Showing 1–50 of 1,392 results for author: Song, J

Think-to-Personalize: Unifying Reasoning and Retrieval for User-Centric Personalized Dense Retrieval

Authors: Angqing Jiang, Gaoming Zhang, Jianchun Song, Kena Qi, Dayao Chen, Wei Lin, Defu Lian

Abstract: Dense retrieval has become a cornerstone of modern local-lifestyle e-commerce search by encoding queries and items into semantic embedding spaces. While recent advancements have transitioned from BERT-based embedding models to Large Language Models (LLMs), most approaches still treat LLMs as static text encoders, neglecting their inherent reasoning capabilities. Furthermore, standard dense retriev… ▽ More Dense retrieval has become a cornerstone of modern local-lifestyle e-commerce search by encoding queries and items into semantic embedding spaces. While recent advancements have transitioned from BERT-based embedding models to Large Language Models (LLMs), most approaches still treat LLMs as static text encoders, neglecting their inherent reasoning capabilities. Furthermore, standard dense retrieval models remain query-centric, which is insufficient in e-commerce scenarios where sparse and ambiguous queries create an intent gap that can only be bridged by the rich context of user history. Meanwhile, existing personalized retrieval methods typically rely on implicit embedding interactions, which lack the reasoning capability to effectively disambiguate user intent from noisy historical behaviors. To address these challenges, we propose Think-to-Personalize (TTP), a novel framework that unifies explicit user-centric intent reasoning with dense retrieval. By reasoning over the user's historical purchase sequence, TTP explicitly deduces latent personalized needs and generates an intent-enhanced query, which is then encoded into a unified dense embedding. Specifically, we design a two-stage training paradigm: (1) a Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) stage that establishes cold-start capabilities; and (2) a Reinforcement Learning (RL) stage that aligns the reasoning process with retrieval utility using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Extensive experiments on both proprietary and public benchmarks demonstrate that TTP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, in online A/B tests, it achieved a +0.46% lift in order volume, validating its practical effectiveness and establishing a new paradigm for reasoning-driven personalized dense retrieval. △ Less

Submitted 19 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: Accepted at CIKM 2026. 11 pages, 8 figures, and 9 tables

Execution-grounded evaluation reveals hidden failures in language-model calculations for environmental science

Authors: Maohao Ran, Chendong Ma, Yanting Zhang, Dailing Jiang, Yusen Huang, Meng Gao, Jun Song

Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used for quantitative work in the environmental sciences, yet existing evaluations score only final answers, leaving calculation process unobserved. Here we introduce AtmosCoder-Bench, an execution-grounded benchmark that makes the calculation process visible. Built through a transferable semi-automated pipeline (436 problems, 3,910 variants, 7,029 graded qua… ▽ More Large language models are increasingly used for quantitative work in the environmental sciences, yet existing evaluations score only final answers, leaving calculation process unobserved. Here we introduce AtmosCoder-Bench, an execution-grounded benchmark that makes the calculation process visible. Built through a transferable semi-automated pipeline (436 problems, 3,910 variants, 7,029 graded quantities), every problem is validated to be unambiguous and human-solvable, with uniquely verifiable answers. We find that (i) multiple-choice formats inflate measured accuracy by at least 12 percentage points; (ii) many failures arise not from missing knowledge but from models failing to apply known formulas and constraints consistently throughout multi-step computation; and (iii) even frontier models remain weak when task-specific conditions invalidate familiar methods, often reverting to canonical solution patterns rather than adapting methods to the relevant physical regime, leaving expert oversight essential. △ Less

Submitted 19 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 29 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables, plus supplementary materials. Maohao Ran and Chendong Ma contributed equally. Corresponding author: Jun Song (junsong@hkbu.edu.hk). Code: https://github.com/acodercat/AtmosCoder-Bench

EDITBRIDGE: Towards Faithful and Efficient Ultra-High-Resolution Image Editing

Authors: Jiayi Song, Shijie Huang, Fangtai Wu, Yubo Huang, Zhenxiong Tan, Songhua Liu, Jiaming Liu, Ruihua Huang

Abstract: High-resolution image editing is increasingly demanded in professional workflows, yet existing diffusion-based models remain constrained to resolutions below 1K due to quadratic attention complexity and prohibitive memory requirements. A prevalent workaround employs a two-stage pipeline: editing at low resolution followed by independent super-resolution. However, this approach suffers from two cri… ▽ More High-resolution image editing is increasingly demanded in professional workflows, yet existing diffusion-based models remain constrained to resolutions below 1K due to quadratic attention complexity and prohibitive memory requirements. A prevalent workaround employs a two-stage pipeline: editing at low resolution followed by independent super-resolution. However, this approach suffers from two critical issues: information divergence, where hallucinated details contradict the original high-resolution (HR) source, and texture degradation, manifesting as over-smoothed or over-sharpened artifacts. We propose EditBridge, a diffusion bridge framework for efficient ultra high-resolution editing. Unlike conventional diffusion that regenerates from noise, we formulate refinement as structured data-to-data translation from the low-resolution (LR) edited result to its HR counterpart, explicitly conditioned on the original HR source to preserve authentic details. To efficiently incorporate HR source guidance, we introduce a prior-guided block-wise sparse attention mechanism that exploits semantic correspondence from first-stage editing to constrain cross-image interactions to spatially aligned regions, significantly reducing computational overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EditBridge achieves high-fidelity editing with superior perceptual quality at resolutions up to 4K, delivering 3.6--8.4$\times$ speedup at 2K and enabling practical 4K editing in 61 seconds. △ Less

Submitted 18 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Abra: Scaling Diffusion Image Training

Authors: Kyle Chickering, Wei-An Lin, Swayam Bhanded, Dan Saunders, Akshat Tripathi, Jiaming Song, Shyamal Buch, Xinchen Yan

Abstract: Compute-optimal scaling laws guide the training of frontier language models yet remain largely unexplored for visual generation. We present a systematic scaling law study for text-to-image diffusion models using Abra, a controlled family of flow-matching transformers trained across three orders of magnitude worth of compute ($10^{19}$ to $10^{22}$ FLOPs), reaching significantly larger compute budg… ▽ More Compute-optimal scaling laws guide the training of frontier language models yet remain largely unexplored for visual generation. We present a systematic scaling law study for text-to-image diffusion models using Abra, a controlled family of flow-matching transformers trained across three orders of magnitude worth of compute ($10^{19}$ to $10^{22}$ FLOPs), reaching significantly larger compute budgets than previous works. We demonstrate that diffusion models scale just as predictably as language models but require far more data to train optimally: compute optimality occurs at approximately $200$ image tokens per parameter, ten times the Chinchilla compute-optimal prescription for LLMs. We show that unlike language models, diffusion models are robust to overtraining and that practitioners should err on the side of more data rather than a larger model. Finally, we show that this predictability extends beyond training loss to generative quality metrics, optimal CFG settings, representation quality, and even the shape of the training curves, which collapse onto a universal form. △ Less

Submitted 17 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 25 pages, 19 figures

$τ_0$-VLA: a Hierarchical Robot Foundation Model with World-Model-Guided Test-Time Computation

Authors: Xiaowei Cai, Yunuo Cai, Bingao Chen, Jingxiao Chen, Zhi Chen, Siyuan Feng, Tengyu Hou, Jingshun Huang, Han Jiang, Runkun Ju, Dong Li, Mingxiang Li, Shaowei Li, Xinchen Li, Yifan Li, Yi Liu, Zhongyuan Liu, Jianlan Luo, Junwen Miao, Ruiqi Ni, Buqing Nie, Mingjie Pan, Xinlin Ren, Jianheng Song, Jiaxu Wang , et al. (14 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: Long-horizon robot manipulation requires a robot to both execute individual skills reliably and sequence them coherently over extended tasks. Most hierarchical vision-language-action (VLA) models make each such decision with a single forward pass, leaving no mechanism to allocate additional computation to difficult or consequential choices. We introduce $τ_0$-VLA, a hierarchical robot foundation m… ▽ More Long-horizon robot manipulation requires a robot to both execute individual skills reliably and sequence them coherently over extended tasks. Most hierarchical vision-language-action (VLA) models make each such decision with a single forward pass, leaving no mechanism to allocate additional computation to difficult or consequential choices. We introduce $τ_0$-VLA, a hierarchical robot foundation model that formulates high-level subtask generation as a compute-scalable inference problem through world-model-guided test-time computation. At each inference step, the high-level policy uses execution memory to generate a subtask and, when needed, searches over alternatives before committing to its output. A low-level policy then executes the generated subtask across multiple robot embodiments. The policy is trained on 40,115 hours of heterogeneous real-world data with multimodal co-training. Across in-domain and distribution-shifted settings, allocating additional test-time computation substantially improves next-subtask prediction accuracy, and these gains translate into higher closed-loop success on long-horizon robot manipulation tasks. △ Less

Submitted 17 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 18 pages, 5 figures. Project page: https://tau0-vla.github.io/

OceanLight: Efficient Global Ocean Forecasting via Geometry-Adaptive Unstructured Mesh Representation

Authors: Wei Wu, Xiang Wang, Hongze Leng, Qingye Min, Junxing Zhu, Junqiang Song

Abstract: Reliable global ocean forecasting is critical for climate monitoring, marine navigation, and extreme event early warning. Physics-based ocean forecasting models impose prohibitive computational costs, while existing deep learning approaches predominantly rely on structured-grid architectures, incurring unnecessary computation on masked land cells and enforcing uniform resolution across dynamically… ▽ More Reliable global ocean forecasting is critical for climate monitoring, marine navigation, and extreme event early warning. Physics-based ocean forecasting models impose prohibitive computational costs, while existing deep learning approaches predominantly rely on structured-grid architectures, incurring unnecessary computation on masked land cells and enforcing uniform resolution across dynamically heterogeneous ocean regions regardless of local flow complexity. Here we present OceanLight, an efficient global ocean forecasting framework innovatively combining geometry-adaptive unstructured mesh tokenization with a graph neural network (GNN) backbone. OceanLight achieves pointwise forecast accuracy and kinetic energy spectral fidelity exceeding both operational numerical analyses and state-of-the-art AI-based models, while surpassing all AI-based ocean models in geostrophic balance consistency. Furthermore, OceanLight demonstrates reliable mesoscale eddy representation, capturing coherent ocean structures beyond pointwise statistical optimization. These capabilities are delivered with a 62% reduction in GPU memory consumption and 70\% reduction in FLOPs relative to structured-grid baselines. Our unstructured mesh representation establishes a generalizable paradigm for scalable data-driven oceanography. △ Less

Submitted 17 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 35 pages, 21 figures

ACM Class: I.2.6; I.2.1; J.2

TIDE: An FPGA quantum-control processor for deterministic adaptive execution with guarded runtime program revision

