Shanghao Shi, Jian Xiao, Ching-Hsiang Chan, Sanjoy Baruah, Sastry Kompella, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik, William Yeoh, Ning Zhang
Latent communication enables agents to collaborate efficiently by directly exchanging intermediate model representations rather than raw sensor data or text messages. Existing approaches, however, are primarily designed for LLM agents and do not consider the bandwidth constraints and heterogeneous task deadlines faced by cyber-physical agents. In this work, we propose SCALE, a real-time latent communication method tailored for cyber-physical agents. Motivated by the spatio-temporal continuity of the physical world, SCALE matches tokens across consecutive latent messages using similarity scores to identify reusable information and avoid redundant transmission. It then profiles the semantic gain and communication cost of transmitting different amounts of latent information. Based on these profiles, SCALE employs a real-time scheduler that jointly determines which pending messages to transmit and how many latent tokens to send, subject to available bandwidth and task deadlines. We evaluate SCALE across three cyber-physical benchmarks and a physical spider robot case study under diverse network conditions and heterogeneous task deadlines. Our results show that SCALE significantly improves both task performance and on-time delivery in bandwidth-constrained networks. Our code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SCALE-4E80/.
Robert Ren, Matthew Bronars, He Zhu, Yikai Tang, Jianing Zhang, Sergey Zakharov, Pavel Tokmakov, Katerina Fragkiadaki
We introduce GPWM, a Generative Particle World Model that predicts how 3D scenes evolve by generating the motion of particles and rigid bodies over time. Unlike video world models that generate scene appearance, GPWM operates directly in 3D physical space. A single representation and architecture cover rigid, deformable, cloth, and granular materials, in both passive physics and robotic interaction. GPWM is an object-aware multi-resolution transformer that combines flow matching with diffusion forcing to generate coherent physical trajectories far beyond its training horizon. We train and evaluate GPWM on ParticleWorlds, a 25.5-million-frame corpus spanning diverse geometries, materials, interactions, and robot embodiments. GPWM outperforms the best prior learned-dynamics baseline in each of six physical domains, reducing prediction error by 31% on average. Breaking from the domain-specific setting of prior methods, a single Unified GPWM models these heterogeneous regimes with one set of weights, largely outperforming per-domain baselines and even surpassing our own specialist models in two domains. GPWM further generalizes to unseen geometries, physical properties, object counts, and rollout horizons. Beyond prediction, GPWM enables contact-rich planning by learning a generative prior over joint actuator-object motion. Instead of searching over unconstrained actions, planning searches the model's latent noise for interactions that achieve a desired object-space goal. With the same world model, noise-space planning substantially outperforms action-space search on pushing and picking, where complex contact sequences are hard to discover. Executed open-loop in simulation, the resulting plans achieve goal-directed manipulation without reference action trajectories or goal-specific policies.
Jingyang Zhao, Jason William Setiawan, Uman Khalid, Chaoning Zhang, Een-Kee Hong, Hyundong Shin
Sweep coverage requires each point of interest (PoI) to be revisited by some mobile sensor at least once during every sweep period, and it underlies persistent patrolling, environmental monitoring, and infrastructure inspection. Given a set of $N$ PoIs, each associated with a nonnegative weight representing its importance, the weighted budgeted sweep coverage problem (WB-SCP) seeks routing trajectories for a budget of $M\leq N$ identical mobile sensors with a common maximum speed to maximize the total weight of the sweep-covered PoIs. For the unweighted special case in which every PoI has unit weight, the first constant-factor approximation algorithm achieves a ratio of $0.0116-O(\varepsilon)$ for any constant $\varepsilon>0$, and whether the WB-SCP itself admits such an algorithm has remained open. In this paper, we resolve this open question by proposing two constant-factor approximation algorithms for the WB-SCP. The first converts any bifactor $(α,β)$-approximation algorithm into a $β/(2α)$-approximation algorithm, yielding a ratio of $1/16=0.0625$. The second builds on a greedy maximum-coverage framework and improves the ratio to $1-e^{-1/2}-\varepsilon$ for any fixed $\varepsilon>0$. Both algorithms also improve the best-known ratio for the unweighted case, and the second extends to heterogeneous sensors with different speeds while preserving the same guarantee.
