Allex Kan, Ji Zhang, Hao Yin, Hao Li, Owen Fu, Xunxing Chen, Lin Huang, Zion Wang 等 13 位作者
Molecular dynamics predicts molecular motion from atomic forces and trajectory integration. Density functional theory (DFT) provides first-principles forces, but its $O(N^3)$ cost limits simulations to thousands of atoms; empirical force fields scale to millions but miss bond breaking and charge transfer. Equivariant message-passing Transformers learn the ab initio potential at linear cost. Stacked layers propagate information beyond a single cutoff, giving four layers a receptive field up to 23Å. At this frontier, scale is limited by communication: layers exchange boundary features across devices, force backpropagation repeats the exchange, and moving atoms change neighbor graphs and tensor shapes. We present Tessera, a distributed runtime that fixes workload shapes between rebuilds. It sorts atoms along a space-filling curve into equal-count shards, ensuring identical atom counts and tensor shapes per rank. Peer sets scale as $K^{0.5}$, not $K$. A conservative neighbor skin preserves topology across updates, enabling each rebuild interval to replay as one CUDA Graph. Fused kernels, three-level neighbor search, and overlapped All-to-All complete it. On 512 GPUs, Tessera sustains 30.7M atoms at 89.7% weak-scaling efficiency (77--90% across three per-GPU loads); per-step time rises 1.11--1.29x as machine and problem grow 16x. Graph reuse cuts full-step time $1.87\times$. Across an $8\times$ device increase, neighbor-search cost grows $1.7\times$, versus $3.0\times$ for Morton order. In a live $10.24$M-atom salt solution, NVE energy drift is $0.42\,μ$eV/atom/ps over $10$ ps, and structure matches a serial reference. A 10.06M-atom Norovirus capsid sustains 100 ps of NVT at $\approx 8$ ps/day on 256 A100 GPUs. Over 200,000 steps, it has no broken bonds or anomalously close pairs and uses three compiled variants, with no graph breaks or eager fallbacks.
Long video understanding requires VideoLLMs to answer queries about videos spanning tens of minutes to hours, but such long videos produce far more visual tokens than current VideoLLMs can process. To address this issue, keyframe selectors are proposed to select the most query-relevant frames by computing the similarity between frame and query embeddings. Existing selectors either encode frames independently without temporal context or process chunks in isolation with ranking objectives that are difficult to optimize. To alleviate those limitations, we propose FrameScout with two core designs: (i) a streaming selector architecture that leverages a sliding-window KV cache and successor aggregation to produce temporally-contextualized frame embeddings; (ii) a frame-query contrastive objective that aligns frame and query embeddings in a shared space, directly training the selector to distinguish relevant frames from irrelevant ones. Extensive experiments on three long-video benchmarks and six base VideoLLMs demonstrate that FrameScout consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/Hubert-1102/FrameScout.
Yuji Wang, Teng Hu, Yuheng Chen, Ran Yi, Han Feng, Weijian Cao, Chengjie Wang, Lizhuang Ma 等 9 位作者
Despite remarkable progress in instruction-based video editing, textual descriptions remain limited in expressing fine-grained appearance, spatial transformations, and temporal dynamics. We introduce Visual In-context Editing, a new paradigm that shifts video editing from text-only instructions to visual demonstrations, where users specify desired edits through heterogeneous visual references including single images, image pairs, and video pairs. To establish this paradigm, we curate VicEdit-400K, the first large-scale dataset for visual in-context video editing, containing 400K high-quality samples across ten editing tasks with comprehensive semantic and visual consistency filtering. Building upon this foundation, we propose VicEdit, a unified framework that enables effective reasoning over diverse visual contexts and textual instructions. Specifically, we introduce Modality-Adaptive Semantic Distillation to extract modality-aware visual editing semantics and Dual-Context Injection to align visual contexts with textual editing intents. Extensive experiments on VicEdit-Bench demonstrate that VicEdit achieves state-of-the-art performance on both conventional instruction-based editing and visual in-context editing. Further controlled studies and human evaluations verify that VicEdit effectively leverages heterogeneous visual references, establishing visual in-context editing as a promising paradigm for controllable video editing.
Solving diverse partial differential equations (PDEs) is fundamental in science and engineering. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in code generation, symbolic reasoning, and tool use, but reliably solving PDEs across heterogeneous settings remains challenging. Prior work on LLM-based code generation and transformer-based foundation models for PDE learning has shown promising advances. However, a persistent trade-off between execution success rate and numerical accuracy arises, particularly when generalization to unseen parameters and boundary conditions is required. In this work, we propose OpInf-LLM, an LLM parametric PDE solving framework via operator inference. The proposed framework leverages small amounts of solution data to enable accurate prediction of diverse PDE instances, including unseen parameters and configurations, and provides seamless integration with LLMs for natural language task specification and physics-based reasoning of proper feature parameterization. Its low computational demands and unified solution pipeline further enable a high execution success rate across heterogeneous settings, opening new possibilities for generalizable reduced-order modeling in LLM-based PDE solving.
