Read, Allocate, Route: Role-Coupled Tokenization for Pixel-Space Generative Transformers
Jiongfan Yang, Weichen Fan, Haiwen Diao, Zhongang Cai, Ziwei Liu
AI 速览：SpecSlot通过将每个空间锚点拆成多个按DCT频带分工的slot，让全局注意力只处理低频slot、高频细节在局部交互，从而在不加长全局序列的前提下提升像素空间生成式Transformer的细节建模能力。
Pixel-space generative Transformers typically use one token per image patch, so capturing finer detail requires more tokens and makes global attention increasingly expensive. We observe that finer detail does not necessarily require more global communication: low-frequency structure benefits from global exchange, while high-frequency detail can be modeled locally. Based on this insight, we introduce SpecSlot, a pixel-space rectified-flow Transformer that decouples output detail from the length of the global attention sequence. SpecSlot expands each spatial anchor into multiple slots, each assigned a disjoint band of DCT coefficients; this separates anchor density from spectral subdivision. Only the lowest-frequency slot from each anchor participates in global attention, while all slots interact locally. This allows the model to increase spectral detail without enlarging the global sequence. A spatial head further adds a local correction to the spectral prediction, while the generative state, target, and loss remain in pixel space. On ImageNet-256, SpecSlot achieves a comparable final FID to a FLOPs-matched JiT control while converging faster. On ImageNet-512, it improves FID by 2.84 over the control with 3.9% fewer FLOPs, and comes within only 0.69 FID of JiT-B/16 at 38.2% lower cost. On text-to-image generation, SpecSlot surpasses JiT-B/8 on DPG-Bench by 1.06 at 40.6% lower forward cost.
Probing Spatial State Representations in Visual Foundation Models
Baiqiao Yin, Zhongang Cai, Ruisi Wang, Qiwei Liang, Lei Yang, Ziwei Liu
AI 速览：该研究通过四个层级的冻结特征探针，检验视觉基础模型在流式自我中心观测下是否具备可维持、可预测更新并可用于目标导向动作的空间状态表征。
An observer sees only part of the surrounding world, yet must keep track of what lies beyond the current view. Spatial perception therefore involves more than recognizing individual images: it calls for a persistent spatial state that is updated under self-motion and used to guide action. Do visual foundation models provide representations that support such a state? We study this question through four levels of spatial capability---spatial structure, object persistence, predictive spatial update, and actionability---using frozen-feature probes on ten representations under streaming egocentric observations of static indoor environments. The resulting capability profiles vary across tasks, network layers, and prefix lengths: strong readout of the visible scene does not ensure accurate object persistence or future-feature retrieval. Matched controls separate readout accuracy from reliance on visual history and motion. Native future prediction retains recoverable spatial structure, but a spatial reader trained on real features does not transfer to predicted features unchanged. Finally, goal-dependent candidate selection does not establish reliable continuous action utility: predicted actions respond to goal changes, yet supplying the correct goal does not reliably improve progress. Across the four levels, object persistence and actionability build on camera-pose readout, whereas feature prediction builds on visible-scene readout. Together, these findings motivate evaluating spatial representations not only by what can be decoded from them, but by whether that information is maintained beyond observation, updated predictively, and used for goal-directed action.
ContextEcho: A Benchmark for Persona Drift in Long Agentic-Coding Sessions
Xianzhong Ding, Yangyang Yu, Changwei Liu, Bill Zhao, Le Chen, Tao Chen
AI 速览：作者提出 ContextEcho 基准与可复用测试框架，用于刻画长程智能体编程会话中编程助手人格的漂移现象。
Frontier language models are trained to exhibit stable programming assistant personas, yet those personas may drift over long agentic coding sessions in production. After a long real-world coding session, a model that hedges preferences in a fresh chat ("I don't have preferences") may instead express them directly ("Python -- the feedback loop is instant..."). Existing persona-stability studies focus on scripted chat of tens of turns, leaving long production coding sessions involving thousands of tool-using agent steps, repeated compaction, and hours of interaction largely uncharacterized. We introduce ContextEcho, a benchmark and reusable harness with a 25-probe identity suite, a snapshot-then-probe protocol that evaluates conversation state without perturbing the main session, judge-based and judge-free metrics, and a corpus of 57 long agentic-coding sessions collected with consent and redacted for release across Claude Code and Codex CLI. We use one representative session for a 23-model cross-provider study and all 57 sessions for corpus-scale trajectory analysis across frontier and open-weight models. Results show that persona drift occurs across providers and emerges early in real agentic interaction, while in-session compaction neither reliably resets nor amplifies it. A single-shot anchor restores the original assistant persona, though placebo controls suggest a generic register-reset effect. On same-task continuations, drifted prefixes improve tool-call fidelity -- which we attribute to retained task context rather than drift itself. In tool-free chat, however, the same prefixes break output-format contracts and inflate output length. These findings motivate ContextEcho as an open-source framework for auditing persona drift in long coding sessions without retraining.