Jingyang Zhao, Jason William Setiawan, Uman Khalid, Chaoning Zhang, Een-Kee Hong, Hyundong Shin
The metric traveling salesman problem (TSP) is a fundamental problem in combinatorial optimization that asks for a minimum-cost Hamiltonian cycle in a complete undirected graph with $N$ vertices, where edge costs satisfy the triangle inequality. The biased TSP (BTSP) is a natural generalization of the metric TSP, in which the vertex set is partitioned into $k$ subsets: edge costs satisfy the triangle inequality within each subset, while edges crossing the subsets may violate the triangle inequality by a certain bias factor. This model captures scenarios in which distances are metric only locally but may be distorted across different regions or types of vertices. In this paper, we study approximation algorithms for the BTSP and its path variant, the biased traveling salesman path problem (BTSPP), which asks for a minimum-cost Hamiltonian path. Previously, constant-factor approximation algorithms were known only for the case $k=2$. Whether the BTSP and the BTSPP admit constant-factor approximation algorithms for any fixed integer $k>2$ has remained an open question. We resolve this question affirmatively. We show that both the BTSP and the BTSPP admit $O(k)$-approximation algorithms with running time $N^{O(2^k k!)}$. Moreover, for the BTSPP with $k=2$, we propose an improved $(α+2+\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithm, where $α<3/2-10^{-34}$ is the best-known approximation ratio for the metric TSP, improving upon the previous ratio of $4$
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as AI agents that operate in short reasoning-action loops, interleaving model computation with external calls. Unlike traditional chat applications, these agentic workloads require inference serving systems to balance low latency, stable token emission, and throughput under multiple request arrivals from different AI agents. Recent deployments highlight a shift toward running small language models (SLMs) locally on consumer-grade GPUs, driven by privacy, compliance, and cost constraints. When heterogeneous requests overlap on a single GPU, long prefills and short decodes contend for resources, creating head-of-line blocking that destabilizes interactive performance. By analyzing agent workloads, we observe that their execution naturally separates into cold prefills, which process long system prompts, resume prefills, which append tool outputs to cached contexts, and short decodes, which are latency-critical. This mix intensifies contention compared to conventional chatbot serving. We present AgentServe, a single-GPU serving system that ensures stable multi-agent execution under such conditions by isolating prefills from decodes, applying dynamic budgeting to resume prefills, and allocating GPU resources through pre-established CUDA Green Context slots with adaptive control. Evaluation results show that AgentServe significantly improves latency stability while sustaining competitive throughput, achieving up to 2.8x TTFT improvement and 2.7x TPOT improvement over state-of-the-art baselines across different settings.
Yuji Wang, Teng Hu, Yuheng Chen, Ran Yi, Han Feng, Weijian Cao, Chengjie Wang, Lizhuang Ma 等 9 位作者
Despite remarkable progress in instruction-based video editing, textual descriptions remain limited in expressing fine-grained appearance, spatial transformations, and temporal dynamics. We introduce Visual In-context Editing, a new paradigm that shifts video editing from text-only instructions to visual demonstrations, where users specify desired edits through heterogeneous visual references including single images, image pairs, and video pairs. To establish this paradigm, we curate VicEdit-400K, the first large-scale dataset for visual in-context video editing, containing 400K high-quality samples across ten editing tasks with comprehensive semantic and visual consistency filtering. Building upon this foundation, we propose VicEdit, a unified framework that enables effective reasoning over diverse visual contexts and textual instructions. Specifically, we introduce Modality-Adaptive Semantic Distillation to extract modality-aware visual editing semantics and Dual-Context Injection to align visual contexts with textual editing intents. Extensive experiments on VicEdit-Bench demonstrate that VicEdit achieves state-of-the-art performance on both conventional instruction-based editing and visual in-context editing. Further controlled studies and human evaluations verify that VicEdit effectively leverages heterogeneous visual references, establishing visual in-context editing as a promising paradigm for controllable video editing.
As sequence lengths continue to grow, distributed attention based on sequence parallel (e.g., Ring-Attention) has become a mainstream solution for large language models (LLMs). Nevertheless, inherent communication dependencies limit computation-communication overlap, reducing GPU utilization. Moreover, in cross-hardware (NUMA or node) architectures, due to imbalanced communication bandwidth, frequent communication synchronization will limit overall performance. Based on these insights, we propose CHARM+, Cross-Hardware Attention with Re-Merge Multistream Mechanism. We reorganize sequential communications into several levels and achieve intra-level parallelism and computation overlap. Furthermore, we decouple cross-hardware communication from intra-hardware communication, eliminating synchronization overhead caused by bandwidth imbalance. Forward and backward algorithms were evaluated on multiple hardware architectures and consistently outperformed state-of-the-art methods. Compared to Ring-Attention, our forward and backward algorithms achieve average speedups of 1.3x and 1.7x on a dual-NUMA PCIe architecture, and 2.8x and 2.9x on a dual-node NVLink architecture, respectively.