Recent video world models allow users to explore generated environments through camera navigation. Continuous hand motion provides a fine-grained action channel for interacting with the people and objects encountered during exploration. We present TouchéWorld, a framework that integrates gesture-driven interaction into a camera-controlled video world model. Given an initial image and a scene-description prompt, the model generates video conditioned on temporally aligned camera and hand controls. We construct joint camera--hand training data from heterogeneous egocentric videos through annotation completion, consistency-based filtering, and temporal alignment. Building on a pretrained camera-controlled world model, we combine spatial hand-skeleton conditioning with numerical hand-motion features through parameter-efficient adaptation. Causal adaptation and few-step distillation support chunk-level online generation, allowing users to update their controls based on generated visual feedback. We further introduce TouchéBench to evaluate hand-motion following, camera--hand coordination, online interaction, and object response. Together, these components establish a framework for studying continuous exploration and hand-driven interaction within generative worlds.
Underwater spatial reasoning depends on object boundaries and geometric cues that are obscured by scattering, color distortion, and low visibility. Existing underwater resources capture these cues through images, annotations, and depth maps, but provide fragmented supervision for vision-language models. We present a spatial data engine that connects visual appearance with object-level geometry through enhancement, 2D and geometry-assisted question generation, and expert filtering. It produces 4.27M QA pairs across five capability groups. We use this corpus to train USI-Brain and introduce an Underwater Prior-guided Rectifier (UPR) that applies gated corrections to visual features. USI-Bench evaluates the resulting capabilities with 6,525 held-out QA pairs. On its 15 task metrics, USI-Brain and USI-Brain + UPR improve over Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct by 5.76 and 7.63 points on average, respectively, using signed differences on 100-point scales. Ablations show that geometry-assisted supervision improves depth and ordering by 4.8 and 6.1 points with UPR disabled, while UPR adds 18.0 points in scene description under matched training data. Both variants use raw images at evaluation. Across NautData, UWBench, and MarineEval, USI-Brain achieves the best or joint-best score on 28 of 32 metrics. Model weights and USI-Bench will be released at https://github.com/SKY-Zhu-91/USI-Brain.
Multiple instance learning (MIL) is the dominant framework for whole-slide image analysis in computational pathology, typically combining a frozen patch encoder, a projection layer, and a slide-level aggregator. While encoders and aggregators have been extensively studied, the projection layer remains a largely morphology-only bottleneck. This limits endpoints such as biomarker status and survival, which are governed by a molecular state that is not fully captured by H&E morphology. We introduce Molecularly Informed Staining Transform (MIST), a plug-in replacement for the MIL projection layer that uses paired spatial transcriptomics only during training to construct virtual molecular stains. MIST clusters gene expression profiles into cross-modal prototypes, anchors them in the frozen foundation model feature space, and uses them to reorganize H&E patch features along molecularly guided axes. It requires no transcriptomics at inference and can be inserted before standard MIL aggregators. We evaluate MIST across 23 downstream tasks and 8 MIL aggregators. MIST improves 240 of 256 configurations over the standard projection layer, with an average gain of +3.5%, observed consistently across endpoint types: +5.2% on survival prediction, +3.3% on tissue subtyping, and +2.6% on biomarker prediction. Ablations confirm that gene-derived prototypes are the primary source of the gains, while spatial, biological, and pathological analyses show that cross-modal prototype affinities capture spatially coherent molecular programs from H&E alone.
Diffusion models have become the dominant paradigm for high-quality image generation, but their iterative inference across tens of timesteps incurs substantial computational overhead. Prior accelerators exploit temporal similarity in diffusion models via differential quantization or output sparsity, yet suffer from increased memory footprint, design complexity, and image degradation. In this work, we present Phantom, an algorithm-architecture co-designed accelerator built on temporal caching. We view temporal similarity as differential sparsity: between adjacent timesteps, only a small fraction of tokens (outliers) change significantly. Phantom recomputes only these outlier tokens and reuses the rest from a temporal cache. Phantom runs on standard systolic arrays with lightweight additions: a Phantom Engine at the global buffer that detects outliers and updates the cache as activations stream through, and a condensed pipeline that maps the resulting sparse updates onto dense systolic computation for FC, convolution, and attention layers. Evaluations on modern diffusion models show that Phantom achieves an average 4.0x speedup and 5.5x energy saving over GPUs and prior accelerators while preserving generation quality.
