Pengkai Wang, Wei-Wei Zhang, Yan Li, Min Tang, Zhitian Hou, Zeyu Liu, Guanghao Zhu, Yuanyi Wang 等 16 位作者
Current medical benchmarks typically break down clinical competence into isolated factual questions, single-image tasks, or static case vignettes. These tests score individual answers, but reveal less about whether a model can integrate subspecialty knowledge with multimodal evidence and track a patient's condition throughout a course of care. To close this gap, we introduce NPCBench, a clinical apprenticeship benchmark for nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). NPCBench mirrors specialist training, from guideline and foundational knowledge to case planning, longitudinal review, CarePath integration, and open-ended consultation. It contains 4,777 component and consultation items and a 100-patient CarePath cohort with 417 scored diagnostic and care tasks. The episode-level evaluation tests whether diagnostic and care answers are jointly correct within a care pathway. By linking stepwise tasks to patient-level care trajectories, NPCBench evaluates whether models ground decisions in visual evidence, interpret changes in patient state, and meet clinical requirements in consultation. Across 30 evaluated models, we observe a composition gap: strong performance on individual tasks does not ensure jointly correct diagnostic and care answers for the same patient. Among 21 multimodal models, strict CarePath success reaches at most 23%. Paired controls and physician calibration further examine evidence grounding, longitudinal revision, and consultation judging. Overall, NPCBench broadens the evaluation of medical artificial intelligence beyond static question-answering paradigms to an apprenticeship-oriented assessment of clinical workflows, thereby offering a testbed for evidence-based and temporally coherent reasoning in oncology care.
Generative retrieval (GR) has emerged as a strong candidate generator for sequential recommendation as language models and semantic-item identifiers have improved. However, GR is not a uniformly stronger replacement of dense retrieval (DR) in online retail candidate generation. We examine their differences on two Amazon Toys datasets under different metrics. GR leads on best relevant item value among users both methods cover, while DR leads on exact-target recall and relevant value across the ranked list. With deep analysis, we find that popularity contributes the most to GR's measured value lead. Adding the same static item value to DR in one reranking step reverses this lead and keeps recall above GR. Finally, on an industrial-scale internal e-commerce dataset with LLM-judged relevance, we show that a 14B SID-LLM still underperforms a $47\times$ smaller dense encoder.
Large language models (LLMs) face significant challenges in processing long contexts due to the linear growth of the key-value (KV) cache and quadratic complexity of self-attention. Existing approaches address these bottlenecks separately: Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) reduces the KV cache by projecting tokens into a low-dimensional latent space, while sparse attention reduces computation. However, sparse methods cannot operate natively on MLA's compressed latent structure, missing opportunities for joint optimization. In this paper, we propose Latent-Condensed Attention (LCA), which directly condenses context within MLA's latent space, where the representation is disentangled into semantic latent vectors and positional keys. LCA separately aggregates semantic vectors via query-aware pooling and preserves positional keys via anchor selection. This approach jointly reduces both computational cost and KV cache without adding parameters. Beyond MLA, LCA's design is architecture-agnostic and readily extends to other attention mechanisms such as GQA. Theoretically, we prove a length-independent error bound. Experiments show LCA achieves up to 2.5$\times$ prefilling speedup and 90% KV cache reduction at 128K context while maintaining competitive performance.
We present E-GenRM (E-commerce Generative Reward Model), a generative reward model tailored to e-commerce shopping agents. User expectations are shifting from simple product queries to open-ended shopping tasks. However, existing trajectories and reward designs remain largely bounded by current agent usage patterns and known failures, providing limited guidance for further capability improvement. These limitations call for an integrated reward modeling framework for open-ended shopping agent tasks. On the data side, E-GenRM leverages naturally occurring user behavior across the shopping app to construct diverse, long-horizon conversational trajectories beyond established usage patterns. On the modeling side, E-GenRM first learns from behavior-grounded evaluation chains through supervised fine-tuning. It is then optimized through criterion-guided reinforcement learning, which rewards correct preference judgments and evidence-supported factual claims under each criterion. Personalized hard-negative training further improves its sensitivity to user preferences reflected in shopping behavior, beyond explicit requirements. We additionally develop an active evidence retrieval extension that acquires missing e-commerce information for evaluation. On E-GenRM-Bench, E-GenRM-27B achieves 87.40\% preference accuracy, outperforming the strongest baseline by 6.97 percentage points. In a 14-day online A/B test on Taobao, a shopping agent post-trained with E-GenRM improves the effective shopping-assistance rate by 1.39 percentage points and user satisfaction by 2.33 percentage points.
