He Hu, Juzheng Si, Qianning Wang, Fei Ma, Fuji Ren, Sicheng Zhao, Yucheng Zhou, Laizhong Cui
Large language models (LLMs) hold significant potential for psychological support, capable of generating empathetic responses and simulating therapeutic conversations. However, existing LLM-based approaches often lack sufficient grounding in structured diagnostic reasoning and diverse therapeutic strategies, limiting their effectiveness in complex counseling scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose PsyLLM, the first large language model designed to incorporate diagnostic- and therapeutic-oriented reasoning for mental health counseling. To develop PsyLLM, we design a novel automated data synthesis pipeline that processes real-world mental health posts collected from Reddit, where users frequently express psychological distress and seek community support. The pipeline transforms these posts into multi-turn counseling dialogues and leverages LLMs guided by international diagnostic standards (e.g., DSM/ICD) and multiple therapeutic frameworks (e.g., CBT, ACT, psychodynamic) to generate structured, clinically informed reasoning traces. A rigorous multi-dimensional filtering mechanism further improves the quality and clinical fidelity of the synthesized dialogue data. In addition, we introduce a new benchmark and evaluation protocol, assessing counseling performance across four key dimensions. Our experiments, along with evaluations by professional counseling experts, demonstrate that PsyLLM consistently outperforms various baseline models on this benchmark. Code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/Emo-gml/PsyLLM.
Jiancheng Zhao, Jixiang Luo, Haibin Huang, Chi Zhang, Xuelong Li
Video compression at ultra-low bitrates remains challenging due to the loss of perceptually important details under limited bit budgets. Recent generative video compression methods leverage pretrained video priors to improve perceptual quality and temporal coherence, but many follow a compress-then-generate paradigm, where generative priors are primarily exploited during reconstruction. Moreover, representations learned for generation and reconstruction are not inherently optimized for entropy coding. In this work, we propose \method, which adapts pretrained video representations into compression-oriented representations while preserving their reconstruction capability. Specifically, we adapt the pretrained causal video VAE of MiniMax-H3 into a discrete video tokenizer and develop a small autoregressive entropy model that captures local and global token dependencies, with grouped prediction for parallel decoding. To further improve coding efficiency, we jointly optimize the tokenizer and entropy model using a differentiable rate surrogate, allowing rate gradients to adapt token assignments toward lower coding costs while preserving reconstruction quality. Experiments on UVG, MCL-JCV, and HEVC Class B demonstrate superior perceptual rate--distortion performance, achieving BD-LPIPS savings of 82.2\%--87.5\% and BD-DISTS savings of 78.3\%--85.0\% relative to GLC-Video.
AvalancheBench: Evaluating Enterprise Agent-Driven Semantic Query Processing Through Latent World Recovery
Darek Kleczek, Fuheng Zhao, Alexander W. Lee, Julien Tissier, Pawel Liskowski, Ugur Cetintemel, Anupam Datta
AI 速览：提出多模态企业分析基准 AvalancheBench，用潜在世界规格生成观测数据，考察数据智能体能否在端到端分析中正确决定何时及如何使用语义算子，并量化错误在问题间的“雪崩式”传播。
As LLMs improve, data agents are emerging as a new interface for analytics, while semantic query processing engines use LLMs to operate over structured and unstructured data. Existing benchmarks largely evaluate agents and semantic query engines in isolation, leaving it unclear whether agents can decide when and how to use semantic operators in end-to-end analysis. We introduce AvalancheBench, a multimodal enterprise analytics benchmark that generates observed data from latent world specifications and evaluates data agents on their ability to recover that world. The benchmark's 3 validated tasks contain 58 questions spanning text, images, and documents. Questions are provided together as a multi-part analytical brief and may share intermediate results, exposing the avalanche effect: errors can propagate through legitimate dependencies, and inappropriate reuse can cause otherwise unrelated questions to fail. AvalancheBench measures analytical fidelity, monetary cost, and capability-adjusted token cost (CATC), a new metric that weights token use by model capability to separate technical efficiency from provider pricing. We evaluate 5 model-harness configurations across 3 agent harnesses using Snowflake Cortex AISQL as the engine, with the best configuration reaching macro analytical fidelity of 0.82. Agents fail primarily in constructing the analysis: failing to recover facts that require semantic computation costs 45.1% of lost points, yet incorrect operator outputs account for only 2.5%, versus 36.3% from agents misusing or avoiding semantic operators. Misinterpreting requirements costs the most, at 51.5%. Errors also spread between questions: 29% of lost points come from reusing another question's results. Finally, monetary cost and CATC produce different Pareto frontiers, distinguishing economically attractive configurations from those that are technically resource efficient.