Authors: Xiaoqin Luo, Jiayun Song, Xiaolu Su

Abstract: Measurement-responsive quantum experiments require control programs that can revise future operations after execution has begun without disturbing events already committed to precise timing. We present Time-Deterministic and Instruction-Dynamic Execution (TIDE), an FPGA quantum-control processor that separates a runtime-revisable future from a hardware-timed committed-event stream. TIDE provides t… ▽ More Measurement-responsive quantum experiments require control programs that can revise future operations after execution has begun without disturbing events already committed to precise timing. We present Time-Deterministic and Instruction-Dynamic Execution (TIDE), an FPGA quantum-control processor that separates a runtime-revisable future from a hardware-timed committed-event stream. TIDE provides two complementary update paths: Dynamic Instruction Parameter Update (DIPU) applies a one-shot patch to the next matching event before parameter capture, while Dynamic Instruction Stream Overwrite (DISO) performs guarded replacement, logical deletion, and out-of-line insertion in future resident-program regions. Per-channel committed-event FIFOs isolate accepted descriptors from subsequent control-core and update activity. The implemented Xilinx ZCU102 design meets timing at 250 MHz for the control core and 425 MHz for the timing/update domain. With downstream ready, every tested descriptor committed at least one timing-domain cycle before its programmed timestamp was dispatched in the programmed cycle at the registered output interfaces. In separate post-commit tests, committed timestamps and payloads remained unchanged under the applied perturbations. The minimum all-success mapped DIPU margin was four 250 MHz control-domain cycles. Under continuous payload delivery, an L-word contiguous overwrite completed in L+5 update-domain cycles. Within the characterized guard-distance range, rejected DISO requests preserved the resident path, whereas all admitted replacement, deletion, and insertion transactions exercised here executed a complete revised sequence. TIDE therefore enables runtime adaptation of both parameters and instruction structure while preserving deterministic service of committed quantum-control events. △ Less

Submitted 15 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 14 pages, 4 figures

ACTS-SQL: Agentic and Critic-Oriented Tree-Structured SQL Correctness with Large Language Models

Authors: Xinmei Huang, Jie Song, Peng Li, Fuxin Jiang, Jing Zhang, Tieying Zhang, Jianjun Chen, Chenming Liu, Tao Yang, Maoyin Liu, Wenda Li, Hong Chen, Cuiping Li

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly adopted in Text-to-SQL systems, yet SQL errors remain a major obstacle in real-world Text-to-SQL inference pipelines. Existing SQL correction approaches either rely on large-scale, high-quality training data with substantial overhead, or adopt single-path agentic workflows that are brittle to early mistakes and prone to error propagation. To de… ▽ More Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly adopted in Text-to-SQL systems, yet SQL errors remain a major obstacle in real-world Text-to-SQL inference pipelines. Existing SQL correction approaches either rely on large-scale, high-quality training data with substantial overhead, or adopt single-path agentic workflows that are brittle to early mistakes and prone to error propagation. To develop a practical SQL correctness system for industrial scenarios, we present a training-free framework that formulates SQL correction as a plan-guided, tree-structured debugging process. By maintaining multiple correction strategies and enabling backtracking, the framework mitigates error accumulation during iterative refinement. We further integrate execution-based verification and clause-level diagnostic tools to support strategy pruning and precise error localization. We evaluate the system on the BIRD-Critic benchmark and observe consistent accuracy gains over strong LLM backbones and representative agent-based baselines, achieving a 9.42% improvement over the previous state-of-the-art method. The framework is also deployed in the Torch Log Service (TLS) of Volcano Engine to support an online Text-to-TLS API. In production, it improves execution accuracy from 36.77% to 53.61% on real user queries with a representative strong LLM backbone (GPT-5). These results demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of our approach in real-world deployments. △ Less

Submitted 15 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Rethinking Reverse KL as Adaptive Entropy Distillation

Authors: Shizhen Li, Zhiyu Shen, Yuyin Lu, Yunhe Pang, Jielin Song, Yanghui Rao, Fu Lee Wang

Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) is widely used to transfer the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to smaller students, but existing objectives often struggle to balance faithful imitation and robust generation. In particular, existing methods mainly combine FKL and RKL, overlooking that RKL itself provides a mechanism for adjusting the student's imitation strength. Motivated by this, we revi… ▽ More Knowledge distillation (KD) is widely used to transfer the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to smaller students, but existing objectives often struggle to balance faithful imitation and robust generation. In particular, existing methods mainly combine FKL and RKL, overlooking that RKL itself provides a mechanism for adjusting the student's imitation strength. Motivated by this, we revisit on-policy Reverse Kullback-Leibler (RKL) distillation and decompose its objective into a teacher-fitting term and a student-entropy term, without introducing an explicit FKL branch. We show theoretically that the token-level optimal student distribution corresponds to a tempered variant of the teacher distribution, where the adaptive weight controls the trade-off between mode-seeking and uncertainty preservation. Guided by this insight, we propose \textbf{Adaptive Entropy Distillation (AED)}, which uses the teacher's entropy to dynamically calibrate token-level imitation strength. Experiments on instruction-following and mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that AED achieves superior overall performance and generally improves teacher--student distributional and entropy alignment. △ Less

Submitted 5 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Can We Defend Against AI-Generated Video Attacks on Real-World Crisis Events? A Systematic Evaluation of Detectors, Generators and Social Dissemination

Authors: Shuo Liang, Yixing Ma, Pengfei Zhou, Zhenglin Wan, Xingyan Chen, Zihan Mei, Manting Li, Feihan Chen, Zhiwen Wang, Bin Xu, Haotian Zhang, Jiajun Song, Shiya Su, Run Liu, Zhenghang Ni, Yifa Yu, Jintao Hong, Bolong Feng, Yifei Liu, Zirui Zhang, Jingxuan Zhang, Songlin Zhao, Yifan Bai, Kang Tan, Yizhe Liu , et al. (11 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: Recent video generators can fabricate realistic depictions of wars, disasters, public emergencies, and other real-world crises, creating substantial risks of misinformation. Existing benchmarks, however, provide limited evidence on detector and generator behavior in such settings, including how detectability varies with generation conditions, how people perceive generated videos, and whether detec… ▽ More Recent video generators can fabricate realistic depictions of wars, disasters, public emergencies, and other real-world crises, creating substantial risks of misinformation. Existing benchmarks, however, provide limited evidence on detector and generator behavior in such settings, including how detectability varies with generation conditions, how people perceive generated videos, and whether detectors remain reliable during social dissemination. To address this gap, we introduce RA-Bench, a benchmark for AI-generated video detection that uses Real videos as Anchors. RA-Bench contains 17,886 videos, comprising 1,830 real-video anchors across 10 social-risk categories and 16,056 generated clips from four open-source and five closed-source generators. Based on RA-Bench, we organize our evaluation along three dimensions. We first assess detector generalization across seven traditional detectors, ten zero-shot multimodal models under three review settings, and two MLLMs specifically fine-tuned on AI-generated video detection. Across these methods, none of the three detector families generalizes consistently across RA-Bench instances. We then examine how detectability varies with generation quality, conditioning information, and sampling seeds. These analyses show that generation properties affect detector families differently, while source-level detection patterns remain stable across seeds. Finally, we study human authenticity judgments and detector reliability during social dissemination. We find that videos that mislead people are also difficult for current detectors, and that social dissemination makes detection harder. Together, these findings show that current methods struggle to detect realistic AI-generated videos, highlighting the need for detectors robust to evolving video generators. △ Less

Submitted 16 August, 2026; v1 submitted 14 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 63 pages, 20 figures, 32 tables

CSG-Mamba: A Convolutional Scoring Gating Vision State Space Network for Endoscopic Polyp Segmentation

Authors: Yuliang Wang, Jiaqi Wu, Jiaye Song, Shuxia Ren

Abstract: Accurate polyp segmentation is critical for computer-aided colonoscopy, yet endoscopic images often contain low-contrast boundaries, mucosal texture interference, specular highlights, and device-dependent appearance shifts. Vision State Space Models (SSMs) provide efficient long-range modeling with linear complexity, but existing Vision Mamba segmentation models typically convert 2D features into… ▽ More Accurate polyp segmentation is critical for computer-aided colonoscopy, yet endoscopic images often contain low-contrast boundaries, mucosal texture interference, specular highlights, and device-dependent appearance shifts. Vision State Space Models (SSMs) provide efficient long-range modeling with linear complexity, but existing Vision Mamba segmentation models typically convert 2D features into 1D scanning sequences, which may weaken local geometric continuity and over-smooth irregular contours. We propose CSG-Mamba, a convolutional scoring gating Vision State Space network for endoscopic polyp segmentation. Built on a VM-UNet-style asymmetric U-shaped encoder-decoder, CSG-Mamba inserts a Convolutional Scoring Gating (CSG) module at the semantically rich bottleneck. CSG generates a local spatial score map through pointwise and large-kernel depthwise convolutions and recalibrates state-space features by multiplicative gating. Experiments with three random seeds show that CSG-Mamba achieves 0.9220 Dice and 15.87 HD95 on Kvasir-SEG, and 0.7418 Dice and 0.6570 mIoU on CVC-ColonDB, outperforming the baselines on most overlap and recall metrics while maintaining competitive boundary accuracy. △ Less

Submitted 14 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 14 pages, 6 figures, and 5 tables. Accepted by ICONIP 2026

Equilibrium Pricing in Oligopolistic Data Markets

Authors: Bhaskar Ray Chaudhury, Jugal Garg, Eklavya Sharma, Jiaxin Song

Abstract: We study equilibrium pricing in oligopolistic data markets with budget-constrained buyers (e.g., machine learning companies purchasing data to improve model accuracy) and strategic data sellers. Sellers compete by setting prices for their datasets, giving rise to a pricing game whose pure Nash equilibria correspond to equilibrium prices. While equilibrium prices are guaranteed for rivalrous goods… ▽ More We study equilibrium pricing in oligopolistic data markets with budget-constrained buyers (e.g., machine learning companies purchasing data to improve model accuracy) and strategic data sellers. Sellers compete by setting prices for their datasets, giving rise to a pricing game whose pure Nash equilibria correspond to equilibrium prices. While equilibrium prices are guaranteed for rivalrous goods via competitive equilibrium, we show that the non-rivalry of data fundamentally alters this picture: an exact Nash equilibrium (NE) need not exist, and in fact, 1.363-approximate NE may also not exist under uniform pricing. We therefore investigate relaxed equilibrium notions. Allowing sellers to use beyond-uniform pricing---specifically, piecewise-linear convex pricing functions---guarantees approximate stability within a constant factor: there exists a pricing profile in which no seller can improve revenue by a factor of two by deviating to any uniform price (a 2-approximate NE against uniform deviations). Finally, our simulations demonstrate fast convergence and empirical approximation guarantees that outperform the worst-case bound of 2. △ Less

Submitted 14 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: This work received an oral presentation at ICML 2026

NARU: A Benchmark for NARrative Evolution and Cultural Nuance Understanding in Japanese Extreme Long Video

Authors: Yuheng Huang, Jianlang Chen, Jiayang Song, Hua Qi, Aza Kai, Vincent Markert, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Jianjun Zhao, Lei Ma

