Cascade prediction aims to forecast the future evolution of information diffusion and is an important task in social network analysis. Most existing methods represent users and cascades in real-valued Euclidean spaces, which may offer limited capacity to model multi-factor interactions and asymmetric influence in complex diffusion processes. To address these challenges, we propose CasHyper, a hypercomplex-based cascade prediction framework that integrates hypercomplex algebra with graph neural networks and Transformers. CasHyper organizes user and cascade embeddings into multiple hypercomplex components, with each component encoding distinct latent factors, and uses structured algebraic operations to model cross-component interactions. The non-commutative hypercomplex product further yields order-dependent interaction representations, enabling the model to learn asymmetric influence among users. In the network encoding stage, a static heterogeneous graph channel captures user-user and user-cascade relations, while a Neural ODE-based dynamic channel models the continuous evolution of node states and edge weights. A hypercomplex Transformer with norm-preserving rotary transformations is then introduced to incorporate relative positional information into cascade sequence modeling. Finally, an interaction-aware module and a linear projection module are combined to estimate the probability of each candidate user participating next. Experiments on four real-world datasets show that CasHyper achieves competitive or better performance than the compared methods under the evaluated settings, including relative improvements of up to $43.24\%$ on Android and $18.43\%$ on Christianity in Hits@50.
Large language models are deployed as long-horizon agents that compose diverse tools across MCP services into executable workflows. Existing MCP environment-scaling methods are data-centric: they first synthesize a database and scenario, then derive tools and tasks from them. As a result, tool interfaces may not match real ones, tool compositions are not grounded in execution, and tasks rarely span more than one environment. We propose ToolSpace, a tool-centric framework that reverses this order. ToolSpace mines data, state, and retry dependencies from adjacent calls in execution traces of real MCP services and open agent corpora, using deterministic rules rather than LLM judgment, and clusters the resulting weighted tool-composition graph into environments. Databases are synthesized only for state-mutating environments, while query and stateless tools replay recorded returns. ToolSpace then performs state-aware random walks with rollback and decompiles each chain into a natural-language task with assertion-based checks, keeping only samples that replay successfully from the initial state. Applied to AutomationBench and tau3-Bench Banking, the pipeline produces harder Pro versions on which 7 frontier models drop by up to 38.2 points. Across seven long-horizon tool-use benchmarks, ToolSpace raises Qwen3.6-35B-A3B from 23.0 to 41.0 average score (43.2 with RL) and GLM-5.2 from 44.6 to 56.6, on par with Claude Opus 5. Ablations show that execution-witnessed edges clearly outperform LLM-judged ones, and performance keeps improving with data and environment scale.
Junfeng Wang, Jiawei Liu, Yongchao Xu, Tao Jiang, Jiangbo Ai, Jin Zhang, Chong Wang, Qixing Zhang
Complex visual question answering often requires vision-language models to think with images, i.e., actively acquire local visual evidence by zooming into informative regions of high-resolution images. Our error analysis shows that many failures in this setting originate from incorrect observation actions, where the model fails to localize key regions or obtain crops that contain sufficient evidence for answering. We further observe that bounding-box tokens exhibit substantially higher generation entropy than ordinary language tokens, indicating high uncertainty when the model decides where to look. However, existing reinforcement learning methods based on final-answer rewards provide only trajectory-level feedback, making it difficult to assign precise credit to the observation actions. We propose Observation Policy Optimization (OPO), an RL algorithm for optimizing observation actions in tool-augmented thinking with images. OPO consists of two core modules. First, Uncertainty-Guided Observation Branching (UOB) treats each image zoom-in tool call as an observation event and selectively branches at high-uncertainty, low-redundancy events during rollout, enabling efficient exploration of alternative cropping decisions and their resulting visual evidence. Second, Evidence-Localized Advantage Attribution (ELAA) compares sibling branches using local evidence-sufficiency rewards and assigns credit only to the corresponding observation-action tokens. By decoupling observation-action optimization from trajectory-level outcome supervision, OPO improves visual evidence acquisition and further enhances visual reasoning performance. Experiments show that OPO consistently improves Qwen3-VL models across scales and achieves competitive performance against larger models and tool-augmented baselines. Code is publicly available.
