AI 速览：MDSKILL 将技能记忆按状态定位、动作规划与执行控制三个功能视角组织，并用动态指标筛选高质量技能，再通过在线策略自蒸馏把互补经验内化到共享策略中，以提升智能体自我进化效率。
Skill memories encode past experiences as textual prompts to improve reinforcement learning (RL) for self-evolving agents. Complementing RL, On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) provides dense, fine-grained supervision to internalize knowledge from skill-guided trajectories and accelerate policy learning. However, self-generated memories often contain noisy supervision and functionally entangled, redundant, or conflicting knowledge, making direct distillation difficult. Under limited training budgets, these issues can hinder knowledge internalization and even degrade performance. To address this problem, we propose MDSKILL, a multi-view distillation approach for skill memory internalization. MDSKILL organizes skill memories into three complementary functional views (state grounding, action planning, and execution control) and selects high-quality skills using dynamic metrics to construct view-specific and integrated reasoning branches. OPSD then transfers and consolidates complementary experiential knowledge across these branches into a shared policy, enabling efficient skill internalization and continuous agent self-evolution. We evaluate MDSKILL on three agent benchmarks against RL, skill-augmented, and self-distillation baselines that do not rely on stronger external teacher models. Without additional computational overhead, MDSKILL improves upon SOTA performance by up to 7.1% and 8.1% on ALFWorld and WebShop. Extensive ablations and evolution analyses further validate its effectiveness in knowledge internalization and policy improvement. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MDSKILL-CF53.
Zhong Li, Qi Huang, Yuxuan Zhu, Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri, Niki van Stein, Thomas Bäck, Matthijs van Leeuwen, Zaiwen Wen 等 9 位作者
Optimization modeling translates real decision-making problems into mathematical optimization models and solver-executable implementations. Although language models are increasingly used to generate optimization formulations and solver code, existing benchmarks for this capability are almost entirely text-only. This omits many optimization-modeling tasks that arise in operational practice, where requirements are described in text but essential instance information is often conveyed through visual artifacts such as tables, graphs, maps, schedules, and planning dashboards. We introduce multimodal optimization modeling, a benchmark setting where models must construct both a mathematical formulation and executable solver code from a text-and-visual problem specification. To evaluate this setting, we develop a solver-grounded framework that generates structured optimization instances, verifies each instance with an exact solver, and builds both model-facing inputs and hidden reference files from the same verified source. We instantiate it as MM-OptBench, a benchmark of 780 solver-verified instances spanning 6 optimization families, 26 subcategories, and 3 structural difficulty levels. We evaluate 9 multimodal large language models (MLLMs), including 6 frontier general-purpose and 3 math-specialized models, with aggregate, family-level, difficulty-level, and failure-mode analyses. The task remains far from solved: the best two models reach 52.1% and 51.3% pass@1, while on average across the six general-purpose MLLMs, pass@1 is 43.4% on easy and 15.9% on hard instances. All three math-specialized MLLMs solve 0/780 instances. Post-hoc extraction diagnostics and oracle-reading evaluation reveal difficulties in both multimodal grounding and downstream solver-artifact generation. MM-OptBench provides a concrete testbed for solver-grounded, decision-oriented multimodal intelligence.
Video generation has progressed from isolated clips to coherent short-form audiovisual sequences, and the bottleneck is shifting from rendering to semantic control. This report summarizes the observations and insights on multimodal understanding gained from successive generations of Kling. We argue that generation quality is the projection of multimodal understanding through the entire data--conditioning--alignment--evaluation chain, and we examine this chain module by module. Kling-MLLM, a shared multimodal foundation model that unifies image, video, audio, synchronized audio--video, and interleaved inputs, is specialized for each downstream module. Because a DiT is trained on far fewer training samples than a language model, we treat captioning as a semantic contract that maximizes description density, and extend it to reference-grounded captioning that makes reference bindings explicit. Prompt enhancement translates user intent into this caption distribution: basic PE is derived from captions of compelling videos and refined with text-level and generator-in-the-loop reinforcement learning, while agentic PE refines the story and retrieves compelling examples. We show that a reliable text encoder comes from perceptual training rather than from stronger language ability, and that candidates can be screened from text alone before end-to-end training. Reward modeling pairs a general reward model for explainable, localized critiques with a decision reward model for fast multidimensional scoring, treating perceptual bandwidth as a first-class design parameter. Finally, we review task-specific automatic evaluation, focusing on protocols that expose scoring shortcuts and help trace failures to their upstream source. We hope these lessons offer practical guidance for building the understanding stack behind controllable video generation.