Abstract: Long-form video understanding encompasses tasks that go beyond retrieving isolated events, including tracking an evolving narrative and interpreting social meaning that may remain implicit. However, existing benchmarks rarely evaluate these capabilities jointly, particularly in high-context, non-English media. To address this gap, we introduce NARU, a benchmark designed to evaluate Narrative evolu… ▽ More Long-form video understanding encompasses tasks that go beyond retrieving isolated events, including tracking an evolving narrative and interpreting social meaning that may remain implicit. However, existing benchmarks rarely evaluate these capabilities jointly, particularly in high-context, non-English media. To address this gap, we introduce NARU, a benchmark designed to evaluate Narrative evolution and Reasoning on cultural Understanding in Japanese long-form video. NARU consists of 1,481 questions grounded in 155 videos totaling 146.8 hours, spanning four narrative and five cultural dimensions. To construct the benchmark at this scale, we propose a hierarchical memory-based annotation pipeline that transforms raw video into structured event, narrative, and cultural annotations, then generates questions via task-oriented synthesis and iterative shortcut removal. The construction process includes two native-speaker verification stages involving 68 annotators. Evaluations across eight model configurations reveal substantial limitations in both long-range narrative integration and culturally grounded reasoning. By exposing these persistent gaps, NARU offers a systematic testing ground for developing MLLMs capable of reliably interpreting long-form, high-context video. △ Less

Submitted 13 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: Yuheng Huang and Jianlang Chen contributed equally to this work. More details available on the project's website https://ma-labo.github.io/naru/ and https://infinimind.io/en/company/news/2026/narubench-release

UniSwap: Streaming Audio-Visual Identity Swapping for Talking Videos

Authors: Yuxuan Zhang, Haozhong Xiong, Jiayi Song, Jinpeng Yu, Yang Shi, Jiaming Liu, Ruihua Huang, Liwei Wang

Abstract: Talking-video character replacement requires coordinated transfer of appearance and voice while preserving the source motion, scene, linguistic content, and audio-video timing. Existing methods use separately optimized models for the two modalities, making audio-visual consistency difficult to enforce. We present UniSwap, the first framework for streaming joint audio-visual identity replacement in… ▽ More Talking-video character replacement requires coordinated transfer of appearance and voice while preserving the source motion, scene, linguistic content, and audio-video timing. Existing methods use separately optimized models for the two modalities, making audio-visual consistency difficult to enforce. We present UniSwap, the first framework for streaming joint audio-visual identity replacement in talking videos. Given a source video, a reference image, and a reference voice clip, UniSwap transfers the reference appearance and vocal timbre within a single audio-visual diffusion transformer while preserving the source content and dynamics. To address the scarcity of aligned cross-identity training pairs, we introduce a swap-and-reconstruct pipeline that removes visual and vocal identity from real clips and uses the original clips as reconstruction targets. Starting from a bidirectional backbone, we progressively adapt the model through In-context Pretraining for joint replacement, Conditional Streaming Adaptation for block-causal KV-cached generation, and Efficient Self-forcing DMD for mitigating exposure bias and reducing sampling from 30 to 3 denoising steps per block. Efficient Multi-LoRA Switching enables the three DMD roles to share a single frozen backbone. Feature-RoPE Decomposition keeps cached positions within the training range, supporting stable long-form inference. Experiments demonstrate strong audio-visual synchronization, competitive identity preservation, efficient streaming, and stable long-form generation. △ Less

Submitted 13 August, 2026; v1 submitted 12 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

LiveAnimate: Stable Long-Form Streaming Human Animation in Real-Time

Authors: Yuxuan Zhang, Haozhong Xiong, Yubo Huang, Jiayi Song, Jinpeng Yu, Haofan Wang, Jiaming Liu, Ruihua Huang, Liwei Wang

Abstract: Pose-driven human animation synthesizes a video of a target person from a single reference image and a driving pose stream. Real-time generation is essential for interactive applications such as live streaming, telepresence, and virtual avatars, yet diffusion-based systems require minutes to hours per clip, precluding responsive interaction. We present LiveAnimate, to our knowledge the first anima… ▽ More Pose-driven human animation synthesizes a video of a target person from a single reference image and a driving pose stream. Real-time generation is essential for interactive applications such as live streaming, telepresence, and virtual avatars, yet diffusion-based systems require minutes to hours per clip, precluding responsive interaction. We present LiveAnimate, to our knowledge the first animation system to combine real-time streaming with stable long-form generation at billion scale, built on a 14B-parameter video Diffusion Transformer (DiT). A two-stage training pipeline first adapts a pretrained bidirectional DiT into a block-causal autoregressive generator through Reference-Anchored Teacher-Forcing Adaptation, and then reduces the sampling budget to three steps through Block-wise Self-Forcing Distillation. To preserve appearance over extended streams, we introduce Pose-Retrieval Sink Attention (PR-Sink), a bounded KV-cache mechanism combining a Static Sink that permanently anchors the first generated block, a Dynamic Sink that holds a pose-retrieved historical block, and a three-slot Rolling Window. When a pose recurs, PR-Sink restores the relevant appearance context without retaining the entire sequence, so memory and per-block latency remain constant regardless of stream duration. Together with Ulysses sequence parallelism and operator fusion, these designs enable 19.63\,FPS streaming inference on two NVIDIA H100 GPUs. On a three-minute benchmark, LiveAnimate maintains nearly constant perceptual quality and identity from the first 30 seconds to the final minute, while prior systems degrade substantially or require hours of offline computation for the same rollout. These results establish a new operating point in quality, latency, and duration for interactive full-body animation. △ Less

Submitted 13 August, 2026; v1 submitted 12 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

DEFT: Data-Efficient Frequency-domain Top-k Sampling via Inverse Discrete Fourier Transform for Spatiotemporal Dynamical Systems Modeling

Authors: Hengbo Xiao, Jiale Liu, Jiahao Song, Guannan He

Abstract: Modeling spatiotemporal dynamical systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) poses two major challenges: it either requires expensive physics-based simulators that entail iterative numerical solving at high computational cost, or it depends on abundant training data, yet purely data-driven models often generalize poorly to downstream dynamic operating conditions. We propose DEFT, a… ▽ More Modeling spatiotemporal dynamical systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) poses two major challenges: it either requires expensive physics-based simulators that entail iterative numerical solving at high computational cost, or it depends on abundant training data, yet purely data-driven models often generalize poorly to downstream dynamic operating conditions. We propose DEFT, a frequency-domain data sampling method that identifies the dominant Fourier modes of a physical system and systematically varies the corresponding amplitudes and phases to generate physically consistent training data via the inverse discrete Fourier transform. In addition, we derive a generalization bound of this method. We note that it also provides a theoretically principled criterion for selecting $K$. We evaluate the proposed method through three sets of experiments, each targeting a distinct aspect of its utility. First, we validate the framework on canonical PDEs solving demonstrating that it outperforms traditional methods when the system is dominated by a few prominent frequency components. Second, we employ DEFT as a data-value filter on the diffusion--sorption and Burgers equations of PDEBench, showing that it reduces data requirements by $40\%$ while sacrificing less than $2\%$ in predictive accuracy. Third, to evaluate DEFT for more challenging and practically relevant problems, we validate it in the battery degradation PDE system, achieving consistently high predictive accuracy across various test datasets with $R^2$ values exceeding $0.99$. Moreover, the learned frequency-domain features transfer to other battery chemistries with only $20\%$ of the fine-tuning data. These results demonstrate that DEFT is an effective data-sampling method for efficient operator learning. △ Less

Submitted 11 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

ToolVision: Learning When and How to Use Visual Tools with Capability-Aligned Supervision

Authors: Delin Mao, Chenghao Sun, Jingwei Song, Chishui Chen, Linfeng Zhang

Abstract: Thinking with images allows a multimodal model to compensate for limited perception by invoking visual tools through code. Yet the prevailing SFT-then-RL recipe creates a different supervision misalignment at each stage. SFT is expected to teach how to use tools, but trajectories from stronger teachers may succeed through perceptual capabilities that a smaller student cannot reliably reproduce or… ▽ More Thinking with images allows a multimodal model to compensate for limited perception by invoking visual tools through code. Yet the prevailing SFT-then-RL recipe creates a different supervision misalignment at each stage. SFT is expected to teach how to use tools, but trajectories from stronger teachers may succeed through perceptual capabilities that a smaller student cannot reliably reproduce or exploit, causing the student to imitate tool-call patterns without learning how to make them useful. RL is expected to teach when to use tools, but outcome-only rewards make fallible tool execution a liability and suppress tool use, whereas a blanket bonus for every correct tool-using trajectory encourages valid but ineffective operations. To address these two misalignments, we introduce ToolVision. During SFT, a multi-agent pipeline explores candidate trajectories, and a committee including student-scale models scores stepwise evidence gain to rank and prune the search branches. Only successfully executed trajectories with correct final answers are retained for SFT. Before RL, ToolVision compares the learner's performance with and without tools, then rewards successful tool use only on questions where tools provide a clear benefit. Both signals are constructed automatically from public task data without additional human annotations of tool use or necessity. ToolVision-8B improves over its base on all seven main benchmarks, surpasses Thyme-7B, CodeVision-8B, and CodeDance-7B on all three high-resolution benchmarks, and outperforms Qwen3-VL-32B-Thinking on V* and HRBench 8K. We will publicly release the datasets and source code. △ Less

Submitted 9 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 18 pages, 13 figures

Improving Generalization Robustness of Multimodal RLVR

Authors: Pengfei Zhou, Zhiwei Tang, Xiaopeng Peng, Chenrui Zhou, Lama Moukheiber, Yixing Ma, Bin Xu, Jiajun Song, Zhenglin Wan, Wangbo Zhao, Jiasheng Tang, Bohan Zhuang, Fan Wang, Yang You

Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) makes Multimodal Large Language Models more accurate, but the gains are brittle: simply paraphrasing a question or changing the prompt template can degrade them, which challenges reliable deployment in high-stakes scenarios like medical VQA. We trace this to two issues of the standard RL objective. First, the binary verifier conflates format wi… ▽ More Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) makes Multimodal Large Language Models more accurate, but the gains are brittle: simply paraphrasing a question or changing the prompt template can degrade them, which challenges reliable deployment in high-stakes scenarios like medical VQA. We trace this to two issues of the standard RL objective. First, the binary verifier conflates format with content, so the reward signal cannot tell a wrong answer apart from a misformatted one. Second, the training distribution covers only a thin slice of the real-world prompts that the model might meet at deployment, so policies that perform well on the training distribution can behave differently under unseen prompts during test. Both failures call for a robust post-training method that helps the policy cover a broader distribution of semantically equivalent prompts, and we identify two measures that help achieve this objective: separating format from semantics in the reward, and applying policy invariance across perturbed prompts with equivalent semantics. We therefore propose Prompt-Invariant RLVR (PIRL), consisting of a dynamic trinary reward and a consistency regularizer based on an embedding-space adversary. Under stress testing, PIRL's average accuracy on benchmarks drops by only $\le 1\%$, where GRPO drops ~3%. On dynamic evaluation, PIRL also achieves the smallest performance drop. △ Less

Submitted 14 August, 2026; v1 submitted 9 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 32 pages, 5 figures

SRE-FER: Regional residual evidence learning for mitigating local evidence dilution in fine-grained facial expression recognition