Using large language models to interpret experimental evidence, design discriminating experiments and formulate well-supported mechanistic explanations remains a central challenge in materials research. Here we establish PSM-Bench, an 800-question benchmark developed by perovskite researchers to evaluate scientific reasoning in perovskite photovoltaics. We also introduce OpenPerov, an expert-informed language-model framework that learns from expert-calibrated evidence records reconstructed from 4,035 training articles; these records link experimental strategies, controls and observations to mechanistic interpretations. Structured-evidence adaptation outperformed conventional question-answer training, and OpenPerov Flash ranked first among 13 closed-book systems. OpenPerov Pro raised Scientific Mastery further, from 87.6 to 89.1, by revising selected passages with retrieved evidence. On questions derived from subsequent studies, both models also outscored expert-authored answers. In an experimental test of self-assembled monolayer design, OpenPerov selected a K analogue that outperformed the Na analogue preferred by experts. Devices incorporating the selected contact reached a power conversion efficiency of 27.05% and retained 96.74% of their initial efficiency after 1,000 h of dark thermal ageing at 85 $^\circ$C. These results show that reconstructed scientific reasoning provides an effective basis for building domain models that interpret experiments and inform materials design.
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) minimizes empirical risk over observed preference comparisons, implicitly assuming that the training preference distribution matches the deployment preference distribution. In practice, this distributional assumption often fails, as preference distribution shifts can arise at three levels: group-level shift, prompt-level shift, and preference-level shift. Such multi-level distributional mismatch poses a critical challenge for safe LLM deployment, yet existing robust DPO methods typically either model uncertainty over the joint preference distribution or focus on individual sources of shift, leaving the hierarchical structure of OOD preference shifts underexplored. We propose TPO, a tri-level distributionally robust framework for OOD preference alignment, which jointly models all three levels of distributional uncertainty through a hierarchically structured rectangular ambiguity set. By instantiating it with Wasserstein distance, we derive a tractable and interpretable objective that combines a preference-level margin penalty, prompt-level adversarial embedding perturbation, and worst-case group reweighting, each governed by an independent radius. We establish finite-sample convergence guarantees and empirically validate the effectiveness of TPO across diverse OOD environments.
Yunfei Zhu, Wenfeng Zhang, Pan Zeng, Xin Huang, Tao Jia, Weiting Shao, Wei Hu, Jianming Hu
Semi-supervised medical image segmentation aims to train reliable segmentation models using limited labeled data and abundant unlabeled data. However, existing methods typically rely on prediction confidence or model consistency to estimate pseudo-label reliability, but these criteria are insufficient to characterize both semantic reliability and geometric plausibility. To address this issue, we propose ProGeo-RC, a prototype-guided semantic reliability and geometric error calibration framework for semi-supervised medical image segmentation. ProGeo-RC consists of two key modules: Prototype-guided Semantic Reliability Estimation (PSRE) and Structured Semantic-Geometric Error Calibration (S-SGEC). PSRE uses probabilistic class prototypes to estimate the semantic reliability of unlabeled predictions and calibrate pixel-wise teacher pseudo labels, while S-SGEC introduces signed-distance-field-based geometric constraints to refine ambiguous boundaries and suppress spurious foreground responses outside target structures. Experiments on the ACDC and MVAA-CT datasets show that ProGeo-RC achieves better performance compared with representative semi-supervised segmentation methods. Under the 10\% labeled setting on ACDC, ProGeo-RC improves DSC and Jaccard by 0.37\% and 0.49\% over the corresponding second-best results, while reducing 95HD and ASD by 0.61 and 0.21, respectively. These results indicate that joint semantic reliability estimation and geometric error calibration can provide more reliable pseudo supervision for semi-supervised medical image segmentation.