Yulong Li, Rong Xia, Yuxuan Zhang, Jianxu Chen, Xiwei Liu, Haochen Xue, Maosheng Li, Yuhang Liu 等 15 位作者
We introduce DoAtlas-2, a foundation for self-evolving causal biomedical discovery that organizes knowledge around causal mechanisms and advances through external evidence from human populations. DoAtlas-2 integrates 771 research resources covering more than 720,000 participants in 48 countries, from longitudinal clinical phenotypes, medical imaging, and continuous physiological signals to eight molecular layers, together with an evidence network of approximately 4.7 million literature-derived records over 93,566 concepts and 149,383 candidate causal relations. DoAtlas-2 autonomously formulates research questions from evidence gaps and unresolved mechanisms, prespecifies their causal designs, and generates validated analyses. Supporting, challenging, and unresolved results continuously revise mechanistic interpretations, the causal evidence state, and the discovery frontier, so that DoAtlas-2 self-evolves within a closed loop of hypothesis generation, empirical testing, and renewed discovery. DoAtlas-2 has systematically evaluated 2,031 research questions. In the Human Phenotype Project (HPP), it formulated 4,014 candidate pathway questions across vascular, early-glycemic, and hepatic-metabolic systems, and screening of the first 1,079 yielded statistical support for 756. Representative studies identify blood pressure as a convergence node linking adiposity, hepatic, and lipid phenotypes to vascular outcomes, and show that an adiposity-inflammation-blood-pressure pathway is largely attenuated by joint adjustment for body mass index (BMI) and smoking. The discovered vascular network constitutes a completely interpretable predictive foundation, admitting exact attribution of every prediction and closed-form mediation effects. DoAtlas-2 thereby unifies causal mechanism discovery, population-evidence testing, and interpretable prediction within one continuously evolving foundation.
Individual-level trajectories are essential for applications that rely on user-level mobility behavior. Existing mobility-generation approaches face a fundamental tension between individual-level and population-level statistical fidelity: top-down models reproduce aggregate mobility statistics but struggle to guarantee realistic individual trajectories, while bottom-up generators synthesize individual trajectories yet often fail to preserve key population-level mobility regularities after aggregation. In particular, many bottom-up generated populations fail to reproduce the displacement distribution, whose heavy tail is well summarized by a truncated power law. We formalize this phenomenon as the \textbf{Population-Level Displacement Gap}. To investigate its prevalence, we conduct a systematic evaluation of representative model-driven and data-driven trajectory generators. Our results provide evidence that the Population-Level Displacement Gap is prevalent across diverse generation paradigms. To diagnose this gap, we introduce the \textbf{Scale Fidelity Profile (SFP)}, a scale-decomposed metric that quantifies discrepancies in trip allocations across spatial scales. SFP indicates that population-level displacement mismatches co-occur with systematic errors in how trips are allocated across spatial scales. Motivated by this observation, we develop \textbf{ScaleTraj}, an autoregressive Transformer that decomposes location prediction into a Scale Selection Head that decides the movement scale and a Scale-Aware Cell Selection Head that predicts the destination conditioned on the selected scale. Experiments on two datasets show that ScaleTraj reduces the Population-Level Displacement Gap versus model-driven and data-driven baselines, while preserving fidelity. Our code is available at https://github.com/SCU-TrustworthyAI/ScaleTraj.
Research taste, the judgment of what to read, which problems to pursue, and which methods to try, increasingly shapes the work of AI scientists, yet it remains far less understood than their ability to execute research. We introduce IdeaTaste, a benchmark that scores an LLM by how closely the research proposals it writes from a literature snapshot frozen at 2025 match the work the same communities published in 2026. Our experiments span six contemporary language models and four research areas from established to emerging fields, covering more than 90{,}000 proposals in total. LLM agents fall well short of human communities in both the literature they cite and the ideas they state, reaching about 26\% of the human level on citation matching and only 18\% on idea matching. Their populations can cite as diversely as a community and take up its tasks and methods, yet rarely arrive at the concrete approaches and research plans it pursues. Neither richer field context nor larger populations substantially close this gap. In blinded expert review, AI proposals trail the 2026 papers least in presentation and most in expected success, echoing their gap in concrete approaches, and those whose ideas no human paper shares fare worst, suggesting weaker directions rather than overlooked opportunities. These results indicate that the main bottleneck in AI research taste lies less in finding the directions a community works on than in turning them into the concrete approaches it goes on to pursue. We release IdeaTaste as an open, continuously updated leaderboard (https://cxcscmu.github.io/IdeaTaste) that benchmarks contemporary AI proposals against future publication cycles.