Hanqing Wang, Zhaotian Cai, Ruichuan An, Bohan Zeng, Tao Zhang, Yilin Chen, Xu Jiang, Kaiquan Chen 等 16 位作者
Vision--Language--Action (VLA) models generate robot actions from visual observations and language instructions, but their understanding of physical dynamics remains limited. Video world models can capture scene dynamics, yet generating future videos introduces high latency into the control loop. We introduce PDRVLA, whose lightweight Physical Dynamics Module extracts physical tokens from vision--language features to condition action generation without online video generation. The module learns through direct prediction of future RGB, depth, and optical-flow features, with auxiliary supervision through a frozen pretrained video world model. Training relies entirely on publicly available data, expanded through human-to-robot synthesis, subtask annotation, and embodied chain-of-thought (ECoT) annotation. Across four simulation benchmarks, PDRVLA achieves success rates of 99.3% on LIBERO, 89.9% on LIBERO-Plus, 93.6% on RoboTwin~2.0, and 81.5% on SimplerEnv. Ablations show improved future prediction with world-model supervision and evaluate how subtask conditioning, future object-pose supervision, and ECoT training affect action success.
Scaling computer-use agents from individual actions to complex software work requires experience that connects decisions to complete outcomes. We present NorthCUA, an integrated system for turbocharging computer-use agents through experience at scale. Its Experience Flywheel supplies diverse executable tasks to the NorthCUA Harness, which sustains long interactions, records decisions, and checks task outcomes. The Flywheel uses these records to curate verified trajectories. For unsolved tasks, recursive self-improvement evolves reusable skills and preserves verified milestones so later attempts build on earlier progress. Staged Learning combines this experience with grounding data from the Flywheel to develop GUI competence through mid-training and long-horizon supervised fine-tuning. The policy then learns from fresh attempts in the same Harness through joint desktop-web reinforcement learning, closing the loop between experience production and policy improvement. The resulting Nano, Mini, and Pro family achieves state-of-the-art results among open-source models across GUI grounding, desktop execution, and Web interaction under the reported evaluation settings. For more responsive Web workflows, NorthCUA-Ultrafast pairs direct action selection with open-ended generation on pre-RL Nano, offering a measured quality-latency tradeoff. Together, these advances establish NorthCUA as a high-performing model family and a reusable foundation for agents that carry complex software work from intent to completion.
Ge Fan, Kai Meng, Huiping Chu, Yuning Jiang, Han Zhu, Bo Zheng
Helping users discover new interests is vital to the long-term health of industrial recommender systems, yet the usual remedy, boosting exposure of under-explored (discovery) content, often backfires in production. We report URED (Unexposed Recycling for Efficient Discovery), a training-free recall-stage system serving Taobao feed recommendation at Alibaba for over six months to tens of millions of daily active users. It rests on a production-validated insight: naive boosting fails because it injects cold, information-poor candidates that rankers systematically over-estimate, buying no discovery gain while risking engagement. Items scored highly but never exposed (signals industrial pipelines routinely discard) form a pool that is both relevant and reliably predictable. Over a 30-day horizon URED aggregates them and re-injects at recall time through a lightweight pipeline spanning offline storage, distributed aggregation, and low-latency online serving, adding under 1% latency via a single O(1) lookup per request with no model retraining. Online A/B tests show +3.47% discovered categories and +8.47% content richness with engagement preserved: completion video views rise significantly (+2.62%) and total views move positive (+0.36%, not significant). Ablations confirm both design pillars are necessary: a one-day window collapses the discovery gain to +0.55% (not significant), and random injection without score filtering yields no gain while trending negative on engagement (-0.17%). Across production recall channels, URED reaches 13.9x the platform-average discovery rate (6.3x the strongest nearline baseline) at engagement quality on par with the platform average. We share deployment details and lessons for practitioners facing the exploration-exploitation dilemma under tight resource constraints.
Spiking Neural Networks offer event-driven, energy-efficient computation for speech command recognition, yet most existing methods follow fixed computation paths, allocating redundant computation to easy samples while providing limited insight into how evidence evolves during inference. To address these challenges, we introduce SpikCTU, a compact spiking network with adaptive recurrent computation for speech command recognition. Specifically, a hybrid spiking embedding module preserves continuous input information alongside spike features to construct a fixed temporal memory. A shared Continuous Thinking Unit (CTU) repeatedly reads this memory using keys derived from spikes and continuous values, and updates a binary recurrent state with lightweight stage adapters. Furthermore, combining a fixed base prediction with accumulated corrections at each step enables learned aggregation over all steps or confidence-based early exit using only the predictions available so far. Experiments on three speech command recognition benchmarks show that SpikCTU achieves competitive accuracy with only 0.16--0.17M parameters, and the early exit strategy can substantially further reduce computational cost without compromising accuracy. In addition, trajectory and attention analyses reveal that recurrent steps enable error correction and progressively refine predictions. Code is available at https://github.com/Rivflyyy/spikctu.