Zhongrui Xie, Wenfeng Zhang, Wei Hu, Ruitao Xie, Wenjie Wang, Zhouyun Xie, Yi Zhang, Tao Jia
Semi-supervised cardiac image segmentation aims to exploit abundant unlabeled images together with limited annotations, but the reliability of pseudo-label supervision is highly uneven across spatial regions. In a dual-network setting, interior regions are usually more stable, whereas boundary regions, low-confidence areas, and disagreements between networks can introduce noisy supervision. However, existing methods typically impose uniform supervision on all unlabeled pixels, overlooking reliability differences and limiting discriminative learning in challenging areas. To address this issue, we propose R2CL (Reliability-Role Collaborative Learning), a framework for semi-supervised cardiac image segmentation. R2CL models confidence relationships between two networks to assign roles to unlabeled regions: mutually uncertain regions are used for entropy regularization, confidence-discrepant regions for directional knowledge transfer, and mutually confident regions as reliable supervision anchors. Reliability-Role Mixed Cross Learning (RR-MCL) implements these roles through region-mixed training, directional cross-network supervision, and entropy regularization over mutually uncertain regions. Reliability-Transition Prototype Contrastive Learning (RT-PCL) constructs query features from foreground-adjacent reliability-transition regions and learns network-specific class prototypes from mutually confident regions, improving feature discrimination around ambiguous boundaries. High-confidence Context Refinement (HCR) exploits reliable interior pixels and trusted dense blocks within mutually confident regions to complement stable contextual supervision. R2CL achieves stable improvements in region-overlap and boundary-related metrics across multiple datasets, with more evident advantages on the foreground-sparse MVAA-CT dataset.
Kunjun Li, Wenhao Chai, Yihao Liang, Yuezhou Hu, Shuyao Xu, Yi Pan, William X. Zheng, Kannan Ramchandran 等 10 位作者
Speculative decoding accelerates memory-bound LLM decoding with a lightweight drafter, and parallel drafters extend this speedup by drafting a whole block in one forward pass. However, it remains unclear whether their released systems (stock) attain the full speedup that parallel drafting permits. We identify three challenges. First, with one request, each step accepts few tokens but reads every target weight. Second, with batching, per-request verification work roughly halves the speedup over autoregressive (AR) decoding. Third, speculative decoding is deployment-specific, and no universal optimization fits every serving regime, drafter, target model and GPU. To address these challenges, we present SpecPilot, an autonomous agentic loop that discovers algorithms and systems optimizations for each deployment. In each round, a cost model locates the largest gaps between the current system and its ceiling. Parallel agents explore directions and integrate the successful ones. Token forcing checks every output token against stock to detect reward hacking. A structured memory carries validated mechanisms to new rounds and deployments. SpecPilot discovered a general lossless 12-bit weight format, tree verification for hybrid recurrent targets, two-level verification and three batching mechanisms. We evaluate it across four target models, three drafters, two GPU platforms and five benchmarks. Without training or quality loss, it raises the speedup over AR from stock's 4.46$\times$ to 10.87$\times$ with one request, and from 1.94$\times$ to 3.93$\times$ with batching.
Normalizing flows (NFs) provide exact likelihoods and deterministic invertible sampling, but have historically lagged behind diffusion models for large-scale image generation. We identify a key obstacle: NFs are required to learn a single invertible transport over the full ambient space, making them highly sensitive to high-dimensional representations. This leads to a semantic-capacity mismatch in modern visual representation spaces, where semantic information is compact but encoded in overcomplete features. We propose SRC-Flow, which introduces a Semantic Representation Compressor (SRC) to compact high-dimensional RAE features into a low-dimensional semantic space before flow modeling and preserve reconstruction through the frozen RAE decoder. This compact space reduces the modeling burden of NFs and enables effective likelihood-based generation in semantic representation space. We further adopt constant noise regularization tailored to the fixed unconditional bijection learned by flows. On ImageNet 256x256 and 512x512, SRC-Flow achieves state-of-the-art generation quality among normalizing flow methods, with gFID scores of 1.65 and 2.07 under classifier-free guidance, while retaining exact likelihood computation in the compact semantic representation space and deterministic invertible sampling at the flow level. Codes and models will be released in the future.