Video generation is shifting from end-to-end synthesis toward agentic generation, where planning, tool use, and feedback enable coherent, controllable multi-shot videos. In parallel, video world models provide action-conditioned observations and predicted futures, serving as interactive environments for agents. We study their intersection through the agent harness: an executable runtime that constructs context, exposes tools, maintains state, routes feedback, and manages budgets around video models. This report examines three directions. First, agentic video generation, where harnesses coordinate scripting, shot planning, asset management, production, and editing, alongside the evaluation challenges of these systems. Second, agentic world modeling, where harnesses mediate observation, control, execution, and state. We discuss hybrid designs in which game engines or agent-written programs maintain world state while video models render observations, and how agents and world models can mutually evaluate and improve one another. Third, recursive self-improvement (RSI) in video model development, distinguishing output revisions, updates to harness state, generator parameters, and evaluators, and changes to the improvement procedure itself. We identify how these improvements feed back into subsequent development. Across these directions, we analyze essential agent capabilities, including audiovisual perception, long-horizon planning, memory, code-based interaction, feedback-guided control, skill reuse, and multi-agent coordination. We conclude with challenges in autonomous video production, lifelong memory, programmable hybrid control, autonomous model development, provenance, cost accounting, and evaluation linking video quality and task performance to sustained improvements in models and harnesses.
An Lanji, Dawei Liu, Jin Li, Haoran Xu, Mei Chen, Yu Tian
Diffusion transformers (DiTs) have become the dominant architecture for high-fidelity image synthesis, yet they suffer from slow training convergence and high computational cost. Two recent lines of work address this from complementary angles: Representation Alignment (REPA) accelerates DiT training by aligning intermediate features with a pretrained external representation model (e.g., DINOv2), while Representation Auto-Encoders (RAE) replace the pixel-space VAE with a compact representation-space tokenizer learned from self-supervised features. However, these approaches are developed and applied in isolation: REPA still relies on a pixel-space VAE for latent diffusion, and RAE does not exploit the alignment signal that accelerates the diffusion backbone. We present \textbf{UniRA}, a unified framework that couples representation alignment and representation auto-encoding into a single objective. UniRA learns a representation-space tokenizer whose output serves simultaneously as the diffusion target and the alignment anchor, so the tokenizer, the diffusion backbone, and the external representation model are co-optimized. We give a theoretical result showing that this joint optimization preserves the representation quality of the external model while accelerating diffusion convergence, and we derive a principled weighting that balances the reconstruction, alignment, and generation objectives. On ImageNet class-conditional generation at 256*256 and 512*512, UniRA matches or surpasses state-of-the-art DiTs (SD3, REPA, RAE) in FID while reducing training steps by up to 5*. We further show that the unified representation space supports improved zero-shot classification and linear probing, confirming that generation and understanding benefit from a shared, aligned latent space.
Jing Zhang, Lianghong Guo, Yanlin Wang, Terry Yue Zhuo, Yong Wang, Mingwei Liu, Jiachi Chen, Ensheng Shi 等 11 位作者
The Development Knowledge Question Answering (Dev Knowledge QA) task aims to provide accurate natural language answers to knowledge-seeking questions during software development. To investigate the importance of Dev Knowledge QA in AI-assisted software development and the extent to which it has been explored, we conduct a preliminary analysis of real user-LLM dialogues from WildChat. Our findings indicate that Dev Knowledge QA plays a significant role in real-world software development scenarios, and these raw dialogues cannot be directly used to construct a Dev Knowledge QA benchmark. Existing Dev Knowledge QA benchmarks are limited in development knowledge scope and often not built from real user queries. To bridge this gap, we design a three-phase pipeline that transforms real-world dialogue into simple development knowledge-seeking QA pairs. Through this pipeline, we introduce SimpleDevQA, a multilingual Dev Knowledge QA benchmark inspired by real user dialogues. This dataset covers three languages (English, Chinese, and Russian), and focuses on questions with unique, short, and verifiable answers, making evaluation more accurate and simple. Extensive experiments with 21 mainstream LLMs show that closed-source models generally perform best on SimpleDevQA. We also find that RAG-based knowledge injection improves accuracy, and that Dev Knowledge QA performance correlates with both model confidence and code-generation capability. To facilitate the replication study, we have released our data and code at: https://github.com/DeepSoftwareAnalytics/SimpleDevQA.