Yusheng Dai, Vladimir Iashin, Kangdi Wang, Yuxuan Jiang, Ilpo Viertola, Weiqiang Wang, Qiuhong Ke, Min Zhao 等 9 位作者
Streaming video-to-audio (V2A) generation is essential for immersive interactive applications. However, real-time constraints leave existing streaming V2A methods far behind offline models: (1) visual frontends shrink their receptive fields to cut look-ahead latency, severely degrading audio-visual alignment; (2) causal autoregressive diffusion backends denoise each audio patch in isolation, impairing audio quality. To this end, we present LiveFoley, a streaming causal autoregressive diffusion architecture that addresses both bottlenecks with imperceptible latency. For the visual frontend, we introduce a Trailing Sliding Window that converts non-causal segment-level encoders into streaming modules without retraining. By simply realigning the window, it preserves precise audio-visual alignment, while a configurable hop size reduces the frontend look-ahead well below the human perceptual threshold. Building on this tunable hop size, we propose the Unified Varhop Framework to accommodate scenarios with diverse latency and computation budgets. For the audio backend, we explore widening the denoising window of the local diffusion transformer (LocDiT) head in two temporal directions. History LocDiT adds past context to improve quality at no latency cost and serves as our default. Alternatively, Future-Warmup LocDiT breaks the autoregressive deadlock with an approximate future condition, further improving generation quality at the cost of an acceptable backend look-ahead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LiveFoley matches offline models in temporal alignment and leads streaming systems in generation quality. Project page: https://dalision.github.io/livefoley-page/
Mingyu Jin, Yutong Yin, Jingcheng Niu, Qingcheng Zeng, Wujiang Xu, Mengnan Du, Wei Cheng, Zhaoran Wang 等 10 位作者
In this work, we investigate how the internal representations of Large Language Models (LLMs) change with inputs of increasing difficulty. Although sparsity changes may not be obvious for individual samples, dataset-level results reveal a consistent statistical trend: as task difficulty increases (e.g., harder questions, longer contexts, or more answer choices), the last hidden states of LLMs become systematically sparser. In short, \textbf{the harder the task, the sparser the representation}. This sparsity--difficulty relation is observable across diverse models and domains, suggesting that harder inputs drive more concentrated activation patterns in the last hidden state. Through a series of controlled analyses and learning-dynamics experiments, we show that representational density is a learned property of data familiarity: models develop rich, distributed representations for mastered patterns, while unfamiliar inputs default to sparser activations. Our finding is also actionable. We illustrate this with Sparsity-Guided Curriculum In-Context Learning (SG-ICL), which uses sparsity to select few-shot demonstrations matched to the query's difficulty, outperforming standard CoT and Auto-CoT baselines on MATH-500. Our study provides new insights into how LLM representations reflect task difficulty and how this signal can be leveraged for inference. The source code is available at the URL: https://github.com/MingyuJ666/sparsityLLM.
Innovative intersection designs can improve roadway safety and operational efficiency, but their uncommon geometries may create challenges for driver comprehension during early deployment. Evaluating these designs through full-scale field implementation can also be costly. This paper presents InterSim, a Unity game engine-based human-in-the-loop (HITL) driving simulator that constructs digital twins of site-specific innovative intersections in a virtual environment. InterSim links the real world and the simulation world through two closed cycles: a digital twin cycle that builds each intersection twin from agency design and traffic data and returns evidence from simulation to the agency, and an HITL cycle in which human drivers or automated driving algorithms operate the ego vehicle under identical scenario conditions. The research capabilities of InterSim are demonstrated through two case studies: a surrogate safety study compares post-encroachment time distributions between a Reduced Conflict Intersection and a standard intersection under different traffic volumes; an eco-driving study compares human drivers with a rule-based agent using vehicle-to-infrastructure information and reveals differences in emission and driving behavior. These studies demonstrate that InterSim provides a reusable digital twin platform for investigating innovative intersection designs from diverse perspectives. Demo video and open-source code can be accessed at https://purduedigitaltwin.github.io/InterSim/
Xiaofeng Tan, Jun Liu, Bin-Bin Gao, Yuanting Fan, Xi Jiang, Chengjie Wang, Hongsong Wang, Feng Zheng
RLHF is widely used to align flow-matching text-to-image models with human preferences, but often leads to severe diversity collapse after fine-tuning. In RL, diversity is often assumed to correlate with policy entropy, motivating entropy regularization. However, we show this intuition breaks in flow models: policy entropy remains constant, even while perceptual diversity collapses. We explain this mismatch both theoretically and empirically: the constant entropy arises from the fixed, pre-defined noise schedule, while the diversity collapse is driven by the mode-seeking nature of policy gradients. As a result, policy entropy fails to prevent the model from converging to a narrow high-reward region in the perceptual space. To this end, we introduce perceptual entropy that captures diversity in a perceptual space and maintains the property of standard entropy. Building upon this insight, we propose two entropy-regularized strategies, Perceptual Entropy Constraint and Perceptual Constraints on Generation Space, to preserve perceptual diversity and improve the quality. Experiments across two base models, neural and rule-based rewards, and three perceptual spaces demonstrate consistent gains in the quality-diversity trade-off; PEC achieves the best overall score of 0.734 (vs. baseline's 0.366); a complementary setting of PEC further reaches a diversity average of 0.989 (vs. baseline's 0.047). Our project page (https://xiaofeng-tan.github.io/projects/PEC) is publicly available.