Interactive video world models aim to follow user actions while maintaining scene consistency over extended interactions. History-based methods reuse generated latents to preserve scene content, but three limitations of this reuse contribute to error recirculation. 1) The latent generated at each interaction is retained as history, potentially containing blurred details, geometric distortions, or semantic drift. 2) Although retrieved historical content matches the current scene, it can still contain errors that are carried into the next chunk. 3) New outputs then become history for later interactions, potentially reinforcing the same errors through repeated reuse. To limit this cycle, we aim to predict the future scene state from the current generated latent and the next action before generating the next interaction's video chunk. This future-state prior provides guidance for the next chunk, with the aim of reducing the errors carried forward from history. To this end, we propose a plug-and-play Causal Next-Chunk Predictor (C-NCP) with cross-model adaptability and prediction-guided modulation. We integrate C-NCP into four base generators and evaluate the augmented models across three benchmarks for interactive long-video generation and action-conditioned world modeling. Extensive experiments demonstrate reduced error accumulation and improved long-horizon consistency across diverse generation settings. The project page is at https://GuangYuanKK.github.io/futureworld.
Animals exhibit diverse shape-changing behaviors, from the undulatory swimming of eels to the arching movements of inchworms. Reproducing these biological shapes with modular soft robots offers a promising approach to developing versatile bioinspired robotic systems. However, translating a desired shape into a feasible robotic configuration remains challenging. Existing cable-driven modular soft robots rely on computationally expensive physics-based modeling and combinatorial search for inverse design, making it difficult to efficiently reproduce diverse target shapes. To address this challenge, we present a learning-based real-to-sim-to-real framework that translates biological curves into robotic configurations through surrogate-assisted inverse design and uncertainty-guided refinement. The proposed method combines learned inverse prediction with targeted candidate exploration, using a fast forward surrogate to evaluate and select suitable designs. The learned forward surrogate reduces deformation prediction time from $1.53 \times 10^5$ ms to 0.0008 ms, achieving approximately a $1.9 \times 10^8$-fold speedup. At the same time, the proposed inverse design method reduces design time from $1.99 \times 10^6$ ms to 4.18 ms. On 5,000 test samples generated from previously unseen threading patterns, the method achieves a 93% shape reconstruction success rate under surrogate-based evaluation. Physical demonstrations with four bioinspired robots further illustrate the translation of biological curves into realizable robotic shapes.
We introduce Nemotron 3.5 Super and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, open and efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer models designed for reasoning, long-context understanding, and agentic workloads. Super is a 120B-parameter, 12B-active multimodal model, while Lightning is a smaller 30B-parameter, 3B-active text model; both designed for efficient deployment. Both models combine large-scale distillation, long-context training, and native speculative decoding, while Super further incorporates Indic continued pretraining and agentic software-engineering mid-training. We develop a comprehensive post-training pipeline spanning supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning (RLVR and RLHF), complemented in Super by specialized teacher training and multi- teacher on-policy distillation (MOPD). This transforms Super from a text-only base model into a multimodal agent capable of reasoning over text, images, video, and interactive tool environments. We further explore test-time scaling through parallel agent execution and self-verification. Across training and deployment, we jointly optimize capability and efficiency. Indic continued pretraining improves Indian-language benchmarks by up to 9.82 percentage points, while agentic mid-training strengthens software-engineering capabilities and robustness across agent harnesses. The post-trained Super model achieves 51.78% on SWE-bench Pro, surpassing Nemotron 3 Ultra despite using approximately 4.6x fewer active parameters. Post-training MTP boosting improves speculative- decoding acceptance length by up to 21.8% under probabilistic draft sampling, while NVFP4 quantization achieves 99.62% median accuracy recovery relative to BF16. Inference optimizations enable up to 4,856 output tokens/s/GPU on GB200 while sustaining at least 50 tokens/s/user.
The PPSZ algorithm of Paturi, Pudlák, Saks, and Zane solves 3-SAT by processing the variables in a uniformly random order, setting a variable whenever a bounded number of clauses implies its value, and guessing it otherwise. Its running time is determined by how many variables are forced in this process, and the exact exponent is a central question in the study of exponential-time satisfiability algorithms. Scheder showed that the classical analysis of PPSZ is not tight for 3-SAT. We ask how much further a sharper analysis of the unmodified algorithm can go. Our analysis uses auxiliary distributions on variable orderings that correlate the positions of variables sharing critical clauses. Such correlations make forcing more likely for some variables, can make it less likely for others, and incur an entropy cost. We choose the correlated pairs at random on short components, so that every pair is selected with the same probability, and we express the forcing loss as a sum of weights attached to these pairs in advance. Gains and losses then scale by the same factor and can be compared directly. Combining the resulting estimate with the complementary estimate of Scheder through an explicit linear-programming certificate gives a uniform improvement for every uniquely satisfiable formula. We prove that the original PPSZ algorithm, with a sufficiently large but fixed implication strength, solves Unique-3-SAT in randomized time $O^*(1.306969598^n)$. Through the lifting framework of Scheder and Steinberger, it solves general 3-SAT in randomized time $O^*(1.307031578^n)$. Both bounds improve the guarantees obtained from the analysis of Scheder for the same algorithm. These improvements follow entirely from the analysis, while PPSZ continues to use a uniformly random variable order and unbiased guesses. It shows that the known guarantees for PPSZ can be strengthened by analysis alone.
