Yixiao Chen, Ke Cheng, Yue Liu, Jun Zhang, Jie Jiang
What should data teach a language model at a particular point in training? A circuit view reveals three distinct bottlenecks: forming a computation, making its required content available, and selecting among available routes. A shared diagnosis-to-data principle connects them: localize the missing operation, preserve its causal relation, vary shortcut-bearing context, and re-audit the residual. Formation-sensitive selection and prerequisite ordering accelerate a binding-matching-transport path; a brief early prefix from the same training multiset retains a validation advantage through 100B tokens. Availability counterfactuals then distinguish writing content from invoking available memory, while paired supervision and context-opportunity ranking improve matched route decisions and long-context answer likelihood. A continuous 350M-model experiment connects the three interventions on the same facts: early circuit training improves subsequent learning, and the complete sequence outperforms stage-replacement controls on facts withheld from Use teaching. Independent query surfaces and opposed-source decisions expose conditional arbitration as the remaining frontier. Together, these results show why a change in the limiting operation calls for a change in supervision, not merely a new ranking of difficult examples.
Yuxi Hu, Jun Zhang, Wei Mao, Yuchen Rao, Friedrich Fraundorfer
Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting enables efficient generalizable novel view synthesis, but existing pixel-aligned methods often generate highly redundant Gaussian primitives, causing the final representation size and rendering cost to grow rapidly with image resolution and the number of input views. We propose BudgetSplat, a budget-controllable feed-forward framework that adapts the final Gaussian representation to a user-specified preservation ratio. Rather than treating compaction as simple importance ranking, we formulate it as a joint problem of importance estimation, spatial coverage, and cross-view redundancy. A single trained model supports varying numbers of context views and multiple test-time budgets without per-budget retraining or per-scene compression. To realize this formulation, Intra-Cross Mask Supervision provides structure-, coverage-, and redundancy-aware guidance for learning Gaussian importance, while budget-conditioned feature modulation adapts Gaussian opacity and attributes to the requested preservation ratio. Coverage-Aware Budget Selection further combines patch-wise pre-selection, view-wise opacity ranking, and 3D redundancy suppression to construct compact yet spatially distributed Gaussian representations. Experiments on indoor reconstruction and cross-dataset generalization demonstrate consistent quality--size trade-offs across different input view counts and preservation ratios, substantially reducing final representation storage and rendering cost while preserving rendering quality.
Ning Yang, Chengzhi Wang, Yibo Liu, Baoliang Tian, Haijun Zhang
Prefill-only KV compression freezes a token subset at the end of prefill and decodes from it without further eviction. The retention decision is therefore irreversible, yet existing methods estimate the corrective signals it relies on, per-head reliability and prompt-level compression sensitivity, online from a single noisy prompt. We argue this is the wrong statistical unit: these signals exhibit far higher cross-prompt regularity than within-prompt signal-to-noise. We introduce \textsc{CompilerKV}, a KV-retention policy whose corrective tables are compiled offline from a calibration corpus, reducing online correction after the standard observation-window scan to $O(1)$ lookups plus a budget clamp. We find that compiled retention tables behave as portable architectural priors: rankings transfer across disjoint corpora on four backbones (mean Spearman $\barρ{=}0.90$), and direct model-to-model table transfer costs only $0.4$--$0.8$ LongBench points on average. At a 512-token budget, \textsc{CompilerKV} attains compressed-SOTA on all four backbones, improving over the strongest prefill-only baseline by $+1.67$ points on average (task-bootstrap 95\% CI $[+1.08,+2.37]$). Pressure regimes amplify the gap: under a fixed $512/32k$ cache ratio, \textsc{CompilerKV} remains the strongest compressed method through 128k RULER ($\sim\!73$ vs.\ FullKV $\sim\!79$, SnapKV $\sim\!38$); on 32k NIAH it reaches $0.89$ vs.\ SnapKV $0.42$; and at 32k input, retaining only $1.56\%$ of the prefill KV, batch-16 serving remains feasible where FullKV is OOM.
Yuxi Hu, Wenhao Dong, Jun Zhang, Friedrich Fraundorfer
Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) becomes increasingly difficult to scale to long multi-view sequences. Anchor-based compression methods such as ZPressor alleviate representation growth by decoding Gaussians only from a compact set of anchor feature maps, but keeping these anchors fixed forces each one to aggregate an increasing number of support views. We identify this representation--fusion mismatch and introduce \textbf{CrossPressor}, a training-free method for scalable anchor-based fusion. CrossPressor preserves all decoder-facing anchor queries while constraining the view-growing support sequence through coverage-cycled evidence routing, distributing retained spatial evidence across support views and fusion layers while keeping all support views represented. Routing before K/V projection, together with joint context packing, further reduces support-side fusion cost without retraining. CrossPressor maintains reconstruction quality close to dense fusion while achieving up to $26.12\times$ faster cross-view fusion and $1.43\times$ end-to-end acceleration on long input sequences. Our project page is at: https://yuhsihu.github.io/CrossPressor.