Lincen Yang, Qi Huang, Niki van Stein, Thomas Bäck, Matthijs van Leeuwen, Zhong Li
Subgroup discovery aims to identify regions of the feature space where a target variable deviates from its marginal distribution. A fundamental challenge in this problem is the trade-off between a subgroup's deviation and its support: small subgroups can be highly deviating but statistically meaningless, while large ones cannot deviate much by construction. Existing methods tackle this challenge by collapsing the two into a single scalar quality measure, implicitly committing to one particular trade-off and making it difficult to recover the most deviating subgroup under a user-specified support constraint. We instead provide the first theoretical and structural characterization of optimal subgroups with maximum Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence under arbitrary support constraints. Under a partition-based generative model, where the feature space decomposes into regions of homogeneous conditional distributions of the target variable called atoms, we prove that every point on the deviation-support Pareto front is a union of whole atoms together with at most one fractional atom. This reduces an uncountable search to a finite combinatorial problem. Guided by this theory, we propose a simple two-step recipe: learn a homogeneous partition, then select atoms greedily. Across 19 benchmark datasets, it finds the most deviating subgroups at a range of support thresholds, and reliably improves subgroups returned by existing methods when applied as a post-processing step. These results empirically validate the sufficiency and necessity of our theoretical contributions.
Urban photogrammetric point clouds are commonly processed as local 3D patches, limiting the context available for distinguishing geometrically similar categories. Orthographic projection of the same data yields a co-registered digital orthophoto map (DOM)/RGB-D representation that supports efficient large-context modeling but compresses vertical geometry. Existing projection--point methods mainly fuse these two representations at the feature level while retaining a classifier shared across all samples. We present the Aerial Content-Aware Sample-Adaptive Classifier (ACASAC), which complements feature fusion with decision-level adaptation. A point-aligned aerial region bridges the full aerial crop and local 3D patch. ACASAC models scene-to-local variation within the projection and the representation discrepancy between aligned 2D and 3D supports, then transfers both relations to refine the local point class representation. The refined representation, scene-level aerial context, and fixed fused-head prior jointly form a classifier for the current sample. ACASAC improves the fixed dual-representation head by 2.1 and 2.7 mIoU points on SensatUrban and UrbanBIS, respectively, and by 2.1--2.3 points across four tested encoder combinations.
In physical backpropagation, users return loss derivatives over the time-division duplex uplink, giving the base station the downlink gradient without channel reconstruction. Reciprocity calibration conventionally prioritizes base-station chains, as column-normalized zero-forcing reduces a per-user factor to a stream rotation. This priority can reverse. With ideal base-station chains and no noise, per-user amplitude errors make the returned field a weighted sum-rate gradient. With zero-forcing full service at both optima, the loss is independent of array size. Otherwise the selection penalty, serving the wrong users, carries 86 to 94 percent of the amplitude-induced loss in five of six configurations. Per-user phase errors mainly slow the iteration. Base-station chain errors scale the returned field per antenna, and at 3 dB and 25 degrees they cost one user 1.3 dB of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) that no array size removes. With 80 users, such errors on both sides, and mismatched pilots, oracle per-user and base-station calibration leave 6.2 and 12.3 percent loss at 256 antennas on clustered channels. This ordering holds at 30 dB SNR and reverses for 1 dB, 10 degree user errors. A capped one-echo estimator comes within 2.4 percentage points of oracle per-user calibration but underperforms no calibration at 10 dB SNR.
Over-the-air backpropagation returns a loss gradient through the reciprocal channel, which requires the return port to see the channel of the forward port. If the terminal moves in between, a fluid antenna system can return through the port nearest to the forward position. In ray-traced Chicago streets, with a pedestrian displacement of about half a wavelength and a street-level base station, this rule reverses 20 percent of the gradients at a port spacing of 0.7 wavelengths and 49 percent at 0.9 wavelengths, while one of the four nearest ports stays aligned in all but 2 and 9 percent. We derive a certificate for the sign of the mean correlation from the second moment of a planar angular spectrum. It reduces to a linear program with three variables and infinitely many constraints, is tight, and holds over a region of second moments. In a static Gaussian model, observations collected along a line cannot tell an angular spectrum from its mirror image, so the sign of the cross moment must come from other information. At unsurveyed positions of the same city, a knowledge map that transports surveyed paths through virtual sources and fits them to the causal channel history lowers the reversal rate at 0.9 wavelengths from 49 to 27 percent. Its gain over the nearest port survived every tested error, while its gain over a geometry rule stayed significant at the tested single-error levels of 5 degrees of phase drift per step and 2 mm of position error but not at the next tested levels. Without any survey, across five cities and ten base stations, the nearest port reverses 37 percent of the returns at 0.9 wavelengths and a rule based on the direction and elevation of the base station 20.5 percent. The multilayer perceptrons we tested did not beat these physical rules by the margin fixed in advance in the primary settings.
