As streaming generation becomes the dominant serving paradigm for both text-only and multimodal large language models, ensuring safety throughout the generation process has become a critical challenge. We introduce PGuard, a native, streaming, and plug-in guardrail that transforms safety monitoring from an external serving dependency into an integrated capability of the backbone model. PGuard directly leverages the backbone's intermediate representations for token-level safety detection, without altering its original inference pathway or generation behavior. Specifically, dynamic layer gating selectively aggregates residual-stream representations across layers to extract safety-relevant signals during both prefill and autoregressive decoding. To balance detection accuracy and computational efficiency, PGuard supports multiple representation-modeling architectures, including a lightweight stateless variant and sequence-aware variants built on multi-scale causal EMA-attention and GRU-based recurrent modules. Its design also accounts for the execution characteristics of LLM serving frameworks, such as SGLang, optimizing computation and data access to minimize additional runtime and synchronization overhead. As a result, PGuard incurs only 0.82-2.26% end-to-end overhead on the hundred-billion-parameter backbone Qwen3.5-122B-A10B served by SGLang. Extensive evaluations across more than 30 benchmarks spanning text and multimodal safety, jailbreaks, cyber and CBRN risks, multilingual scenarios, and real-world traffic demonstrate state-of-the-art performance among native guardrails. On text queries with Qwen3.5-9B, PGuard achieves an average F1 score of 0.836, approaching dedicated external guardrails, while supporting deployment-time configuration of category-specific thresholds and enforcement actions.
We study ordinary kernel ridge regression over full Hölder-Zygmund balls, measuring errors in Sobolev norms and in pointwise and uniform losses for mixed derivatives. For targets of smoothness $s$, every RKHS norm equivalent to $H^{s+d/2}$ gives the optimal $H^r$ risk for $0\le r<s$; integer choices of $r$ include integrated squared derivative losses. Pointwise and uniform guarantees require additional kernel structure. A localized wavelet kernel attains the sharp derivative rates with the same regularization orders as for function estimation, whereas equivalent changes of the RKHS norm can destroy the population bias rates. For the ordinary Gaussian kernel with a shrinking bandwidth, we prove a uniform derivative risk bound with the optimal polynomial rate and an explicit, unoptimized logarithmic factor. The results allow bounded measurable design densities bounded away from zero and conditionally sub-Gaussian noise.
Intermediate-fusion cooperative perception lets a vehicle detect objects beyond its own field of view by fusing features shared by nearby agents. When only a collaborator's cameras are degraded by fog, motion blur or exposure errors, the features it shares drift away from the training distribution while the ego input stays clean, and cooperation can become worse than not cooperating at all. Test-time batch-normalization adaptation, the standard training-free remedy, estimates statistics over the pooled batch of all agents and therefore normalizes both the clean ego and the corrupted collaborator with a mixture of two distributions. We show that this mixing harms even the clean ego: when the ego shares BN statistics with a corrupted collaborator, its detection from its own features drops by 3.58 to 6.68 AP@0.5 points although its cameras are untouched. We propose AgentNorm, an agent-wise test-time normalization that i) estimates the normalization statistics of every collaborator from its own current observation and ii) anchors the ego to its source statistics, so that the ego path remains exactly the original model. AgentNorm has no learnable parameters, needs no gradients or labels, is independent of the order of test frames, and runs locally on each agent without changing the transmitted features. On camera-based OPV2V with four fusion checkpoints and collaborator-only corruptions, AgentNorm raises AP@0.5 under severity-5 fog from 29.42-37.25 to 43.32-58.86 and outperforms pooled normalization by 5.53-12.94 points under fog and motion blur, at an extra latency of 2.3 ms per frame. On the real-world DAIR-V2X-C dataset, it outperforms pooled normalization in all ten infrastructure-corruption settings. We also report the cases it does not fix: occlusion, which removes image content rather than shifting feature statistics, and the case in which all agents share the same shift.
Modern automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have achieved remarkable accuracy by scaling model depth and capacity, but at the cost of increased memory, energy, and computational demands. On edge devices where ASR is often most needed, such as watches and glasses, deploying such large models is infeasible due to extremely constrained resources. This raises a fundamental question: can we achieve high representational power in deep ASR models without scaling up parameterization? In this work, we revisit the role of depth and identify layer wise representational dynamics, in which most layers learn functionally similar transformations. Motivated by this insight, we propose a block-recurrent ASR architecture that replaces parameterized depth with a small set of recurrent blocks, each consisting of weight-shared layers, thereby preserving effective depth while drastically reducing model size. Through representation-guided grouping and knowledge distillation, block-recurrent models retain the accuracy of large reference models while using an order of magnitude fewer parameters. Across Open ASR Leaderboard benchmarks, a model with only two shared blocks recovers 97.4% of the accuracy of large models on average. The compact backbone further enables efficient on-device personalization through lightweight MoE-LoRA adaptation, allowing user-specific models to match or surpass the accuracy of general-purpose ASR systems with significantly lower inference cost. By reusing weights across recurrent steps, the proposed architecture reduces memory-access overhead and inference energy consumption. Together, these results show that high quality ASR can be achieved without large parameterization, and that structured recurrence provides a principled path towards ultra-compressed, energy-efficient, and personalized speech recognition on the edge.
Yicheng Liu, Shumin Shi Beijing Institute of Technology, Youchao Zhou, Xingchen Zhang Beijing Institute of Technology
Large language models (LLMs) perform well on Standard Chinese but struggle with low-resource Chinese dialects due to substantial phonological divergence. We investigate whether incorporating Middle Chinese, the common historical ancestor of most of the modern Chinese dialects, can improve dialectal pronunciation modeling in a linguistically interpretable manner. We focus on two specific task variants: (1) conditional sound change rule induction (a variant of Sound Law Induction, SLI), where models infer executable phonological transformation rules from Middle Chinese to modern dialects, and (2) sentence-level dialectal pronunciation transcription (a variant of Grapheme-to-Phoneme, G2P), requiring dialect-specific International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) generation. We construct a multi-source dataset covering Middle Chinese and 12 modern Chinese dialects, including character-level correspondences, rule exemplars, and sentence-level IPA transcription. We adopt a parameter-efficient training framework combining LoRA-based supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for the first task. Across both tasks and a wide range of dialects and evaluation metrics, our approach achieves overall improvements over strong baselines, including DeepSeek-V3.2 and ChatGPT-5.2, while revealing variation across dialects. These results demonstrate the value of leveraging historical linguistic knowledge for modeling low-resource Chinese dialects.
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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