Decoding visual stimuli from the spiking activity of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) informs both our understanding of the retinal code and the design of visual prostheses. Natural vision is dynamic, yet state-of-the-art decoders mostly reconstruct single frames with artificial neural networks that process dense, continuous-valued signals rather than the retina's sparse, asynchronous spikes. We asked whether dynamic scenes can be reconstructed and tracked entirely within the spike domain, and at what computational cost. We built an end-to-end spiking neural network (SNN) whose neurons integrate the recorded RGC spikes over time. Populations of up to 1836 RGCs were recorded ex vivo from mouse retina on high-density microelectrode arrays while flashed images, moving bars, drifting gratings and randomly moving handwritten digits were presented. For moving digits, one shared spiking encoder fed two readouts, one reconstructing the image and one decoding the digit's position. Compute energy was estimated from counted synaptic operations. The SNN decoded what and where at once. It reconstructed the stimuli with a structural similarity (SSIM) of up to 0.93, refining the reconstruction as spikes accumulated, and tracked a randomly moving target with a mean error of 1.33 pixels on a $32\times32$ grid. Its fidelity nearly matched that of the best of 17 larger spiking and artificial decoders (5.9 million to 1.7 billion parameters, versus 5.4 million), and at a mean firing rate of 14.2% it needed an estimated $\sim$70-fold less compute energy than a dense artificial network of the same architecture. Dynamic visual scenes can thus be decoded from retinal population activity in the spike domain, with a compact network and at a compute cost compatible with implantable and wearable neural interfaces, supporting spike-native decoders for visual prostheses.
Yining Zhang, Mingyang Yi, Chen Wang, Xuwen Xiang, Tianhe Jia, Zedong Dan, Chengqing Zong, Yue Wang
High-performance GPU kernels are essential for efficient LLM deployment, yet optimizing them remains expertise-intensive. Recent LLM-based code generation makes automatic GPU operator generation promising, but operator optimization remains a hardware-aware search problem. Existing LLM-based methods face a granularity mismatch: coarse hints are reusable but hard to execute, whereas detailed memories are actionable but enlarge the search space and obscure optimization bottlenecks. The key challenge is therefore to organize optimization experience at an appropriate granularity. To address this issue, this paper proposes HTAM (Hierarchical Transition-Attended Memory), a coarse-to-fine framework for LLM-based operator optimization. HTAM builds a two-level Hierarchical Transition Graph (HTG) to organize coarse global directions, detailed local strategies, and transition experience between optimization steps. During each evolution step, HTAM selects a global direction from the current state and recent optimization history, retrieves the corresponding local strategy memory, and uses it to guide concrete CUDA code generation. Experiments on KernelBench demonstrate that HTAM improves correctness, fast-solution rate, and speedup over LLM-based baselines, while backend and Robust-KBench studies indicate transferable benefits from structured memory.
Personalized neural audio watermarking systems embed user-specific payloads into audio to trace the user associated with a leaked or misused copy. Existing evaluations mainly assume access to a single personalized copy, but real-world distribution may expose multiple copies of the same recording. We find that simple sample-wise averaging breaks traceability: averaging only two copies produces tracing-failure rates of 87.7-99.7% across the five systems while largely preserving audio quality. Decoder outputs show distinct responses to coalition payload composition across systems, with high majority agreement in TimbreWM but substantially lower agreement in WMCodec. In a more sophisticated payload-aware setting, mixture weighting can further steer the decoder toward a selected nonmember, achieving a target success rate of 92.3% in TimbreWM. Preliminary confidence screening rejects many collusion-induced assignments while retaining most valid single-copy outputs. Code and results are available at https://github.com/Silwan5z/neural-audio-watermark-collusion-attack. This work highlights multi-copy traceability as an additional evaluation dimension for personalized neural audio watermarking alongside conventional single-copy robustness.
Kangning Zhang, Wenxiang Jiao, Bowen Fang, Shuai Shao, Jiachen Zhu, Rong Shan, Shijian Wang, Hao Wang 等 11 位作者
Harness evolution from a common base exhibits Locality, Complementarity, and Nonstationarity: variants repair different failures, and their utility changes as the policy learns. Rather than seeking a universally superior harness, we introduce Harness-S to selectively rescue failures of a base execution system through sibling harnesses and transfer the resulting capabilities into a single policy that remains effective under the original harness. Directional Harness Evolution develops specialized sibling harnesses along distinct repair directions, forming a reusable Sibling Harness Pool that remains fixed during policy training. Complementary Harness Rescue Training invokes this pool only when all initial attempts under the base harness fail. The same policy generates fresh rollouts under selected auxiliary harnesses, and these trajectories replace the failed group for reinforcement learning. An Adaptive Harness Router selects the Top-k variants using Harness Behavior Profiles and voting across multiple LLMs. Policy-aware profile re-anchoring refreshes this evidence as the policy learns. Across AppWorld, SWE-Gym, and DBBench, the trained policy substantially outperforms policy-only training when returned to the original base harness. Behavioral analyses and held-out cases support the transfer of harness-elicited behaviors into the policy itself. Reusing the router for Rank-1 inference provides additional gains at the same executor rollout count.