Building agentic systems that can autonomously self-improve from experience is a longstanding goal of AI. Large language models (LLMs) today primarily self-improve via two mechanisms: self-reflection for context updates, and reinforcement learning (RL) for weight updates. In this work, we propose Evolutionary System Prompt Learning (E-SPL), a method for jointly improving a model's experiential context and its weights. In each RL iteration, E-SPL samples trajectories under multiple system prompts in parallel, then uses them to jointly update the weights with RL and evolve the system prompts with self-reflection. E-SPL encourages a natural division between procedural knowledge in weights and interpretable declarative knowledge in system prompts. Most notably, in an easy-to-hard generalization setting (AIME $\rightarrow$ BeyondAIME), E-SPL improves RL success rate from 38.8% $\rightarrow$ 45.1%. E-SPL also improves RL on AIME 2025 (56.3% $\rightarrow$ 60.6%), HMMT 2025 (50.0% $\rightarrow$ 52.7%), and agentic search (44.2% $\rightarrow$ 48.6% on gpt-oss-120b). Across all settings, E-SPL outperforms both RL-only and evolution-only baselines, demonstrating that weight updates and context updates are deeply synergistic and can together yield gains in generalization that neither achieves alone. Code is available at https://github.com/LunjunZhang/E-SPL.
Wei Guo, Tianyi Liao, Zixin Wang, Shenghui Song, Jun Zhang, Khaled B. Letaief
Movable antennas (MAs) improve wireless communications by adapting antenna positions to the propagation environment. However, antenna movement also changes the mutual coupling (MC) among elements of the transmit and receive arrays, which affects the performance of MA-enabled systems. In this paper, we investigate MC-aware joint precoding and antenna positioning for a downlink multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) system with MAs at both the base station and users. We establish an MC-aware system model by combining field-response propagation with a circuit-based representation of the transmit and receive arrays. Based on this model, we formulate a weighted sum-rate (WSR) maximization problem that jointly optimizes multi-stream precoders and antenna positions. The problem is challenging because the precoders and positions are coupled through the propagation channels and position-dependent MC matrices. To address this challenge, we reformulate the problem in the antenna-current domain to to efficiently handle the MC matrices and develop a current-domain weighted minimum mean square error (WMMSE) framework for alternating optimization. Furthermore, we handle the nonconvex position updates within the framework by using majorization--minimization (MM) and solve the resulting convex subproblems with a dedicated conic alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed design improves the WSR over both an MC-aware fixed array and a movable-array design that ignores MC during optimization.
Wenjie Huang, Jun Zhang, Hongyaoxing Gu, Haoyang Huang, Tianqi Xu, Xinyue Hao, Xinyi Hu, Xinle Du 等 13 位作者
Multi-turn conversations with multimodal large language models (MLLMs) reuse input context, but long multimodal inputs increase time to first token (TTFT). Query-aware hard pruning reduces prefill tokens but permanently excludes information that later questions may require. We propose Raincheck, a framework for deferred multimodal prefill that decouples initial token selection from later information availability. An existing pruning method selects tokens for initial prefill; Raincheck preserves and progressively prefills unselected tokens in source order using unused compute capacity during decode. Unfinished prefill continues after answer return during available scheduling gaps. Attention visibility control and affine state mapping enable context updates after generation begins in full-attention and hybrid recurrent models. Prefill-decode fusion reduces repeated weight reads. We evaluate Qwen3-VL-8B and Qwen3.5-9B with 30% initial multimodal-token retention. Across both models and four pruning methods, Raincheck recovers on average 77.7% and 60.4% of the quality lost to matched hard pruning on MultiVerse and ConvBench, respectively. On MultiVerse, the SGLang implementation reduces mean first-turn TTFT by up to 24.1% relative to full prefill, with less than 0.5% increase in mean time per output token (TPOT).
Kehan Zheng, Deyao Hong, Qian Li, Jun Zhang, Jie Jiang, Hongning Wang
Conventional recommender systems operate within platform-specific catalogs, limiting access to potentially valuable resources across platforms. We propose user-centered agentic recommendation, a paradigm in which user agents compare recommendations from competing platform agents, and formalize their interaction as a repeated game. Platforms strategically modify descriptions without changing intrinsic item value, while each user agent assesses platform credibility using feedback from consumed items only. Our analysis shows that expanded resource access need not improve user welfare: strategic misrepresentation and limited verification can offset the benefits of platform competition. We quantify when platform credibility assessment allows users to benefit from broader access despite strategic exaggeration. Our analysis identifies resource and reporting conditions that guarantee higher average welfare than the original platform with an interaction budget linear in platform count. Experiments on synthetic and Amazon-grounded markets show that credibility assessment can improve finite-horizon utility, while its benefits depend on market size and mechanism parameters.