RL for LLM reasoning often reaches an early performance plateau as the policy distribution becomes increasingly sharp. Recent work has studied policy entropy as both a diagnostic and a control signal for this behavior. In our experiments, however, increasing entropy alone does not reliably change the eventual plateau. We analyze RL through its implicit target policy and derive a sharpness factor $κ$, together with an effective counterpart $κ_{\mathrm{eff}}$, that describes how strongly reward or advantage gaps are translated into probability-ratio gaps. Motivated by this view, we introduce \emph{reward budgeting}, a plug-in advantage construction that assigns a fixed total reward budget to each prompt. For binary rewards and independent on-policy rollouts, its unclipped score-function estimator follows the gradient of an exact finite-$G$ concave objective with diminishing returns, while its advantage gap decreases as more rollouts become correct. For general rewards, a shifted log-mean interpretation holds asymptotically under the stated regularity conditions. These results motivate, rather than establish exact objective equivalence for, the clipped implementations. On Qwen3-8B and Llama3.2-3B-Instruct, reward budgeting consistently improves a range of RL baselines, with gains up to +12.50 on AMC23 and +10.00 on AIME24 and AIME25. Overall, our results support an update-dynamics view of premature convergence and show that strong gains can be obtained without explicitly preserving entropy.
Automatic modulation classification (AMC) underpins spectrum sensing and non-cooperative signal identification in cognitive radio, yet the two standard CPU-feasible approaches to it, a compact convolutional neural network (CNN) on raw in-phase and quadrature (I/Q) samples and a classical higher-order-cumulant feature classifier, are rarely compared against each other conditioned on signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We show that they are, in fact, complementary: the CNN is markedly more robust at low SNR, where hand-crafted statistics collapse toward chance, while the cumulant classifier is more accurate at high SNR, where higher-order statistics cleanly separate dense constellations. We exploit this complementarity with FuseAMC, a lightweight decision-fusion model that trains a logistic-regression meta-combiner over the concatenated class-posteriors of an approximately 198k-parameter residual CNN and a gradient-boosted-tree cumulant classifier, on a validation split disjoint from test. On RadioML 2016.10a (5 seeds, 44k-frame held-out test set), FuseAMC reaches 55.8% overall accuracy, improving on the best cumulant-feature baseline by 5.1 points and on the CNN alone by 3.2 points (paired-bootstrap 95% confidence-interval lower bounds of 5.0 and 3.1 points, both positive), while matching the best classical baseline in its own strong high-SNR regime and the CNN in its strong low-SNR regime. With about 0.2 million parameters, a model footprint of a few megabytes, and roughly 3 MFLOPs per frame, the whole pipeline trains and runs on one CPU core, targeting general-purpose and embedded processors without hardware acceleration.
EEG-based brain-computer interfaces support a broad range of applications, yet designing decoding architectures that perform well across diverse tasks remains challenging. We introduce AutoBCI, an agentic framework in which a Designer Agent and a Forecaster Agent support the discovery and selection of EEG decoding architectures across tasks. The Designer Agent performs Pool-Guided Architecture Discovery (PGAD), generating and refining architectures through training and validation across multiple EEG tasks, such as emotion recognition, motor imagery, and sleep staging. The Forecaster Agent performs Performance Estimation from Early Knowledge (PEEK), using architecture code, the training protocol, and early learning curves to predict full-budget validation performance and select promising candidates for continued training. Across 14 EEG datasets spanning motor imagery, emotion recognition, and sleep staging, we evaluate AutoBCI with six LLMs, including Opus 5.5 and GPT 5.6 Sol, and compare the architectures selected by the search procedure against ten baselines: six conventional EEG models and four foundation models. The architecture discovered by AutoBCI with Claude Opus 5.5 achieves 64.16% average test balanced accuracy (bAcc), compared with 63.87% for REVE, the strongest baseline on this metric. Using ten observed epochs, PEEK reduces mean absolute error in predicting average validation bAcc from 2.20 to 1.36 percentage points, a 38.1% reduction relative to the best-observed-score baseline. Code is available at https://github.com/Jiang-Muyun/AutoBCI
Zhengshuai Yang, Linna Jiang, Changyun Li, Guihu Zhao
Prenatal ultrasound biometry must return a head circumference (HC) and refuse when the image cannot support one. Selective prediction trades coverage against error, but its finite-sample guarantees bound the rate of gross errors, not their magnitude. We audit a tool-grounded biometry pipeline on two separately pre-registered four-way splits of the 999 labelled HC18 images, retraining the segmenter three times on each. Calibrating the contour-completeness threshold by exact Clopper-Pearson risk control returns a certificate indistinguishable from a hand-set floor, yet the pipeline still emits a 271.3 mm error: a small, geometrically complete ring fitted to an image whose true HC is 324.6 mm. The accepted candidate scores 0.94 completeness, so the score cannot see the failure, and one outlier among $\approx 150$ answers leaves the certified risk bound ($α= 0.10$) intact. A second, untouched split reproduces the mechanism on a different image (233.3 mm). Constraining the admissibility region---the anatomical range in which the measurand is defined---removes the family instead: raising the lower bound from 50 to 55 mm costs 0.4 coverage points and cuts the worst-case error on both splits to 11.4 and 11.1 mm, whereas suppressing it through the completeness threshold costs 19.0 and 12.1 points. At an anatomically defined 70 mm the frozen tests give 1.91 and 1.81 mm MAE.