Programmable garbled-circuit execution must balance the benefits of cross-program reuse against the cost of repeated work during secure execution. A complete garbled processor provides a fixed circuit for many programs, but its evaluator repeatedly visits processor-wide structures even when only a small part performs the current protected computation. We present RV2GC, which reconstructs the garbling boundary around a fixed library of RISC-V instruction circuits. Public scheduling and operand routing operate outside the circuit topologies; persistent label-encoded state connects independently invoked garbled instruction circuits and instruction-specific garbling-free paths through a common interface. A Conditional-execution Stack and protected commits support secret-dependent branches, bounded loops, and secret-indexed memory access under public scheduling, keeping instruction and memory-address sequences independent of private inputs. Across nine benchmarks, measured ARM2GC-to-RV2GC runtime ratios range from 12.81 to 4,043. In terms of circuit size, the largest listed instruction circuit has 3,386 gates, corresponding to 2.044% and 0.393% of the 256-byte and 4,096-byte Amber processors, respectively. Additional comparisons quantify schedule storage, communication, and the cost of secret-dependent execution.
Haolin Chen, Deon Metelski, Leon Qi, Tao Xia, Joonyul Lee, Steve Brown, Kevin Riley, Frank Wang 等 33 位作者
End-to-end automation of realistic healthcare operations stresses three capabilities underrepresented in current benchmarks: policy density, decisions must be grounded in a large library of medical, insurance, and operational rules; Multi-role composition: a single task requires the agent to play multiple roles with handoffs; and multilateral interaction: intermediate workflow steps are multi-turn dialogs, such as peer-to-peer review and patient outreach. We introduce $χ$-Bench, a benchmark of long-horizon healthcare workflows across three domains: provider prior authorization, payer utilization management, and care management. Each task hands the agent a clinical case in a high-fidelity simulator of 20 healthcare apps exposed via 87 MCP tools, which it must drive to a terminal status through tool calls and writing the role's artifacts, guided by a 1,290+ document managed-care operations handbook skill. Across 30 agent harness/models configurations, the best agent resolves only 28.0% of tasks, no agent clears 20% on strict pass^3, and executing all tasks in a single session slumps the performance to 3.8%. These results raise the hypothesis that similar gaps are likely to surface in other policy-dense, role-composed, irreversible enterprise domains.
Nonlinear structural system identification remains challenging when governing physics is only partially known and measurements are sparse. Deep Bayesian filtering addresses these challenges by combining learnable dynamical representations with probabilistic state-space models, physical inductive biases, and uncertainty-aware inference. This paper presents, for the first time, a unified tutorial treatment of deep Bayesian filtering for nonlinear structural system identification, connecting model formulation, learning, posterior inference, and evaluation. Amortized variational inference and differentiable Kalman filtering are introduced as complementary strategies within this broader framework. The Deep Markov Model (DMM) provides a data-driven reference, while the Physics-guided Deep Markov Model (PgDMM) and Neural Extended Kalman Filter (Neural EKF) serve as illustrative instances through which methodological choices and their implications are examined. Dynamic state estimation and joint state and parameter estimation are demonstrated on a three-dimensional shear-frame benchmark with hysteretic Bouc-Wen connections and sparse acceleration measurements. The comparative analysis yields new observations concerning the relationships among reconstruction accuracy, predictive fidelity, physical interpretability, and estimation robustness. Physical structure improves latent-state interpretability without necessarily ensuring faithful predictive dynamics, while comparable typical reconstruction accuracy can conceal substantial differences in estimation robustness. These findings motivate practical guidelines for model construction, training, and evaluation that distinguish reconstruction, forecasting, state recovery, and parameter identification. The tutorial concludes by outlining challenges in uncertainty calibration, identifiability, and validation on real structures.
Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) typically uses uniform coverage across Transformer layers despite heterogeneous positional requirements. Phase-off interventions reveal non-uniform, model-specific rotary-phase dependence, while coverage interventions relate it to coverage-upgrade benefits. We propose profiling-guided layer-wise RoPE allocation, assigning high/low coverage under a fixed budget using early coverage-benefit profiles. The framework supports fixed-width query/key representations and physical rotary-dimension allocation in Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA). Normalized-depth mapping transfers profiles within model families, enabling small-model measurements to guide larger-model allocations before pretraining. A brief analysis relates selection and transfer to score calibration and inter-layer interactions. From-scratch experiments demonstrate validation-loss improvements over available budget-matched baselines, while analytical resource accounting identifies favorable quality--storage--compute trade-offs for physical MLA. These results connect positional demand to transferable, efficient architecture design.
