a geometry-segmentation oracle that gives detector-free ground-truth visibility. As true visibility falls from every scene to one in eight, the confidence stays nearly constant and uncorrelated with visibility, and the detector reports the target present in about nine of ten scenes, firing on same-category distractors: it signals that the category is present somewhere, not that the specific target is visible. The failure holds across three detectors (Grounding DINO, OWLv2, and Segment Anything Model 3), nine object categories, two simulators with different renderers and object sets, built and natural occlusion, and real video. Two consequences follow: a confidence-based metric understates the value of resolving occlusion by about ten times (8 against 88 points in our active-perception setting), and a confidence-based gate fires exactly when the object is hidden. No single-view signal we tried, including a realizable localization check, flags the occlusion, because the occluders sit where the target is. We connect the effect to detector miscalibration and object hallucination, release the controlled benchmark, and recommend target-grounded signals for gating and evaluation.

14.5CLJun 12
Implicit Reasoning for Large Language Model-based Generative Recommendation

Yinhan He, Liam Collins, Bhuvesh Kumar et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as backbones for Generative Recommendation (GR), promising access to pretrained world knowledge. Yet reliably invoking this knowledge for GR remains poorly understood. A key obstacle is that LLM-based GR typically represents items with Semantic IDs (SIDs), disrupting LLMs' natural-language reasoning interface because these tokens are unseen by the LLM during pretraining. Existing approaches address this with expensive multi-stage pipelines that ground SIDs and elicit explicit rationales, but offer limited insight into when and why each stage is necessary. In this work, we systematically decompose explicit reasoning training pipelines for LLM-based GR, revealing three key limitations: weakened world-knowledge verbalization, misalignment between SID and natural-language token embedding spaces, and sensitivity to rationale quality, all of which hurt explicit reasoning performance. To circumvent these issues, we propose PauseRec, a lightweight implicit reasoning paradigm tailored for GR. PauseRec is exceptionally practical, avoiding costly reasoning trace acquisition and reasoning alignment training, leading to a multitude of benefits: (1) it outperforms standard explicit CoT methods by up to 6.22%, (2) it reduces training cost by up to 65% GPU hours, and (3) it speeds up inference by up to 71.3%. These results position PauseRec as a lightweight alternative to explicit rationale generation, enabling more effective and efficient LLM-based GR.

23.9DBJun 29
Experience Graphs: The Data Foundation for Self-Improving Agents

Gang Liao, Yujia He, Abdullah Ozturk et al.

The database community has repeatedly advanced the state of the art by recognizing that new workloads demand new system architectures. We argue that long-horizon agentic tasks -- code generation, scientific discovery, hardware design -- are such a workload. These agents explore: they generate artifacts, execute tools, observe failures, branch, and repair over hundreds of steps. This search produces a structured object we call an experience graph: executable artifacts, tool outputs, rewards, sibling comparisons, and causal lineage. Yet existing agent frameworks treat this experience as disposable state -- JSON checkpoints and session logs that cannot be recovered after a crash, queried across users, or materialized into training data. We propose Trellis: a data foundation that treats the experience graph as first-class, governed, queryable database state. The core insight is that search over experience graphs is a database access pattern. Frontier selection is a query, cross-session reuse is vector-seeded graph retrieval, training-data extraction is a materialized view, and reconstructing what an agent knew at any past step is a time-travel query. When the database owns the experience graph, agents become stateless compute, and crash recovery, horizontal scaling, and a closed-loop training flywheel emerge as architectural byproducts. We ground the design in KernelEvolve, a production accelerator-kernel optimizer at Meta, where cross-session reuse reaches a target speedup roughly 10x faster at 52% lower token cost. More broadly, Trellis turns inference-time search from disposable computation into a durable institutional asset: logs made databases reliable; experience graphs may make agents cumulative.

11.0LGJul 9
CAAD: Causality-Aware Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection via Multi-Scale Alignment and Structural Causal Consistency

Xin Wang, Yunshi Wen, Yanan He et al.

The operational integrity of complex industrial systems relies on precise anomaly detection and diagnosis. The vast majority of existing methods narrowly focus on capturing temporal similarities of representations, often overlooking the disruption of internal causal relationships, which characterizes system failures and latent anomalies. In this paper, we propose a novel framework (CAAD) that reframes anomaly detection as the continuous verification of Granger causality consistency through exogenous variables. Specifically, the CAAD framework models exogenous time-series variables as residuals, identifying anomalies as significant deviations caused by external interventions. The proposed framework leverages multi-scale alignment to internalize system dynamics and utilizes a gradient-based matrix to monitor internal causal relationship breakdowns. By quantifying causal deviations of both dynamic evolution and relational topology, the CAAD is able to capture subtle causal shifts to achieve precise anomaly detection. Extensive experiments on real-world industrial datasets demonstrate that the CAAD achieves high-precision anomaly detection, outperforming most state-of-the-art baselines.

6.7CVJul 8
VCDP: Variation-Conditioned Distributional Proxy Learning for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Zimu Zhang, Yiheng Zhong, Zhuoru Zhang et al.

