Showing 1–50 of 143 results for author: Zhong, R

DA-WAM: Decision-Aligned Future Latents for Driving World Models

Authors: Ruiguo Zhong, Benshan Ma, Xiaolong Chen, Lang Zhang, Mingyue Feng, Yaonong Wang, Pei Liu, Jun Ma

Abstract: Anticipating how scenes evolve under ego actions is fundamental to safe autonomous driving, yet the full potential of world models for decision-making remains unrealized. The critical challenge lies in ensuring that future modeling is not merely predictive, but decision-informative: the predicted future must directly shape which trajectory is selected. Existing approaches decouple future represent… ▽ More Anticipating how scenes evolve under ego actions is fundamental to safe autonomous driving, yet the full potential of world models for decision-making remains unrealized. The critical challenge lies in ensuring that future modeling is not merely predictive, but decision-informative: the predicted future must directly shape which trajectory is selected. Existing approaches decouple future representation learning from planning optimization, or share predicted states across trajectory candidates, thereby diluting the action-specific consequences that ought to guide selection. To bridge this gap, we propose DA-WAM, a framework that unifies predictive representation learning, action-conditioned future modeling, and trajectory scoring under a single decision-making objective. DA-WAM maintains predictive supervision throughout planner optimization via an online encoder and a stable momentum target, allowing future representations to co-evolve with the driving task. An action-conditioned predictor generates a distinct future latent state per trajectory candidate, which is then evaluated by a future-latent-conditioned factorized scorer. For the expert-matched trajectory, the predicted future latent is supervised by the observed future representation, while safety-critical hard negatives provide additional supervision near planning boundaries. Extensive experiments on NAVSIM-v1 and NAVSIM-v2 demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, while ablations and diagnostic analyses validate the key components. △ Less

Submitted 20 August, 2026; v1 submitted 19 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

UniVerse: Benchmarking and Enhancing LALMs on Culturally Inclusive Low-Resource Music Understanding

Authors: Ziya Zhou, Shangda Wu, Shenyang Xu, Yutong Zheng, Dafang Liang, Suin Chung, Danbinaerin Han, Junyan Jiang, Yongyi Zang, Ruibin Yuan, Rongxiu Zhong, Shilei Zhang, Junlan Feng, Jinglei Liu, Haotian Zhou, Zijin Li, Dasaem Jeong, Wei Xue, Yike Guo

Abstract: Recent advances in large audio-language models (LALMs) have significantly improved performance in tasks such as music captioning, genre classification, and sound event detection. However, limited attention has been paid to improving their adaptability across diverse musical traditions, particularly folk music rooted in distinct cultural contexts. Folk-music traditions are typically resource-scarce… ▽ More Recent advances in large audio-language models (LALMs) have significantly improved performance in tasks such as music captioning, genre classification, and sound event detection. However, limited attention has been paid to improving their adaptability across diverse musical traditions, particularly folk music rooted in distinct cultural contexts. Folk-music traditions are typically resource-scarce, unevenly represented across regions, and poorly documented. Even when such samples appear in large-scale pre-training, LALMs often fail to capture their structural and stylistic characteristics, partly due to the absence of dedicated evaluation protocols and training solutions. To address these limitations, we introduce UniVerse, a reproducible solution for low-resource music understanding. Specifically, we propose UniVerseBench, a benchmark of 5,042 Q&A pairs across more than 38 cultural and linguistic entities, constructed via an expert-guided yet highly automated pipeline. In parallel, we construct a fully automated, model-generated multi-turn dialogue training dataset UniVerseSet. By training LALMs on UniVerseSet, we systematically adapt and investigate representative multimodal imbalance learning strategies across both dense and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures. Experimental results indicate that fully automated data curation combined with imbalance-aware training yields non-trivial improvements, but models still struggle to capture fine-grained acoustic features, indicating a gap between surface-level alignment and deep musical comprehension. △ Less

Submitted 18 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: 21 pages, 7 figures, 8 tables