Wilson Wongso, Lihuan Li, Arian Prabowo, Xiachong Lin, Baiyu Chen, Hao Xue, Flora D. Salim
Generating high-fidelity synthetic Web of Things (WoT) telemetry, such as GPS trajectories, is increasingly important for transportation, urban planning, and location-aware services, particularly when privacy concerns restrict access to real-world mobility data. Existing trajectory generation methods face a trade-off between efficiency and road network fidelity: continuous-space methods generate trajectories efficiently but ignore road topology, while topology-aware methods rely on search-based autoregressive decoding that limits generation speed. We propose TrajDLM, a topology-aware trajectory generation framework based on block diffusion language models. TrajDLM represents trajectories as sequences of discrete road segments, combining a block diffusion backbone, graph-based road network representations, and topology-constrained sampling to generate realistic trajectories with topologically valid road transitions. To address the tendency of supervised models to favor near-shortest routes, we introduce TrajRFT, a rejection-sampling fine-tuning stage that improves route fidelity by training on self-generated routes selected for their similarity to real trajectories. Across three city-scale vehicle telemetry datasets, TrajDLM closely matches real-world mobility in population-level distributions, local route similarity, and route diversity, while generating trajectories up to $7.5\times$ faster than the strongest baseline. It also demonstrates zero-shot transfer to unseen transport modes. These results establish block diffusion with topology-constrained sampling and rejection-sampling fine-tuning as an efficient approach to generating realistic synthetic mobility telemetry for location-aware Web services and WoT applications.
Estimating scene illumination from images is challenging as lighting is inherently spatially varying, depending on geometry, occlusion, and light sources. Existing methods incorporate geometric cues by deriving local environment maps or probe-based representations, but largely rely on regression or parametric models, resulting in over-smoothed lighting and limited realism. We revisit spatially-varying illumination estimation from a generative perspective and introduce LUMEN, a geometry-conditioned diffusion framework for synthesizing high-dynamic-range (HDR) environment maps at arbitrary spatial locations from single or multi-view images. Specifically, we reconstruct a coarse 3D scene from input images and render partial environment maps at arbitrary locations to encode visibility and spatial structure. These signals are fused with multi-view image features and fed into a diffusion transformer to generate full HDR environment maps. To train the model, we build a synthetic dataset of 700 indoor scenes with dense spatial supervision, including multi-view RGB images, depth, and HDR illumination at multiple sampled locations. This dataset enables the model to learn spatially consistent lighting distributions across diverse scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LUMEN significantly improves visual fidelity and spatial coherence compared to prior approaches.
Yuheng Zhang, Wenlin Yao, Changlong Yu, Yao Liu, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Hyokun Yun, Lihong Li
Group relative policy optimization (GRPO) trains large language models with verifiable rewards by normalizing rewards within response groups. When every response in a group receives the same reward, the advantages vanish and the group provides no policy gradient signal. We propose Adaptive Rollout and Response Reuse Policy Optimization (AR3PO) to obtain informative groups with fewer generations. Adaptive rollout samples responses to each prompt in stages and stops sampling once the model generates a correct response. If all sampled responses are incorrect, response reuse replaces one of them with a past correct response to the same prompt, when available, and recomputes the group advantages. Policy-recomputed reuse trains on the updated groups using probabilities recomputed under the rollout policy; advantage-only reuse uses historical responses only to compute advantages. Across four mathematical benchmarks with 7B and 8B models, AR3PO consistently improves over GRPO and achieves performance comparable to DAPO while requiring up to $4.2\times$ fewer generated responses. Experiments with a 32B model also show comparable performance to DAPO at a similar training stage with substantially fewer generated responses.
Yi Chen, Hanna Hsieh, Shuhong Liu, Chuanbo Hua, Zihan Ma, Kun Wang, Joo-Young Kim
Machine unlearning aims to make a model forget specific data, yet unlearned LLMs often fail to stay unlearned: brief fine-tuning can revive removed knowledge. Existing robustness predictors rely on global weight-space displacement, but distance alone can be misleading when random or destructive updates collapse performance. We argue that relearning robustness depends on update structure: robust unlearning should affect forget-critical weights while sparing retain-critical ones. We introduce the Forget-Retain Alignment Gap (FRAG), a training-free predictor that scores an update's forget-retain alignment without running a relearning attack, and separates selective from dense updates more reliably than global distance. Building on the forget-critical, retain-sparing principle, Forget-Retain Pruning (FRP) improves relearning robustness. Our results suggest that weight selectivity better explains robustness than distance alone. Code is available at https://github.com/Yi1-Chen/FRAG.