ESS-Flow: Training-free guidance as Bayesian inference in source space
Adhithyan Kalaivanan, Zheng Zhao, Jens Sjölund, Fredrik Lindsten
AI 速览：ESS-Flow 利用流模型源分布的高斯先验，在源空间用椭圆切片采样做无梯度贝叶斯推断，实现预训练流模型的条件生成。
Guiding pretrained flow-based generative models for conditional generation or to produce samples with desired target properties enables solving diverse tasks without retraining on paired data. We present ESS-Flow, a gradient-free method that leverages the Gaussian prior of the source distribution in flow-based models to perform Bayesian inference directly in the source space using elliptical slice sampling. ESS-Flow only requires forward passes through the generative model and observation process, making it applicable even when gradients are unavailable, such as with non-differentiable simulation-based observations or quantization in the generation process. We demonstrate its effectiveness on scientific applications including generating materials with target properties, protein backbone structures with improved designability, and synthesizable, drug-like molecules.
Ju Dong, Xinyu Xiao, Yiming Zhou, Tianshuo Yang, Xuerong Liu, Lei Zhang, Jian Chen, Haocheng Zhao 等 15 位作者
Humanoid loco-manipulation requires coordinated body motion and hand interaction over time, and a plausible-looking command sequence can still drop a held object or leave an interaction incomplete. We present action-conditioned latent foresight, a latent world-action model (WAM) that evaluates proposed command sequences before execution. An action generator proposes joint motion-hand command sequences from vision, language, and the robot state. An action-conditioned endpoint predictor estimates the visual features each sequence prefix reaches and measures progress toward a demonstration-derived subgoal, while a joint temporal prior scores temporal consistency given the robot state and preceding commands. The robot executes the first commands of the best-scoring sequence and replans from the next observation. During training, action consistency regularization reconstructs the first demonstrated command from observed and predicted feature changes, encouraging the predictor to retain action-relevant information. On ten tasks in the humanoid loco-manipulation simulation benchmark SIMPLE, our method achieves 89.7% average success, compared with 73.7% for Psi-Zero and 82.0% for DiT4DiT. On seven real-robot tasks, it achieves 85.7% under standard conditions and 65.7% under unseen object configurations, while GR00T N1.7 achieves 70.0% and 48.6%, respectively. Project page: https://ju6276.github.io/Action-Grounded-Foresight/
Dynamic driving scene reconstruction has made remarkable strides in recent years by leveraging generative priors, particularly in the quality of novel trajectory rendering. Nevertheless, a significant gap remains between the generated data and real-world sensor observations, severely hindering further improvements in reconstruction fidelity. In this paper, we present ReconDreamer#, a self-evolving framework that synergizes reconstruction and generation for dynamic driving scenes, which substantially bridges the gap between synthesized novel trajectory data and recorded real-world observations. Within this self-evolving closed-loop framework, the generative and reconstruction models mutually reinforce each other through iterative refinement, ultimately yielding a significant enhancement in the 3D representation capability of the reconstruction model. Additionally, we introduce a geometry-prior-based adaptive ground model to further enhance the rendering quality of the reconstruction model. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct comprehensive evaluations on Waymo, nuScenes, PandaSet, and EUVS benchmarks. Specifically on Waymo, at a 6-m lateral shift, ReconDreamer# improves NTA-IoU and NTL-IoU by 8.8% and 3.0%, respectively, and reduces FID by 15.1% relative to ReconDreamer++.