Yuzhen Ding, Hongying Feng, Jianfeng Zhao, Jason Holmes, Martin Bues, Lisa A. McGee, Jean-Claude M. Rwigema, Nathan Y. Yu 等 17 位作者
Background and purpose: Intensity-modulated proton therapy (IMPT) enables conformal dose delivery for head and neck (H&N) cancers. However, its sensitivity to inter-fractional anatomical changes motivates online adaptations, where rapid and accurate Monte Carlo (MC) dose calculation remains a major bottleneck. Low-statistics MC simulations reduce computation time but introduce noise. This study aimed to develop a diffusion-transformer framework to recover high-statistics dose distributions from noisy MC simulations. Materials and methods: A diffusion-transformer-based dose denoising framework was developed. Eighty H&N patients were used for training and additional 10 H&N patients and 30 patients with lung, breast, and prostate cancers (10 per site) were used for evaluation. Noisy and high-statistics dose maps were generated using MCsquare. The model was trained using noisy dose maps and CT images as inputs and high-statistics dose maps as ground truth, with mean squared error, residual, regional mean absolute error (MAE), and dose-volume histogram (DVH) losses. Performance was evaluated using MAE, 3D gamma passing rates, and DVH indices. Results: Mean whole-body MAE ranged from 0.08 +/- 0.06 to 0.20 +/- 0.11 Gy (Relative Biological Effectiveness, RBE) (RBE = 1.1) across test cohorts. Mean whole-body 3 %/2 mm gamma passing rates ranged from 95.8 +/- 0.8 % to 97.6 +/- 0.9 %. DVH indices from high-statistics and predicted dose distributions showed close agreement for clinical target volumes and organs of interest. Conclusions: The diffusion-transformer-based framework denoised low-statistics MC dose distributions. Despite being trained on H&N data, the model generalized to lung, breast, and prostate cohorts without retraining.
Xuanang Gao, Zhiwei Ning, Gengming Zhang, Jiaxi Cao, Runze Yang, Zhonglong Zheng, Jie Yang, Rong Xiao 等 9 位作者
Robust depth estimation aims to maintain high-quality depths across diverse conditions. However, most existing methods estimate depth without taking into account the object-level information. As a result, the predicted depth may easily deviate within objects and become blurred under adverse conditions. To overcome this weakness, we propose RoSAMDepth, a novel framework that can assist robust self-supervised depth estimation in leveraging rich and diverse object-level priors from the Segment Anything Model (SAM). We focus on incorporating object-level information across three key aspects: a segment-guided representation contrasting method that injects object-level awareness into the feature representation space; an adaptive regional outlier masking strategy combined with a regional Gaussian likelihood loss that enforces regional depth smoothness; and an object-level reliability estimation strategy that mitigates the influence of unreliable supervision. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and diverse weather conditions demonstrate that our method produces sharper, more accurate depth predictions, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/xagao/RoSAMDepth.
Generative recommendation (GR) has emerged as a promising paradigm that predicts target items by autoregressively generating their semantic identifiers (SID). Most GR methods follow a quantization-representation-generation pipeline. While most research focuses on quantization and generation, the representation that bridges the two remains underexplored. Existing representation constructions mainly take two forms: either directly flattening the SID code embeddings into a sequence or merging them into a compact vector via external networks. While effective, they still expose two practical challenges: \textbf{1) Loss of item semantics:} Information lost by quantization or compression needs to be recovered during the representation stage. \textbf{2) Insufficient modeling of structured SID relations:} Intra-item code composition patterns and inter-item prefix-transition patterns are not explicitly preserved for representation and subsequent SID generation. To overcome these challenges, we propose \textbf{ComeIR}, a \textbf{\uline{Co}}nditional \textbf{\uline{me}}mory Enhanced \textbf{\uline{I}}tem \textbf{\uline{R}}epresentation framework that reconstructs SID code embeddings into item-aware inputs and preserves structured SID evidence for prediction. Item-guided Token Scoring estimates the contribution of each SID code using the item embedding employed by the quantizer. Dual-level Conditional Memory captures intra-item prefix composition and inter-item prefix transitions, while Memory Merge integrates these signals into each historical item representation. The Memory-restoring Prediction Head further conditions SID-level prediction on the generated prefix and historical transition evidence. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of ComeIR, and further reveal scalable gains from enlarging conditional memory.
We introduce NAGO, a noise-aware generative operator for efficient sampling from invariant measures of stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) in function space. Our central idea is to treat the source measure as a design variable rather than a fixed Gaussian default. We establish admissibility conditions for well-defined infinite-dimensional flows and show that the finite-band source--target covariance ratio controls the spectral stiffness of the marginal velocity field. This analysis yields an admissibility-constrained spectral-matching rule: choose a source that is sufficiently rough for well-posedness, then minimize covariance mismatch over the resolved Fourier modes. On three representative stochastic-field benchmarks, this source design improves few-step spectral accuracy and several complementary distributional and physical statistics. In a controlled Matern-field ablation, it reduces the accurate RK4 budget from about 30 steps for Gaussian functional flow matching to 3--5 steps, a $6$--$10\times$ reduction in neural ODE evaluations. These gains are strongest for stationary multiscale fields and depend on the metric, resolution, and guidance protocol.