Neural operators provide efficient surrogates for computational fluid dynamics (CFD), but most are designed for static geometries and are not equipped to model unsteady flows induced by continuously moving boundaries. We study dynamic-boundary 4D CFD prediction for articulated moving geometries and introduce RoboCFD-4D, a temporally resolved robotic CFD benchmark spanning diverse morphologies and flow conditions. To address the computational and autoregressive challenges of this setting, we propose DynaSolver, a neural operator that explicitly conditions on boundary evolution and causal flow history. DynaSolver employs an efficient physical-token formulation that amortizes point-to-token projection across the operator stack, substantially reducing repeated point-space spatio-temporal computation while retaining accurate point-level reconstruction. We further introduce Replay-Augmented Parallel Training, which exposes the model to autoregressively generated histories while preserving parallel dense supervision, narrowing the gap between ground-truth-conditioned training and autoregressive rollout. Experiments on RoboCFD-4D show that DynaSolver achieves the best full-rollout accuracy among a broad range of learned CFD surrogates, with its advantage increasing as rollout proceeds, indicating substantially reduced autoregressive error accumulation. Project page: https://made-gpt.github.io/DynaSolver-ProjectPage.
Ali Abedi, Q. M. Jonathan Wu, Ning Zhang, Farhad Pourpanah
Skin cancer diagnosis, particularly differentiating melanoma from benign nevi, is challenging due to the visual similarity between lesions. Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs) have shown promising performance, their effectiveness often deteriorates on data from heterogeneous clinical sources. Conventional domain adaptation methods address domain shift but require access to source data during adaptation, which is often infeasible due to privacy regulations. Multi-source-free unsupervised domain adaptation (MSFDA) addresses this limitation by leveraging multiple labeled source domains to generalize to an unlabeled target domain without requiring access to source data. However, existing MSFDA methods rely on full backbone fine-tuning, leading to catastrophic forgetting and overfitting on small clinical datasets, and address domain shift at the aggregation stage without establishing a shared domain-invariant feature space. Furthermore, their reliance on hard pseudo-labels or confidence-weighted aggregation introduces noisy supervision signals under domain shift. To address these limitations, we propose CAT-CKD, consisting of two components: (1) contrastive adapter training (CAT), which trains lightweight ConvPass adapters within a frozen ViT backbone using supervised contrastive learning (SCL) to establish a shared domain-invariant feature space before source-specific model training, and (2) consensus knowledge distillation (CKD), which aggregates logits from multiple source models into a consensus supervisory signal and adapts a student model on unlabeled target data using KL divergence. Experiments on five publicly available skin lesion datasets show that CAT-CKD achieves an average AUROC of 86.1%, outperforming existing MSFDA methods while requiring only 4.3M trainable parameters. The code is available at https://github.com/A-Abedi/CAT_CKD.
Long-horizon interactions with LLM-based assistants require memory systems that preserve and update user states, preferences, and interaction histories. Existing evaluations report end-to-end QA accuracy and cannot determine whether errors arise from encoding, retrieval, or generation. We introduce EvalMem, an operation-level diagnostic framework with three parallel Examiners. For each query, the Encoding Examiner checks whether the target fact is stored, the Retrieval Examiner assesses whether the native retriever returns usable evidence, and the Generation Examiner tests whether the model can answer from oracle evidence. Their outputs form fine-grained multi-label defect codes. To improve store-level diagnosis, we adapt agentic RAG with a recall-first strategy that searches using both the query and source evidence, increasing recall of present evidence on LoCoMo from 70.2% to 95.6%. Evaluations of seven memory systems on LoCoMo, LongMemEval-S, and dynamic DynaMem-Bench identify retrieval as the most frequently attributed failure layer; in default LoCoMo, retrieval defects reach 22.1%, compared with 7.7% for encoding and 6.5% for generation. Guided by this diagnosis, MemWiki, a search-friendly auxiliary structure built from each system's memory export, improves mean accuracy by 2.5 and 2.3 percentage points on LoCoMo and LongMemEval-S, respectively.
Yuxuan Du, Hanqing Zhao, Xinbiao Wang, Yiming Lu, Kaining Zhang, Dacheng Tao
AI scientists are expanding automated research across scientific domains, yet their ability to turn the scientific record into a foundation for autonomous discovery remains elusive. Here we uncover a fundamental barrier to this transition and demonstrate a route to overcome it in computational quantum science, where advances shape both what we can learn from complex quantum systems and what quantum computing can ultimately deliver. To identify this barrier, we introduce OmniQ, an expert-audited virtual research environment that converts published studies into executable reproduction tasks. Across 59 papers spanning classical simulation, quantum algorithms and quantum-property characterization, we systematically evaluate five agentic systems powered by large language models and six third-party agent harnesses. Our findings reveal that current AI scientists often fail to reproduce published results, exposing a fundamental mismatch between what scientific papers communicate and what autonomous agents require. By contrast, human expert intervention can turn these failures into successful reproductions, showing that the missing information can be identified and converted into reusable research experience. Guided by this observation, we develop Residual Agents (RA), a quantum-tailored self-improving AI scientist that distils externally verified workflow repairs into such experience. RA substantially improves research performance under fixed base models and limited adaptation budgets. For example, RA raises DeepSeek V4.1 Flash performance from 68% to 85%, matching Claude Code with Opus 5 at a third of its cost despite using a weaker base model. We integrate all reproduced results into an extensible platform built on the model context protocol, making verified research workflows directly accessible to AI scientists and allowing new scientific papers to be continuously incorporated.