This vision paper argues that distributed learning, including federated and decentralized, should become a first-class paradigm in LLM post-training, not merely a privacy add-on. Current methods like RLHF and DPO rest on an invisible assumption: preference data should be centralized. We contend this assumption is scientifically unjustified, practically unsustainable, and ethically problematic. As LLMs deploy into healthcare, law, finance, and multilingual communities, preference data originates from populations that cannot or will not centralize. We develop a three-pillar argument grounded in (1) privacy and data sovereignty, (2) pluralism and representational equity, and (3) robustness and scalability. We formalize key technical challenges unique to this intersection, reference drift, preference heterogeneity, and the DP-utility trade-off for contrastive losses, and propose concrete algorithmic directions, and sketch a research agenda. Our analysis shows distributed post-training is not only necessary but tractable, and ignoring it risks AI that is legally noncompliant, representationally narrow, and brittle at scale.
Wencai Ye, Guangyi Liu, Chaoyi Wang, Wenbin Luo, Shengyu Wang, Mingjie Sun, Peng Wang, Quanming Yao 等 10 位作者
Live-streaming advertising is an important monetization channel on short-video and e-commerce platforms, where rapidly changing live content, promoted products, and user feedback impose strong freshness requirements on recommendation models. Existing generative recommenders designed for static domains fail at three levels: static semantic IDs (SID) cannot track evolving live ads; single-scale behavior modeling misses shifting intent; preference optimization conflicts between fresh on-policy feedback and training stability. We propose TAGR, a generative recommendation framework with temporal adaptation at three levels: live-ad tokenization, user intent modeling, and preference alignment. At the token level, Live Semantic-Collaborative ID (LSID) periodically refreshes each active ad's SID based on its current live scene and promoted products, while retaining a stable hierarchical token vocabulary for autoregressive generation. At the intent level, Intent-Aware Generation (IAG) models live-room entry histories at multiple temporal granularities as the primary intent sequence, keeps auxiliary behaviors as separate inputs, and weights next-token prediction (NTP) using post-request intent evidence and business value. At the alignment level, Intermittent On-Policy Preference Optimization (IOPO) periodically samples fresh candidate groups from the current policy and performs behavior- and value-aligned preference updates interleaved with supervised NTP maintenance to preserve learned behavior distribution. Deployed on a large-scale e-commerce live-stream advertising platform, TAGR improves live-room entry and shopping-cart click rates by 8.5% and 7.4%, respectively, and achieves a 16.1% revenue lift over the production baseline. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and industrial viability of temporally adaptive generative recommendation for live-stream advertising.
Yang Wu, Qiang Meng, Zhaojiang Liu, Youquan Liu, Jian Yang, Jin Xie
Current end-to-end autonomous driving models are fundamentally constrained by the behavioral cloning ceiling of imitation learning. While reinforcement learning offers a path to smarter autonomy, it demands two missing pieces of infrastructure: (1) a cognitive foundation that understands traffic semantics and driving intent, and (2) a foresighted physical environment that can anticipate the consequences of candidate actions. To this end, we propose CoPhy, a CognitivePhysical reinforcement learning framework for autonomous driving. To distill to think, we distill VLM knowledge into the BEV encoder and then discard the VLM entirely, retaining cognitive ability at zero inference cost while releasing the cognitive channel as a pluggable interface for optional human language commands. To foresee to act, we build an auto-regressive BEV world model that explicitly predicts future semantic maps conditioned on candidate actions, serving as an interpretable physical sandbox from which safety metrics are directly derived. Built upon this dual infrastructure, we optimize the driving policy via GRPO with a novel dual-reward mechanism: a physical reward derived from BEV rollouts enforces hard safety constraints, while a cognitive reward from a language-aligned scorer ensures intent compliance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoPhy not only achieves state-of-the-art results on NAVSIM v1 and v2 benchmarks, but also enables safer driving via cognitively informed scene compliance and flexible intent control through user-defined language instructions. Project page: https://wuyang98.github.io/CoPhy/.