Sean Bin Yang, Zongyi Xu, Jilin Hu, Ying Sun, Kristian Torp, Bin Yang, Torben Bach Pedersen, Christian S. Jensen
Urban region representation learning encodes heterogeneous urban signals, such as mobility flows, points of interest, and land-use patterns, into unified embeddings for downstream tasks, including check-in prediction, crime forecasting, and service demand estimation. Existing approaches rely on globally shared fusion and joint optimization, implicitly assuming uniform modality importance and naturally balanced multi-objective training. However, urban data is inherently heterogeneous. Our empirical analysis reveals two structural issues: (i) modality utility varies markedly across regions, causing static fusion to overemphasize signals from certain modalities; and (ii) heterogeneous objectives exhibit persistent gradient imbalance, causing representational bias and unstable training. We present PRISM, a self-adjusting framework for adaptive multi-view learning. PRISM adapts sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) routing to learn region-specific view allocations, while a Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID)-inspired regulation mechanism mitigates gradient conflicts during optimization. Experiments on three large-scale urban datasets show that PRISM achieves more competitive performance than strong multi-view baselines, while providing more stable optimization behavior and more balanced region representations.
Wei-Wei Zhang, Pengkai Wang, Yan Li, Zhijie Sang, Guan-Qun Zhou, Jun-Yan Li, Shu-Han Zhou, Pei-Wen Liu 等 16 位作者
Large language models (LLMs) show promise in specialty medicine, yet existing evaluations largely focus on isolated clinical encounters rather than tracking how clinical responsibilities evolve across a longitudinal care pathway. Here we introduce NPC-RubricBench, a phase-aware benchmark for evaluating multistage clinical reasoning across the cancer care continuum, using nasopharyngeal carcinoma as a defined disease context. Curated from longitudinal records of 405 patients across two cancer centers, the benchmark comprises 941 patient-phase units across six sequential care phases and 17,688 patient-specific atomic criteria spanning five evaluation dimensions, with each assessment strictly restricted to decision-time clinical evidence. Evaluating 30 general-purpose and medical LLMs revealed that strong diagnostic performance does not carry over to downstream care. We evaluated 30 general-purpose and medical LLMs, showing that high diagnostic performance did not translate into improved downstream care. Instead, the dominant failure modes reversed across phases. Explicit decision errors dominated anatomical staging at 48.2%, whereas decision omissions dominated initial work-up and post-treatment follow-up at 33.4% and 30.4%, respectively. In the evaluated model set, medically adapted models showed higher omission rates than general-purpose models. Moreover, varying query granularity exposes a critical specification trade-off: broad open-ended requests degrade Decision Quality across all 30 models, while more detailed, checklist-like prompts raise Decision Quality but reduce Evidence Faithfulness and Safety Adherence. Furthermore, NPC-RubricBench demonstrates that static diagnostic benchmarks are insufficient to ensure consistent clinical reliability over time, highlighting the importance of phase-adaptive safeguards in multistage medical AI.
Sean Bin Yang, Ying Sun, Yunyao CHeng, Hao Miao, Jilin Hu, Bin Yang, Torben Bach Pedersen, Christian S. Jensen
Self-supervised learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for Path Representation Learning (PRL) in road networks. PRL aims to learn informative representations of paths traversed by moving objects, such as vehicles, where each path consists of a sequence of connected road segments. These representations are essential for various downstream tasks, including travel-time estimation and path ranking. However, existing methods often suffer from ineffective view generation and inefficient training procedures due to their reliance on heuristic augmentations and computationally intensive contrastive learning. To address these issues, we propose AutoPRL, an effective and efficient self-supervised PRL framework that integrates three key components. The Automatic Data Augmentation (AutoDA) module employs variational autoencoders to generate semantically meaningful and diverse feature-level path views by modeling each topology-aware node embedding with a Gaussian latent distribution, thereby mitigating information loss and enhancing representation quality. Second, the Cross-View Decoupled Contrastive (CVDC) learning mechanism improves training efficiency by disentangling the optimization of positive and negative pairs across node- and path-level views, enabling more stable contrastive learning. Third, an Adaptive Co-Training (ACT) module dynamically adjusts uncertainty-based loss weights to balance multiple objectives, ensuring efficient and scalable training. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that AutoPRL achieves strong and consistent performance in both effectiveness and efficiency across multiple downstream tasks.