Xing Liu, Yifan Guo, Hongtai Lv, Lei Lou, Yuyi Tan, Jiang Du, Xijia Zhang, Ming Zhang 等 21 位作者
Intraoperative frozen-section diagnosis of central nervous system (CNS) lesions guides surgical decisions but is challenged by artefacts, diagnostic complexity and time constraints. Most pathology foundation models have limited exposure to CNS frozen tissue. Here we present FOCUS, a subspecialty foundation model pretrained on 27,930 frozen-section whole-slide images enriched for CNS tissue. FOCUS ranked first across all 11 diagnostic and 12 biomarker-prediction tasks in the internal test cohort, achieving mean AUCs of 0.969 and 0.877, respectively. This advantage was retained in the temporal and external test cohorts. We further organized a WHO-aligned diagnostic hierarchy, where FOCUS also outperformed comparator models. In a reader study, FOCUS assistance enabled junior readers to approach or exceed unassisted senior readers in hierarchical diagnostic accuracy and granularity. More importantly, FOCUS assistance enabled readers to correctly identify a mean of 63.0% of initially missed lymphoma cases (73.2% among junior readers), potentially avoiding unnecessary extensive resection. These findings highlight the potential of FOCUS to provide clinically actionable support for intraoperative CNS pathology and inform surgical decisions.
Weicai Yan, Xinhua Ma, Wang Lin, Tao Jin Zhejiang University
Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods introduce a small number of training parameters, enabling pre-trained models to adapt rapidly to new data distributions. While these methods have shown promising results, they exhibit notable limitations. First, most existing methods operate in the signal space domain, which results in substantial information redundancy. Second, most existing methods utilize fixed prompts or adaptation layers, failing to fully account for the multi-scale characteristics of signals. To address these challenges, we propose the Multi-Scale Frequency Adapter (FreqAdapter), which integrates textual information and performs multi-scale fine-tuning of visual signal in the frequency domain. Additionally, we introduce a multi-scale adaptation strategy to optimize receptive fields across different frequency ranges, further enhancing the model’s representational capacity. Extensive experiments on multimodal models, including CLIP and LLaVA, demonstrate that FreqAdapter significantly improves both performance and efficiency. FreqAdapter improves performance with minimal cost and fast convergence within one epoch.
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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
Wangtao Sun, Haotian Xu Tsinghua University, Tsinghua University, Huanxuan Liao, Xuanqing Yu Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhongtao Jiang ByteDance Inc., Shizhu He Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jun Zhao Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Kang Liu Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences
This paper notices that while symbolic instruction and neural parameters play different roles on steering LLMs’ behavior, both instructions and parameters are the compression of task data, they are supposed be strongly correlated and can be learned to predict one from the other. Therefore, This paper proposes a novel neural network framework, SHIP (Shuttle between the Instructions and the Parameters), to model and learn the bi-directional mappings between the instructions and the parameters of LLMs. We verify that SHIP can effectively map one of the instructions/parameters to the other by evaluating it on the tasks of instruction deduction and induction. The results show that SHIP performs better than existing baseline methods in terms of deductive capabilities while significantly surpassing them in inductive capabilities. Moreover, SHIP can effectively combine the two mapping processes to perform excellent inductive reasoning. We further discuss how the latent fusing methods and latent dimensions affect SHIP’s performance, and show SHIP can effectively generalize with pre-training. The code and data for this paper are released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Shuttle-Between-Instructions-Parameters
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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
Yang Wu Axon, Jinhong Yu Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Jingwei Xiong, Zhimin Tao Jiangsu university, Xiaozhong Liu Worcester Polytechnic Institute
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into scientific workflows presents exciting opportunities to accelerate biomedical discovery. However, the reactive nature of LLMs, which respond only when prompted, limits their effectiveness in collaborative settings that demand foresight and autonomous engagement. In this study, we introduce CoLabScience, a proactive LLM assistant designed to enhance biomedical collaboration between AI systems and human experts through timely, context-aware interventions. At the core of our method is PULI (Positive-Unlabeled Learning-to-Intervene), a novel framework trained with a reinforcement learning objective to determine when and how to intervene in streaming scientific discussions, by leveraging the team’s project proposal and long- and short-term conversational memory. To support this work, we introduce BSDD (Biomedical Streaming Dialogue Dataset), a new benchmark of simulated research discussion dialogues with intervention points derived from PubMed articles. Experimental results show that PULI significantly outperforms existing baselines in both intervention precision and collaborative task utility, highlighting the potential of proactive LLMs as intelligent scientific assistants.