Tian Zhang, Yiwei Xu, Juan Wang, Keyan Guo, Xiaoyang Xu, Bowen Xiao, Quanlong Guan, Jinlin Fan 等 11 位作者
Tool-augmented large language model (LLM) agents aggregate dialogue history, tool outputs, and retrieved content into an accumulated runtime state to complete multi-step tasks. This execution model exposes agents to indirect prompt injection (IPI) attacks, in which attacker-controlled instructions embedded in external artifacts enter the agent state and later influence tool use. Multi-turn IPI is especially challenging because injected content can persist across steps and trigger unauthorized state-changing actions only after merging with user intent. This creates a source-attribution problem: existing inference-time defenses can often detect suspicious behavior but do not directly distinguish whether a pending action is supported by the user task or influenced by injected content. They therefore resort to conservative blocking, termination, or broad filtering. We propose AgentSentry, an inference-time defense that operationalizes temporal causal diagnostics through boundary-local counterfactual re-executions at tool-return boundaries. It substitutes the mediator under a restored snapshot, records whether the pending proposal survives, and aggregates user-view and probe scores across adjacent boundaries. When a proposal is mediator-sensitive, AgentSentry purifies the implicated mediator content while preserving task-relevant evidence and resumes execution from the sanitized state. We evaluate AgentSentry on AgentDojo across four task suites, three IPI attack families, and three black-box LLM backbones. It records no observed successful attack in the evaluated cases (ASR = 0%) and achieves an average Utility Under Attack (UA) of 76.10%. Over the strongest evaluated baseline, it improves average UA by 1.84--7.60 percentage points, with benign FPRs of 2.06%--5.15%. We further evaluate long-horizon and adaptive attacks, imperfect purification, runtime overhead, and an OpenClaw case study.
Xinwei Yue, Hao Li, Jingjing Zhao, Xianfu Lei, Yuanwei Liu
Pinching antenna systems (PASS) provide flexible transmitter-side radiation reconfiguration for high-frequency wireless communications. This paper applies PASS to non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) covert communication networks, where activated pinching antennas (PAs) transmit superimposed signals to a pair of users stochastically distributed within a rectangle. Two passive wardens respectively monitor the downlink transmissions intended for two users. More specifically, we derive the closed-form detection error probability (DEP) expressions for two wardens under bounded noise uncertainty. Then we analytically determine the optimal detection thresholds and minimum DEPs in the worst-case covert detection scenarios. The covert transmission rates of two users are further characterized by taking into consideration ideal successive interference cancellation and non-ideal successive interference cancellation at near user and intra-NOMA interference at far user. Numerical results are presented to confirm that: 1) PASS-NOMA is capable of providing higher covert rates relative to conventional orthogonal multiple access OMA schemes; 2) As the number of activated PAs begun to increase, the near user has ability to obtain a larger covert rate gain than far user; and 3) The DEP of PASS-NOMA networks is larger than that of both PASS-OMA and traditional antenna based NOMA in specific output power regions.
Bingchao Wang, Yongcheng Jing, Shunyu Liu, Chengyu Wang, Jun Huang, Jie Yang, Wei Liu, Dacheng Tao
Mobile GUI agents are typically fine-tuned 7B-scale vision-language models (VLMs) that generate each action as text. However, these VLMs decode every action token by token, and even agents that score candidate actions keep a large language model or VLM in the loop, making them slow and memory-hungry. To address these issues, we propose GUI-JEPA, to our knowledge the first decoder-free GUI agent policy built on a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), which selects actions in the latent space of a JEPA encoder pretrained on unlabelled GUI screenshots. Its action- and region-conditioned latent predictor turns the screen latent into one latent per candidate action, letting lightweight heads score all candidates against the instruction in a single batched pass, without decoding a token. We further show that the scorer relies on this latent pathway and that the predictor is trained for the decision itself: a randomly initialised predictor does just as well as one pretrained on screen dynamics. On AndroidControl, GUI-JEPA is 2.8-4.0x faster on the same GPU than a Qwen2.5-VL-7B agent we fine-tune with the same inputs, while reaching 86-92% of its in-distribution accuracy with 6% of its parameters. Code is available at https://github.com/bcwang-sjtu/GUI-JEPA
Bingchao Wang, Yongcheng Jing, Chengyu Wang, Jun Huang, Jie Yang, Wei Liu, Dacheng Tao