AI 速览：RFW-A 将智能体程序合成与程序化生成结合，先由智能体构建并验证类别级可复用生成器，再以程序化执行低成本批量产出铰接资产，并构建了 RFW-A-400K 数据集。
High-quality articulated assets are essential for embodied perception, simulation, and manipulation, yet constructing them at scale remains difficult. Manual annotation and procedural modeling require substantial human effort. Recent agentic systems automate asset construction through program synthesis, but repeat costly reasoning and refinement for every new asset. Our key observation is that assets within a category can share construction logic despite variations in structure and appearance. Agentic synthesis and procedural generation are therefore complementary: agents can construct reusable programs, while procedural execution reuses the resulting logic across many samples. We therefore present RFW-A, which combines the two in a new articulated-asset generation paradigm. Starting from existing articulated programs, RFW-A organizes reusable components and their dependencies into category-level generators. Agents test and refine these generators across sampled configurations and motion states. Once constructed and validated, the generators produce diverse assets through procedural execution with no further model calls or token charges. The estimated API cost of generator authoring averages $10.62, amortizing to $0.05 per asset over 200 assets, versus $1.24 for the sampled per-asset agentic synthesis baseline. Using RFW-A, we built RFW-A-400K, containing over 400K sim-ready articulated assets across more than 500 categories. Experiments show high structural and kinematic validity and stable execution across physics simulators. Beyond asset validity, training with RFW-A-400K improves part-level articulation estimation on seen and unseen categories, while policies trained in simulation with retrieved and program-edited assets transfer zero-shot to real articulated objects.
Rong Fu, Jia Yee Tan, Ziyu Kong, Shuning Zhang, Xianda Li, Kun Liu, Simon Fong
Zero-knowledge circuits enable privacy-preserving and scalable systems but are difficult to implement correctly due to the tight coupling between witness computation and circuit constraints. We present zkCraft, a practical framework that combines deterministic, R1CS-aware localization with proof-bearing search to detect semantic inconsistencies. zkCraft encodes candidate constraint edits into a single Row-Vortex polynomial and replaces repeated solver queries with a Violation IOP that certifies the existence of edits together with a succinct proof. Deterministic LLM-driven mutation templates bias exploration toward edge cases while preserving auditable algebraic verification. Evaluation on real Circom code shows that proof-bearing localization detects diverse under- and over-constrained faults with low false positives and reduces costly solver interaction. Our approach bridges formal verification and automated debugging, offering a scalable path for robust ZK circuit development.
Local deployment of MoE-based LLMs on CPU-GPU nodes is attractive for cost and privacy reasons, yet limited GPU memory forces most experts into CPU memory. Prefill is then compute-bound and benefits from aggressive GPU loading, while decode is I/O-bound and requires conservative PCIe transfers. These demands cannot be amortized under low batching---typical of local assistants and document tools---forcing phase-agnostic schedulers into a seesaw: favoring prefill's aggressive loading injects unmaskable I/O that stalls decode, while favoring decode's conservative transfers starves prefill's GPU of work. We observe that expert routing is predictable in phase-specific ways, allowing us to decouple the two phases and optimize prediction, scheduling, and execution independently for each phase. PDScope predicts expert activations to guide placement and prefetching, adapts these policies to each phase's bottleneck via cross-layer cost modeling, and compiles decisions into overhead-free pipelines using a static computation graph, cache prefetching, and zero-copy asynchronous I/O. On mainstream MoE models, PDScope achieves 2.5-10.3x higher prefill throughput and 2.1-6.1x higher decode throughput than existing systems, showing that phase-aware co-design unlocks efficient MoE inference under memory constraints and extends naturally to multi-batch settings.
Collaborative virtual reality (VR) produces rich multimodal traces of team behavior, yet practical methods for characterizing time-varying team communication remain limited. We present time-dynamic semantic-activity entanglement (TSAE), inspired by the entanglement concept introduced by Gloor et al. (2022), to describe communication-based team synchronization within discrete time windows. TSAE is modeled by combining relative speaking activity with contextual semantic alignment for participant pairs, which is aggregated into participant-level trajectories and summarized through the Gini coefficient to understand the distribution of team-level communication synchrony. This approach is employed with German-language transcripts from fifteen collaborative VR gameplay sessions. Transcript utterances are represented using a long-context embedding model with a late-chunking strategy and analyzed within fixed game-time windows. A representative session illustrates shifting dyadic alignment and low-to-moderate participant contributions, with sporadic periods of high entanglement. Across fifteen game sessions, the metrics indicate complementary insights, offering a qualitative contrast to the core-periphery pattern reported in the foundational work. Hence, these descriptive findings support the study of communication as a dynamic process and provide a mathematically grounded approach to analyze its evolving distribution in shared interactive VR spaces.