Xin Xu, Ke Cheng, Hao Wang, Yangru Huang, Yanghao Xiao, Zhichao Chen, Zhisheng Zhong, Xun Liu 等 14 位作者
Improving an agent through successive revisions requires balancing exploration and evaluation under a limited budget. A narrow search can miss useful sequences of edits, while fully evaluating every intermediate version often exhausts the budget before those sequences yield a verified improvement. Inspired by the draft--verify principle of speculative decoding, we propose Speculative Recursive Self-Improvement (SpecRSI), a two-level framework coupling inner-loop agent search with outer-loop improver learning. SpecRSI drafts successors before their predecessors are fully evaluated, while adopting only fully evaluated, admissible versions. In the inner loop, Verification-Aware Tree Search (VATS) allocates the budget between further edits and outstanding checks using the predicted verified return of a continuation. In the outer loop, Group Verification Optimization (GVO) updates the improver from completed searches while keeping the real evaluator fixed. We evaluate SpecRSI on scientific optimization (including active queue management (AQM) for network infrastructure), coding, and general agent-system benchmarks. Under matched evaluation-call budgets, SpecRSI improves scientific terminal gain over Janus by 60.0%--96.3% and area under the budget curve by 32.1%--91.6%, while achieving higher means across all 50 scientific backbone--task pairs and outperforming MetaRSI-v1 by 1.30--2.70 percentage points (pp) in system score across twenty backbones. On instance-level comparisons, it further improves PyBaMM terminal gain by 142.6% and SWE-Pro success by 6.0 pp at 7.0% and 9.2% lower token cost, respectively. These results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach.
Group distributionally robust optimization (GDRO) aims to learn models that perform well across $m$ distributions simultaneously. Existing methods either (i) query $m$ samples per round, which imposes strict implementation requirements, or (ii) query only a single sample per round, which requires many rounds to converge and therefore leads to long runtime. To avoid these limitations, we introduce a novel setting called \emph{flexible sample queries} (FSQ), which allows the number of samples that can be queried to vary across rounds. Under the FSQ setting, we cast GDRO as a two-player game: one performs non-oblivious online convex optimization, while the other tackles a non-oblivious prediction with limited advice (PLA) problem. In this game, the first player updates its decision using follow-the-regularized-leader with stochastic gradients. For the second player, we develop a new PLA method equipped with an adaptive exploration strategy that can leverage an arbitrary per-round sample size. We then establish the \emph{first} high-probability regret bound for non-oblivious PLA. By integrating these components, we develop an anytime GDRO algorithm that supports FSQ, and derive a high-probability optimization error bound of $O\left(\frac{1}{t}\sqrt{\sum_{j=1}^t \frac{m}{r_j}\log m}\right)$, where $r_j$ is the sample size at round $j$. This result demonstrates that the optimization error decreases as the per-round sample sizes increase, and implies the same near-optimal sample complexity of $O(m\log (m)/ε^2)$ for any fixed sample size $r\in[m]$.
Tianyu Liu, Jun Zhang, Wenjie Huang, Yuhao Shen, Tianqi Xu, Xinyue Hao, Hongyaoxing Gu, Xuyang Liu 等 15 位作者
Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by reducing the sequential cost of token-by-token generation. Advanced SD methods reduce proposal cost with parallel drafters that predict entire blocks in one forward pass, but overall speedup still depends on acceptance length. On-policy distillation (OPD) can push well-trained drafters beyond acceptance-length plateaus, yet conventional pipelines collect supervision through sequential draft-and-verify rollouts. Our key insight is that on-policy supervision need not inherit these dependencies: a draft block can be supervised using only its reference prefix and draft-sampled history. We propose SpecOPD, a branch-parallel OPD framework that parallelizes draft sampling and target supervision across independent branches drawn from the evolving drafter policy at reference anchors. We pack these branches into proposal trees to share target-prefix computation, using tree masks for full attention, branch-consistent indexer groups for sparse attention, and indexed state replay for linear attention to preserve each branch's history. We train the drafter with an E2E-TV surrogate that directly targets acceptance length. Our study spans 8B full-attention (GQA), 27B full-linear (GQA--GDN), and 125B sparse-linear (QSA--GDN) targets, three parallel draft architectures (DFlash, DSpark, and DFlash V2), and four task domains (dialogue, coding, mathematics, and agentic). SpecOPD achieves up to 41.45% higher mean acceptance length, $16.09\times$ supervised-token throughput over sequential-rollout OPD under native configurations, and up to $3.56\times$ generation speedup over autoregressive decoding.
