AI 速览：作者提出 Assess→Decide→Respond 框架，让防御方在多轮对话的关键轮次先显式做出可解析的安全决策，再据此生成回复，以利用对齐的“浅层性”进行防御。
Safety alignment has enabled large language models to reliably refuse harmful requests directly, yet the same request distributed across a multi-turn conversation still succeeds far too often. This brittleness has a mechanistic root: Alignment is shallow, with safety behavior concentrated in a model's first few output tokens, and existing defenses inherit the weakness, supervising the surface form of the response without ever giving the model an explicit safety decision to learn. We take the opposite view of shallowness: if a short span determines the trajectory of an entire response, that span is the highest-leverage place to intervene, and the defender can occupy it first. We propose Assess $\to$ Decide $\to$ Respond, a framework in which the defender assesses the user's intent, commits to an explicit, parseable safety decision, and only then generates a reply conditioned on it, with the commitment trained by reinforcement learning at the payload turn. Because the decision is a token span, the reward can be a rule: a self-verified reward checks the committed label against the conversation's known nature, requiring no judge and no annotation, while the same format also supports an LLM-as-judge reward over a graded decision space with safe redirection. Across two model families and fourteen benchmarks spanning safety, utility, and helpfulness, our defenders achieve the strongest multi-turn safety in a controlled comparison, maintaining their lead in safety while preserving utility at a modest cost to helpfulness. A per-token KL analysis and interventional probes confirm why this works: training concentrates its effect on the brief deliberation that sets a response's trajectory, and the decision committed there is a causal control point. The very shallowness attackers exploit becomes the mechanism of defense.
AI 速览：PIVOT 将教师生成的纠正片段插入学生 rollout，并对这些片段施加 token 级 KL 监督，与 RLVR 目标联合训练，以缓解困难推理任务中稀疏奖励无学习信号的问题。
Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) is limited by sparse outcome-level feedback on hard reasoning tasks: when all rollouts in a group fail, rewards provide no learning signal. Stronger teachers can provide additional guidance, but this raises a central question: how can such signals be incorporated into RLVR to support successful rollouts while remaining learnable for the student? We distinguish two complementary mechanisms: trajectory-level intervention, which improves access to reward-bearing trajectories, and token-level supervision, which provides dense targets to guide student learning. Our controlled experiments show that either mechanism alone can remain insufficient, motivating their combination. We therefore introduce PIVOT, which inserts teacher-generated corrections into student rollouts and applies token-level KL supervision to these segments alongside the RLVR objective. Beyond their combination, we systematically analyze where to intervene and how to supervise, yielding a recipe for effective guidance. Across hard logic games and mathematical reasoning benchmarks, PIVOT consistently outperforms existing methods, nearly doubling mean avg@8 on logic games from 19.5% for the best-performing baseline to 35.6%.
AI 速览：作者提出基于大语言模型的智能体 ClinGeX，通过检索与依赖感知编排 105 个可执行技能来辅助临床基因组解读，并在基准与人类-AI 协作研究中报告了优于对照的表现。
Clinical genomic analysis requires experts to integrate evolving guidelines, databases, and computational evidence. As sequencing has become increasingly accessible, this complex and labor-intensive process has become a major bottleneck to the timely use of genomic information in clinical decision-making. To fill this gap, we developed ClinGeX, a large-language-model agent that composes 105 curated executable skills through task-specific retrieval and dependency-aware orchestration. On 223 temporally held-out benchmark cases, ClinGeX achieved 71.7\% macro-averaged task-level concordance with expert reference classifications, compared with 45.7\% for the strongest comparator. In a three-condition, counterbalanced human-AI collaboration study, 45 clinical genomic professionals assessed 135 clinically derived cases under routine (no AI assistance), DeepSeek-assisted and ClinGeX-assisted conditions. ClinGeX assistance increased raw case-level concordance across criterion-level variant analysis, genomic interpretation in rare disease and molecular oncology decision-making (51.1\%, 57.8\%, 64.4\% versus 15.6\%, 31.1\%, 20.0\% in comparator conditions) and reduced reported interpretation time in all scenarios. During an exploratory one-month real-world non-interventional assessment, 11 experienced professionals submitted feedback on 96 self-selected analysis episodes and reported frequent conclusion adoption and time savings. These findings support executable domain skills as a promising approach to augment specialist genomic interpretation.