GUI grounding on high-resolution screens fails mostly on small targets, and zooming in is a common training-free remedy. However, most existing zooming pipelines do not match the zoom to the target's size, accept the zoomed answer unconditionally and never revisit a wrong answer. To address these issues, we propose AdaGround, a training-free framework with three components: (1) Token-Normalized Adaptive Zooming, which sets the magnification, field of view and zoom depth of each sample from the model's own estimate of the target size; (2) Verifier-in-the-Loop Refinement, which uses one marked-click Yes/No verifier to keep or reject each zoom, choose between zoom chains, trigger re-grounding and, with an existence query, decide when to abstain; and (3) Compositional Structure Grounding, which composes spreadsheet cells from their headers. On Qwen3-VL models, AdaGround surpasses state-of-the-art training-free zooming methods and many trained GUI models, improving accuracy over the backbone by 7.4 to 20.6 points on OSWorld-G and ScreenSpot-Pro, and its gains carry over to held-out UI-Vision. Code is available at https://github.com/bcwang-sjtu/AdaGround
The space of possible visual content is enormous, and arguably unbounded. Any training set, however large, therefore covers only a tiny fraction of it. Yet generative models are typically trained to fit only the images they are given. In visual autoregressive (AR) generation, for example, each token is predicted from the preceding ground-truth (GT) tokens and supervised solely by the GT next token. Confining learning to observed data in this way limits how much of the visual distribution a model can capture. In this work, we hypothesize that letting a model imagine beyond its training data, by exploring plausible visual realizations it has never observed, can ease this limitation. We use visual AR generation as a proof of concept, since its fixed, discrete token space makes imagination easier to steer and constrain. We propose Next Token Imagination (NTI), a method that allows the model to explore beyond the GT next token, subject to a carefully designed criterion that keeps this imagination bounded by the underlying visual distribution. Extensive experiments on ImageNet show that NTI substantially and consistently improves the fidelity of generated images, approaching state-of-the-art diffusion and AR models while using a smaller model and lower training cost.
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.
Extending large language models (LLMs) to the speech domain has recently gained significant attention. A typical approach connects a pretrained LLM with an audio encoder through a projection module and trains the resulting model on large-scale, task-specific instruction-tuning datasets. However, curating such instruction-tuning data for specific requirements is time-consuming, and models trained in this manner often generalize poorly to unseen tasks. In this work, we first formulate that the strongest generalization of a speech-LLM is achieved when it is trained with Self-Generated Instruction-Free Tuning (SIFT), in which supervision signals are generated by a frozen LLM using textual representations of speech as input. Our proposed SIFT paradigm eliminates the need for collecting task-specific question-answer pairs and yields the theoretically best generalization to unseen tasks. Building upon this paradigm, we introduce AZeroS (Auden Zero-instruction-tuned Speech-LLM), which is trained on speech-text pairs derived from publicly available corpora, including approximately 25,000 hours of speech with ASR transcripts and 3,000 hours of speech with paralinguistic labels. Built upon Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, the model updates only two lightweight projection modules (23.8 million parameters each), while keeping both the LLM and audio encoders frozen. Despite the minimal training cost and modest data scale, AZeroS achieves state-of-the-art performance on both semantic and paralinguistic benchmarks, including VoiceBench, AIR-Bench Foundation (Speech), and AIR-Bench Chat (Speech).
Zheng Lin, Zhanwei Wang, Yuxin Zhang, Yafei Wang, Ons Aouedi, Zihan Fang, Jinfeng Xu, Jing Yang 等 12 位作者
The proliferation of orbital sensing data and the real-time demands of emerging global services are pushing low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks from bent-pipe relays toward intelligent onboard processing. This shift confronts a fundamental tension, where modern artificial intelligence (AI) training paradigms require intensive computation, abundant memory, and stable connectivity, all of which are scarce under the dynamic topologies, intermittent links, and severe size, weight, and power (SWaP) constraints of satellite networks. Addressing this tension demands rethinking AI workflows, from training and inference to the emerging deployment of large language models (LLMs), under a constraint-aware design philosophy. To the best of our knowledge, this paper provides the first survey that jointly covers all three, whereas prior surveys examine these aspects in isolation. We begin by identifying the deployment challenge of satellite intelligence (SI) and deriving design principles for SI. We then examine three advancing paradigms: i) distributed training, where federated learning (FL) and split learning (SL) enable satellite-ground co-training under resource limitations; ii) collaborative inference, which exploits single-satellite, multi-satellite, and satellite-ground architectures to meet real-time service demands; and iii) on-orbit LLM adaptation and serving, which tackles the frontier challenge of deploying LLMs under severe orbital constraints and resource-aware serving. Finally, we identify open challenges and future directions. By bridging the AI and satellite networks, this paper provides a research roadmap for the implementation of space-native AI technologies.