Video generation is shifting from end-to-end synthesis toward agentic generation, where planning, tool use, and feedback enable coherent, controllable multi-shot videos. In parallel, video world models provide action-conditioned observations and predicted futures, serving as interactive environments for agents. We study their intersection through the agent harness: an executable runtime that constructs context, exposes tools, maintains state, routes feedback, and manages budgets around video models. This report examines three directions. First, agentic video generation, where harnesses coordinate scripting, shot planning, asset management, production, and editing, alongside the evaluation challenges of these systems. Second, agentic world modeling, where harnesses mediate observation, control, execution, and state. We discuss hybrid designs in which game engines or agent-written programs maintain world state while video models render observations, and how agents and world models can mutually evaluate and improve one another. Third, recursive self-improvement (RSI) in video model development, distinguishing output revisions, updates to harness state, generator parameters, and evaluators, and changes to the improvement procedure itself. We identify how these improvements feed back into subsequent development. Across these directions, we analyze essential agent capabilities, including audiovisual perception, long-horizon planning, memory, code-based interaction, feedback-guided control, skill reuse, and multi-agent coordination. We conclude with challenges in autonomous video production, lifelong memory, programmable hybrid control, autonomous model development, provenance, cost accounting, and evaluation linking video quality and task performance to sustained improvements in models and harnesses.
Yan Tai, Yunan Ding, Guangzhao Li, Siqi Luo, Chaoyang Zhang, Guangtao Zhai, Guodong Guo, Xiaohong Liu
KV cache quantization is well studied for autoregressive language models, where cached prefix states are exact under causal attention and quantization is mainly a cache reconstruction problem. Diffusion language models (dLLMs) break this assumption. Fast dLLM inference reuses KV states across denoising steps, but bidirectional token representations can change as masked tokens are revealed, so the reused cache may already differ from full recomputation before quantization is applied. We study KV cache quantization under this cache-reuse error. We adapt KIVI and KVQuant to Fast-dLLM-style prefix and dual cache reuse, and introduce TRACE and dLLM-KVQ. TRACE reconstructs feasible dLLM reveal trajectories from prompt-answer pairs, providing calibration states that match iterative masked decoding. dLLM-KVQ uses these trajectories to choose per-layer K-cache entries that remain in high precision according to output- and attention-level behavior metrics, while applying standard low-bit value quantization. Across LLaDA and Dream evaluations on GSM8K, HumanEval, MATH, and MBPP, dLLM-KVQ achieves the highest average score among quantized methods across the reported 4-bit and 2-bit prefix/dual cache settings.
World action models (WAMs) increasingly couple internal visual or world representations with action generation, making their world-to-action pathways a critical yet poorly understood source of robustness. We investigate when perturbations to these internal representations actually become behaviorally consequential, and uncover a pronounced mismatch between representation perturbability and closed-loop vulnerability: attack effectiveness varies sharply across visual K/V routes, while larger representation displacement does not reliably imply stronger control failure. Our analysis attributes this mismatch to the action-conditioned readout, where keys determine where action queries read and values determine what content they receive. This motivates an action-facing view of vulnerability, in which the effect of a perturbation depends on how it is routed into action generation rather than on representation-space magnitude alone. We instantiate this view with Tail-AV, a short-probe signal for identifying vulnerable routes, and operationalize it in PASA-KV, which selects action-facing K/V targets before training a fresh task-shared attack. Experiments across multiple WAM systems and a physical robot validate readout-informed target selection, demonstrate strong closed-loop attacks, and reveal substantial system-level differences in resistance.
Ruize Xu, Chenxiao Yang, Yanhong Li, David McAllester
We demonstrate that a small transformer can learn to execute programs in MicroPy, a simplified yet computationally universal programming language. Given procedure definitions together with an expression to evaluate, the transformer predicts small-step execution using PENCIL scaffolding for space-efficient execution within a bounded context window. After training on randomly generated, semantically arbitrary MicroPy programs, the learned transformer generalizes to held-out human-written programs including bit copying and flipping, binary addition and multiplication, and SAT verification and solving. The trained model exhibits out-of-distribution generalization: it correctly evaluates programs drawn from a substantially different distribution than the one used to generate its training data. Since MicroPy can express any computation, our results provide empirical evidence that a standard transformer can be trained to act as a universal computer when paired with PENCIL scaffolding. Project page: https://www.micropy.org
Renzhi Wu, Li Sheng, Zikun Cui, Junjie Yang, Tai Guo, Keke Zhai, Yan Li, Jerry Fu 等 11 位作者
Long-sequence recommendation can improve along two axes: \emph{evidence scaling} exposes longer histories, while \emph{reasoning scaling} adds layers that interpret that evidence for a candidate. Existing models couple them: sequence encoders propagate every added event through depth, whereas one-shot selection prevents later layers from revisiting omitted evidence. We introduce the Latent Workspace Ranker (LWR), which keeps typed evidence in persistent banks and propagates a fixed-size candidate-local workspace. Each layer rereads the banks from its evolving workspace and archives compact post-interaction state, allowing history length and reasoning depth to grow independently. We compare four architectures across various history--depth configurations using evidence scaling at fixed depth, reasoning scaling at fixed 10K history, and their joint compute-efficient frontier. LWR leads all families at long histories, continues improving with reasoning compute, and converts additional training compute into quality gains at the fastest fitted rate on the joint frontier. At 10K history, it improves NE by 0.19% over HSTU while using 69.6% fewer forward GFLOP/request. It also outperforms existing baselines on two billion-scale ranking surfaces. These results show that separating addressable evidence from propagated state makes reading more and reasoning deeper independently controllable and jointly useful.