Buzhao Liu, Jianing Ye, Xiu Yuan, Yangtong Feng, Chengsong Huang, Tyler Dinh, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik, Ning Zhang 等 9 位作者
Recently, LLM-based autonomous agents have shown strong capabilities in iteratively generating, evaluating, and refining executable solutions. In robotic manipulation, Code-as-Policy lets these agents search over modular and editable robot programs. However, effective program search requires physical understanding: agents must understand how objects can be manipulated, how scene geometry constrains actions, and why interactions succeed or fail. Existing methods rely mainly on execution feedback for program refinement, often leaving these physical questions unresolved. We introduce RoboAuto, a framework for robot program search that explicitly organizes physical understanding at the object, scene, and interaction levels through three components. First, a hierarchical knowledge base combines executable skills with object-centric knowledge of affordances, spatial relations, and action effects, learned from embodied data and online task solving. Second, scene grounding connects this knowledge to the current environment by identifying relevant objects and resolving action-critical quantities. Third, multi-stage planning with self-designed experiments checks whether each stage produces its expected physical effects and actively tests competing hypotheses to resolve physical uncertainties. RoboAuto achieves superior performance across five benchmark families, attaining an 89.1% success rate on short-horizon LIBERO-PRO tasks and more than twice the mean success rate of ASPIRE on LIBERO-PRO Long and LIBERO-Plus. It also outperforms ASPIRE and $π_{0.5}$ on three challenging long-horizon real-robot tasks requiring precise manipulation. We further show that the knowledge base transfers across simulators and embodiments, and that program search performance scales with its size. Project page: https://roboauto-ai.github.io/
Bangwei Guo, Yunhe Gao, Meng Ye, Yang Zhou, Difei Gu, Guoning Zhang, Leon Axel, Dimitris Metaxas
Medical image segmentation remains fragmented along two axes: segmentation paradigms and data dimensionality. Existing methods are typically developed separately for semantic, in-context, and interactive segmentation, and are further specialized to either native 2D images or 3D volumetric data. In clinical practice, however, segmentation workflows take many forms: a case may be initialized by semantic prediction, reference-guided segmentation, or user interaction. Regardless of how it begins, fine-grained refinement is naturally performed on 2D views; for volumetric scans, such 2D edits must propagate coherently to the rest of the volume. We present UniPro, a unified model that bridges segmentation paradigms and data dimensionality, using propagation to extend 2D segmentation to 3D volumes. Our key insight is that volumetric propagation and in-context segmentation share the same reference-conditioned prediction mechanism, differing only in whether the reference image-mask pairs come from other cases or from previously segmented neighboring slices. Building on this view, UniPro supports semantic, in-context, interactive, and propagation-based segmentation within a single slice-based framework, using class priors, reference exemplars, user clicks, and neighboring-slice predictions as mode-specific conditioning inputs. To improve propagation reliability, UniPro further incorporates bidirectional and 3D supervision to regularize slice-wise propagation beyond per-slice losses. Extensive experiments across diverse modalities and anatomies show that UniPro achieves strong performance across all segmentation settings, enabling annotation-efficient 3D segmentation from sparse 2D initialization and reducing slice-by-slice correction effort.
Wanyang Hong, Zhaoning Zhang, Yi Chen, Libo Zhang, Baihui Liu, Linbo Qiao, Zhiliang Tian, Dongsheng Li
Large language models often lose track of persistent instructions and relevant information as multi-turn conversations grow. We study this cumulative contextual decay through three related failure modes: attention pollution, dilution, and drift. We propose REA(Role-aware Heuristic Episodic Attention), a context-management framework that assigns different persistence and representation policies to instructions and episodic interactions. Instructional Memory retains identified global constraints in a dedicated prefix. Episodic Memory preserves user inputs and compresses model replies, while heuristic retrieval selects raw text, compressed representations, or omission for each historical turn. On Long-MT-Bench+, REA improves the judge score from 6.32 to 7.36 on a 10-point scale, a 16.5% relative gain over the Vanilla baseline, and reduces average latency by 2.91x. Additional evaluations show aggregate gains on three backbones spanning 1.7B-7B parameters and on Chinese and English role-playing tasks. These results support role-aware context management as a practical approach to maintaining conversational continuity and instruction adherence.