Wenwen Hou, Xinyuan Song, Wenqian Weng, Shiwei Liu
Activation sparsity is a promising approach for accelerating large language model (LLM) inference by reducing computation and memory movement. However, existing activation sparsity methods typically apply uniform sparsity across projections, ignoring the heterogeneous statistical properties of Transformer weights and thereby amplifying performance degradation. In this paper, we propose ActTail, a TopK magnitude-based activation sparsity method with global activation sparsity allocation grounded in Heavy-Tailed Self-Regularization (HT-SR) theory. Specifically, we capture this heterogeneity via the heavy-tail exponent computed from each projection's empirical spectral density (ESD), which is used as a quantitative indicator to assign projection-specific sparsity budgets. Importantly, we provide a theoretical analysis that establishes an explicit relationship between the activation sparsity ratio and the heavy-tail exponent under the HT-SR regime, offering principled guidance for sparsity allocation beyond heuristic design. Experiments on LLaMA and Mistral models show that our method improves both perplexity and downstream task performance at high sparsity compared to uniform allocation. At 80% sparsity, perplexity is reduced by 21.8% on LLaMA-2-7B, 40.1% on LLaMA-2-13B, and 9.4% on Mistral-7B.
Shiwei Liu, Linyuan Wang, Nuolin Sun, Libin Hou, Bin Yan
Automatic modulation classification (AMC) of radio signals is a core technology for spectrum monitoring and electromagnetic situational awareness. Deep neural networks (DNNs) play an important role in this field owing to their powerful feature extraction capabilities and end-to-end learning paradigm. However, their vulnerability to adversarial attacks poses serious security challenges to practical deployment. Adversarial training, a common defense, has limitations including poor generalization across attack types and high training costs. Inspired by Just image Transformers (JiT), a diffusion generative model that directly predicts clean images, this paper proposes a JiT-based denoising defense against adversarial examples for radio signal modulation classification. During training, a signal-specific 1D Transformer denoising network is optimized via flow matching to directly predict clean signal samples. It thereby learns a mapping that projects arbitrary examples back onto the low-dimensional manifold of clean signal examples. During inference, arbitrary examples are fed into the trained network and directly projected onto this manifold. This enables denoising defense without prior knowledge of attacks. Experiments on the RML2018.01A dataset were conducted without attack information, using a single empirically selected, fixed denoising start time. Compared with PGD-based adversarial training, the proposed method achieves a relative improvement of at least 20.58% in robust accuracy under PGD attacks. It also achieves a relative improvement of 10.20% in classification accuracy on clean examples. When evaluated against attack types unseen during adversarial training, the proposed method provides stronger defense than adversarial training. In particular, at higher attack strengths, it achieves a relative improvement of at least 39.72% in robust accuracy.
Physical understanding and reasoning depend on forming compact and generalizable representations of the world. While modern vision-language models can recognize and explain diverse physical events, they often lack explicit representations of the underlying mechanisms-such as object states, physical parameters, and governing dynamics-needed for reliably reasoning how the world evolves and responds to interventions. In this work, we introduce Code-as-World, a paradigm that represents physical worlds through executable world representations. By expressing physical composition, dynamic evolution, and visual appearance as executable code, Code-as-World provides a compact, quantitatively grounded, and controllable abstraction of the physical world. To construct such representations from multimodal observations, such as natural-language descriptions or real-world videos, we develop an agentic discovery loop inspired by abductive reasoning, where an agent proposes, executes, renders, verifies, and iteratively refines executable world hypotheses. As a concrete application, we use verified executable worlds to provide scalable physical supervision for training vision-language models on quantitative physical reasoning. Experiments show that Code-as-World-VL achieves state-of-the-art performance on QuantiPhy and surpasses leading proprietary models, highlighting the potential of executable world representations as a scalable foundation for physical intelligence.
Mass formulas for prescribed hull dimensions have mainly been studied for linear codes viewed as subspaces of the whole space. We study internal enumeration for an arbitrary fixed parent code. Let $C$ be an $[n,k]_q$ linear code with an $\ell$-dimensional hull, and let $s$ be the subcode dimension. We determine the number of subcodes with prescribed dimension, hull dimension, and type over finite fields of both even and odd characteristic. We decompose the parent code into an LCD complement and its hull, and use projection to reduce enumeration to the corresponding problem inside the LCD complement. This yields explicit formulas refined by complete type and shows that the counts depend only on the relevant parameters, not on the particular parent code or its length. The known whole-space mass formulas and the enumeration of LCD subcodes of LCD codes arise as special cases. Motivated by code extension, we also study the dual containment problem: for a fixed code, we enumerate larger codes containing it with prescribed hull dimension and type. By duality, this problem is converted into the subcode enumeration problem already solved above, leading to corresponding conditional mass formulas. Finally, we investigate the asymptotic distributions arising from the exact enumeration formulas. When both the subcode dimension $s$ and $k-\ell-s$ tend to infinity, the hull distribution is governed by the LCD complement, and the limiting proportions are explicit constants determined by the field, the prescribed hull dimension, and the relevant type. When $s$ approaches or exceeds the dimension $k-\ell$ of the LCD complement, we determine the asymptotic proportion of subcodes attaining the minimum possible hull dimension and establish the associated concentration behavior. Analogous asymptotic results are obtained for the containment problem.