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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
Recent efforts to accelerate inference in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have largely focused on visual token compression. The effectiveness of these methods is commonly evaluated by measuring the accuracy drop on existing MLLM benchmarks before and after compression. However, these benchmarks are originally designed to assess general perception and reasoning abilities, rather than the specific challenges posed by visual token compression, leading to a fundamental task mismatch. In this work, we uncover a counterintuitive yet consistent phenomenon: simple image downsampling outperforms many advanced visual token compression methods across multiple widely used benchmarks. Through a comprehensive empirical study spanning eight popular benchmarks and multiple state-of-the-art compression techniques, we show that (i) current benchmarks contain substantial noise (task-irrelevant samples) for evaluating visual token compression, and (ii) downsampling can act as an effective data filter that distinguishes between simple and difficult samples with respect to compression sensitivity. Motivated by these findings, we propose VTC-Bench, an evaluation framework that explicitly leverages downsampling as a discriminator to denoise existing benchmarks, enabling a fairer and more meaningful additional assessment of visual token compression 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
Zequn Xie, Xin Liu, Fangming Feng, Boyun Zhang Zhejiang University, Tao Jin Zhejiang University
In recent years, CLIP-based text-video retrieval methods have developed rapidly, with research focusing on constructing diverse features and achieving effective interactions. However, the asymmetry of cross-modal information poses a challenge to accurately establishing retrieval relationships. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel video retrieval framework, termed the Dual-Pathway and Dual-View model (DPDV), which consists of the Dual-Pathway Partitioning Module (DPPM) for constructing features at an appropriate granularity and the Dual-View Interaction Module (DVIM) for performing effective feature interactions. For DPPM, we simulate a human macro-level cognitive perspective by partitioning visual features into two categories based on their relevance to the text query and supplementing less relevant features with additional textual information. For DVIM, we simulate a human alignment strategy from macro to micro levels, focusing on local visual features while comprehensively modeling fine-grained interactions. We evaluate DPDV on five benchmark datasets, achieving leading retrieval performance.
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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
Songtao Jiang, Yuan Wang, Ruizhe Chen, Yan Zhang ByteDance Inc., Ruilin Luo, Bohan Lei Zhejiang University, Yeying Jin, Sibo Song Alibaba Group 等 12 位作者
While reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been proven highly effective for enhancing reasoning, its application to medical visual question answering (Med-VQA) is hampered by models producing reasoning inconsistent with either the visual evidence or the final answer. Our analysis reveals a critical flaw in RLVR training: it paradoxically encourages models to disregard visual evidence and generate answers that contradict their own reasoning. This degradation is most pronounced in specialized medical modalities (e.g., Fundus, Ultrasound) where base VLMs lack robust understanding, a failure we attribute to a flawed reward mechanism exacerbated by the scarcity of diverse training data. To tackle this, we introduce Med-Zero-17K, a large-scale dataset spanning over 30 modalities and 24 clinically relevant tasks, and the Multi-Consistency Reward (MCR) framework, which explicitly rewards both perceptual grounding and logical coherence. Extensive experiments validate our approach: integrating MCR into the RLVR framework delivers robust performance gains. This success stems from our crucial finding that rewarding internal consistency is significantly more effective than attempting to judge reasoning correctness. Furthermore, MCR proves highly versatile, exhibiting strong generalization across diverse VLM backbones, compatibility with RL algorithms like GRPO and DPO, and extending its effectiveness to 3D VQA tasks and R1-style training paradigms. Code and dataset will be released.