Zero-freeness for Random Regular Graphs up to the Replica Symmetry Breaking Threshold
Zejia Chen, Chunyang Wang, Xinyuan Zhang
AI 速览：作者在随机 d-正则图上证明硬核模型与反铁磁 Potts 模型（含正常 q-染色）在副本对称区内具有零点自由区域，并由此得到多项式时间近似配分函数的算法。
We study antiferromagnetic spin systems on random regular graphs through the lens of the phase transitions characterized by the complex zeros of the partition function. Our motivating examples include the hardcore model and the antiferromagnetic Potts model (including proper $q$-colorings at $β=0$). For both models on random $d$-regular graphs, we establish, with high probability over the graph, zero-free regions throughout the interior of the replica-symmetric regime. Asymptotically, this regime extends up to tree occupation density $$α< α_{\mathrm{RSB}}(d) = (2\log d - 2\log\log d + 2 - 2\log 2 + o_d(1))/d$$ for the hardcore model and up to degree $$d < d_{\mathrm{RSB}}(q) = (2q-1)\log q - 2\log 2 + o_q(1)$$ for proper $q$-colorings. Leveraging the standard algorithmic implications of zero-freeness, we obtain deterministic polynomial-time algorithms that multiplicatively approximate the corresponding partition functions at fixed rational parameters throughout this regime, with high probability over the graph. Our algorithmic guarantees significantly improve upon prior work and extend beyond the parameter ranges reached by previously known search algorithms. To establish our results, we first develop reinforced small subgraph conditioning, which resolves short-cycle fluctuations in the complex plane by lifting classical small subgraph conditioning on random regular graphs to random holomorphic functions. Second, we overcome the standard second-moment barrier caused by the exponential blowup of the bare second moment inside the replica-symmetric phase, by showing that replica symmetry implies a nonpositive Bethe functional and upgrading planted overlap concentration to an exponentially small bound, which enables a typical-graph truncation that controls complex second moments up to the replica symmetry breaking threshold.
HiFOR: Hierarchical Foresight with Action-Guided World Grounding for Vision-Language-Action Model
Rongxing Ding, Hongyu Qu, Kehong Wu, Xudong Wang, Fan Zhang, Xinguang Xiang, Xiangbo Shu
AI 速览：HiFOR 提出层级前瞻预测与动作引导的世界检索框架，以增强视觉-语言-动作模型对短期动态和长期目标的联合建模能力。
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated promising capabilities in robotic manipulation by integrating visual perception, language understanding, and action generation. Recent advances have further incorporated future prediction to enhance the understanding of environmental dynamics and task progression. However, existing methods often model short-term dynamics and long-term task objectives separately, while directly incorporating predicted futures into action policies without sufficiently considering their relevance to current action requirements. To address these limitations, we propose HiFOR, a hierarchical foresight framework with action-guided world retrieval. Specifically, Hierarchical Foresight Prediction jointly predicts short-term state evolution, semantic milestones, and final goal states through a Hierarchical Dependency Mask (HDM), establishing dependencies across temporal horizons. Building upon these predictions, Structure-Aware Latent World Modeling organizes future latent representations along the horizon, view, and spatial dimensions to facilitate fine-grained retrieval. Furthermore, Action-Guided Factorized World Retrieval adaptively retrieves relevant future information from the structured latent world based on evolving action representations during denoising, providing targeted guidance for action generation. Extensive experiments on two simulation benchmarks and six real-world robotic manipulation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
GUI-AC: Enhancing Continual Learning in GUI Agents
Can Lin, Wenjun Yang, Tao Feng, Hangjie Yuan, Dan Zhang, Yifan Zhu, Zhonghong Ou, Wen Chen 等 9 位作者
AI 速览：GUI-AC提出一种持续强化微调框架，通过优势与策略概率联合刻画grounding rollout并引入grounding certainty，以针对性优化探索与过度自信问题。
Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) serve as the dominant medium for human-computer interaction, yet building GUI agents that generalize across the vast diversity of real-world interface environments, with the same flexibility and robustness that humans naturally exhibit, remains unsolved. Notably, GUI data are inherently non-stationary: the continual emergence of previously unseen interface instances (e.g., novel domains and resolutions) induces persistent distribution shifts, significantly impeding the continual learning of existing GUI agents. Reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) has attracted considerable attention as a promising approach. Nevertheless, RFT exhibits pronounced instability in its grounding capability, where rollout outcomes are highly imbalanced and fixed clipping can suppress valuable exploration. More importantly, policy probability alone does not reveal the semantic role of a grounding prediction. To address these challenges, we propose GUI-AC, a continual RFT framework that jointly characterizes grounding rollouts through advantage and policy probability. This yields a four-region view of grounding behavior and enables targeted optimization of Exploration and Overconfidence. GUI-AC further introduces grounding certainty to support two core mechanisms: (i) Adaptive Advantage, which strengthens the negative correction for overconfident grounding failures; and (ii) Dynamic Clipping, which relaxes the upper clipping bound for exploratory grounding rollouts. Extensive experiments show that GUI-AC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GUI-AC-Code.