Authors: Jiaye Song, Ruochen Zhang, Yuliang Wang, Jiaqi Wu

Abstract: Fine-grained facial expression recognition (FER) hinges on capturing subtle muscular cues that distinguish adjacent emotions. Yet capturing these cues presents a dilemma. Detector-based methods depend on fragile landmark pipelines, whereas we find that directly transferring foundation models such as DINOv3 under conventional global readouts can cause local evidence dilution: early global aggregati… ▽ More Fine-grained facial expression recognition (FER) hinges on capturing subtle muscular cues that distinguish adjacent emotions. Yet capturing these cues presents a dilemma. Detector-based methods depend on fragile landmark pipelines, whereas we find that directly transferring foundation models such as DINOv3 under conventional global readouts can cause local evidence dilution: early global aggregation washes out sparse muscular signals and leaves persistent confusion between categories such as fear/surprise and sad/neutral. To recover this evidence, we propose SRE-FER, a readout-level regional residual evidence learning framework. Its core module, RERA, adds zero-initialized residual logits that refine class boundaries while preserving the backbone's global prediction. Training-time action unit (AU) guidance steers regional features toward expression-relevant areas using Facial Action Coding System (FACS)-based anatomical priors, without requiring an external facial pipeline at inference. An optional Full setting further routes sample-specific non-redundant tokens. On three benchmarks, SRE-FER attains 92.76% on RAF-DB, 91.32% on FERPlus, and 67.78% on AffectNet-7, demonstrating highly competitive performance compared to existing FER methods. △ Less

Submitted 9 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 10 pages, 5 figures.Accepted at the 9th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition (AIPR 2026)

Understanding Calibration and Truncation Error Propagation in Training-Free Low-Rank Compression for LLMs

Authors: Mohanad Odema, Gabrielle De Micheli, Dayin Gou, Nilesh Malpeddi, Prathamesh Vaste, Jacob Song

Abstract: Training-free low-rank compression frameworks have been gaining prominence for LLM compression given their effectiveness in reducing model parameter count while maintaining task-level accuracy. However, existing SOTA frameworks share two key limitations: (1) residual errors in calibration data activations accumulate across layers during compression, causing misalignment between representations sim… ▽ More Training-free low-rank compression frameworks have been gaining prominence for LLM compression given their effectiveness in reducing model parameter count while maintaining task-level accuracy. However, existing SOTA frameworks share two key limitations: (1) residual errors in calibration data activations accumulate across layers during compression, causing misalignment between representations simulated at compression time and those experienced at inference; (2) the assumption that layer importance distribution is preserved post-compression does not hold. Together, these two effects introduce misalignment in the compression process in relation to the deployed model. We study these effects and propose a simple, training-free methodology compatible with existing frameworks to mitigate them, comprising: (1) Layer-by-Layer Compression with Calibration Correction; (2) Iterative Compression with Rank Allocation Correction. Implemented atop an existing SOTA decomposition framework, and evaluated on Llama and Qwen3 models across various benchmarks and compression rates, our approach demonstrates up to ~1-2.5 accuracy point improvements over per-weight and joint decomposition baselines on zero-shot tasks. △ Less

Submitted 9 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: COLM 2026

Unified Hallucination Fuzzing for Multimodal Large Language Models

Authors: Pengfei Zhou, Jiajun Song, Zhiwei Tang, Yixing Ma, Xiaopeng Peng, Donghui Si, Yuhang Xu, Huiqi Song, Yiyuan Miao, Yichen Qian, Weihua Chen, Wangbo Zhao, Bohan Zhuang, Jiasheng Tang, Yang You

Abstract: Hallucination remains a persistent challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), severely limiting their reliability in high-stakes applications. Existing evaluations, predominantly based on static benchmarks, suffer from narrow taxonomical coverage and rapid performance saturation, failing to reflect model robustness in evolving real-world scenarios. To bridge this gap, we present a sys… ▽ More Hallucination remains a persistent challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), severely limiting their reliability in high-stakes applications. Existing evaluations, predominantly based on static benchmarks, suffer from narrow taxonomical coverage and rapid performance saturation, failing to reflect model robustness in evolving real-world scenarios. To bridge this gap, we present a systematic evaluation framework integrating a comprehensive benchmark with self-evolving stress testing. First, we introduce UniHall, a fine-grained dataset grounded in a unified taxonomy spanning Object, Instruction, and Knowledge dimensions. Second, to address benchmark saturation, we propose Self-Adaptive Multimodal Fuzzing (SAMF), a self-adaptive framework that employs evolutionary mutation strategies to explore the boundaries of model hallucinations. Crucially, to ensure reliable assessment of dynamic inputs, SAMF incorporates a structured metric suite driven by an ensemble of multi-modal oracles. Our extensive experiments reveal that state-of-the-art MLLMs exhibit significant performance degradation under fuzzing compared to conventional settings, exposing a dissociation between reasoning capabilities and factual grounding. Furthermore, we identify a helpfulness-hallucination trade-off, where reinforcement learning alignment inadvertently exacerbates sycophancy in instruction-following tasks. The framework, code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/LanceZPF/EvalHall. △ Less

Submitted 15 July, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 47 pages, 17 figures

MemPrism: Task-Conditioned Relational Memory Views for Long-Horizon Agents

Authors: Zhisheng Chen, Bingfan Zeng, Bangde Cao, Zhengwei Xie, Yuxuan Li, Jinhan Li, Zheng Lu, Xiangchen Guan, Zikai Xiao, Rui Qian, Jingwei Song

Abstract: Long-horizon agents rely on memory to reuse experiences, yet existing memory systems often assume that evidence can be directly consumed through a fixed representation. This leads to representation mismatch, where relevant information is available but not organized for the current decision. To this end, we propose MemPrism, a task-conditioned relational memory framework that separates persistent e… ▽ More Long-horizon agents rely on memory to reuse experiences, yet existing memory systems often assume that evidence can be directly consumed through a fixed representation. This leads to representation mismatch, where relevant information is available but not organized for the current decision. To this end, we propose MemPrism, a task-conditioned relational memory framework that separates persistent experience storage from decision-time working memory. MemPrism records interactions as the event stream and dynamically constructs relational views according to the current task context. A lightweight view policy selects the relation structure, evidence range, outcome condition, and granularity, while a deterministic composer and render transform historical facts into a temporary optical working-memory view for a frozen task policy. Experiments on long-horizon embodied and web-agent benchmarks show that MemPrism consistently improves the task performance, especially as trajectories become longer, while reducing memory token consumption. Furthermore, the learned view policy transfers across different VLMs without additional adaptation, demonstrating the effectiveness of task-conditioned relational views as a general memory interface for agents. △ Less

Submitted 6 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Language-Specialized Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation for Multilingual LLM-Based ASR

Authors: Yuan Xie, Jiaqi Song, Xianliang Wang, Ming Lei, Jie Gao, Jie Wu

Abstract: Modern LLM-based ASR systems have established multilingual capability as a standard feature, leveraging large-scale multilingual corpora and LLMs' cross-lingual knowledge to achieve competitive performance across multilingual benchmarks. However, jointly modeling languages with heterogeneous acoustic, phonological, and lexical characteristics inevitably introduces optimization conflicts, undermini… ▽ More Modern LLM-based ASR systems have established multilingual capability as a standard feature, leveraging large-scale multilingual corpora and LLMs' cross-lingual knowledge to achieve competitive performance across multilingual benchmarks. However, jointly modeling languages with heterogeneous acoustic, phonological, and lexical characteristics inevitably introduces optimization conflicts, undermining language-wise specialization. To address this challenge, we propose Language-Specialized Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation (LS-MOPD), which decouples language-specific knowledge acquisition from multilingual capability integration: language-specialized teachers are independently optimized via reinforcement learning (RL), with their expertise then integrated into a generalist multilingual student through language routing and token-level multi-teacher distillation, thereby reducing direct cross-lingual optimization conflicts. We further explore static and dynamic acoustic-prefix configurations to examine how teacher-student prefix consistency influences the efficacy of on-policy distillation. Experiments on benchmarks covering Mandarin, Mandarin subdialects, Cantonese, and English demonstrate that LS-MOPD substantially outperforms RL baselines and surpasses the empirical performance envelope defined by the best-performing RL teachers on nearly all benchmarks, revealing its potential to generalize beyond all teachers in multilingual ASR. △ Less

Submitted 10 August, 2026; v1 submitted 4 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

MinerU.Chem: A High-Precision System for Optical Chemical Structure and Reaction Recognition

Authors: Haote Yang, Jiang Wu, Jingchao Wang, Xingjian Wei, Lixin Ma, Linye Li, Chen Zhu, Xiaolong Wu, Yuheng Lu, Ziran Zhu, Junyuan Gao, Lingli Ge, Yuan Xu, Huijie Ao, QianQian Wu, Dechen Lin, Huaiyu Gu, Lu Chen, Shengxin Lu, ShaSha Wang, Yuanyuan Cao, Zhejia Yu, Ruijie Zhang, Zimai Tian, Jiaxing Sun , et al. (20 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: In organic chemistry papers and patents, molecular structures, reaction schemes, and experimental conditions are often presented as molecular structure depictions, reaction diagrams, and complex tables or figures. Such information is difficult for general-purpose document parsing systems to directly convert into machine-readable data. This limits data production for organic chemistry knowledge bas… ▽ More In organic chemistry papers and patents, molecular structures, reaction schemes, and experimental conditions are often presented as molecular structure depictions, reaction diagrams, and complex tables or figures. Such information is difficult for general-purpose document parsing systems to directly convert into machine-readable data. This limits data production for organic chemistry knowledge base construction and for AI for Chemistry tasks such as reaction prediction, retrosynthesis, condition recommendation, molecular property prediction, and drug molecule design. This report introduces MinerU-Chem, a document parsing system for organic chemistry literature integrated into the MinerU online platform. Built on top of MinerU's general document parsing pipeline, MinerU-Chem adds five chemistry-specific modules: chemistry relevance filtering, molecular structure detection, molecule identifier extraction, molecular structure recognition, and reaction scheme parsing. Together, these modules convert organic-chemistry-related image regions in documents into a Molecule Summary List and a Reaction Summary List. For molecular structure recognition, MinerU-Chem uses CARBON (Complex Atomic Representation and Bonding Object Notation) as its core representation. CARBON enables recognition results to preserve both the visual layout of the original image and complex chemical semantics, while supporting the export of standard downstream formats such as MolFile and SMILES. On the SMILES-evaluable subset of MolRecBench-Wild (N=2,392), MinerU-Chem's molecular structure recognition module achieves a SMILES exact-match accuracy of 93.02%, outperforming the best evaluated comparison system, GPT-5.6-Sol (74.87%), by 18.15 percentage points. The system has been integrated into the MinerU online platform and is available at https://mineru.net/OpenSourceTools/Extractor . △ Less

Submitted 20 August, 2026; v1 submitted 4 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

ED-DiT: Physics-Guided Diffusion Pretraining for Transferable Molecular Representations from Electron Density

Authors: Liang Shuang, Haocheng Wang, Jiayi Song, Shuquan Ye, Ben Fei

Abstract: Pretraining has shown strong potential for learning transferable representations, yet it remains underexplored for electron-density-based molecular learning. Electron density provides a continuous three-dimensional description of molecular electronic structure, capturing both local spatial patterns and global physical quantities. This raises a key question: can electron-density fields be used for… ▽ More Pretraining has shown strong potential for learning transferable representations, yet it remains underexplored for electron-density-based molecular learning. Electron density provides a continuous three-dimensional description of molecular electronic structure, capturing both local spatial patterns and global physical quantities. This raises a key question: can electron-density fields be used for self-supervised pretraining to learn a shared representation that transfers across diverse electronic-structure-related tasks? We propose ED-DiT, a physics-guided Diffusion Transformer for self-supervised pretraining on electron-density point clouds. ED-DiT learns reusable representations by reconstructing corrupted and partially masked log-density fields across diffusion noise levels. An electron-number consistency constraint is further introduced to preserve the total electronic mass. The pretrained encoder can be adapted to property prediction, open-/closed-shell classification, molecule-electron-density retrieval, and molecule-conditioned electron-density prediction. Experiments on six EDBench tasks show that ED-DiT consistently outperforms the same architecture trained from scratch, especially under limited supervision. For molecule-conditioned electron-density prediction, it reduces RMSE from 2.2474 to 1.3753 and surpasses the available baseline. With only 10% labels, it improves orbital energy prediction RMSE from 0.0293 to 0.0138. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of physics-guided electron-density pretraining for learning transferable molecular representations. △ Less