Jianing Zhang, Runan Li, Honglin Pang, Ding Xia The University of Tokyo, Zhou Zhu, Qian Zhang, Chuntao Li Jilin University, Xi Yang Jilin University
Deciphering ancient Chinese Oracle Bone Script (OBS) is a challenging task that offers insights into the beliefs, systems, and culture of the ancient era. Existing approaches treat decipherment as a closed-set image recognition problem, which fails to bridge the “interpretation gap”: while individual characters are often unique and rare, they are composed of a limited set of recurring, pictographic components that carry transferable semantic meanings. To leverage this structural logic, we propose an agent-driven Vision-Language Model (VLM) framework that integrates a VLM for precise visual grounding with an LLM-based agent to automate a reasoning chain of component identification, graph-based knowledge retrieval, and relationship inference for linguistically accurate interpretation. To support this, we also introduce OB-Radix, an expert-annotated dataset providing structural and semantic data absent from prior corpora, comprising 1,022 character images (934 unique characters) and 1,853 fine-grained component images across 478 distinct components with verified explanations. By evaluating our system across three benchmarks of different tasks, we demonstrate that our framework yields more detailed and precise decipherments compared to baseline methods.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Congmin Zheng, Jiachen Zhu, Zhuoying Ou, Yuxiang Chen, Kangning Zhang, Rong Shan Shanghai Jiaotong University, Zeyu Zheng Carnegie Mellon University, Mengyue Yang University of Bristol 等 11 位作者
Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced reasoning ability, yet conventional alignment remains dominated by outcome reward models (ORMs) that judge only final answers. Process Reward Models(PRMs) address this gap by evaluating and guiding reasoning at the step or trajectory level. This survey provides a systematic overview of PRMs through the full loop: how to generate process data, build PRMs, and use PRMs for test-time scaling and reinforcement learning. We summarize applications across math, code, text, multimodal reasoning, robotics, and agents, and review emerging benchmarks. Our goal is to clarify design spaces, reveal open challenges, and guide future research toward fine-grained, robust reasoning alignment.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Tianle Liu, Zhiliang Tian National University of Defense Technology, Zhen Huang National University of Defense Technology, Tianlun Liu National University of Defense Technology, Jingyuan Huang, Zhaoning Zhang National University of Defense Technology, Chengcheng Shao, Dongsheng Li National University of Defense Technology
As the text generated by large language models (LLMs) increasingly resembles human-written text (HWT), detecting LLM-generated text (LGT) is crucial to avoid malicious use of LGT. Recent research treats LGT detection as an out-of-distribution (OOD) detection problem and views HWT as the OOD. However, existing OOD detection methods assume that LGT is a single homogeneous distribution. In practice, LGT exhibits different characteristics under different generation conditions. Text from weaker LLMs tends to form distinct clusters and is easy to detect, whereas text from stronger models significantly overlaps with HWTs and is hard to detect. To address the issue, in this paper, we propose an LGT detection framework based on density-aware manifold learning and the construction of hybrid Mahalanobis energy. We apply density-aware manifold learning with Laplacian smoothness and density regularization in embedding space, amplifying differences between LGT and HWT. We further propose a density-adaptive hybrid Mahalanobis metric that combines global and local covariance via density weighting, enabling adaptation to the manifold-aware embedding space. Finally, based on the metric, we define the distribution energy as a measure of distribution discrepancy, and we employ energy learning and contrastive learning to separate distributions hierarchically, establishing a clear OOD decision boundary. Experiments show that our method outperforms strong baselines.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Dongqi Liu, Hang Ding, Qiming Feng, Xurong Xie, Zhucun Xue, Chengjie Wang Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Tencent YouTu Lab, Jian Li Tencent Youtu, Jiangning Zhang 等 9 位作者
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as an important means of enhancing the performance of large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive tasks. However, most existing RAG strategies treat retrieved passages in a flat and unstructured way, which prevents the model from capturing structural cues and constrains its ability to synthesize knowledge from dispersed evidence across documents. To overcome these limitations, we propose Disco-RAG, a discourse-aware framework that explicitly injects discourse signals into the generation process. Our method constructs intra-chunk discourse trees to capture local hierarchies and builds inter-chunk rhetorical graphs to model cross-passage coherence. These structures are jointly integrated into a planning blueprint that conditions the generation. Experiments on question answering and long-document summarization benchmarks show the efficacy of our approach. Disco-RAG achieves state-of-the-art results on the benchmarks without fine-tuning. These findings underscore the important role of discourse structure in advancing RAG systems.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Baihui Liu National University of Defense Technology, Kaiyuan Tian National University of Defense Technology, Wei Wang National University of Defense Technology, Zhaoning Zhang National University of Defense Technology, Linbo Qiao, Dongsheng Li National University of Defense Technology