Layering and reverse extension for weighted $k$-path vertex cover
Jiajing Wu, An Zhang, Shiming Li, Guohui Lin
AI 速览：作者在分层与反向扩展局部比值框架下设计局部权重函数，为加权 k-路径顶点覆盖问题给出新的近似比。
We study the weighted $k$-path vertex cover problem for any fixed integer $k \ge 2$, in which a vertex non-negatively weighted simple graph $G = (V, E)$ is given and one wants to find a minimum-weight vertex subset $C \subseteq V$ such that every simple path on $k$ vertices in $G$ contains at least one vertex of $C$. The problem generalizes the classic weighted vertex cover problem, that is, $k = 2$, and it admits a $k$-approximation algorithm of Hochbaum~[SIAM J. Comput., 1982] and a $(k - \frac 12)$-approximation algorithm of Brüstle et al.~[IWOCA 2021]. In this paper, we carefully design local weight functions in the Layering and Reverse Extension local ratio framework of Bar-Yehuda et al.~[ACM Comput. Surv., 2004], leading to an approximation algorithm of ratio $\frac {3k-1}4$ for odd $k \ge 3$ and of ratio $\frac {3k}4$ for even $k \ge 4$. When $k = 3$ and $k = 4$, these ratios are $2$ and $3$, respectively, matching the state-of-the-art approximation ratios for the corresponding special cases.
Wenhao Wang, Aditya Saraf, Lioba Heimbach, Kushal Babel, Fan Zhang
On high-throughput, low-fee blockchains, a qualitatively new form of maximal extractable value (MEV), spam MEV, has emerged: searchers submit large volumes of speculative transactions, whose profitability is resolved only at execution time. On major rollups, it can consume more than half of block gas, even though only a small fraction of probes ultimately results in a trade. Despite growing awareness of this phenomenon, there is no principled framework for understanding how blockchain design parameters shape its prevalence and impact. We develop such a framework, modeling spam transactions competing for on-chain opportunities under a competitive equilibrium that drives their profits to zero, and deriving equilibrium spam volumes as a function of block capacity, minimum gas price, and the transaction fee mechanism. Empirical evidence from Base and Arbitrum is consistent with several predictions of the model: spam grew sharply as block capacity was scaled up and fell when minimum gas prices were introduced. Our analysis yields three main insights. First, spam is always costly: when block capacity is scarce, it displaces users and drives up gas prices; as block capacity grows, it increasingly consumes execution resources, raising network externality, i.e., the cost of provisioning and processing blocks. We show that spam takes an increasing share of each additional unit of block capacity, so capping it before all users are included creates a favorable trade-off: forgoing a small amount of user welfare eliminates disproportionate spam and externality. Second, we extend the analysis to approximate priority fee ordering and show that it can reduce spam by making earlier block positions more expensive, as spammers pay more to reach early block positions. Third, as user demand grows and blockspace is scaled accordingly, spam's share of block capacity plateaus rather than growing indefinitely.
Liuji Chen, Zeyu Zhang, Xinyuan Zhang, Shuai Nie, Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Liang Wang
Personalized text generation requires models to capture user-specific writing styles from historical data. Existing approaches based on retrieval, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, or activation steering either introduce inference and storage overhead or struggle to separate stylistic signals from semantic content. We propose GLASS, a training-free framework for personalized generation via Global-Local Activation Steering with Sparse priors. GLASS uses sparse autoencoders to extract a global user-style prior from historical responses and constructs local contrastive style vectors over clustered interaction scenarios. During inference, it jointly injects global and local vectors into different model layers, enabling context-aware personalization without retrieval or parameter updates. Experiments on LaMP and LongLaMP show that GLASS outperforms retrieval-, fine-tuning-, and steering-based baselines across ROUGE metrics and LLM-as-judge evaluations. Further analyses show that SAE-based representations are more robust to topic and length shifts, suggesting better disentanglement of stylistic information from semantic residue.
Choosing a robot action model requires evidence about task capability, adaptation cost, deployment requirements, and the reliability of reported conclusions. Success rates alone offer limited guidance to researchers with different computing budgets and goals. We propose RoboSeed, a multidimensional evaluation framework for vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action models (WAM), within a continuing program to train, evaluate, and openly release robot models with verifiable evidence for model selection. The framework defines five dimensions: capability, downstream training affordability, deployment affordability, locally verified research value, and reproduction evidence. It maps empirical measurements and audit criteria to 0-100 profiles using fixed normalization anchors, with balanced, training-constrained, and deployment-constrained preference settings. Interface and protocol checks establish when comparisons are appropriate. Missing measurements remain explicit, incomplete aggregate scores are withheld, and weighted input coverage identifies evidence gaps. We apply the framework to representative VLA and WAM models, drawing on local training, released-weight evaluation, task-level audits, and an evaluation-system study. The results reveal budget-dependent backbone choices, sensitivity to adaptation recipes, and differences between language and visual task interfaces. Reproducible scoring code and machine-readable evidence support extension to additional models. The study provides dimension-level assessments and priorities for further measurement, while incomplete serving traces and heterogeneous protocols preclude overall numerical rankings.
Aoqian Zhang, Chunzheng Wang, Haoran Chen, Annan Tang, Cheng Xiang, Fan Shi, Shuzhi Sam Ge
Humanoids have become increasingly agile and capable in real-world environments. To operate safely in dynamic scenarios, they must rapidly evade fast-moving obstacles while maintaining stability and physically feasible whole-body motion. Learning such behaviors remains challenging due to the high-dimensional dynamics of humanoid systems and the need to jointly balance reactive obstacle avoidance, motion naturalness, and control robustness. In this work, we present Humanoid Dodgeball, a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for agile dynamic obstacle avoidance in humanoids. Our method enables highly dynamic whole-body evasive maneuvers against incoming projectiles through threat-aware reward shaping, while multiple direction-specific adversarial motion priors regularize the learned behaviors toward stable and diverse human-like motions. Extensive simulation and hardware experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework substantially improves dynamic obstacle avoidance performance across diverse obstacle speeds and launch distances, while preserving robust and physically plausible humanoid motions.