Individual-level trajectories are essential for applications that rely on user-level mobility behavior. Existing mobility-generation approaches face a fundamental tension between individual-level and population-level statistical fidelity: top-down models reproduce aggregate mobility statistics but struggle to guarantee realistic individual trajectories, while bottom-up generators synthesize individual trajectories yet often fail to preserve key population-level mobility regularities after aggregation. In particular, many bottom-up generated populations fail to reproduce the displacement distribution, whose heavy tail is well summarized by a truncated power law. We formalize this phenomenon as the \textbf{Population-Level Displacement Gap}. To investigate its prevalence, we conduct a systematic evaluation of representative model-driven and data-driven trajectory generators. Our results provide evidence that the Population-Level Displacement Gap is prevalent across diverse generation paradigms. To diagnose this gap, we introduce the \textbf{Scale Fidelity Profile (SFP)}, a scale-decomposed metric that quantifies discrepancies in trip allocations across spatial scales. SFP indicates that population-level displacement mismatches co-occur with systematic errors in how trips are allocated across spatial scales. Motivated by this observation, we develop \textbf{ScaleTraj}, an autoregressive Transformer that decomposes location prediction into a Scale Selection Head that decides the movement scale and a Scale-Aware Cell Selection Head that predicts the destination conditioned on the selected scale. Experiments on two datasets show that ScaleTraj reduces the Population-Level Displacement Gap versus model-driven and data-driven baselines, while preserving fidelity. Our code is available at https://github.com/SCU-TrustworthyAI/ScaleTraj.
Large language model agents automate web penetration testing through observation-action loops, enabling defenders to influence decisions with deceptive decoy observations. Advanced agents can recognize and bypass static decoys, then refocus on real targets. We propose AgentSnare, a trajectory-adaptive deception system that expands a decoy environment alongside exploration. For online deployment, ShadowOS combines an LLM-driven decoy constructor with a virtual kernel. Conditioned on exploration, it generates decoy artifacts that the kernel materializes and handles consistently across interactions, sustaining long-horizon exploration. Because deploying a powerful LLM for decoy construction is costly and slow, we train a small LLM using an offline adversarial interaction-simulation framework. It synthesizes multi-round trajectories by generating candidates and retaining those that sustain simulated interactions. Across 15 CVE-Bench web applications and four attacker models, AgentSnare absorbs 49.9% of tool calls to delay attacks, retains 57.2% of post-entry actions in the decoy to divert trajectories, and grounds 89.5% of completion reports in decoy evidence to defuse threats; across 60 attacker-CVE pairs, no real target is exploited at pass@3.
Zhihua Wang, Yifeng Gao, Yunhao Feng, Rui Pan, Baiheng Zhao, Zixing Chen, Nan Li
Web communities rely on moderators to catch harmful messages such as insults, hate speech, and scams, but no one can read every message. Existing tools give each message a risk score, which tells moderators where to look but not what to read or how to check it. Yet meaning depends on context: the same reply, "I agree.", can support or oppose removing someone from a group. Moderators therefore need source-grounded evidence, not just scores: a few key messages kept with their original wording and replies. We present CST, a lightweight triage pipeline that first decides where to look, then what to show. It scores risk by pairing character patterns, which capture exact wording, with sentence meaning from a fixed multilingual model, so it handles several languages and runs on an ordinary CPU. It then groups related messages and picks from each group in turn, so a small reading budget covers different parts of a discussion, and links every pick back to the original thread. Across six tasks from five datasets in several languages, CST ranks harmful messages more accurately than a fully fine-tuned multilingual model and, under the same budget, finds more of them than reading by score alone. In a user study, reviewers needed at least 27% less time with CST's grouped evidence while keeping decision accuracy above 94%. CST turns risk scores into evidence that moderators can read quickly and check in context. Code and dataset reconstruction resources will be released at https://github.com/Kirito14IT/CST-MIL.