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has become a dominant architecture for scaling large language models due to their sparse activation mechanism. However, the substantial number of expert activations creates a critical latency bottleneck during inference, especially in resource-constrained deployment scenarios. Existing approaches that reduce expert activations potentially lead to severe model performance degradation. In this work, we introduce the concept of activation budget as a constraint on the number of expert activations and propose Alloc-MoE, a unified framework that optimizes budget allocation coordinately at both the layer and token levels to minimize performance degradation. At the layer level, we introduce Alloc-L, which leverages sensitivity profiling and dynamic programming to determine the optimal allocation of expert activations across layers. At the token level, we propose Alloc-T, which dynamically redistributes activations based on routing scores, optimizing budget allocation without increasing latency. Extensive experiments across multiple MoE models demonstrate that Alloc-MoE maintains model performance under a constrained activation budget. Especially, Alloc-MoE achieves 1.15\times prefill and 1.34\times decode speedups on DeepSeek-V2-Lite at half of the original budget.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Libo Zhang, Zhaoning Zhang National University of Defense Technology, Hongwanyang, Peng Qiao, Dongsheng Li National University of Defense Technology
Although speculative decoding is widely used to accelerate Vision-Language Models (VLMs) inference, it faces severe performance collapse when applied to Video Large Language Models (Vid-LLMs). The draft model typically falls into the trap of attention dilution and negative visual gain due to key-value cache explosion and context window mismatches. We observe a visual semantic internalization phenomenon in Vid-LLMs, indicating that critical visual semantics are implicitly encoded into text hidden states during deep-layer interactions, which renders raw visual inputs structurally redundant during deep inference. To address this, we propose the Sparrow framework, which first utilizes visually-aware text-anchored window attention via hidden state reuse to fully offload visual computation to the target model, and leverages intermediate-layer visual state bridging to train the draft model with semantic-rich intermediate states, thereby filtering out low-level visual noise. Additionally, a multi-token prediction strategy is introduced to bridge the training-inference distribution shift. Experiments show that Sparrow achieves an average speedup of 2.82x even with 25k visual tokens, effectively resolving the performance degradation in long sequences and offering a practical solution for real-time long video tasks.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Nuo Chen National University of Singapore, Andre Lin HuiKai National University of Singapore, Jiaying Wu National University of Singapore, Junyi Hou National University of Singapore, Zining Zhang National University of Singapore, Qian Wang, Xidong Wang, Bingsheng He National University of Singapore
Despite the growing adoption of large language models (LLMs) in academic workflows, their capabilities remain limited in supporting high-quality scientific writing. Most existing systems are designed for general-purpose scientific text generation and fail to meet the sophisticated demands of research communication beyond surface-level polishing, for example, maintaining conceptual coherence across sections. Furthermore, academic writing is inherently iterative and revision-driven, a process that is not well supported by direct prompting-based paradigms. To address these scenarios, we propose a human-AI collaboration framework for academic paper revision, centered on criteria-guided intent alignment and context-aware modeling. To validate the framework, we curate a dataset of 7,000 research papers from top-tier venues, annotated with 140,000 instruction–response pairs that reflect realistic, section-level scientific revisions. We instantiate the framework in XtraGPT, the first suite of open-source LLMs (1.5B to 14B parameters) specifically fine-tuned for context-aware academic paper revision. Extensive experiments show that XtraGPT significantly outperforms same-scale baselines and rivals the quality of proprietary counterparts. Both automated preference assessments and human evaluations confirm the effectiveness of XtraGPT in improving scientific drafts. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/Xtra-Computing/XtraGPT and https://huggingface.co/collections/Xtra-Computing/xtragpt.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Chenghao Yang, Yuning Zhang, Zhoufutu Wen, Tao Gong University of Science and Technology of China, Jiaheng Liu Nanjing University, Qi Chu University of Science and Technology of China, Nenghai Yu University of Science and Technology of China
Model distillation is a primary driver behind the rapid progress of LLM agents, yet it often leads to behavioral homogenization. Many emerging agents share nearly identical reasoning steps and failure modes, suggesting they may be distilled echoes of a few dominant teachers. Existing metrics, however, fail to distinguish mandatory behaviors required for task success from non-mandatory patterns thatreflect a model’s autonomous preferences. We propose two complementary metrics to isolate non-mandatory behavioral patterns: \textbf{Response Pattern Similarity (RPS)} for verbal alignment and \textbf{Action Graph Similarity (AGS)} for tool-use habits modeled as directed graphs. Evaluating 18 models from 8 providers on \tau-Bench and \tau^2-Bench against Claude Sonnet 4.5 (thinking), we find that within-family model pairs score 5.9 pp higher in AGS than cross-family pairs, and that Kimi-K2 (thinking) reaches 82.6% S_{\text{node}} and 94.7% S_{\text{dep}}, exceeding Anthropic’s own Opus 4.1. A controlled distillation experiment further confirms that AGS distinguishes teacher-specific convergence from general improvement. RPS and AGS capture distinct behavioral dimensions (Pearson r = 0.491), providing complementary diagnostic signals for behavioral convergence in the agent ecosystem.Our code is available at https://github.com/Syuchin/AgentEcho.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表