Xiangfei Sheng, Xiaofeng Pan, Leida Li, Qian Zhang, Biao Wang, Johan Wagemans, Weisi Lin
Aesthetic image cropping (AIC) aims to improve image composition and aesthetic quality by removing extraneous or distracting content. Over the past decade, AIC methods have evolved from specialized vision models to multimodal large language models(MLLMs). Reliable evaluation that reflects human preferences is essential for benchmarking AIC methods and guiding model optimization. However, the current AIC evaluation relies largely on geometry-based metrics such as intersection over union (IoU), as well as image aesthetic assessment(IAA) models. Although inconsistencies with human preferences have long been observed, the robustness and reliability of these evaluation criteria remain underexplored. To bridge this gap, we first construct CropBench, a large-scale benchmark comprising 106,995 human preference pairs for 1,019 images, with each candidate set containing the original image and candidate crops produced by 14 AIC methods. A systematic study on CropBench reveals that the existing criteria, ranging from IoU to off-the-shelf IAA assessment models, only exhibit limited alignment with human preferences. Building upon CropBench, we further propose CropReward, an MLLM-based reward model that evaluates a candidate crop by comparing with the original uncropped image and outputs a score indicating explicit aesthetic improvement or degradation relative to the original. In addition, we employ CropReward to construct CropReward-300k, the largest AIC dataset to date, and further develop CropAlign, a preference-aligned AIC model trained solely with CropReward supervision, without human-annotated crop boxes. Experimental results demonstrate that CropReward aligns with human preferences significantly better than AIC existing criteria. CropAlign also surpasses the state-of-the-art AIC methods, demonstrating the advantage of CropReward in guiding AIC model optimization.
Segmentation networks that predict at an output stride are trained against label maps downsampled by strided sampling, nearest-neighbor resampling or majority pooling. These methods label each coarse grid cell on its own, so a region that wins no cell is absent from the target and receives no positive label. We present MatchDown, which builds the coarse target from a minimum-cost matching between regions and the grid cells they occupy. It keeps as many regions as any one-region-per-cell target can, certifies how many losses are unavoidable, and with priority tiers (MatchDown-P) keeps every evaluated region (a region that a metric scores) of at least one cell's area. On COCO, Cityscapes and BBBC038 at factors 2 to 16, MatchDown-P loses exactly the minimum number of regions, whereas the downsampling used by StarDist, nnU-Net and connectomics pyramids loses four to five times as many on COCO at factor 8. Keeping a region in the target and reconstructing its shape are different problems: we show that no region lost by majority pooling can be reconstructed above IoU 0.5 by upsampling any coarse target, yet on BBBC038 a star-convex head trained on MatchDown targets segments 35% of the nuclei that majority pooling loses above IoU 0.5, against 15% when trained on majority targets and 24% on StarDist's strided target. On two nucleus datasets, with thresholds cross-validated for count error, this head has instance accuracy at IoU 0.5 (Acc50) 2.6 to 4.2 points above the strided target and at most 2.8 points below cell-center sampling, and a lower count error than the strided and cell-center targets on BBBC039. On BBBC039, an affinity head, which outputs one label per cell, lowers count error relative to majority targets by 9.3 nuclei per image at 7.2 points lower Acc50. MatchDown runs once, before training, in place of the label-downsampling step.
Wenlin Chen, Mingtian Zhang, Jiajun He, Zijing Ou, José Miguel Hernández-Lobato, Bernhard Schölkopf, David Barber
Score-based distillation methods train one-step diffusion models in two stages: they first train a teacher score model, then distill it into a one-step student model. However, this distillation process can introduce bias from two sources: errors in the teacher score model and student score estimate. We propose DiffRatio, a new approach for training one-step diffusion models without teacher supervision based on a density-ratio formulation that connects score-based distribution matching and GAN-style adversarial training. Instead of using a teacher score model to provide training targets, DiffRatio directly learns a log density ratio between the student and data distributions across diffusion time steps. As a pre-trained score model is only used to initialize the one-step generator and does not supervise training, this design simplifies the training pipeline, mitigates gradient estimation bias, and reduces the size of auxiliary networks. The learned density ratio can be used as a verifier, enabling a principled inference-time parallel scaling method that further improves sample quality without external rewards or extra sequential computation. DiffRatio achieves strong one-step generation results on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet (64x64 and 512x512), outperforming most teacher-supervised distillation methods.
As Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly participate in persistent social environments, understanding their long-term social interaction capabilities becomes increasingly important. While existing research has advanced long-term memory and conversational context retrieval, less attention has been paid to whether agents can autonomously re-engage with previously inactive conversations. In particular, remembering a past interaction does not necessarily mean that an agent can identify when to revisit it, decide to return, or reconstruct the context needed for a coherent continuation. To investigate this gap, we introduce agent social re-entry as a multi- dimensional evaluation problem, distinguishing three complementary capabilities: Finding, Returning, and Reconstructing. We develop a shared-snapshot evaluation framework that measures these dimensions independently, allowing us to examine how conversational resurfacing and persistent memory relate to different aspects of social re-entry. Evaluations across six LLM configurations show that resurfacing substantially improves target conversation identification, while persistent memory is associated with higher rates of autonomous target-directed replying. However, neither improvement is accompanied by consistent gains in contextual reconstruction. These results highlight the distinction between accessing previous conversations, choosing to re-engage, and maintaining conversational continuity. Our framework provides a way to evaluate these capabilities separately rather than relying on memory retrieval or conversational response quality alone.
Currently, there is a gap in the field of ultra-high-definition (UHD) video dehazing due to the lack of a benchmark for evaluation. Furthermore, existing video dehazing methods cannot run on consumer-grade GPUs when processing continuous UHD sequences of 3--5 frames at a time. In this paper, we address both issues with a new benchmark and an efficient method. Our key observation is that atmospheric dehazing reduces to a per-pixel affine transform governed by the low-frequency depth field, which can be compactly encoded in bilateral grids whose prediction cost is decoupled from the output resolution. Building on this, we propose LiBrA-Net, which factorizes the spatiotemporal affine field into a spatial--color and a temporal bilateral sub-grid predicted at a fixed low resolution, fuses their coefficients in the $\mathfrak{gl}(3)$ Lie algebra under group-theoretic regularization, maps the result to invertible $GL(3)$ transforms via a Cayley parameterization, and restores high-frequency detail through a lightweight input-guided branch. We further release UHV-4K, the first paired 4K video dehazing benchmark with depth, transmission, and optical-flow annotations on every frame. Across UHV-4K, REVIDE, and HazeWorld, LiBrA-Net sets a new state of the art among compared video dehazing methods while running native 4K at 25FPS on a single GPU with only 6.12M parameters. Code is available at https://github.com/ycwang31/LiBrA-Net.
Agent safeguards must determine whether an agent's behavior violates the safety rules of the current task, environment, and user. Because these rules vary across contexts, a safeguard needs to select the relevant policy before judging the behavior. Existing policy-aware safeguards can apply a supplied policy, but generally assume that the correct policy is already known. They therefore do not learn how to select a policy from a library, even though an incorrect choice can lead to an incorrect safety judgment. We introduce RePolicy, a safeguard that jointly learns policy selection and safety assessment. Given an agent trajectory and a set of candidate policies, RePolicy selects the policy that best matches the situation, applies its requirements, and predicts whether the behavior is safe. We construct PolicyTraj-20K, a dataset of more than 20,000 agent trajectories annotated with applicable policies, safety labels, and explanations. We train RePolicy with supervised demonstrations followed by reinforcement learning, while randomizing policy order, identifiers, and distractors to reduce shortcut learning. Across six agent-safety benchmarks and 19 baselines, RePolicy-4B achieves leading overall safety-detection performance and improves policy-selection accuracy. These results show that safeguards can learn which safety requirements to use for assessing agent behavior.
Lei Tian, Chunzheng Zhu, Kai Wu, Yifan Zhang, Haihua Yang
Native multimodal large language models (native MLLMs) jointly encode visual and linguistic sequences within a unified autoregressive Transformer, emerging as a promising paradigm for multimodal understanding. Unlike conventional ViT-based MLLMs relying on external vision encoders, ViT-free native MLLMs tokenize pixel patches directly, potentially suffering severe visual token redundancy. A pilot study confirms this: unlike ViT-based models that degrade under compression, ViT-free MLLMs tolerate aggressive compression with near-lossless or even improved performance. Yet existing compression methods target ViT-based settings, leaving native MLLMs, which stand to gain the most, unexplored. To close this gap, we introduce an analysis pipeline centered on token discriminability and cross-dimensional heterogeneous redundancy, revealing that (i) redundancy is distributed independently and heterogeneously along height and width axes, and (ii) early-layer visual tokens are indiscriminable and uniformly redundant. Guided by these findings, we propose PACE (Pareto-Adaptive Compression for Efficient Native MLLMs), the first visual token compression framework tailored for native MLLMs with Multimodal-RoPE. Leveraging dimensional decoupling of positional encoding, PACE decomposes attention into two orthogonal spatial saliency estimates along height and width, gated by a positional attention signal, yielding direction-aware importance with negligible overhead. It further casts token budget allocation as Pareto optimization over performance preservation, inference efficiency, and spatial coverage, jointly identifying optimal compression depths and retention ratios. Experiments show PACE maintains near-lossless performance at only 25%-50% visual token retention, even improving several benchmarks, while delivering over 2x FLOPs reduction.