Renzhi Wu, Zikun Cui, Junjie Yang, Li Sheng, Yongjun Xie, Jerry Fu, Nipun Mathur, Sri Reddy 等 9 位作者
Sequential recommenders typically construct history inputs from item identifiers or content features using an embedding map shared across users. The same item therefore yields the same initial embedding representation, even when users have different relationships to the item. We propose personalized item representations in user history, where each item's embedding expresses its relationship to the user. Personalization becomes a property of the history inputs themselves, supplying richer evidence for later sequence modeling. We instantiate this idea with PRISM, which reuses upstream ranking computation to generate personalized item embeddings. An autoencoder jointly compresses all layer states from a user tower, a user--item tower, and same-request candidate mixing into one embedding per scored pair for downstream replay. Offline evaluation on Surface 1, a major recommendation surface at billion scale, reports an average downstream normalized entropy (NE) change of $-0.15\%$, compared with $-0.07\%$ for VISTA at similar history lengths. We further identify an empirical sequence-length scaling law: over history lengths of 26--240 events, NE gain follows a fitted power law with exponent 0.468, increasing from 0.06\% to 0.17\%. Therefore, personalized item representations in user history provide a new scaling dimension for improving recommendation quality.
Hong Lin, Zhongle Xie, Lidan Shou, Ke Chen, Gang Chen
Customizing Pretrained Models (PMs) for downstream tasks demands task-specific data, which burgeoning Web3 applications provide abundantly. Blockchain-powered federated learning (BCFL) offers a secure and privacy-preserving paradigm to customize PMs among self-interested and untrusted Web3 participants. Yet, existing BCFL algorithms face severe efficiency and scalability challenges when applied to large PMs, due to their substantial computational and memory requirements and the hardware constraints of many participants. This paper introduces DICE, a novel BCFL algorithm that addresses the efficiency and scalability challenges of customizing large PMs in Web3 via two sets of synergistic techniques: (i) a dynamic progressive learning scheme and a model slice verification scheme to enable a wider range of honest participants, including those unable to deploy the full model, to engage in customizing PMs, while preserving model utility; (ii) a tree-structured committee consensus protocol and an efficiency-driven incentive scheme to address the dominant bottleneck that hinders existing BCFL algorithms from scaling to a larger number of data holders for customizing data-hungry large PMs, while maintaining security. Theoretical analysis and extensive experimental results on customizing vision and language PMs demonstrate DICE's efficiency, effectiveness, and security.
Zhefan Rao, Meng Chu, Xuan Billy Zhang, Jingfan Chen, Guohao Cai, Runyi Li, Shiyi Du, Xu Huang 等 92 位作者
World Models (WMs) can support Multimodal Agents (MAs) through simulated experience, while Agent trajectories can inform World Model refinement. Evaluating this interaction requires separate evidence about action selection and state evolution. We introduce Dual Exam, which tests Agents under fixed environment response mechanisms and World Models under fixed action interventions across physical, digital, social, and scientific domains. The Agent track compares 10 configurations on 1,088 items in 15 reporting categories. The World Model track contains 400 cases across eight scenarios; 15 configurations have full coverage and one covers six scenarios. GPT 6 Astra leads the case-weighted Agent Index at 31.3, and GPT-Image-2 leads the full-coverage WM Overall at 21.7. These scores use different tasks and metrics and are not directly comparable. A 150-case pilot of one coupled pairing records zero task successes and motivates component-level diagnosis. Results reveal uneven task performance and failures to preserve task-relevant state. Their value for predicting coupled success or sustained reciprocal learning remains to be established.