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables photorealistic novel- view synthesis with real-time rendering, yet fine-grained di- agnosis of its rendering artifacts remains challenging. These artifacts are typically spatially localized and exhibit diverse degradation patterns, making them difficult to character- ize using global quality metrics and image-level assessment benchmarks, which provide no explicit indication of where they occur or what types of artifacts they represent. To ad- dress this limitation, we introduce GaussFlaw-80K, the first large-scale dataset for fine-grained perceptual diagnosis in 3DGS. Constructed through a model-assisted human-in-the- loop pipeline, GaussFlaw-80K contains 80,049 artifact re- gions across 14,289 rendered images, each annotated with a pixel-level mask and one of eight flaw labels spanning ge- ometric, blending, and photometric degradations. These an- notations turn 3DGS artifact diagnosis into an explicit and measurable task. Building on this dataset, we propose Ge- oCritic, a geometry-guided multi-task model that integrates RGB appearance with depth-derived cues to jointly localize artifacts and classify their flaw types. Beyond evaluation, we further demonstrate the downstream benefits of fine-grained diagnosis through three complementary targeted operations: Gaussian densification, attribute correction, and outlier prun- ing. Experiments show that GeoCritic achieves an AUC-J of 0.9507 and an Acc@1 of 80.08%, while diagnosis-guided re- finement improves all reported global and crop-level metrics across diverse datasets and 3DGS backbones.
Cooperative perception (CP) requires substantial communication bandwidth to exchange sensing information among connected agents. A variety of compression techniques have been proposed to reduce transmission costs while retaining task-relevant information. However, most existing methods follow a frame-wise compression paradigm, overlooking temporal predictability and repeatedly transmitting information that could be inferred from historical context. To address these limitations, we propose MirrorComm, the first world model-based communication-efficient CP framework. Specifically, mirrored world models at the transmitter and receiver predict the transmitter's current observation from a shared history of its reconstructed observations. The transmitter compares this prediction with its current observation and selectively transmits observation updates to correct prediction errors, reducing repeated transmission of predictable information. Experiments on the OPV2V dataset across two downstream tasks including object detection and semantic segmentation show that MirrorComm reduces communication bandwidth requirements by up to approximately 66-fold while maintaining comparable performance to a state-of-the-art (SOTA) method. Ablation studies further demonstrate the effectiveness of the individual components.
LLM-based coding agents increasingly rely on external program knowledge, yet access to static-analysis graphs alone does not ensure appropriate operation selection or evidence interpretation. We present APG, an infrastructure for semantics-grounded static program analysis. Built on SVF and LLVM, it decomposes compiler-derived program analyses into atomic capabilities that LLM agents can select, compose, and orchestrate for goal-directed, cross-graph investigation, with query safeguards and evidence traces preserving inspectable results and provenance. APG provides 38 atomic capabilities. On analysis requests arising during benchmark repair runs, 35 achieve first-attempt query-generation success rates above 50%, including 13 at 100%. Evaluation on 812 C/C++ defects shows higher repair success than the evaluated baselines. Compared with Passive Graph Push, APG improves first-iteration repair success by 17.6 and 18.0 percentage points on the two benchmark collections and reduces average LLM input-token consumption by 90.8%. Our tool is available at https://github.com/JasonZhongZexin/APG-ICSE-Demo and its demonstration video at https://youtu.be/vkuExZUjGnw
Estimating scene illumination from images is challenging as lighting is inherently spatially varying, depending on geometry, occlusion, and light sources. Existing methods incorporate geometric cues by deriving local environment maps or probe-based representations, but largely rely on regression or parametric models, resulting in over-smoothed lighting and limited realism. We revisit spatially-varying illumination estimation from a generative perspective and introduce LUMEN, a geometry-conditioned diffusion framework for synthesizing high-dynamic-range (HDR) environment maps at arbitrary spatial locations from single or multi-view images. Specifically, we reconstruct a coarse 3D scene from input images and render partial environment maps at arbitrary locations to encode visibility and spatial structure. These signals are fused with multi-view image features and fed into a diffusion transformer to generate full HDR environment maps. To train the model, we build a synthetic dataset of 700 indoor scenes with dense spatial supervision, including multi-view RGB images, depth, and HDR illumination at multiple sampled locations. This dataset enables the model to learn spatially consistent lighting distributions across diverse scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LUMEN significantly improves visual fidelity and spatial coherence compared to prior approaches.