Chen Su, Xingqun Qi, Xurui Hu, Bingkun Yang, Muyi Sun, Man Zhang, Zhenan Sun
Deriving plausible and dynamic Human Object Interaction (HOI) has gained tremendous progress in Embodied AI and Immersive AR/VR. While existing HOI methods have effectively explored human interaction with individual or fixed objects, they still show limitations in complex multi-object interaction scenes. Meanwhile, previous approaches focus more on the contact information held by human-object relation, overlooking the significance of the contact situation of various entities (i.e., object-object). To address these limitations, we propose UniffordInteractor, a Reasoning-then-Interacting framework that leverages unified affordance for realistic and long-horizon human and multi-object interaction modeling. At the reasoning stage, we devise a Unified Affordance Reasoner (UAR) that employs a fine-tuned 3D Multimodal Large Language Model for unified object-centric affordance prediction. At the interacting stage, we propose Hierarchical Interaction Generator (HIG), which formulates the interaction generation as a hierarchical (e.g., root to body to hand to objects) autoregressive prediction, conditioned on the obtained unified affordance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniffordInteractor surpasses SOTA counterparts in human and multi-object interaction generation.
Before AI can be trusted to discover new science, it should be able to reproduce what science already knows. Reproduction provides a rigorous checkpoint for an AI scientist: the target claim is known, yet recovering it still requires translating an incomplete scientific description into an executable experiment and producing evidence that can be independently verified. Existing research-reproduction benchmarks largely focus on AI and machine learning, where experiments share relatively homogeneous software stacks. Extending this capability across scientific disciplines introduces a different challenge: agents must operate domain-specific scientific software, make physical and numerical choices, diagnose long-running computations, and distinguish valid evidence from merely plausible outputs. We introduce PAPERBENCHX, a benchmark of 93 expert-constructed paper-reproduction tasks spanning 12 research areas across electromagnetics, photonics, chemistry, materials science, biology, and robotics. Each task provides the source paper, a public task specification, and a domain-native scientific environment involving specialized scientific software. Agents must reconstruct a key experiment, execute and diagnose it, and deliver a runnable workflow that supports the target scientific claim. To evaluate scientific validity rather than surface-level agreement, we replay every submission from scratch and score only regenerated evidence against expert-validated criteria. Across 10 frontier agent configurations, the best configuration fully reproduces only 14% tasks under the 90% threshold. Meanwhile, mean rubric scores range from 27.53% to 59.08%, indicating that substantial partial progress rarely translates into complete scientific reproduction. These results reveal a large gap between paper understanding and reliably producing reproducible scientific evidence.
Large language models can often identify useful semantic structure in formal artifacts, but their outputs cannot be trusted as proofs or solver decisions. We study whether LLMs can instead guide formal reasoning systems through a narrow, solver-verifiable interface. We instantiate this idea in quantified array SMT solving, where modern instantiation-based techniques can fail when key ground terms and equalities are hidden by auxiliary variables, axiom guards, and nested array terms. We observe that many instances are largely driven by a small set of focal ground terms or constraints, similar to the backdoor sets in SAT solving. Building on this, we present LinguaArray, a framework where an LLM proposes a small Semantic Focus Set (ground terms/constraints), while a conventional SMT solver remains the sole proof engine and certifies all results. LinguaArray uses these LLM-suggested, solver-validated finite sets to significantly enhance solver capability, solving additional satisfiable and unsatisfiable instances that the backend alone fails to solve. It interacts within a finite time and then falls back to the backend solver to mitigate potential regressions. Evaluation on 1015 SMT-LIB instances across five logics under 1200s timeout (including LLM latency) shows that LinguaArray solves up to 69.1% of instances and increases solved-instance counts by 105%--397% over the corresponding backends.
Recent image generation models have shown strong capabilities in generating high-fidelity and photorealistic images. However, they are fundamentally constrained by frozen internal knowledge, thus often failing on real-world scenarios that are knowledge-intensive or require up-to-date information. In this paper, we present Gen-Searcher, as the first attempt to train a search-augmented image generation agent, which performs multi-hop reasoning and search to collect the textual knowledge and reference images needed for grounded generation. To achieve this, we construct a tailored data pipeline and curate two high-quality datasets, Gen-Searcher-SFT-10k and Gen-Searcher-RL-6k, containing diverse search-intensive prompts and corresponding ground-truth synthesis images. We further introduce KnowGen, a comprehensive benchmark that explicitly requires search-grounded external knowledge for image generation and evaluates models from multiple dimensions. Based on these resources, we train Gen-Searcher with SFT followed by agentic reinforcement learning with dual reward feedback, which combines text-based and image-based rewards to provide more stable and informative learning signals for GRPO training. Experiments show that Gen-Searcher brings substantial gains, improving Qwen-Image by around 16 points on KnowGen and 15 points on WISE. We hope this work can serve as an open foundation for search agents in image generation, and we fully open-source our data, models, and code.