Zeng You South China University of Technology, Yaofo Chen, Qiuwu Chen, Ying Sun AIGCode, Shuhai Zhang, Yingjian Li, Yaowei Wang Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen and Pengcheng Laboratory, Mingkui Tan
Large language models (LLMs) face significant challenges in processing long contexts due to the linear growth of the key-value (KV) cache and quadratic complexity of self-attention. Existing approaches address these bottlenecks separately: Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) reduces the KV cache by projecting tokens into a low-dimensional latent space, while sparse attention reduces computation. However, sparse methods cannot operate natively on MLA’s compressed latent structure, missing opportunities for joint optimization. In this paper, we propose Latent-Condensed Attention (LCA), which directly condenses context within MLA’s latent space, where the representation is disentangled into semantic latent vectors and positional keys. LCA separately aggregates semantic vectors via query-aware pooling and preserves positional keys via anchor selection. This approach jointly reduces both computational cost and KV cache without adding parameters. Beyond MLA, LCA’s design is architecture-agnostic and readily extends to other attention mechanisms such as GQA. Theoretically, we prove a length-independent error bound. Experiments show LCA achieves up to 2.5× prefilling speedup and 90% KV cache reduction at 128K context while maintaining competitive performance.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Yang Ji, Ying Sun Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)
Structured pruning offers a hardware-friendly approach for efficient LLM inference. Early static methods determine fixed subnetworks through offline calibration, suffering from performance degradation and calibration sensitivity. Recent methods explore input-adaptive pruning by selecting a subset of tokens as probes to estimate hidden activations for online pruning decisions.However, existing probe selection strategies fail to identify outlier-triggering tokens, and uniform layer-wise sparsity misaligns with heterogeneous outlier distributions, leading to critical channels being incorrectly pruned. Therefore, we propose OCP (Outlier-Centric Probing for structured pruning), a principled framework that prioritizes capturing outlier-triggering tokens rather than reconstructing full hidden distributions. Specifically, OCP includes three key components: (1) sensitivity-weighted probing for FFN layers that identifies outlier patterns via precomputed weight aggregations, (2) attention-accumulated probing that leverages preceding attention matrices to identify salient tokens, and (3) online adaptive sparsity allocation that dynamically adjusts layer-wise pruning based on history-guided outlier statistics. Extensive experiments on LLaMA2, LLaMA3, and OPT demonstrate that OCP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across benchmarks, achieving up to 25% perplexity reduction at 1.6\times speedup.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Zheng Gong, Ying Sun Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Ping Li Huawei Technologies Ltd., Yi Zheng Huawei Technologies Ltd., Zhefeng Wang Huawei Technologies Ltd.
Representation Fine-tuning (ReFT), a recently proposed parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PeFT) method, significantly improves parameter efficiency by modifying the representation space alone. However, directly applying ReFT, which alters a fixed number of representations at the beginning and end positions of each layer, results in suboptimal performance for two reasons. (i) The impact of these fixed-position representations on the output is uncertain; (ii) As the sequence length increases, fine-tuning a fixed number of representations may have diminishing effects on the final results. Based on our observations that punctuation plays a crucial role in integrating representations from preceding layers and modulating those of subsequent layers, we introduce Punctuation-steered Representation Fine-tuning (PuReFT), a straightforward yet powerful approach that additionally fine-tunes punctuation representations to achieve performance improvements. Extensive evaluations on common-sense, arithmetic, and code datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of PuReFT. Furthermore, our analysis of its training speed and memory overhead confirms its greater ease of use and efficiency.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表