Lifan Jiang, Yibo Zhao, Senlin Cheng, Bolei Xu, Xiaobo Li, Can Ye, Dehai Zhao, Deng Cai 等 9 位作者
Digital human e-commerce video generation requires preserving product appearance, human identity, and overall video style during dynamic demonstrations. Although recent models support multiple reference images, their general conditioning schemes do not explicitly distinguish the asymmetric roles of "what is presented" and "who presents it." Consequently, generated videos may favor a single reference, resulting in product distortion, identity drift, or single-reference collapse. To address this issue, we propose DualCast, a role-addressed dual-image conditioning framework for video generation. By explicitly modeling the distinct roles of product and human conditions, DualCast reduces role ambiguity and feature competition between references. First, a dual-spatiotemporal slot injection mechanism VAE-encodes the product and human images separately and places their latent features at the front and rear boundaries of the DiT sequence, enabling sequence-level condition separation and directed injection. Second, a mask-guided region-weighted loss strengthens supervision over product, face, and product-face overlap regions, improving generation fidelity in critical areas. Third, image condition dropout enables a single model to support dual-image, product-only, and human-only generation. In addition, we construct a curated dataset of 10K e-commerce videos for model training. Experimental results demonstrate the strong performance of DualCast.
Large language models increasingly automate complex tasks, but human decision capacity does not scale with their capabilities. In many applications, humans remain essential for providing private context, authority, or judgments unavailable to the agent. We formulate human decision capacity allocation: given multiple consultation opportunities and a limited budget, at which decisions should an LLM agent consult a human? The central challenge is estimating consultation value, which is executor-dependent because the same human input may benefit different downstream agents differently. We introduce Consultation Value Distillation (CVD), which estimates consultation values offline using Monte Carlo executor rollouts and distills these values into lightweight predictors for budgeted allocation, requiring no rollout-based value estimation at deployment. Across five batch and three sequential settings with two frontier executors, CVD improves allocation through joint and continuation-aware value learning, while independent consultation values remain competitive in several settings. CVD also broadly outperforms direct prompting and Value of Information where applicable, remains robust with substantially less rollout supervision, and enables nearly lossless approximate allocation at low search cost.
Coding agents must deliver correct software while respecting users' expertise, preferences, and working conditions. Existing benchmarks increasingly incorporate interaction, yet personalized requirement fulfillment remains underexplored. We introduce PersonaCodeBench, which turns user characteristics into verifiable obligations in persona-driven multi-turn coding sessions. Our persona pool spans roles, technical abilities, interaction preferences, and practical constraints, yielding task-grounded evolved requirements for implementation, permissions, testing, explanation, and delivery. At runtime, a controller governs user simulator responses and requirement disclosure, using online requirement evaluation to provide feedback and advance the interaction. Requirements emerge progressively, with their content, disclosure conditions, and acceptance criteria fixed before evaluation. A completion verifier and a personalization verifier separately assess native correctness and persona fulfillment. Joint pass requires both adherence to the declared budget and compliance with validity conditions. We evaluate all major frontier agents, establish a comprehensive leaderboard, and conduct detailed experimental analyses to validate effectiveness. PersonaCodeBench supports reproducible evaluation of coding agents' ability to meet explicit, personalized user expectations alongside coding objectives.
Xinkai Jiang, Jing Jiang, Hongyi Zhou, Pankhuri Vanjani, Ahmad Baki, Jakub Suliga, Ge Li, Zhuoyue Li 等 10 位作者
This paper presents Proactive Human-in-the-Loop (PHIL), a framework for proactive policy correction and preference-based post-training. PHIL enables operators to preview policy-predicted future motion and intervene before anticipated undesirable actions. During takeover, PHIL continues querying the policy and displaying its predicted trajectories in the physical workspace through an extended reality (XR) interface. PHIL pairs rejected policy predictions with corrective action chunks subsequently executed from the same physical state over the same horizon, and preference-based post-training encourages the policy to favor these corrections. This paper evaluates PHIL on four real-world manipulation tasks using a diffusion policy and a pretrained vision-language-action policy. With five correction episodes per condition, PHIL increases mean success rates across the evaluated tasks and demonstration budgets from 44.0% to 70.3% for the diffusion policy and from 57.8% to 76.9% for X-VLA, compared with HG-DAgger. Separately, policies trained with proactive corrections show fewer unnecessary recovery behaviors in successful episodes. Project page: https://intuitive-robots.github.io/PHIL-page/.