Submitted 4 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 16 pages, 9 figures, 7 tables, including supplementary material

EditFlow3D: Automated Local Editing of 3D Assets with Trajectory Preservation

Authors: Rui Nie, Chuang Wang, Haitao Zhou, Jiahe Song, Buyu Li, Sheng Wang, Qian Yu

Abstract: Controllable local editing of 3D assets requires precise target localization and appropriate visual guidance. However, existing methods lack a simple yet accurate way to obtain 3D masks and struggle to achieve the desired edit while faithfully preserving the structure and appearance of non-target regions. To address these challenges, we present EditFlow3D, a training-free framework for local 3D ed… ▽ More Controllable local editing of 3D assets requires precise target localization and appropriate visual guidance. However, existing methods lack a simple yet accurate way to obtain 3D masks and struggle to achieve the desired edit while faithfully preserving the structure and appearance of non-target regions. To address these challenges, we present EditFlow3D, a training-free framework for local 3D editing. Given a source asset and an edit instruction, a VLM-driven workflow interprets the editing intent and automatically constructs a visual guidance image and a refined 3D editing mask, enabling localized editing in the native representation space of a pretrained 3D generative model. Specifically, mask-guided differential flow focuses the edit on the target region, while step-wise trajectory preservation maintains consistency between non-target regions and the source asset without directly replacing intermediate features. Since the existing Edit3D-Bench covers only a limited range of local editing categories, we further introduce EditFlow-Bench as a complementary benchmark encompassing a broader variety of structural and appearance edits, and evaluate EditFlow3D on both benchmarks. Quantitative results, qualitative comparisons, and a user study demonstrate that EditFlow3D achieves more accurate target-region editing and better preserves non-target regions than existing 3D editing methods. △ Less

Submitted 4 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Channel-wise Dynamic Knowledge Distillation via Adaptive Sample Generation for Action Recognition

Authors: Ping Li, Chenhao Ping, Jie Song, Mingli Song

Abstract: Knowledge Distillation (KD) offers a promising yet underexplored path for compressing large action recognition models. However, existing KD methods suffer from two key limitations: 1) reliance on fixed input samples leads to suboptimal feature alignment between the frozen teacher (larger model) and the learnable student (smaller model), and 2) applying a uniform distillation strength for all chann… ▽ More Knowledge Distillation (KD) offers a promising yet underexplored path for compressing large action recognition models. However, existing KD methods suffer from two key limitations: 1) reliance on fixed input samples leads to suboptimal feature alignment between the frozen teacher (larger model) and the learnable student (smaller model), and 2) applying a uniform distillation strength for all channels fails to account for their varying importance in capturing distinct knowledge (e.g., motion tempo or magnitude) across training epochs. This motivates us to develop an Adaptive Sample-aware Channel-wise Dynamic (ASCD) KD approach, which operates in two stages. First, we use an adaptive sample generation module to create updated samples by incorporating semantics from sample gradients, which are derived by minimizing a feature loss weighted by channel centroid frequency differences at each layer. Meanwhile, crucial motion-related details are preserved by applying a Gaussian mask to frequency features. Second, we employ a channel-wise dynamic distillation module to train student on these generated samples, guided by sample gradients and feature frequencies. For efficiency, samples are updated periodically rather than per epoch. Extensive experiments on three video benchmarks (UCF101, Kinetics-400, Something-Something-v2) and two image datasets (CIFAR-100, ImageNet) demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvccn/ASCD_KD_Action. △ Less

Submitted 4 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: Accepted in ACM MM2026, 16 pages, 7 figures

From Profiling to Synthesis: Benchmarking Implicit Behavioral Alignment in Personalized LLM Agents

Authors: Jiajia Song, Bobo Li, Haiwen Yi, Zibo Ji, Meishan Zhang, Hao Fei, Min Zhang, Mong-Li Lee, Wynne Hsu

Abstract: Large Language Models have enabled increasingly capable autonomous agents, yet personalization remains critical for making such agents practically useful. Recent benchmarks have begun evaluating personalization in agents, but they largely rely on static preference snapshots, fixed interaction logs, or question answering over predefined user profiles. Such designs fail to capture the complexity of… ▽ More Large Language Models have enabled increasingly capable autonomous agents, yet personalization remains critical for making such agents practically useful. Recent benchmarks have begun evaluating personalization in agents, but they largely rely on static preference snapshots, fixed interaction logs, or question answering over predefined user profiles. Such designs fail to capture the complexity of evolving user preferences and neglect preference-conditioned task execution-a discrepancy we term as the knowledge-to-action gap. To address this challenge, we introduce IBA-Bench, a benchmark for implicit behavioral alignment constructed from longitudinal interaction histories that contain noise, implicit cues, and temporal inconsistencies. Unlike prior work, IBA-Bench evaluates whether an agent can execute tasks while satisfying implicit user constraints inferred from historical interactions. We further propose IBA-Agent, an agent framework that reconciles conflicting priorities through broad retrieval and trajectory-level alignment. Experiment results on IBA-Bench show that effective personalization remains a significant challenge for state-of-the-art LLM agents, and the proposed IBA-Agent substantially improves behavioral alignment in complex scenarios across nine application domains. △ Less

Submitted 3 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

CoEvoKG: Co-Evolving Knowledge Graphs with Self-Evolving Search Agents

Authors: Zhaoyang Li, Zenghuang Fu, Qiuyuan Ai, Ping Jiang, Haoyu Wu, Minghui Wu, Chenxu Zhao, Jie Song, Guannan He

Abstract: Large language models can improve with reinforcement learning for search agents, yet existing self play agents repeatedly generate tasks while discarding the knowledge gained during successful searches. We introduce CoEvoKG, a framework that turns a knowledge graph into both a source of verifiable training tasks and a persistent evidence memory for agent evolution. CoEvoKG jointly trains a task… ▽ More Large language models can improve with reinforcement learning for search agents, yet existing self play agents repeatedly generate tasks while discarding the knowledge gained during successful searches. We introduce CoEvoKG, a framework that turns a knowledge graph into both a source of verifiable training tasks and a persistent evidence memory for agent evolution. CoEvoKG jointly trains a task generator and a search agent: the generator creates multihop questions from entity chains sampled from the knowledge graph, while the agent learns from rewards for answer correctness and search trajectories whose entity paths are supported by graph evidence. When a search succeeds, CoEvoKG verifies and deduplicates the retrieved evidence, then writes it back to the corresponding graph nodes and edges. Future rounds reuse this enriched graph for task generation and reward computation, closing the loop between model self evolution and knowledge accumulation. Experiments on six QA benchmarks (NQ, TriviaQA, PopQA, HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, and Bamboogle) with three backbone models show that CoEvoKG improves macro average accuracy over the corresponding base models by +11.2, +10.1, and +11.6 points on Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, respectively. Under matched training budgets, CoEvoKG further improves over competitive self play baselines and RL baselines for search agents by +2.6 to +3.7 macro average points across the three backbones. Code is available at https://github.com/lazzy1225/CoEvoKG. △ Less

Submitted 3 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 10 pages, 4 figures

PartMat: Material-Aware 3D Part Decomposition with a Single Global Latent

Authors: Guangming Fu, Jin Song, Yiyun Fei, Guoqiu Li, Ruigao Yang, Jianan Jiang

Abstract: Part-level 3D generation has recently attracted increasing attention for producing structured and editable 3D assets. However, existing methods typically decompose objects according to functional semantics rather than the editable material boundaries (e.g., fabric, wood, metal) required in practical 3D applications such as interior design. Additionally, current methods often generate parts indepen… ▽ More Part-level 3D generation has recently attracted increasing attention for producing structured and editable 3D assets. However, existing methods typically decompose objects according to functional semantics rather than the editable material boundaries (e.g., fabric, wood, metal) required in practical 3D applications such as interior design. Additionally, current methods often generate parts independently, causing computational costs to scale linearly with the part count. To address these limitations, we present PartMat, an efficient material-aware 3D part decomposition pipeline that represents multi-part geometry with a single global latent. Given a reference image and a single whole-object geometry, PartMat decomposes the object into parts that follow material boundaries. First, we propose PartVAE to learn such a unified representation and decode all material parts in a single forward pass, thereby decoupling inference cost from the number of parts. Second, with this representation, a diffusion model is trained for part generation and refined via reinforcement learning for accurate material assignment and overlap suppression. Finally, to recover fine-grained geometric details, we introduce a sparse-voxel flow-matching model with part attention for geometry post-processing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PartMat significantly outperforms existing baselines in material-aware decomposition accuracy and achieves comparable geometric quality, while maintaining efficient inference. △ Less

Submitted 3 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

CoNav-UAV: Cooperative Dual-Altitude Aerial Navigation via Stackelberg Learning

Authors: Junru Song, Wenhao Zhang, Yang Yang, Xuekai Qiu, Feifei Wang, Weien Zhou, Tingsong Jiang, Ying Wen, Yang Li, Wen Yao

Abstract: Target-oriented vision-and-language navigation (VLN) on aerial platforms is attracting growing attention for missions such as disaster rescue, infrastructure inspection, and security patrol. In this task, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) needs to locate targets given only a concise description of their appearance and surroundings. This requires global exploration and grounding as well as collision… ▽ More Target-oriented vision-and-language navigation (VLN) on aerial platforms is attracting growing attention for missions such as disaster rescue, infrastructure inspection, and security patrol. In this task, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) needs to locate targets given only a concise description of their appearance and surroundings. This requires global exploration and grounding as well as collision-free close-range approach, two interleaved processes difficult to reconcile within a single agent. Most existing methods transfer the ground VLN paradigm to a low-altitude UAV and compensate for its inefficient exploration with external assistance. A recent attempt deploys two UAVs at complementary altitudes yet still relies on privileged information and trains its two agents independently, precluding any mutual adaptation essential for cooperation. Here we propose CoNav-UAV, which explicitly models the task as a Stackelberg game between a high-altitude leader and a low-altitude follower, with the system operating on onboard visual and linguistic inputs alone. To solve this game, we introduce Iterative Stackelberg Learning. The leader's high-level vision-language reasoning is refined via memory-based in-context learning, while the follower's precise motion control is updated via DAgger-style expert distillation. The alternation drives both agents toward a Stackelberg equilibrium. CoNav-UAV consistently outperforms single- and dual-agent baselines across three high-fidelity urban scenes from the AerialVLN benchmark. Success rate improves by up to 30.8 points on the learning scene, and 9.0 points under cross-scene transfer while using about 3x less adaptation data. Further analyses validate the complementary gains of the leader and follower updates and reveal robust gains yet distinct learning dynamics across VLM backbones. △ Less