Semi-supervised 3D medical image segmentation reduces the need for dense voxel-level annotations by exploiting unlabeled volumes. Although existing methods such as consistency regularization, pseudo-labeling, and co-training improve prediction-level robustness, they often provide insufficient feature-space organization for anatomically complex structures, especially small organs and ambiguous boundary regions with large intra-class variations. To address this issue, we propose Variation-Conditioned Distributional Proxy Learning (VCDP), a plug-and-play training-only regularization module for semi-supervised 3D medical image segmentation. VCDP represents each class with a learnable Gaussian distribution for shared class semantics and multiple variation prototypes for fine-grained intra-class patterns. A unified variation-conditioned compatibility score is further formulated to fuse distributional similarity and soft variation aggregation, guiding voxel embeddings to align with both global organ identity and local anatomical variations. VCDP is attached to decoder features during training and removed during inference, introducing no additional inference cost. Experiments on multi-organ segmentation benchmarks show that VCDP improves most evaluated baselines, particularly for small, ambiguous, and highly variable organs. Our anonymous code is released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/VCDP_code-41ED.

9.4CVJul 8
ColorFM: An Optimization-to-Learning Framework for Color Transfer via Flow Matching

Yuhang He, Kai Zhang, Xiaoming Li et al.

Color transfer aims to align the color distribution of a source image with that of a reference image while preserving structural and semantic consistency. However, existing methods often suffer from inaccurate global mapping, semantic misalignment, and visual artifacts. To address these issues, we propose ColorFM, an optimization-to-learning framework. ColorFM connects online optimization to offline inference by reformulating color transfer as the transport of pixel distributions along velocity fields via Flow Matching. Specifically, we introduce ColorFM-O, an instance-specific optimization scheme that fits the velocity field through hierarchical color coupling guided by semantic priors. By numerically integrating the induced flow trajectories, ColorFM-O produces precise and semantically consistent color transfer results, while generating high-quality paired data as pseudo-supervision. Building upon this, we design ColorFM-L, an efficient feed-forward model trained on the generated pairs. Through implicit state modeling, ColorFM-L extracts deep semantic features to predict flow parameters for bidirectional linearized transport, ensuring accurate color transfer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ColorFM-L outperforms state-of-the-art methods in visual quality, structural fidelity, and semantic consistency, successfully combining the accuracy of optimization with the speed of feed-forward inference.

25.2CLJul 7
Hierarchical Acoustic-Semantic Modeling: Modality Separation and Semantic Coherence for Full-Duplex SLMs

Zhenyu Liu, Yunxin Li, Xuanyu Zhang et al.

Developing seamless, high-performance, native intelligent full-duplex Spoken Language Models (SLMs) remains a critical challenge and long-standing goal for the speech and NLP community. Despite notable progress, recent endeavors are fundamentally constrained by severe modality interference, which causes substantial knowledge degradation and compromises semantic integrity -- ultimately making full-duplex SLMs feel unnatural and unintelligent. In this paper, through an exhaustive fine-grained analysis of model optimization dynamics, we uncover the root cause of such performance degradation, revealing that modality interference arises from inherent gradient conflicts between acoustic and semantic modeling when the two modalities are forced to share a deep parameter space. Guided by this key insight, we introduce Lychee-FD, a native end-to-end full-duplex framework designed to mitigate modality interference. Importantly, we propose a hierarchical parameter separation strategy that decouples conflicting modalities in deep layers while preserving cross-modality coherence via a dedicated semantic alignment channel. Extensive experiments on multiple full-duplex benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly advances the state of the art, yielding substantial improvements in both speech intelligence (+7.4% on Spoken QA) and full-duplex interaction fluidity (+28.5% on FullDuplexBench 1.5) without compromising inference efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to achieve two key advances: 1) uncovering and elucidating the root cause of modality interference in full-duplex SLMs, and 2) designing an elegant hierarchical model together with a practical solution for seamless, high-performance, native intelligent full-duplex SLMs.

10.5DCJul 5
CoCoScale: Leveraging Layer-wise Scaling to Unlock the Potential of Online LLM Serving

Jingfeng Wu, Yiyuan He, Minxian Xu et al.

Online large language model (LLM) serving has become the backbone of modern AI applications, powering diverse downstream services through shared hardware clusters. However, modern serving systems frequently encounter highly dynamic workloads characterized by severe workload skewness, where a small fraction of model instances receives the vast majority of traffic. Existing instance-level scaling mechanisms are limited by coarse-grained resource adjustment: scaling up requires the cold-start of full-model replicas, incurring substantial latency, while scaling down leaves the system vulnerable to performance degradation during sudden traffic surges. The key insight of this work is that LLM serving offers a unique opportunity for fine-grained scaling. In this paper, we propose CoCoScale, a layer-wise dynamic scaling mechanism that selectively expands the parallelism of hot layers onto idle resources reclaimed from underutilized devices, enabling elastic data parallelism without altering model architectures or adding hardware overhead. Evaluations demonstrate that CoCoScale significantly reduces cold start latency by 97.9%-99.3% compared to traditional scale up. Under production traces, CoCoScale reduces average latency by 20.7\%--28.1\% and achieves full Service Level Objective (SLO) attainment, demonstrating superior dynamic adaptability and resource efficiency.