We study multigrade deep learning (MGDL) as a principled framework for structured error refinement in deep neural networks. While the approximation power of neural networks is now relatively well understood, training very deep architectures remains challenging due to highly nonconvex and often ill-conditioned optimization landscapes. In contrast, for relatively shallow networks, most notably certain one-hidden-layer ReLU models, training admits convex reformulations with global guarantees under appropriate settings, motivating learning paradigms that improve stability while scaling to depth. MGDL builds on this insight by training deep networks grade by grade: previously learned grades are frozen, and each newly added grade-wise subnetwork is composed on top of the previously learned grades and trained to fit the residual left by the current approximation, yielding a structured and interpretable hierarchical refinement process. We develop an operator-theoretic foundation for MGDL and prove that, for any continuous target function defined on a hypercube, there exists a fixed-width multigrade ReLU scheme whose residuals are pointwise nonincreasing in magnitude and converge uniformly to zero, with strict $L^p$-norm decay at every nontrivial grade for $p\in [1,\infty)$. To the best of our knowledge, this work provides the first rigorous constructive approximation guarantee showing that a grade-wise residual refinement scheme can achieve vanishing error in a fixed-width multigrade ReLU architecture.
Rubric-based rewards provide fine-grained, interpretable supervision for open-ended reinforcement learning, where holistic scalar rewards struggle to capture multidimensional response quality. Static rubrics can lose discriminative power as the policy distribution evolves, while existing policy--rubric co-evolution methods rely on globally prescribed update schedules that ignore heterogeneous reward informativeness. We introduce RACE, a Reward-Adaptive Co-Evolution framework. At the group level, per-rollout-group training-signal routing classifies groups as informative, diversity-collapsed, or rubric-failed, updating the policy only with informative groups while caching rubric failures. At the phase level, event-triggered phase switching enters rubric optimization upon persistent reward saturation and returns when rubric-reward improvement plateaus. Rubric phases train the generator on cached pairs using a frozen judge and a scale-normalized pairwise-margin reward. Across both levels, online threshold adaptation adjusts routing and switching thresholds through proportional control. Under a unified evaluation protocol, RACE achieves the highest average performance and outperforms the strongest fixed-alternation baseline on all eight tasks, while improving rubric discrimination.
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for real-time photorealistic novel view synthesis. However, its training-time densification remains largely heuristic, often resulting in redundant Gaussian proliferation and inaccurate geometric reconstruction. Existing methods predominantly rely on first-order screen-space gradients to trigger cloning and splitting, which fail to distinguish true geometric discontinuities from high-frequency textures or noisy residuals. To address this limitation, we propose ACD-GS, an Asymmetric Curvature-aware Densification framework for compact and geometry-aware 3D Gaussian optimization. Our key insight is that second-order depth responses provide a more reliable structural prior for density control, enabling asymmetric regulation of cloning and splitting to better capture geometric discontinuities. Building on this, we introduce a multi-view photometric consistency constraint to suppress transient single-view errors, together with a capacity-aware adaptive regulation strategy that balances densification and pruning during training. Unlike post-hoc compression or quantization-based approaches, ACD-GS directly prevents redundant Gaussian generation during training, yielding inherently compact representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method reduces nearly 60% of Gaussian count and storage while maintaining competitive rendering fidelity, consistently outperforming existing methods across multiple datasets. Our code is available in https://waveviewer.github.io/ACD-GS/.
Discounted regret measures the performance of an online learner by assigning exponentially decaying weights to past losses, reflecting the greater importance of recent losses in non-stationary online learning. While previous work obtains uniform discounted regret bounds over a continuous range of discount factors using a specialized meta-algorithm, its results are limited to convex functions. In this paper, we demonstrate that strongly adaptive regret bounds can directly imply uniform discounted regret guarantees for convex, strongly convex, and exp-concave loss functions. Our key observation is that discounted regret against a fixed comparator admits an exact decomposition into a convex combination of interval regrets. For convex functions, this reduction yields an $O(\sqrt{\log T/(1-λ)})$ discounted regret bound for all discount factors $λ\in(0,1)$, matching the previous rate over a broader range of discount factors. For strongly convex and exp-concave functions, we provide regret bounds of $O\left(\log T\left(1+\log\frac{1}{1-λ}\right)\right)$.