AI agents often rely on persistent memory to retain user preferences and operational rules across sessions. However, this capability introduces a new safety risk: malicious instructions from messages, documents, or Web content can be retained in memory and influence future tasks even after the original attack content is removed. Existing attack success metrics, however, fail to capture who is affected and how attacks translate into downstream harm during otherwise normal task execution. We introduce MemHarmBench, a victim-centric benchmark for evaluating cross-session prompt injection in memory-persistent AI agents. MemHarmBench considers three categories of potential victims: users, workspace/project owners, and external stakeholders. Our evaluation first exposes an agent to malicious instructions and tests whether they are retained in memory. We then remove the attack content and initiate a new session with a legitimate task while preserving the agent's memory. We jointly evaluate whether the agent follows the attacker's intent, completes the legitimate task, and exhibits observable execution anomalies. Across multiple agent systems, we find that cross-session attacks can remain behaviorally stealthy: agents often complete tasks normally and exhibit no detectable anomalies while still making critical decisions aligned with the attacker's intent. By connecting malicious memory retention to downstream decisions and affected parties, MemHarmBench provides a systematic framework for exposing safety risks that conventional attack- and task-success metrics may overlook. We publicly release MemHarmBench at https://github.com/Kirito14IT/MemHarmBench.
Large language model agents are increasingly used for scientific discovery. However, existing benchmarks mix law inference with programming, score data fitting instead of prediction on unseen inputs, and do not separate empirical evidence from pretrained priors. We introduce SciGame, a controlled benchmark that converts scientific literature into structured scientific cards. Each card yields a pair of Original and dimensionally consistent Counterfactual environments with the same task interface. SciGame contains a Historical collection of canonical laws and a live Temporal collection curated from papers published after model knowledge cutoffs. It evaluates agents in candidate-guided Identification and open-ended Discovery settings. Each setting runs under Prior-only, Fixed, and Adaptive protocols. Experiments on five frontier models yield three findings. First, familiar priors hurt performance once the governing relation is altered. Second, adaptive experimentation helps the strongest models but harms weaker ones under limited budgets. Third, good explanations can hide quantitative failures. Recovering the exact symbolic form remains the main bottleneck, even when agents interpret evidence correctly. Current agents can investigate systems actively, but inducing exact laws in unfamiliar settings remains an open challenge.
Yannan Chen, Beichen Huang, Licheng Zhao, Chris Ding, Kaiming Shen
The normalized cut (NCut) problem is a fundamental one in the area of data clustering. Despite its fractional structure, the NCut problem is seldom considered from a fractional programming (FP) perspective in the existing literature. The main reason is that the conventional FP method is inadequate for this problem case: the classical Dinkelbach's transform can only handle a single ratio and hence is limited to the two-class clustering, whereas the multi-class clustering involves multiple ratio terms. This work proposes a novel so-called multidimensional quadratic transform that is capable of dealing with the multi-ratio case; it recasts the NCut problem into a bipartite matching problem---which can be immediately solved by linear search. Furthermore, we explore the connection between the proposed FP method and the minorization-maximization (MM) theory, and in turn characterize the convergence behavior of our algorithm. Finally, we conduct experiments to numerically demonstrate the advantages of the proposed FP-based algorithm in a variety of data clustering and image segmentation tasks.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across tasks, but they still struggle with complex reasoning that requires integrating scattered knowledge. Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) addresses this challenge by organizing fragment knowledge as graphs, while recent Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) further improve GraphRAG with graph-native retrieval and reasoning capabilities. However, existing GraphRAG methods usually adopt decoupled retrieve-then-generate pipelines, which create objective misalignment between retrieval and reasoning, and training GFM retrievers typically depends on expensive human annotations. To address these limitations, we propose \ourmethod, a unified end-to-end GraphRAG framework that tightly couples a GFM retriever with an LLM generator. Given a query, the GFM retriever first reasons over the graph to score and retrieve relevant document nodes. These node embeddings are then passed through a fully differentiable graph bridge, which projects them into soft-weighted graph prefixes according to retrieval scores and combines them with raw document texts to form graph-augmented prompts. In this way, structural information is injected directly into LLM generation, while the final answer loss can be back-propagated through the bridge to jointly optimize retrieval and reasoning. To stabilize training and reduce reliance on costly annotations, we further introduce a semantic-guided distillation module that provides auxiliary supervision using pseudo-labels derived from query-document semantic similarities. Extensive experiments on three multi-hop QA datasets and three out-of-domain GraphRAG benchmarks show that \ourmethod consistently outperforms strong baseline methods and generalizes well, which demonstrates the effectiveness of end-to-end GraphRAG with tightly integrated GFM retrieval and LLM reasoning.
Multimodal Emotion Recognition (MER) systems often suffer from missing modalities in real-world scenarios. Existing methods usually generate, align, or distill missing modalities as a whole, overlooking the heterogeneous nature of the information carried by each modality. Such holistic treatment mixes inferable shared semantics with uncertain modality-specific details, yielding unstable representations and degrading robustness. To address this issue, we propose the Primitive Memory Distillation (PriMD) framework. Unlike existing methods, PriMD takes an intra-modal perspective and focuses on how different types of information within a modality differ in recoverability. PriMD first disentangles cross-modal shared semantics from modality-specific representations, and then discretizes the latter into learnable semantic primitives to construct modality-specific memory banks. When modalities are missing, PriMD is a teacher-student framework that the student model uses the shared semantics of available modalities as queries to dynamically retrieve primitives. It compensates for missing modality-specific information within a constrained memory space and aligns with the teacher model. Extensive experiments on IEMOCAP, CMU-MOSI, and CMU-MOSEI demonstrate that PriMD achieves state-of-the-art performance and consistently stronger robustness across a wide range of missing-modality settings, while mitigating the instability caused by holistic feature inference. Our code and project website are available at https://www.jiaqizhang-sengoku.com/Code/PriMD and https://www.jiaqizhang-sengoku.com/PriMD/ , respectively.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the backbone of knowledge-intensive multi-hop question answering, yet routing every sub-query through a frontier model turns every hop into a cost multiplier and makes real-world deployment prohibitively expensive. Existing remedies either fix the retrieval schedule, route once at the query level, or lack a principled stopping rule, leaving a critical gap: no framework adapts, hop by hop, to how a trajectory actually unfolds. We introduce RAG-on-a-Diet, a lightweight reinforcement-learning agent that treats each reasoning hop as an independent decision and selects the smallest model (Qwen3-4B, Qwen3-30B, or DS-R1-671B) sufficient for it, guided by entity- and confidence-aware features. Trained via behavior cloning followed by PPO under a five-component cost-aware reward (final, cumulative, step-wise, cost, balance) and coupled with an explicit two-tier termination policy (5-hop cap plus a tau=0.3 confidence gate), the agent carves a Pareto-optimal efficiency frontier. On HotpotQA it cuts Monetary Inference Cost by 60.07% against IRCoT with only a 3.7% F1 drop; it matches Adaptive-RAG’s F1 at 37.30% lower cost; and it attains up to 2.33x higher Quality-per-Monetary-Cost. Consistent gains on MuSiQue, 2WikiMultiHopQA, CRAG, and Bamboogle confirm strong out-of-distribution robustness, setting a new paradigm for fine-grained resource control in multi-hop RAG.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表