Early screening of depression requires efficient analysis of audio and speech data, while conventional CPU and GPU platforms incur high latency and energy consumption for CNN-LSTM inference. To address this challenge, we propose a unified resistive RAM (ReRAM) processing-in-memory accelerator for a CNN-LSTM attention workload. The architecture integrates convolutional, recurrent, attention, and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) stages within a crossbar-based framework, reducing intermediate data movement between spatial and temporal branches. CNN operations are mapped through im2col-based vectorization, while LSTM gate computations are reformulated using concatenated input-state vectors and mapped onto ReRAM crossbars. We further provide module-level workload breakdown, parameter sensitivity analysis, and matched-workload context against representative ReRAM/PIM accelerators. Experimental results show 32.1 times and 9.3 times latency reduction over CPU and GPU baselines, respectively, with about 160 times and 140 times energy reduction. Simplified weight-perturbation tests characterize ASLF sensitivity in an untrained pipeline with synthetic spectrogram-shaped inputs. Task-level prediction accuracy and robustness remain to be evaluated.
Quantum software engineering (QSE) requires understanding application requirements, quantum programs and algorithms, quantum computation paradigms, executions, and deployment. However, relevant quantum computing (QC) concepts are often defined across physical, mathematical, and paradigm-specific levels of abstraction, making it difficult for the QSE community and hence proposed methods to refer to them consistently. To this end, we present QSoftCore, a conceptual model that reorganizes established QC concepts from a software engineering perspective and connects quantum applications, computational problems, algorithms, configurations, programs, and paradigm-specific computation specifications with state evolution, execution results, and backends. Our assessment against QSE literature across key software engineering activities indicates that QSoftCore provides shared QC referents for quantum computations, executions, deployment configurations, backends, and measurement evidence across the QSE lifecycle.
Although Deep Unfolding Networks (DUNs) are predominant in Video Snapshot Compressive Imaging (SCI), they are still limited by a uniform design philosophy. The existing approaches stack high-complexity priors with the same structure repeatedly, neglecting the fact that the optimization paths gradually converge to a nearly static state. As a consequence, representation stagnation occurs, and much computational cost is wasted on small feature updates. To solve this inefficiency, we propose Differential Unfolding (DU), a heterogeneous framework that substitutes repeated work with a periodic schedule of heavy and lightweight stages. The core of DU is the Differential Evolutionary Framework (DEF), which divides the unfolding procedure into two complementary roles: structural anchoring and differential evolution. In this method, high-parameter general stages are used sparsely to form high-fidelity feature foundations. On the other hand, lightweight differential stages use a Differential Representation Prior (DRP) to pass on and refine these foundational features by a differential mechanism. By integrating Differential Representation Attention (DRA) for evolving attention maps and a Differential Modulated FFN (DM-FFN) for feature rectification, DRP effectively models cross-stage variations with minimal overhead. By concentrating high-capacity computation on the sparsely-scheduled general stages and delegating incremental refinement to the lightweight differential stages, DU achieves a superior trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Extensive experiments show that DU-9stg achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality, while DU-5stg surpasses all compared methods with the fewest parameters and FLOPs; compared with the unfolding method DADUN, DU-9stg needs about half the parameters and a quarter of the FLOPs. Code: https://github.com/Muyuan-Zhang/DU
Yehan Zhang, Qianqi Yan, Hang Yin, Ching-Chen Kuo, Shan Jiang, Ming Ouyang, Yijie Liu, Xin Eric Wang
LLM agents increasingly carry out multi-turn tasks across everyday applications, yet users often see only the agent's report rather than the observations, API calls, and state changes behind it. Existing deception benchmarks have studied long-horizon interactions and tool-use settings, but whether agents faithfully report their actions across realistic, stateful application workflows remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce AgentDecept, an executable benchmark for evaluating behavioral deception under pressure. AgentDecept contains 477 pressure variants derived from 257 source tasks across six pressure sources, each paired with a pressure-free counterpart. Interventions enter through event messages, task context, application state, tool responses, and service quotas, spanning explicit events and implicit task or environment changes. Our evidence-grounded protocol evaluates full trajectories by relating user-facing claims to time-ordered observations and executed outcomes, distinguishing falsification, concealment, and equivocation from honest failure and disclosed limitations. The resulting behavioral labels also provide a setting for testing existing activation-based probes. AgentDecept enables controlled analysis of when multi-turn agents' reports diverge from execution in realistic application interactions.
Boyuan Zhang, Yingjun Du, Xiantong Zhen, Ling Shao
Joint-embedding world models enable visual planning by learning action-conditioned dynamics in latent space. Yet they are commonly trained for one-step prediction on encoded states, while planning recursively applies the learned transition to its own predictions. One-step accuracy therefore does not capture how prediction errors propagate under recursive rollout. We decompose multi-step rollout error into the errors introduced at individual steps and their propagation through subsequent transitions. We show that state-affine dynamics are precisely the differentiable transitions with state-independent Jacobians, eliminating the nonlinear propagation residual and making the error propagation operators depend only on the action sequence. Guided by this result, we introduce SALT (State-Affine Latent Transition), an action-conditioned state-affine dynamics model in which the action modulates both the state transformation and the additive update. We train SALT through recursive multi-step rollout supervision, feeding each predicted latent state back into the transition so that training matches how the model is used during planning. Across four visual planning environments, SALT exhibits $1.48$--$2.19\times$ higher one-step prediction error than the matched LeWM baseline, yet improves closed-loop success in every environment by $10.0$ percentage points on average. On OGBench-Cube, the fraction of episodes that fail with a sharp rise in model-predicted cost after execution decreases from $23.3%$ to $2.0%$.