Generative communication uses transmitted information to control stochastic generation at the receiver. A fundamental question is how much source-specific information must be communicated so that outputs generated at the receiver satisfy prescribed fidelity and reliability requirements while preserving the conditional source distribution. We address this question for sources on compact Riemannian manifolds by developing a generative rate-distortion-perception (GRDP) framework without common randomness. We formulate an asymptotic operational GRDP function under a geodesic distortion radius and a failure-probability constraint, and establish its single-letter characterization through an equivalent informational formulation. Furthermore, for the informational formulation with the high-reliability limit, we derive a geometric lower bound determined by the largest source probability mass of a region with bounded geodesic diameter, together with an upper bound based on probabilistic coverings of the source manifold. Small-radius analysis of the lower bound reveals the roles of intrinsic dimension and scalar curvature in the required communication rate. For uniformly distributed sources on compact homogeneous Riemannian manifolds, we prove that the bounds coincide, yielding an exact characterization of the limiting GRDP function. We further specialize this result to unit spheres, obtaining an explicit expression that relates the minimum communication rate to the geodesic distortion radius and intrinsic dimension, revealing that for the $d$-dimensional unit sphere with $d\ge2$, increasing the communication rate by $d$ bits per source symbol can reduce the distortion radius by more than half.
Xinxun Zhang, Yuxiang Wang, Shanshan Feng, Jun Zhang, Tieyun Qian, Binhang Yuan, Kai Yin, Xiao Yan 等 9 位作者
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have spurred growing interest in temporal knowledge graph question answering (TKGQA). Most existing methods rely on semantic retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which suffers from fundamental limitations in complex temporal reasoning. On the one hand, semantic-based RAG methods struggle to capture the multi-hop causal knowledge required for complex temporal reasoning. On the other hand, these methods introduce excessive redundant knowledge, trapping LLMs in spurious reasoning chains that potentially result in erroneous answers. To address these problems, we propose a Temporal Causal Chain-guided RAG (TCC-RAG) to retrieve a concise yet sufficient set of causal knowledge to support complex temporal reasoning. Specifically, we reformulate the temporal knowledge graph into a multi-view causal cue graph, with causal cues inducing connections that explicitly encode temporal evolution and causal dynamics. Based on the causal cue graph, we construct a query-specific temporal causal chain to guide the retrieval process, enabling the model to focus on a concise set of causally relevant knowledge. Finally, we introduce a causal evidence filter to refine the retrieved knowledge, ensuring its causal consistency with the underlying temporal logic of the query. Experiments show that TCC-RAG achieves substantial performance gains of 10.72% and 8.40% on two TKGQA benchmarks, and delivers a remarkable 62.97% improvement for multi-step temporal reasoning.
In this paper, we investigate decentralized online convex optimization with compressed communication, where $n$ learners over a network jointly minimize a sequence of global loss functions based only on their local losses and compressed messages from their neighbors. The best known regret bounds for this problem are $O(ω^{-1/2}nρ^{-1}\sqrt{T\ln n})$ and $O(ω^{-1}nρ^{-2}\ln n\ln T)$ for convex and strongly convex loss functions, respectively, where $ρ\in(0,1)$ is the spectral gap of the communication matrix and $ω\in(0,1]$ is the compression quality factor. Compared with the corresponding lower bounds of $Ω(ω^{-1/2}nρ^{-1/4}\sqrt{T})$ and $Ω(ω^{-1}nρ^{-1/2}\ln T)$, these upper bounds exhibit polynomial gaps in their dependence on $ρ^{-1}$. To close these gaps, we first develop Ascent-gossip, which combines an online compression strategy with a Chebyshev recursion and attains a faster consensus rate than existing compressed gossip methods. Furthermore, by adopting Ascent-gossip, we propose an online algorithm that achieves optimal regret bounds of $\widetilde O(ω^{-1/2}nρ^{-1/4}\sqrt{T})$ and $\widetilde O(ω^{-1}nρ^{-1/2}\ln T)$ for convex and strongly convex loss functions, respectively. Up to logarithmic factors in $n$ and $ρ^{-1}$, these results match the lower bounds in terms of $T$, $n$, $ρ$, and $ω$.
Automating optimization modeling with LLMs is a promising path toward scalable decision intelligence, but existing approaches either rely on agentic pipelines built on closed-source LLMs with high inference latency or fine-tune smaller LLMs using costly process supervision that often overfits to a single solver API. We study how reinforcement learning from inexpensive outcome labels can improve optimization modeling and support reuse across heterogeneous solver environments. To this end, we propose Optimization Modeling from Solver Outcomes (OMSO), which uses reinforcement learning (RL) with a mathematical programming solver as a deterministic, interactive environment. Given a natural-language problem and a target solver, OMSO generates solver-specific code, executes it in a sandboxed harness, and converts execution outcomes into scalar rewards in a closed-loop generate-execute-feedback-update process. This RL formulation learns optimization modeling without process-level supervision and supports cross-solver generalization by switching the solver environment rather than reconstructing solver-specific datasets. Experiments on NL4OPT, MAMO, IndustryOR, and OptiBench across Gurobi, OR-Tools, and COPT show that OMSO matches or outperforms process-supervised SFT, supports zero-shot training-free transfer, direct RL training, and SFT-cold-started RL, and improves modeling reasoning and semantic correctness beyond solver API usage.