Submitted 3 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

From Viral to Void: Multi-Dimensional Behavioral and Contractual Analysis for Rug Pull Identification

Authors: Jinyin Song, Hongping Wang, Xiaoqi Li

Abstract: As the blockchain and decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystems continue to expand and mature, rug pull scams involving meme coins are occurring with increasing frequency, posing a threat to the security of investors' assets and the healthy development of the industry. Rug Pull scams are characterized by extremely low deployment costs, covert execution, rapid fund transfers, and high detection diffi… ▽ More As the blockchain and decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystems continue to expand and mature, rug pull scams involving meme coins are occurring with increasing frequency, posing a threat to the security of investors' assets and the healthy development of the industry. Rug Pull scams are characterized by extremely low deployment costs, covert execution, rapid fund transfers, and high detection difficulty. Traditional manual reviews or fixed rules struggle to meet real-time early warning requirements, and existing detection methods generally suffer from issues such as a single feature dimension, inadequate handling of class imbalance, and weak model generalization and interpretability. To address these shortcomings, this paper focuses on the detection of Ethereum-based rug pull scams. First, we clarify their definitions, types, and harm mechanisms, and construct a multi-dimensional feature system based on dimensions such as malicious smart contract design, on-chain transaction anomalies, liquidity manipulation, and social media disclosures. Next, using the "Second Uncle Coin"(token symbol: BOBU) case as an example, we reconstruct the attack process and derive quantitative detection metrics. Subsequently, a risk detection model based on a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) is designed. We employ a combined strategy of SMOTE oversampling and Focal Loss to address the issue of sample imbalance, dynamically search for optimal thresholds to balance precision and recall, and incorporate gradient pruning and early stopping to enhance training stability. Experiments show that the model achieves an accuracy of 0.927, an F1 score of 0.787, and an AUC-ROC of 0.952 on the test set, outperforming traditional methods. Finally, a visualizable web-based detection system is developed using the Flask framework, enabling batch risk assessment, high-risk ranking display, and result export functions. △ Less

Submitted 2 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

SPAE: Spectrally Guided Autoencoder for Pretrained Visual Latents

Authors: Yibin Huang, Jixiang Hong, Zongzhao Li, Yuhan Dai, Zhibin Wang, Chunwei Wang, Jun Song, Chen Wang, Xiaofei Sun, Xiaoxiao Xu, Conghui Zhu

Abstract: Latents from vision foundation models (VFMs) are semantically rich and well suited for visual understanding. Recent representation autoencoder methods such as RAE have shown that they can provide promising latent spaces for image generation. However, VFM latents remain difficult to model directly: DiT-generated latents exhibit spectral mismatch with encoder latents, especially in high-frequency co… ▽ More Latents from vision foundation models (VFMs) are semantically rich and well suited for visual understanding. Recent representation autoencoder methods such as RAE have shown that they can provide promising latent spaces for image generation. However, VFM latents remain difficult to model directly: DiT-generated latents exhibit spectral mismatch with encoder latents, especially in high-frequency components. Our channel-wise spectral analysis further reveals that these high-frequency components are diffusely distributed across latent channels and entangled with semantic information, making the latent space difficult for DiT to model. To address these challenges, we propose SPAE, latent adaptation framework for generation. Specifically, SPAE employs a compact bottleneck to distill stable semantic information while suppressing high-frequency components, thereby improving the alignment between DiT-generated latents and encoder latents. In addition, we apply a channel-wise masking strategy to promote the decoupling of semantic information and high-frequency details across bottleneck channels. Experiments show that SPAE achieves a favorable balance among visual understanding, generation quality, and reconstruction fidelity. △ Less

Submitted 2 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

AttnLink: Turning Attention into Schema Links for Text-to-SQL

Authors: Jinwang Song, Tao Liu, Haowen Zheng, Xiangheng Li, Yifan Li, Hongying Zan

Abstract: Schema linking is a critical component of Text-to-SQL systems, but existing approaches often trade off contextual modeling capacity, score-based controllability, and inference efficiency. We introduce AttnLink, an attention-based framework that converts LLMs' internal attention into continuous relevance scores for schema items. AttnLink extracts the attention from the generation-start position to… ▽ More Schema linking is a critical component of Text-to-SQL systems, but existing approaches often trade off contextual modeling capacity, score-based controllability, and inference efficiency. We introduce AttnLink, an attention-based framework that converts LLMs' internal attention into continuous relevance scores for schema items. AttnLink extracts the attention from the generation-start position to candidate schema spans, enabling all candidates to be ranked in a single prefill pass without autoregressive decoding. We develop two variants: AttnLink-U, which directly probes pretrained attention without parameter updates, and AttnLink-S, which aligns the attention distribution with gold schema items through direct supervision. To improve coverage of multiple relevant schema items, AttnLink-S combines a set-mass objective with an adaptive probability-floor regularizer. The resulting scores support post-hoc precision-recall control through temperature scaling and cumulative-mass selection. Experiments on Spider, BIRD, and Spider2-SQLite show that AttnLink-S achieves mAP scores of 99.22%, 95.95%, and 83.29%, respectively, with millisecond-scale schema-linking latency. It also yields the best or tied-best execution accuracy for downstream SQL generation in seven of nine generator-dataset settings. △ Less

Submitted 1 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Geometry-guided Emotion Modulation for Controllable and Photorealistic Emotional Talking Face Generation

Authors: Chenggong Hu, Shaoyin Ma, Yi Wang, Li Sun, Mingli Song, Jie Song

Abstract: Audio-driven emotional talking face generation aims to synthesize realistic videos with expressive facial dynamics. However, existing methods struggle to balance controllability and visual fidelity. Although implicit representations capture rich semantics, they lack structural guidance, often resulting in averaged emotional expressions. In contrast, explicit geometric methods offer better control… ▽ More Audio-driven emotional talking face generation aims to synthesize realistic videos with expressive facial dynamics. However, existing methods struggle to balance controllability and visual fidelity. Although implicit representations capture rich semantics, they lack structural guidance, often resulting in averaged emotional expressions. In contrast, explicit geometric methods offer better control over facial expressions but tend to sacrifice high-frequency texture details. To address it, we propose GemTalk, a diffusion-based framework that combines the semantic richness of implicit representations with the structural precision of explicit geometric priors. We introduce a Vision-guided Audio Emotion Projection (V-AEP) module to extract implicit emotional lip and expression features. At the same time, a Diffusion-based Geometric Priors Generator (D-GPG) generates identity-aware blendshape coefficients as explicit structural priors. Crucially, our Geometry-guided Emotion Modulation (GEM) module leverages these geometric priors to recalibrate the magnitude of implicit features, enabling precise, continuous control over emotional expressions, especially emotion intensity, without sacrificing visual quality. Extensive experiments show GemTalk achieves superior performance in photo-realism, and facial emotional dynamics. △ Less

Submitted 1 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 17 pages, 11 figures

SERL-SQL: Selective Hindsight Distillation for Text-to-SQL Reinforcement Agentic Learning

Authors: Tao Liu, Tao Feng, Xiangheng Li, Jinwang Song, Yifan Li, Xiaoqing Cheng, Dixuan Zhang, Siquan Li, Lin Lan, Hongying Zan, Kunli Zhang, Chao Wu

Abstract: Recent Text-to-SQL systems increasingly rely on multi-turn interaction, execution feedback, and reinforcement learning. However, most existing methods use execution correctness only as a trajectory-level reward, which provides limited guidance for identifying the SQL decisions responsible for success or failure. We propose SERL-SQL, a selective execution-grounded reinforcement learning framework f… ▽ More Recent Text-to-SQL systems increasingly rely on multi-turn interaction, execution feedback, and reinforcement learning. However, most existing methods use execution correctness only as a trajectory-level reward, which provides limited guidance for identifying the SQL decisions responsible for success or failure. We propose SERL-SQL, a selective execution-grounded reinforcement learning framework for multi-turn Text-to-SQL agents. SERL-SQL samples on-policy SQL interaction trajectories and uses a training-only teacher to re-score student actions with execution feedback. The resulting teacher--student likelihood gap is converted into bounded, masked weights that reweight GRPO advantages only on SQL and tool-action tokens. In this way, task rewards preserve the optimization direction, while execution hindsight provides localized credit assignment. Experiments on BIRD, Spider, and cross-domain benchmarks show that SERL-SQL achieves competitive performance, reaching 76.56% execution accuracy on BIRD-Dev and 89.92% on Spider-Test. Moreover, our reward-based selection strategy closely approaches the oracle Best-of-N upper bound and consistently outperforms consistency-based selection, showing that SERL-SQL produces high-quality candidates that can be reliably identified by lightweight execution-grounded rewards. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Ffunkytao/SERL-SQL. △ Less

Submitted 4 August, 2026; v1 submitted 1 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 9 pages,6 figures, Underreview

Distill What RGB Can Recover: Privileged 3D Evidence for RGB-Only Vision-Language Models

Authors: Yanbin Hu, Jin Cui, Jun Ye, Jiepeng Zhou, Jiangcheng Song, Boran Zhao, Pengju Ren

Abstract: 3D scene understanding requires reasoning about entity existence, spatial layout, and object relations, yet RGB images alone often provide insufficient 3D cues. Existing 3D-VLMs commonly rely on depth or 3D-position-aware inputs at inference time, introducing additional acquisition, reconstruction, or annotation costs that limit RGB-only deployment. We therefore study how training-time 3D evidence… ▽ More 3D scene understanding requires reasoning about entity existence, spatial layout, and object relations, yet RGB images alone often provide insufficient 3D cues. Existing 3D-VLMs commonly rely on depth or 3D-position-aware inputs at inference time, introducing additional acquisition, reconstruction, or annotation costs that limit RGB-only deployment. We therefore study how training-time 3D evidence can be converted into spatial reasoning capabilities retained under RGB-only inference. We propose a privileged-evidence distillation framework that constructs a distillable teacher through a unified evidence interface and controlled residual injection, and transfers its knowledge to a deployable student receiving only RGB images and questions through logit and structured representation distillation. To avoid imitating teacher signals unsupported by RGB, we further introduce evidence-sensitivity-guided distillation, which uses corrupted evidence to identify highly evidence-dependent targets and down-weight their supervision. We also define a recoverability decomposition based on the matched baseline, teacher, and student, separating privileged gains into RGB-recoverable improvements and residual teacher advantages. Across four benchmarks, the teacher achieves the best result on 7 of 11 reported metrics among the compared methods. The RGB-only student outperforms its matched baseline on all 11 metrics, including gains of 10.4 ScanQA CIDEr and 19.1 Scan2Cap CIDEr@0.5, without additional inference-time inputs. These results validate the effectiveness of training-time privileged 3D evidence distillation for both teacher performance and deployable RGB-only spatial reasoning. Separately, our matched baseline-teacher-student analysis characterizes privileged-gain transfer across evidence types and spatial skills. △ Less

Submitted 31 July, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

MERIT: Efficient In-Place Deletion for Dynamic Graph-Based Approximate Nearest Neighbor Indexes

Authors: Zekai Wu, Jiabao Jin, Peng Cheng, Wangze Ni, Haoyang Li, Lei Chen, Junjie Yao, Jingkuan Song, Heng Tao Shen