Yi Pan, Miao Pan, Qi Lu, Jiaming Huang, Man Zhang, Siteng Huang, Xin Li, Jie Zhang 等 11 位作者
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models have recently achieved strong progress in embodied intelligence. To reduce policy-call frequency while preserving temporal coherence, most generative policies adopt an action chunk mechanism, executing multiple future actions in an open-loop manner under a fixed action horizon. However, this "predict-then-blindly-execute" paradigm sacrifices closed-loop reactivity: in contact-rich physical interactions, even small local perturbations can rapidly amplify within the open-loop blind spot, leading to compounding errors and ultimately task failure. To address this limitation, we propose VLA-Corrector, a lightweight corrective inference framework for action-chunked VLA policies. Without modifying the backbone policy weights, VLA-Corrector introduces a lightweight Latent-space Vision Monitor (LVM) that continuously compares predicted and actual visual feature evolution, enabling online detection of visual dynamics deviations. Once persistent deviation is detected, the system triggers a truncation event, discards the remaining stale actions, and invokes corrective replanning via Online Gradient Guidance (OGG). The detect-and-correct mechanism of VLA-Corrector naturally induces an event-triggered adaptive action horizon: it preserves long-horizon execution when the current chunk remains reliable, and invokes short-horizon corrective replanning when execution begins to drift. In doing so, VLA-Corrector mitigates the trade-off imposed by static horizons between execution robustness and policy-call frequency. It can be integrated into different VLA models without further retraining the VLA backbone, interrupting compounding errors while preserving much of the efficiency benefit of action chunking and substantially improving robustness in long-horizon, contact-rich robotic manipulation tasks.
We present Youtu-Parsing-Omni, an omni-modal parser that converts documents, images, audio, and video into structured records grounded in space and time, providing a perception layer for agents that read, locate, and cite evidence across modalities. Its design rests on one encoder for every modality and one schema for every task. Youtu-Omni-Encoder, initialized from a pre-trained language model to strengthen text reading, encodes all modalities with shared weights in a unified space-time coordinate system, and a few fusion layers let video frames attend to concurrent audio, bringing cross-modal fusion and temporal alignment into perception itself. OmniSchema unifies the outputs of all ten parsing tasks, allowing a single self-evolving post-training procedure, OmniSchema-Aware On-Policy Distillation (OSAD), to provide a shared token-role-based objective across tasks. In each round, the model is trained on its own rollouts against token-level targets from a reference-conditioned copy of itself, which is then refreshed with the trained weights, so that the parser and its supervision co-evolve. With a single 5 B-parameter checkpoint, Youtu-Parsing-Omni achieves state-of-the-art performance on OmniDocBench v1.6 (96.96 Overall) and leads all open-weight models on OmniParsingBench (75.08 Avg.), with its advantage concentrated on audio and video. It also achieves the best overall chart-parsing score (95.02) and the highest exact chemical-fingerprint agreement among compared systems, and matches a dedicated optical-music model in character-level transcription of typeset sheet music while staying far ahead of general-purpose systems. Code and model weights are publicly available.
Wenjuan Zhang, Xiangrui Peng, Zhen Li, Caimeng Yi, Xuesong Ma, Jianwei Wang, Jie Pan
Blurred vehicle contours and low contrast limit detection performance in infrared remote sensing imagery, while existing fusion methods may introduce polarization noise and fail to integrate complementary information effectively. To address these limitations, we propose a Mamba-based infrared polarimetric remote sensing image fusion model. Infrared polarization information reflects surface material properties and geometry, providing complementary information to infrared intensity. The proposed method first combines long-wave infrared total intensity S0 and the degree of linear polarization (DoLP), using a physics-inspired polarization-response proxy and spatial structural continuity to extract guidance features. It then employs bidirectional state space scanning along horizontal, vertical, and both diagonal orientations to enable cross-modal feature fusion across the entire image. Prior-guided multi-window structural similarity, reconstruction constraints, and a relative lower-bound loss for polarization saliency are jointly introduced to suppress noise while preserving global background structures and target polarization features. In addition, we construct AIR-LWIR-Pol, a dataset of 1,901 accurately registered image pairs acquired using an airborne division-of-aperture long-wave infrared polarimetric imaging system, and evaluate downstream vehicle detection using YOLO11. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the comparison methods on four fusion metrics, including entropy and structural similarity. Vehicle detection mAP50 and mAP50-95 reach 55.0% and 29.4%. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of combining physical priors with state space modeling for long-wave infrared polarization image fusion and support its use for target detection in complex remote sensing scenes.