John Martabano Landy, Louis C. Tiao, Yao Xuan, Luc Kien Hang, Rupinder P. Khandpur, Arvind M. Vepa, Srinidhi Raghavendran, Anirudh Agrawal 等 13 位作者
Large-scale ranking and recommendation models of Web platforms benefit from increased compute much as large language models do, and their scaling behavior is broadly power-law in form. Yet ranking models have heterogeneous architectures which makes their scaling law less straightforward than that of LLMs. We address how to discover the scaling law of an arbitrary ranking model efficiently. We introduce a scaling layer, which groups primitive architecture parameters into semantically coherent groups and defines how they co-vary, inducing a mapping from a low-dimensional space of hyper-hyperparameters into the full architecture space. On top of it, Axia fits scaling-informed surrogates, selects configurations by a posterior-based acquisition criterion, and returns a Pareto frontier from which per-model operating points are validated -- replacing exhaustive sweeps with a small number of informative runs. A fleet-level evaluation protocol, computed on a fixed representative model set under matched trial budgets, makes refinements to either component measurable. Our contribution is an automated system that learns model-specific complexity-quality relationships and gives uncertainty-aware guidance for allocating compute across a heterogeneous model ecosystem. Across 34 model iterations in two development cycles on Meta's ads ranking and retrieval system, the workflow yielded a mean 0.66% offline normalized-entropy improvement and 0.36% cumulative online lift.
AI 速览：作者构建两个故意训练出特定错位行为的模型生物，形式化事后行为抑制问题，并提出 PEARL 方法以追求即时抑制、训练后持久性与通用能力保持的平衡。
Undesired model behaviors can emerge or re-emerge at any stage of training. Once observed, how effectively can we suppress them? To study this question, we first construct two model organisms--language models deliberately trained to exhibit a specific misalignment--that differ in what triggers the behavior. The narrow-trigger organism misbehaves only when the prompt contains a specific cue: it cheats on multiple-choice questions by following a planted hint that points to a wrong answer, and behaves normally otherwise. The broad-trigger organism has no such cue: after fine-tuning on insecure code, it gives harmful responses across a wide range of open-ended prompts. We then formalize post-hoc behavioral suppression and evaluate methods along three criteria: immediate suppression of the target behavior, durability under further training, and preservation of general capability. We compare standard methods--SFT, GRPO, and gradient-ascent unlearning--along these dimensions. Building on prior work on alignment shallowness, we hypothesize that more durable suppression requires the ability to recover from a wider range of misalignment states. We introduce Prefix-Expanded Adversarial Reinforcement Learning (PEARL), a GRPO variant that augments rollouts with continuations from intermediate states sampled along cached organism trajectories. Across both organism settings and two model families (Qwen3-4B, GPT-OSS-20B), PEARL achieves strong immediate suppression while preserving task accuracy, and remains durable under further fine-tuning on either the organism's data or unrelated data. It obtains the greatest benefit when the undesirable behavior is broad and cannot be addressed through targeted SFT. Together, our framework and method offer a step toward more durable post-hoc removal of undesired behaviors.
AI 速览：作者提出并发布OpenBrain，一个带置信度与可审计证据的全脑MRI生成分区标签数据集，让用户能按风险筛选、加权或复核生成标签。
Automatic tools can now generate whole-brain MRI parcellations at cohort scale, but generated-label releases often provide little evidence about which cases are reliable enough to reuse. We introduce OpenBrain, a confidence-aware release of 35,838 provenance-verified OpenNeuro T1w cases from 607 source datasets. OpenBrain is organized as an auditable case-record release rather than a directory of standalone segmentation files: each record links a primary parcellation, two committee parcellations, source/license provenance, raw QC-7 measurements, percentile risks, a combined risk score R, and a confidence tier. QC-7 is a reference-free reliability panel over label geometry, image-label consistency, and committee disagreement, so users can filter, weight, audit, or re-threshold generated labels without rerunning inference. We evaluate this released evidence under a frozen protocol. Across external cohorts, lower QC-7 risk corresponds to higher generated-label quality; in fixed-budget training, lower-risk selections improve paired macro Dice over random selection by +3.2 to +3.7 percentage points. OpenBrain also exposes raw axes, committee outputs, provenance, and datasheet documentation, so confidence claims remain inspectable after download. It does not turn generated labels into manual annotations or clinical-grade segmentations. Its contribution is a large open generated-parcellation substrate, a reusable case-level risk-evidence layer, and an external validation protocol for release-time QC. Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/lanqz7766/OpenBrain. Code: https://github.com/lanqz7766/openbrain.