Wenjie Qiu, Hepei Li, Jianfeng Wang, Jun Zhang, Yue-Jiao Gong
Cooperative Coevolution (CC) and Non-Decomposition Algorithms (NDAs) are two primary approaches for large-scale global optimization (LSGO). Although both have achieved success, they exhibit markedly different performance across problem types and each faces approach-specific limitations, leaving the question of "when to use CC" unresolved. We address this gap with WCC, a novel learning-based framework that dynamically decides when to deploy CC in LSGO. WCC employs a streamlined design for efficient adaptive learning. We formulate the decision as a Markov decision process, designing a targeted feature set, a robust reward, and a tailored network architecture to provide the agent with rich information about the problem state and optimization progress. Our auto-regressive policy enables WCC to perform fine-grained, dynamic switching between CC and NDAs while conditionally allocating the computational budget without expert specifications. WCC shows strong competitiveness and superior generalization across problems, optimization horizons, and baseline optimizers. It realizes a "train-once and reuse" paradigm under a low budget, significantly curbing LSGO cost. Additionally, in-depth analyses yield insights not captured by existing theory, offering practical guidance on when and how to effectively deploy CC.
Xinxun Zhang, Yuxiang Wang, Xiaokai Zhou, Jiayue Li, Yi Li, Yue Liu, Jun Zhang, Xiaoling Zhou 等 11 位作者
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction relies on historical behaviors and contextual features to estimate clicks on a target item. Existing Transformer-based CTR models often adopt index-based or temporal positional encodings and token-level causal interaction. However, we observe that most existing positional encodings do not outperform NoPE, while relaxing causal constraints within target-relative temporal groups also yields gains. These observations motivate a fundamental question: what positional encoding and interaction granularity does CTR prediction actually require? To address this question, we propose \textbf{TRIP}, which combines target-aware rank--time positional encoding with temporal-group interaction modeling. Specifically, Factorized Rank Encoding represents each behavior's ordinal position within the historical sequence through a low-rank factorization, while Target-Relative Time Encoding characterizes its temporal distance to the target on a coarse-to-fine scale. This joint design grounds each behavior's positional representation in its sequence context and temporal relation to the current target. Furthermore, Temporal Group-Causal Interaction enriches intra-group representations through bidirectional interaction and masked reconstruction while preserving inter-group causal order. Finally, behavior representations are condensed into compact group summaries for efficient group-level modeling in subsequent layers. Experiments on four public benchmarks show that TRIP improves AUC by up to 4.45\% relative to the strongest baseline.
Xu Hu, Changjie Wu, Linzhe Shi, Hang Zhang, Chen Yang, Lingjun Zhang, Guowen Zhang, Mu Xu 等 11 位作者
World Action Models (WAMs) learn representations for robot control by coupling future visual prediction with action generation. Successful manipulation depends primarily on how the robot and task-relevant objects evolve, whereas future-video prediction must also reconstruct the appearance and background of the entire scene. We therefore propose Trace-WAM, which augments video-action learning with future 3D motion prediction as an auxiliary objective. This objective supervises temporal point correspondence together with image-plane displacement and depth change, directly describing the interaction dynamics and spatial changes involved in manipulation. To this end, we adopt a three-branch Mixture-of-Transformer (Tri-MoT) architecture to jointly learn video prediction, motion prediction, and action generation. The motion expert predicts future trajectories from current visual features, allowing motion supervision to shape the representations used for action generation. Because the action expert does not consume predicted trajectories, inference retains the current-observation policy path: a single visual forward pass followed by action denoising. Experiments on RoboCasa-GR1, LIBERO, and LIBERO-Plus demonstrate strong in-distribution performance and out-of-distribution generalization, with particularly clear gains over Fast-WAM under limited demonstrations and distribution shifts.
Radio maps provide essential wireless propagation knowledge for network optimization and autonomous platforms. Acquiring dense measurements, however, is prohibitively costly, requiring active sampling to prioritize informative measurements. Existing active sampling methods typically rely on variances from prescribed spatial models or learned pointwise uncertainty, which may not fully capture the spatial correlation of different measurements. This paper proposes GraphBARC, a graph-structured active radio map construction framework that integrates learned spatial modeling with analytical Bayesian inference. A graph network learns correlated node and edge factors using only acquired measurements, inducing a joint full-map belief that supports analytical observation updates without retraining. Rather than immediate one-step acquisition, it adopts a nonmyopic sensing strategy that evaluates joint map-wide Bayes risk reduction over feasible multi-step routes, accounting for information redundancy among planned measurements. We reuse candidate responses and derive residual-based bounds directly on route-value differences, retaining shared response-error structure to avoid uniformly high-accuracy evaluation. An error-aware continuation bound screens unpromising prefixes, after which only responses needed for unresolved comparisons are refined. We further establish a computable decision-gap bound and show that certified exclusions remain valid during refinement. Experiments show that GraphBARC reduces mean root-mean-square error (RMSE) by over 16% relative to the evaluated baselines and core planning time by 56% compared with the fixed-accuracy, unpruned implementation.