Large language model agents have enabled software development through natural-language interaction, but extending this paradigm to end-to-end game development remains challenging. Building a playable game requires coordinating code, scenes, assets, animations, physics, and configurations, while allowing developers to validate their integrated behavior through interactive testing. We introduce VibeGame, a framework for creating complete 2D game projects from natural-language prompts and optional reference images. Its AI-native game engine represents project state as schema-validated structured text and provides frame-synchronous runtime control, enabling agents to inspect game states, execute actions, and verify behavior at their own pace. Built upon this interface, we design an Adversarial Agent Team of eight specialized agents to separate implementation from review, so that problems are found and fixed through multi-round loops. For each conducted and accepted project, we further introduce a training-free self-evolution mechanism to distill it into reusable skeletons, modules, and collaboration contracts for future development. We evaluate prompt-assets-to-game (PA2G), where agents are given an asset library, and prompt-to-game (P2G), where agents generate their own art. On a GameCraft-Bench subset, VibeGame in P2G consistently outperforms a range of agent harnesses in either P2G or PA2G with the same underlying model, including GPT-6.1-Sol.
Gilad Fuchs, Leonid Ekimov, Fei Dong, Jiahong Xie, Wei Liu, Maxim Manco, Alexander Nus
Conversational AI is increasingly used at eBay to deliver personalized customer support. We present a production RAG-based How-To Assistant that answers support and how-to queries by grounding responses in a proprietary knowledge base. We study three factors that drive quality: (1) document chunking and contextualization for indexing, (2) query refinement methods, and (3) automatic LLM-based evaluation for rapid iteration and reliable measurement. We also describe the end-to-end system workflow - from offline indexing to real-time serving and report deployment metrics, offering practical guidance for building scalable, high-precision RAG assistants in commercial support settings.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track) · 2026 · 正式发表
Jiawei Liu, Qisi Chen, Jianshu Zhang, Quan Liu, Defu Lian University of Science and Technology of China
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at complex reasoning through search algorithms, yet current strategies often suffer from massive token consumption due to redundant exploration of semantically equivalent steps. Existing semantic similarity methods struggle to accurately identify such equivalence in domain-specific contexts like mathematical reasoning. To address this, we propose EquivPruner, a simple yet effective approach that identifies and prunes semantically equivalent actions during LLM reasoning search. We also introduce MathEquiv, the first dataset we created for mathematical statement equivalence, which enables the training of a lightweight equivalence detector. Extensive experiments across various models and tasks demonstrate that EquivPruner significantly reduces token consumption, improving searching efficiency and often bolstering reasoning accuracy. For instance, when applied to Qwen2.5-Math-7B-Instruct on GSM8K, EquivPruner reduced token consumption by 48.1% while also improving accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/Lolo1222/EquivPruner.
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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
Wenhao Gao, Tianlong Wang, Wei Jia Tencent, Linhao Zhang, Aiwei Liu Wechat AI, Miao Fan, Zhou Xiao Pattern recognition center
Prompt-based in-context learning (ICL) and parameter fine-tuning are two dominant paradigms for incorporating external information into large language models (LLMs), but they incur high inference costs or require expensive retraining. To bridge this gap, context-to-parameter mapping converts prompts into temporary adapter weights. However, we identify a critical failure mode in existing methods: hidden-state collapse, where the adapter-augmented model’s internal states diverge sharply from the full-context oracle in deeper layers. We trace this failure to two coupled gaps: suboptimal Input-Selection and inadequate Supervision-Signal. To address these issues, we propose SADA (State-Aligned Distillation Adapters). We establish the attention-block output as a principled feature interface to improve input selection and introduce state-alignment distillation to enforce consistency between the adapter-augmented model and the full-context oracle. Experiments on long-context language modeling (PG19) and downstream NLU and summarization benchmarks show that SADA consistently outperforms strong baselines like StreamAdapter and GenerativeAdapter, achieving performance comparable to ICL while significantly reducing memory footprint and latency. We further analyze when parameterized context compression is effective and when explicit context retention remains preferable. Our code is available at https://github.com/Taylor-Gavel/SADA.git.
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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