Abstract: Graph-based indexes have become the dominant approach to approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) over high-dimensional data and play a crucial role in real-world applications such as retrieval-augmented generation, recommendation systems, and vector databases. Despite extensive progress in static graph construction and search, efficient in-place deletion remains challenging because obsolete vec… ▽ More Graph-based indexes have become the dominant approach to approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) over high-dimensional data and play a crucial role in real-world applications such as retrieval-augmented generation, recommendation systems, and vector databases. Despite extensive progress in static graph construction and search, efficient in-place deletion remains challenging because obsolete vectors must be removed without allowing stale incoming edges to consume search capacity or expensive graph-wide maintenance to interrupt online services, e.g., retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and recommendation platforms. To address this problem, we propose MERIT (MST-based Efficient Repair with In-place updaTes), an in-place update framework with three core techniques: (1) bounded search-based recovery that combines a deleted vertex's outgoing neighbors with its readily searchable in-neighbors, (2) $k_r$-Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) local repair that promotes local connectivity while retaining multiple routing choices for graph search, and (3) versioned-edge invalidation that immediately filters all stale incoming edges to the deleted vertex and progressively removes them as adjacency lists are rewritten. Its integration with the hierarchical HNSW index and the single-layer Vamana index demonstrates applicability across distinct graph structures. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets show that MERIT processes deletion at nearly the cost of inserting one vector, achieves up to $3.02\times$--$18.87\times$ faster deletion than state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, and keeps search recall stable or even improves it as deletions accumulate. △ Less

Submitted 19 August, 2026; v1 submitted 31 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: 14 pages

UniCross: Unified Cross-Skill Dexterous Manipulation Synthesis

Authors: Hui Zhang, Julian Ferchow, Jie Song, Mirko Meboldt

Abstract: Many dexterous manipulation tasks require the object to remain securely held throughout the interaction. From the perspective of hand-object relational motion, such manipulation comprises four canonical skills: grasping, relocation, in-hand rotation, and in-hand translation. Human hands flexibly compose these skills to accomplish complex tasks. Existing approaches, however, model these skills sepa… ▽ More Many dexterous manipulation tasks require the object to remain securely held throughout the interaction. From the perspective of hand-object relational motion, such manipulation comprises four canonical skills: grasping, relocation, in-hand rotation, and in-hand translation. Human hands flexibly compose these skills to accomplish complex tasks. Existing approaches, however, model these skills separately with skill-specific action constraints, objectives, or even dedicated hand morphologies, which breaks the compatibility and continuity required for long-horizon composition. In this work, we present a unified framework that models all four skills in a single formulation that shares the same state and action spaces and a common objective structure. This formulation enables straightforward distillation of a single cross-skill policy that performs strongly on every skill, generalizes to unseen objects, stays robust to disturbances, and chains skills seamlessly into long-horizon manipulation. The framework also transfers effectively across different hand morphologies. Overall, our results suggest that different dexterous manipulation skills can be viewed as instantiations of a shared task formulation, revealing the intrinsic consistency across different behaviors. △ Less

Submitted 30 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: Project page: https://zdchan.github.io/UniCross/

Structured Redundancy Modeling for Efficient Visual Token Pruning in High-Resolution MLLMs

Authors: Jouwon Song, Woohyeong Kim, Kyeongbo Kong

Abstract: Recent high-resolution Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) generate thousands of visual tokens per input, leading to a visual token explosion that introduces severe latency bottlenecks. While token pruning mitigates this issue, state-of-the-art subset-optimization methods typically rely on iterative subset construction to jointly capture visual diversity and instruction relevance. As visual t… ▽ More Recent high-resolution Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) generate thousands of visual tokens per input, leading to a visual token explosion that introduces severe latency bottlenecks. While token pruning mitigates this issue, state-of-the-art subset-optimization methods typically rely on iterative subset construction to jointly capture visual diversity and instruction relevance. As visual token counts scale, this sequential dependency introduces significant selection overhead, severely limiting the translation of theoretical FLOPs reductions into actual wall-clock speedups. To address this limitation, we propose Single-Forward Pruner (SFPruner), a structural reformulation of visual token pruning that embeds redundancy control directly into the scoring space, bypassing the need for iterative combinatorial optimization. Our non-iterative framework achieves redundancy-aware importance selection in a single forward pass through two complementary mechanisms. First, to attenuate redundancy at the covariance level, we introduce a semantics-guided ridge leverage scheme. By integrating instruction relevance and visual saliency, this mechanism suppresses dominant covariance directions and mitigates representation bias. Second, ranking-based directional masking resolves residual overlap through asymmetric similarity competition, where higher-scoring tokens explicitly suppress redundant lower-scoring alternatives via parallel tensor operations. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our approach maintains stable selection costs, reducing the token selection process by up to 110 ms, from 112.4 ms to just 2.5 ms at 512 tokens in Qwen2.5-VL. This structural efficiency successfully translates theoretical token reductions into tangible inference speedups while preserving highly competitive performance against state-of-the-art techniques under aggressive compression. △ Less

Submitted 25 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: Accepted to ECCV 2026

Advancing All-Weather Building Damage Mapping to the Instance Level: Outcomes and Insights from the 2026 Bright Challenge

Authors: Hongruixuan Chen, He Huang, Haifeng Wang, Jian Song, Junjue Wang, Weihao Xuan, Hamish Mitchell, Jiepan Li, Wei He, Liangpei Zhang, Zijie Wang, Chen Zhong, Jiazhen Zhao, Lei Hu, Ting Hu, Hongyan Zhang, Gregory Angelides, Miriam Cha, Clifford Broni-Bediako, Junshi Xia, Taylor Perron, Naoto Yokoya

Abstract: Rapid post-disaster response requires timely, building-level information on whether structures remain intact, are damaged, or are destroyed. Post-event optical imagery, however, may be unavailable because of cloud, smoke, or darkness. The Bright Challenge evaluated all-weather building damage mapping from a submeter-resolution pre-event optical image and a post-event SAR image. Participants were r… ▽ More Rapid post-disaster response requires timely, building-level information on whether structures remain intact, are damaged, or are destroyed. Post-event optical imagery, however, may be unavailable because of cloud, smoke, or darkness. The Bright Challenge evaluated all-weather building damage mapping from a submeter-resolution pre-event optical image and a post-event SAR image. Participants were required to detect and delineate each building and assign exactly one of three mutually exclusive damage labels. The challenge extended the globally distributed \textsc{Bright} dataset with instance-level annotations for about 291,000 buildings across 16 disaster events spanning seven disaster types. The final phase was evaluated exclusively on two 2025 events absent from training: a wildfire event in California and a hurricane in Jamaica. A total of 157 participants made 1,289 submissions, and 46 teams entered the final phase. The two winning solutions achieved test mAPs of 0.182 and 0.181, approximately 8.7 times the public baseline of 0.021, but remained far below the best in-domain holdout score of 0.513. Across teams ranked in both phases, performance declined sharply and the rank order changed substantially. The two leading solutions independently favored modality-specific encoding, staged or late optical--SAR fusion, and an optical-dominant separation of building localization from damage recognition. The winning method additionally used scene-aware threshold adjustment and pseudo-label adaptation. These results identify cross-event generalization and stable severity discrimination as the principal remaining challenges. All data, annotations, baseline code, and winning solutions are publicly available at https://github.com/ChenHongruixuan/BRIGHT. △ Less

Submitted 23 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Fast Cross-Scenario Adaptation of CSI Models via Channel Conditional Parameter Generation

Authors: Xudong Zou, Siyu Wu, Zunlei Feng, Jie Song, Yuanyu Wan, Mingli Song, Jiacong Hu

Abstract: Deep learning has shown strong potential for massive multiple-input multiple-output (Massive MIMO) physical-layer tasks, including channel state information (CSI) feedback and channel estimation. However, environmental heterogeneity can severely degrade CSI models in unseen scenarios, while conventional adaptation requires target-domain data and substantial computation. This paper proposes Channel… ▽ More Deep learning has shown strong potential for massive multiple-input multiple-output (Massive MIMO) physical-layer tasks, including channel state information (CSI) feedback and channel estimation. However, environmental heterogeneity can severely degrade CSI models in unseen scenarios, while conventional adaptation requires target-domain data and substantial computation. This paper proposes Channel Conditional Parameter Generation (CCPG), an end-to-end pipeline for rapid deployment of CSI models in dynamic wireless environments. CCPG identifies scene-sensitive adaptation bottlenecks through component-freezing experiments and generates only lightweight LoRA weights instead of full model parameters. It compresses high-dimensional channel features into compact latent conditions using cascaded SVD and a Perceiver Resampler. An energy-based canonicalization mechanism mitigates permutation and sign ambiguities in LoRA weights, while a diffusion-based generator incorporates structural information and an asymmetric size-aware loss for topology-aware parameter generation. Experiments on DeepMIMO and WAIR-D for CSI feedback and channel estimation show that CCPG adapts to new scenarios in about 3 seconds with a single forward pass, without target-scenario training or fine-tuning, and achieves cross-domain recovery performance comparable to costly online adaptation. These results demonstrate that CCPG enables efficient deployment of CSI models in large-scale dynamic wireless scenarios for intelligent 6G communications. △ Less

Submitted 22 June, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Reachability in Directed Acyclic Graphs with Near-Linear Cut Queries

Authors: Sanjeev Khanna, Aaron Putterman, Junkai Song

Abstract: In the cut-query model, an algorithm is given access to a graph $G = (V, E)$ \emph{only} via cut queries. This model has seen significant attention in the undirected graph setting, with works establishing $O(n)$ cut query algorithms for computing the global minimum cut, $\widetilde{O}(n^{3/2})$ cut query algorithms for all pairs minimum cut, and many more. However, despite this vast array of progr… ▽ More In the cut-query model, an algorithm is given access to a graph $G = (V, E)$ \emph{only} via cut queries. This model has seen significant attention in the undirected graph setting, with works establishing $O(n)$ cut query algorithms for computing the global minimum cut, $\widetilde{O}(n^{3/2})$ cut query algorithms for all pairs minimum cut, and many more. However, despite this vast array of progress in designing sub-quadratic query algorithms for computing properties of undirected graphs, there has been \emph{no} progress in designing such algorithms in directed graphs. Indeed, even for basic problems like whether a vertex $t$ is reachable from a vertex $s$, the cut query complexity is only known to be bounded in the interval $[Ω(n), O(n^2 / \log n)]$. In this work, we begin a systematic study of these basic problems in directed \emph{acyclic} graphs (DAGs). In this setting, we show that reachability from a single vertex and even topological sorting are both computable in $O(n \log^3 n)$ many cut queries. As a consequence, we also obtain an algorithm which, for any \emph{arbitrary} directed graph $G$, uses only $O(n \log^3 n)$ cut queries and determines whether $G$ contains a cycle. △ Less

Submitted 23 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Towards Ultra-High Reliability in Wi-Fi 8: IEEE 802.11bn Core Mechanisms, mmWave Integration, and Performance Verification

Authors: Xiaoqian Liu, Ming Gan, Weijie Dai, Yuhan Dong, Calvin Chun-Kit Chan, Jian Song