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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
Lujia Yang, Weicai Yan, Yongbo He, Qifei Zhang, Tao Jin Zhejiang University, Jinshan Zhang, Meng Xi, Jianwei Yin Zhejiang University
Sign language translation (SLT) is essential for bridging communication between the deaf and hearing communities, but real-world deployment suffers from domain shift such as signer variability, lighting, and background changes. Supervised fine-tuning is impractical due to limited labeled data, and existing unsupervised adaptation methods require batch statistics or long adaptation. We introduce Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) for SLT, enabling rapid adaptation to domain shift without the need for labeled data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore TTA in SLT. Existing TTA methods predominantly focus on image classification tasks and lack a comprehensive strategy for handling domain shift in SLT. In response, we introduce SAME, a plug-and-play, signer-aware Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) TTA architecture for SLT. SAME inserts lightweight MoE modules after multiple encoder layers. Gates are conditioned on signer features and stabilized with unsupervised regularizers, effectively decoupling domain shift across encoder depths while enabling personalized adaptation. Experiments show that SAME outperforms existing TTA methods and can enhance the capabilities of multiple SLT models.
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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
Fangming Feng, Dongjie Fu, Zequn Xie, Yu Zhang, Yangyang Wu Zhejiang University, Zhou Zhao, Tao Jin Zhejiang University
While diffusion and flow-matching models have advanced TTS, generating high-arousal emotions remains a persistent challenge due to the trade-off between stability and expressiveness. Existing systems often suffer from linguistic collapse when pursuing high intensity or fail to meet target emotional levels under stable settings. In this work, we identify that standard Gaussian initialization inevitably introduces a neutral prosody bias, while uniform Classifier-Free Guidance often distorts the acoustic manifold, leading to artifacts. To address this, we propose an inference framework that rectifies the emotional trajectory. An Emotion-Rectified Noise Prior injects a semantic gradient at initialization to align sampling with the target emotional manifold, and Likelihood-Inverse Guidance adaptively schedules guidance via a conditional/unconditional likelihood ratio, strengthening guidance only when the trajectory drifts toward a neutral fallback. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method effectively resolves the stability bottleneck in high-intensity scenarios, achieving superior linguistic accuracy and emotional fidelity without model retraining. Audio samples are available at https://showtts.github.io/emotionTTS/.
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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
Henry Pinkard, Leyla Kabuli, Eric Markley, Tiffany Chien, Jiantao Jiao, Laura Waller
AI 速览：提出直接量化成像系统测量与未知物体之间互信息的方法，并基于此开发IDEAL技术来设计成像系统。
Imaging systems have traditionally been designed to mimic the human eye and produce visually interpretable measurements. Modern imaging systems, however, process raw measurements computationally before or instead of human viewing. As a result, the information content of raw measurements matters more than their visual interpretability. Despite the importance of measurement information content, current approaches for evaluating imaging system performance do not quantify it: they instead either use alternative metrics that assess specific aspects of measurement quality or assess measurements indirectly with performance on secondary tasks. We developed the theoretical foundations and a practical method to directly quantify mutual information between noisy measurements and unknown objects. By fitting probabilistic models to measurements and their noise characteristics, our method estimates information by upper bounding its true value. By applying gradient-based optimization to these estimates, we also developed a technique for designing imaging systems called Information-Driven Encoder Analysis Learning (IDEAL). Our information estimates accurately captured system performance differences across four imaging domains (color photography, radio astronomy, lensless imaging, and microscopy). Systems designed with IDEAL matched the performance of those designed with end-to-end optimization, the prevailing approach that jointly optimizes hardware and image processing algorithms. These results establish mutual information as a universal performance metric for imaging systems that enables both computationally efficient design optimization and evaluation in real-world conditions. A video summarizing this work can be found at: https://waller-lab.github.io/EncodingInformationWebsite/