Benchmark researchers and developers of large language models (LLMs) and other AI systems need to find relevant evaluations, locate their benchmark datasets and code, and understand the settings behind reported scores. We present Benchmark Radar, a living database and search engine for retrieval and discovery of AI benchmarks, covering LLM evaluation, agentic and tool-use benchmarks, coding, reasoning, safety, and domain-specific evaluations. The system combines daily discovery of benchmark papers, repositories, datasets, and releases with a searchable benchmark catalog, mentions in model cards and technical reports, and score histories. It retains source identities and citations so readers can inspect candidate benchmarks and their evaluation evidence. Daily discovery draws on 37 sources: 13 direct connectors and 24 first-party research and engineering feeds. The catalog contains 1,283 source records drawn from 4 benchmark catalogs and 12,916 numeric observations on 790 records. We describe collection and retrieval, audit the full catalog, and examine benchmark saturation, adoption trends, and the limits of score comparisons. A worked example walks through a complete prior-art search, showing how to query the catalog and inspect benchmark evidence when designing a new evaluation. We release the web dashboard with a benchmark leaderboard, a Pareto frontier view of score against measured use, saturation and trend views, daily feeds, downloadable evidence, a command-line interface (CLI) for offline queries, and reproducible analysis.
Zian Liu, Xiaoxi Meng, Viet Vo, Siqi Ma, Chao Chen, Dongxi Liu, Jun Zhang, Shigang Liu 等 10 位作者
Binary similarity detection is a critical technique that has been applied in many real-world scenarios where source code is not available, e.g., bug search, malware analysis, and code plagiarism detection. Existing works are ineffective in detecting similar binaries in cases where different compiling optimizations, compilers, source code versions, or obfuscation are deployed. We observe that all the cases do not change a binary's key code behaviors although they significantly modify its syntax and structure. With this key observation, we extract a set of key instructions from a binary to capture its key code behaviors. By detecting the similarity between two binaries' key instructions, we can address well the ineffectiveness limitation of existing works. Specifically, we translate each extracted key instruction into a self-defined key expression, generating a key-semantics graph based on the binary's control flow. Each node in the key-semantics graph denotes a key instruction, and the node attribute is the key expression. To quantify the similarity between two given key-semantics graphs, we first serialize each graph into a sequence of key expressions by topological sort. Then, we tokenize and concatenate key expressions to generate token lists. We calculate the locality-sensitive hash value for all token lists and quantify their similarity. %We implement a prototype, called SemDiff, consisting of two modules: graph generation and graph diffing. The first module generates a pair of key-semantics graphs and the second module diffs the graphs. Our evaluation results show that overall, SemDiff outperforms state-of-the-art tools when detecting the similarity of binaries generated from different optimization levels, compilers, and obfuscations. SemDiff is also effective for library version search and finding similar vulnerabilities in firmware.
Qingyun Yang, Zejun Zhang, Dapeng Yan, Tian Zhang, Zhenchang Xing, Yi Li, Zhiming Liu
Code linters, tools that automatically detect code issues, help developers accelerate development and improve code quality by identifying errors early. Unlike previous studies that focused mainly on single linters or informal comparisons, this paper presents the first large-scale empirical study of five widely used Python linters: Ruff, Pylint, Flake8, Mypy and Black, through four key user concerns: linting rule checks, speed, configuration methods, and linter preferences. We analyze 1,551 linting rules, categorize them into five types, and construct rule mappings, finding that more than 40% are shared between multiple linters, with Ruff and Pylint together covering over 80% of all rules. Pylint has the most rules in the first two categories, and Ruff leads in the last three. Next, we measure their running times on 1,000 GitHub projects under three setups (single-rule, default, all-rules), finding a consistent speed ranking from fastest to slowest: Ruff, Mypy, Flake8, Black, and Pylint. Ruff is extremely fast, with runtimes typically within one second. Then, we summarize four configuration methods and four types of configuration options from 443 available options across the five linters. While all linters support the four configuration methods, they differ in project configuration formats and flexibility in their configuration options. Finally, an analysis of 3,094 GitHub projects using the five linters reveals that over 50% use multiple linters, share strong consensus on option selections and rule suppressions, but exhibit project-specific variations in enabled-rule configurations. Our findings provide actionable insights for linter users and establish a benchmark dataset and taxonomy to support future research, such as cross-linter rule mapping, performance modeling, and automated configuration.