Abstract: As the demand for wireless connectivity expands from high-speed data transmission to high-reliability applications, such as the Industrial Internet of Things and immersive communications, traditional Wi-Fi technologies optimized primarily for peak throughput face new challenges in reliability and latency. Consequently, Wi-Fi 8 aims to achieve ultra-high reliability (UHR), improve communication per… ▽ More As the demand for wireless connectivity expands from high-speed data transmission to high-reliability applications, such as the Industrial Internet of Things and immersive communications, traditional Wi-Fi technologies optimized primarily for peak throughput face new challenges in reliability and latency. Consequently, Wi-Fi 8 aims to achieve ultra-high reliability (UHR), improve communication performance in complex environments, and drive the transition from high-speed connectivity to highly reliable intelligent connectivity. This article provides a comprehensive review of the core mechanisms of Wi-Fi 8 and conducts system-level performance verification. We focus on the key enhancement mechanisms at the physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layers in IEEE 802.11bn, elaborating on their theoretical principles and key application scenarios. Additionally, this paper explores the potential role of integrated millimeter-wave (IMMW) technology as a complementary solution for spectrum expansion in the Wi-Fi 8 era, analyzing its basic architecture and implementation. Finally, system-level simulations are performed to verify the effectiveness of the key technologies in IEEE 802.11bn in achieving their performance targets, while further validating the robust performance of the IMMW scheme under practical hardware impairments. △ Less

Submitted 22 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: 16 pages, 13 figures

Athena-Brain Technical Report: An Efficient Robot Brain for General Intelligence and Embodied Interaction

Authors: Jialian Li, Junhong Liu, Yuchen Cao, Weiran Guo, Jiaming Song, Xutao Wang, Yi Zhao, Jiangpin Liu, Jie Chen

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in language understanding, reasoning, and world knowledge. As embodied agents become increasingly capable, there is a growing demand for compact models that can serve as an on-device brain, preserving the broad general intelligence of LLMs while enabling effective high-level interaction with embodied environments. Existing appr… ▽ More Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in language understanding, reasoning, and world knowledge. As embodied agents become increasingly capable, there is a growing demand for compact models that can serve as an on-device brain, preserving the broad general intelligence of LLMs while enabling effective high-level interaction with embodied environments. Existing approaches, however, often prioritize either general-purpose intelligence or specialized embodied capabilities, making it challenging to satisfy both requirements within a single model. We present \textbf{Athena-Brain-8B}, an 8B LLM designed to serve as an on-device brain for embodied intelligence for embodied intelligence. Through a multi-stage post-training pipeline consisting of General Supervised Fine-Tuning, General Reinforcement Learning, Embodied Expert training, and Model Merge, Athena-Brain-8B maintains strong general capabilities while acquiring strong high-level embodied interaction capabilities and generating concise responses for efficient embodied interaction. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of Athena across both general and embodied evaluations. Compared with the corresponding Qwen3-8B thinking model, Athena-Brain-8B achieves comparable performance on general language and reasoning benchmarks while generating substantially shorter responses. On in-domain embodied benchmarks, Athena-Brain-8B consistently outperforms models of similar scale and surpasses several substantially larger frontier models evaluated zero-shot, demonstrating that compact language models can effectively integrate strong general intelligence with embodied capabilities. △ Less

Submitted 25 July, 2026; v1 submitted 21 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Pailitao-MMSearch: Building Native E-Commerce Multimodal Search Foundation

Authors: Xiaohan Ye, Xu Chen, Zihan Gong, Jian Ding, Lianyu Du, Baicheng Chen, Yunmeng Shu, Jingqian Zhao, Zhixiang Zhao, Shuaiqi Jia, Chong Ma, Shuwen Xiao, Xiangheng Kong, Yuan Gao, Jun Song, Jinsong Lan, Xiaoyong Zhu, Bo Zheng

Abstract: The evolution of e-commerce has fundamentally transformed how users search for products, shifting from simple text-based keyword queries to complex multimodal interactions that seamlessly combine product images, natural language descriptions, and mixed-intent instructions. However, existing approaches face a critical dilemma: single-modal specialist models, deployed independently for text retrieva… ▽ More The evolution of e-commerce has fundamentally transformed how users search for products, shifting from simple text-based keyword queries to complex multimodal interactions that seamlessly combine product images, natural language descriptions, and mixed-intent instructions. However, existing approaches face a critical dilemma: single-modal specialist models, deployed independently for text retrieval, visual search, and voice recognition, operate in isolation and cannot handle cross-modal queries, while general-purpose vision-language models lack the domain-specific knowledge necessary for fine-grained product understanding, user behavior modeling, and commercial intent reasoning. In this work, we present Pailitao-MMSearch, one native e-commerce multimodal search foundation model designed to bridge this gap. Our approach introduces three key innovations: (1)HybSID (Hybrid Semantic ID);(2)a two-stage continual pre-training strategy; and (3)a hybrid reasoning post-training pipeline. Built upon Qwen and deployed on Taobao's Pailitao multimodal search platform, Pailitao-MMSearch achieves substantial improvements in online A/B testing, including up to +13.61\% in Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) and +8.21\% in transaction volume compared to traditional multi-modal search pipeline, demonstrating the effectiveness of our native e-commerce multimodal search large language models. △ Less

Submitted 19 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: Technical Report: Pailitao-MMSearch

BoxTwin: Learning Elastoplastic Articulated Object Dynamics from Videos

Authors: Heng Zhang, Gehan Zheng, Kaifeng Zhang, Jay Song, Shivansh Patel, Sonny Hu, Yunzhu Li, Changxi Zheng, Peter Yichen Chen

Abstract: Digital twins enable robots to anticipate and adapt to physical interactions, but existing models struggle with elastoplastic articulated objects (EAOs) that exhibit nonlinear elasticity, plastic yielding, and damage accumulation. We present BoxTwin, an interactive digital twin framework that learns the full dynamics of EAOs from videos. Our pipeline reconstructs the scene, identifies a physics aw… ▽ More Digital twins enable robots to anticipate and adapt to physical interactions, but existing models struggle with elastoplastic articulated objects (EAOs) that exhibit nonlinear elasticity, plastic yielding, and damage accumulation. We present BoxTwin, an interactive digital twin framework that learns the full dynamics of EAOs from videos. Our pipeline reconstructs the scene, identifies a physics aware constitutive model for each EAO. Experiments on manual folding and dual arm manipulation of EAOs show that BoxTwin accurately tracks joint trajectories and reproduces post contact plastic behavior over long horizons. By integrating video driven reconstruction with elastoplastic damage modeling, BoxTwin advances digital twins toward predictive, adaptive control of deformable articulated objects in unstructured environments. △ Less

Submitted 19 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Position: Quantum Program Generation Must Prioritize Validity Over Probabilistic Scaling

Authors: Junhao Song, Yu Zhou, William Knottenbelt, Yudong Cao

Abstract: The scaling hypothesis assumes that increasing model parameters yields emergent reasoning capabilities. This position paper argues that applying this probabilistic paradigm to generic quantum circuit synthesis is a directional error. Unlike natural languages, quantum circuits require strict adherence to mathematical constraints that manifest a significant syntax-semantics gap. Training on unverifi… ▽ More The scaling hypothesis assumes that increasing model parameters yields emergent reasoning capabilities. This position paper argues that applying this probabilistic paradigm to generic quantum circuit synthesis is a directional error. Unlike natural languages, quantum circuits require strict adherence to mathematical constraints that manifest a significant syntax-semantics gap. Training on unverified quantum programs means that models learn syntax but fail to capture the physical semantics of the Hilbert space. Since the valid subset of circuit designs decays exponentially with the number of qubits, post-hoc filtering is mathematically intractable. We propose a pivot from human-centric copilots to verifier-centric agents. We integrate hierarchical constraints, topological masks, and symbolic proxies directly into generation. Our analysis suggests that scale alone cannot bridge the validity gap. Verification-aware architectures offer a viable path for modular quantum program generation. These considerations point toward generation methods that encode task-specific rules of quantum information, rather than relying on imitation alone. △ Less

Submitted 15 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: Accepted to ICML 2026: https://openreview.net/forum?id=oX1vWuQ13y

ANet Patu-1: The Value of Connection in the Agent Network

Authors: Mu Yuan, Jinke Song, Zhaomeng Zhou, Lan Zhang

Abstract: The Internet taught us that the value of a network depends on \emph{how} its nodes connect: broadcast stars scale as $V\!\propto\!N$ (Sarnoff), fully-connected meshes as $N^2$ (Metcalfe), and group-forming networks as $2^{N}$ (Reed). We ask the analogous question for networks of AI agents. We model the net value of connection as a function of coordination-group size, derive from it the properties… ▽ More The Internet taught us that the value of a network depends on \emph{how} its nodes connect: broadcast stars scale as $V\!\propto\!N$ (Sarnoff), fully-connected meshes as $N^2$ (Metcalfe), and group-forming networks as $2^{N}$ (Reed). We ask the analogous question for networks of AI agents. We model the net value of connection as a function of coordination-group size, derive from it the properties an optimal collaboration protocol must have, and introduce ANet Patu-1 -- a self-organizing consensus protocol in which the network continuously re-forms its own coalitions, adaptively riding the upper envelope of all three regimes at $O(1)$ parallel consensus rounds. To measure value without opinion-grading, we score an emergent protocol by formally specifying it and deriving its complexity, the way distributed algorithms are analyzed. Two results follow. (i)~Emergence -- a crowd of the \emph{cheapest} model, when heterogeneous, starts weak but its collective value compounds with $N$ and \emph{overtakes} a crowd of a far \emph{stronger} model that is homogeneous: a crossover that marks a scaling law for collaboration rather than for scale. (ii)~Reflexivity -- a heterogeneous network, given only its own problem and no design hints, converges on ANet Patu-1 itself, reconstructing the high-dimensional law that governs its own connective value. △ Less

Submitted 16 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

CoDiffGRN: Rethinking Gene Regulatory Network Inference via the BEELINE-KGC Benchmark and Co-evolutionary Discrete Diffusion

Authors: Jiaze Song, Runhao Zhao, Minghao Xu, Bin Cui, Wentao Zhang

Abstract: Inferring gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from single-cell transcriptomic data is crucial for biological discovery, yet existing approaches suffer from a fundamental misalignment with real-world needs. Researchers typically seek a small set of high-confidence regulatory interactions for experimental validation, often involving previously unseen genes. However, current benchmarks rely on transducti… ▽ More Inferring gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from single-cell transcriptomic data is crucial for biological discovery, yet existing approaches suffer from a fundamental misalignment with real-world needs. Researchers typically seek a small set of high-confidence regulatory interactions for experimental validation, often involving previously unseen genes. However, current benchmarks rely on transductive splits with global classification metrics, while prevailing models struggle to generalize under inductive settings. To bridge this gap, we reformulate GRN inference as an inductive, ranking-centric graph completion problem and introduce \textbf{\benchmark}, a new benchmark that incorporates an inductive gene-holdout split together with knowledge graph completion metrics to better evaluate top-ranked predictions. Building on this, we propose \textbf{\method}, the first co-evolutionary discrete diffusion framework that jointly models biologically coherent discretized gene expression states and regulatory interactions for robust inductive generalization and improved top-ranked regulatory discovery. We further introduce TF-ALL Subgraph Sampling (TASS) for scalable training. Extensive experiments on {\benchmark} show that {\method} establishes new state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing methods in novel regulatory discovery, and ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of our design. △ Less

Submitted 14 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: 19 pages, 6 figures