Vision-language models are shifting from offline passive understanding toward online proactive interaction. However, prevailing methods largely rely on explicit requests while overlooking implicit user intents (e.g., "where should I click next?" when a user is navigating a website) and fail to continuously update their understanding as user intents evolve. These limitations make them less suitable for intent-aware interaction in real-world scenarios. To address these challenges, we introduce StreamVibe-Bench, a new benchmark that serves as a testbed for user intent understanding and interaction, comprising 4.1K evaluation samples and 85K training samples spanning explicit, implicit, and dynamic intents. Building on this benchmark, we develop StreamVibe-VL, a streaming proactive model that infers implicit user intents from continuous observations and dynamically adapts its interactions as these intents evolve. We further introduce StreamVibe-Harness, which maintains user intents as persistent states with flexible lifecycles through hierarchical memory, enabling it to track the latest user intents and environmental states. Our experiments reveal three key findings: (i) StreamVibe-VL preserves strong general video understanding capabilities while improving response timing and answer quality by 10.7% over existing baselines; (ii) existing proactive models remain limited in understanding user intents and determining when to respond, especially under implicit and dynamic intents; and (iii) StreamVibe-Harness further improves response consistency and adaptation during sustained interactions, resulting in a 12.3% gain in proactive interaction performance.
Zhuoming Liu, Jinhong Lin, Kwan Man Cheng, Lin Zhang, Shayok Bagchi, Yin Li
Many modern vision-language models (VLMs) build on autoregressive decoding of discrete tokens. While text-based output interfaces enable scalable pretraining and strong zero-shot generalization across diverse tasks, they are poorly suited for problems that require precise continuous outputs, such as localizing temporal boundaries of events or generating robotic control actions. To address this challenge, we propose DRIFT, a general framework for adapting pretrained VLMs to continuous decoding tasks. DRIFT combines a base predictor, which provides a coarse estimate of the target output, with a generative refinement module based on flow matching that iteratively improves the prediction. This residual formulation transforms the generative modeling problem from learning a global output distribution to modeling a localized residual distribution around a strong prior, substantially simplifying optimization. We evaluate DRIFT on both perception and planning tasks, including visual grounding and robotic control. Across multiple tasks and architectures spanning MLLMs, VLAs, and WAMs, DRIFT consistently outperforms a strong set of regression- and generative-based solutions.
In reciprocity-based over-the-air split learning, channel aging rotates and attenuates the derivative signal returned to the transmitter. Seven case studies combine numerical forecasts, mechanism checks, and competing predictions. Near the correlation zero, an archived SGD comparison finds truncated inversion 0.000813 lower in cross-entropy than polar correction, with a paired 95% interval for the difference from -0.001853 to 0.000060, and a retained-mode quadratic proxy slightly favors truncation. Selecting the return port with the largest received power falls short of the predicted five-point alignment advantage over random selection at both tested spacings, gaining at most 0.97 points, while the local inverse relation between amplitude and phase gradient is supported. Seven specified interference-induced accuracy-collapse predictions are rejected, and independent zero-mean interference preserves the conditional mean under a fixed linear chain. Per-subcarrier correction and spherical-wavefront compensation do not deliver their predicted accuracy gains. Focusing leaves both methods near chance in a single-mode model and adds no observed gain in a model with a line-of-sight component plus scattering. A successful port assignment under nonsymmetric motion refutes an exact-symmetry requirement. The competing positioning-error prediction is supported. Gaussian rail jitter with a standard deviation of 0.383 wavelengths yields high terminal test accuracy, whereas a fixed bias of the same magnitude yields near-chance accuracy. These cases distinguish valid local physical relations from unsupported training forecasts through task support, noise injection, and update moments.
A Gaussian random wave field is sampled on a lattice within a bounded aperture. After displacement, re-indexing leaves a residual in the Voronoi cell. We study whether the empirical lag correlation has positive real part throughout the cell. For each realization in a single-output reciprocal link with noiseless over-the-air return, this is equivalent to the negative returned gradient being a descent direction for all residuals and differentiable losses with nonzero error signals. Return noise is treated exactly. For isotropic fields, ball-shaped apertures, unshifted lattice points, and dilations approaching the critical covering radius, every minimizer is a deep hole except with exponentially small probability. A Gaussian vector on the deep holes determines the limiting failure probability, with explicit covariance and lattice-independent limiting normalization. Square, hexagonal, simple cubic, and body-centered cubic lattices have two, three, four, and twelve sign classes. At fixed target failure probabilities below the critical limiting value, this covariance determines the exact leading aperture constant. When the margin and target failure probability vanish jointly, that constant is common to lattice shapes within each dimension. A cubic correction yields vanishing relative tail error in a moderate-deviation regime. A non-asymptotic two-sided aperture law has explicit constants. With a Rayleigh-faded specular path and positive diffuse margin, a failure floor occurs at every positive path power exactly when the cosine of its phase change is negative somewhere in the cell. The floor vanishes for all directions exactly when the covering radius is at most a quarter wavelength.
Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in text-to-image generation, yet aligning their outputs with human preferences remains challenging. Diffusion-DPO learns from image preference pairs, but their global labels do not specify how supervision should be allocated across spatial locations and denoising timesteps. The semantic roles of prompt tokens are also not explicitly considered when assigning these local weights. To address these limitations, we propose Token-Oriented Preference Optimization (ToPO), which builds a token-conditioned spatial-temporal weighting map for each pair. A frozen reference denoiser obtains spatial and temporal weights from local noise-prediction error differences under shared noise, while preferred-branch cross-attention links spatial evidence to content tokens. The map reweights Diffusion-DPO and supports an auxiliary pixel-midpoint ordering loss. It requires neither local preference annotations nor a separately trained reward model. Extensive experiments across multiple preference and compositional evaluations show that ToPO achieves state-of-the-art performance among the compared methods with only 500 training updates, demonstrating the potential of token-conditioned preference allocation for high-quality diffusion alignment within a limited update budget.
Runsheng Chen, Yihong Liu, Raoyuan Zhao, Michael A. Hedderich, Hinrich Schütze, Matthias Grabmair
On-policy distillation can transfer the reasoning capabilities of a strong teacher to a smaller student. However, distillation from a stronger teacher model faces two mismatches: its solutions may be difficult for a smaller student to imitate, and its token-level probabilities may be incompatible with, or even unavailable to, the student. Existing methods handle these settings through different forms of supervision. To this end, we propose Bridged Self-Distillation (BSD), a unified framework for distilling from any teacher that provides reasoning traces. The model to be distilled from, termed the external teacher, first provides a reasoning trace as privileged context, which can be generated in an offline fashion. The student generates rollouts without this context, while a copy of the student conditioned on it, serving as the self-teacher, scores the same rollouts in the student's own token space. BSD uses the resulting token-level guidance to adjust updates on unsuccessful rollouts, with a verifier providing the outcome signal. As the external teacher is queried only to produce text, the same training procedure applies to all teacher scenarios: shared-tokenizer, cross-tokenizer, and closed API teachers. Across these scenarios, BSD improves over the base model and outperforms baselines tailored to each scenario, offering a novel and unified pathway for distillation. Code is available: https://github.com/TUMLegalTech/Bridged-Self-Distillation
Bimanual robot manipulation plays an important role in real-world robotic applications, but the high cost of collecting bimanual demonstrations limits the scalable development of bimanual policy learning. Meanwhile, existing single-arm manipulation data are difficult to directly transfer to bimanual systems due to the Single-to-Dual gap in action spaces, coordination requirements, and arm-side spatial preference. To address this issue, we propose RoboSTD, a zero-shot Single-to-Dual data construction method for bimanual robot learning. RoboSTD first applies sagittal-plane mirroring to observations, proprioception, and actions to construct executable contralateral pseudo-demonstrations. It then uses an LLM to generate structured spatio-temporal coordination constraints that guide the reconstruction of pseudo-bimanual supervision across workspace regions and task stages. We evaluate RoboSTD on the AgileX ALOHA platform in both RoboTwin simulation and real-world settings. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RoboSTD for bimanual policy learning. Without requiring additional bimanual demonstrations, RoboSTD increases the average number of collected cups to 2.11x that of the single-arm baseline in the cup collection task. Project page: https://huahungy.github.io/RoboSTD/
Individual-level genotype data underpin genetic discovery, disease-risk modeling, and therapeutic development, yet many critical settings remain data-limited, including underrepresented ancestries, rare or imbalanced disease cohorts, and restricted-access biobanks. Conditional synthetic genome generation would support privacy-aware benchmarking, simulation, and data augmentation, but requires learning an ultra-high-dimensional discrete distribution over hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of correlated single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), or sites of DNA variation. We introduce HELICS: High-fidelity gEneration via Latent Interpolant Conditional Synthesis, a phasing-free latent flow matching framework for genome-wide SNP-level generation from biobank-scale genotype data. HELICS tokenizes chromosomes with convolutional autoencoders, reducing >600K SNPs to 4,096 continuous latent tokens, and trains a transformer parameterized conditional flow matching model over the concatenated multi-chromosome latent representation. Trained on over 417K genomes in the UK Biobank, HELICS generates genome-wide common-variant synthetic cohorts without haplotype phasing and achieves stronger fidelity to real genotypes than existing haplotype-based simulators, including high allele-frequency agreement in external evaluation and superior preservation of local and long-range SNP correlation structure. Conditioning on ancestry and genetic liability summaries enables targeted generation across genetic risk profiles; in perturbation analyses, by increasing the conditioned disease trait liability, HELICS induces SNP-level dosage changes in generated genomes that are highly correlated with published association weights. HELICS provides a scalable generative modeling framework for SNP-level genome data and a path toward conditional synthetic cohorts for data-limited genetic studies.