A Shop Floor Production Scheduling Case based on RFID-supported Smart Factory

Authors: Zhihui Chen, Yize Sun, Yuhao Dong, Zeyu Xiao, Ray Y. Zhong

Abstract: Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has been widely implemented for real-time data collection in manufacturing shop floors, which, in turn, can be used to support dynamic shop floor production planning and scheduling. Within such an environment, uncertainty in operation and production processes collectively contribute to the dynamicity in manufacturing, thereby hampering the schedulin… ▽ More Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has been widely implemented for real-time data collection in manufacturing shop floors, which, in turn, can be used to support dynamic shop floor production planning and scheduling. Within such an environment, uncertainty in operation and production processes collectively contribute to the dynamicity in manufacturing, thereby hampering the scheduling system from achieving maximal utility. To highlight the importance of handling such uncertainty, this paper addresses the problem of dynamic shop floor scheduling for a real-life case smart factory equipped with RFID technology. Feasible production sequence mining and real-time processing rate estimation are conducted on RFID-collected production data to quantify the operation and production uncertainties. A deep reinforcement learning approach based on the RFID data analysis is then presented for shop floor production scheduling. Simulation studies based on real-life case data have demonstrated the feasibility and practicality of the proposed dynamic production scheduling framework. Specifically, it is observed that the proposed framework outperforms existing dispatch methods in terms of minimizing operation makespan, including first in first out (FIFO), last in first out (LIFO) and deep Q network (DQN). △ Less

Submitted 17 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

BDH-CQ: In-Context Learning with Recurrent Latent Reasoning

Authors: Björn Engdahl, Adrian Kosowski, Jan Chorowski, Zuzanna Stamirowska, Przemysław Uznański, Junlin Jiang, Rohan Phadke, Remigiusz Kinas, Richard Zhong

Abstract: We introduce BDH-CQ, a reasoning model that combines in-context learning with recurrent latent reasoning. Inputs presented at inference time continuously update the model's recurrent memory; the model then solves a query through iterative computation in a high-dimensional latent space, without verbalizing its intermediate reasoning. We evaluate the model on the public ARC-AGI-1 evaluation set and… ▽ More We introduce BDH-CQ, a reasoning model that combines in-context learning with recurrent latent reasoning. Inputs presented at inference time continuously update the model's recurrent memory; the model then solves a query through iterative computation in a high-dimensional latent space, without verbalizing its intermediate reasoning. We evaluate the model on the public ARC-AGI-1 evaluation set and use controlled ARC-like interventions to study what it learns from demonstrations, how consistently it applies an inferred transformation, and which concepts remain difficult. A 150M-parameter configuration reaches 29.5% pass@2 at a computed inference cost of \$0.0007 per task. This operating point breaks through the previously reported ARC-AGI-1 cost-accuracy Pareto frontier, establishing a new state of the art in benchmark cost efficiency. △ Less

Submitted 10 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: https://github.com/pathwaycom/arc-task-gen

LaRec: Unleashing LLM-based Latent Reasoning for Generative Recommendation

Authors: Yu Xia, Zihan Lin, Wei Yang, Rui Zhong, Cheng Chen, Huan Ren, Yao Hu

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great promise in recommendation due to superior reasoning abilities. However, existing methods mainly rely on explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT), resulting in verbose reasoning texts and inefficient response times. latent reasoning aims to balance efficiency by thinking within a continuous latent space, yet it faces two major challenges: (1) Lack of Fine-graine… ▽ More Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great promise in recommendation due to superior reasoning abilities. However, existing methods mainly rely on explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT), resulting in verbose reasoning texts and inefficient response times. latent reasoning aims to balance efficiency by thinking within a continuous latent space, yet it faces two major challenges: (1) Lack of Fine-grained Supervision: Latent reasoning relies solely on feedback from the final labels, providing sparse supervisory signals that struggle to effectively guide the optimization of multiple hidden reasoning steps. (2) Single Reasoning Path: The deterministic nature of latent reasoning impedes the exploration of users' diverse interests and preferences, thereby limiting the recommendation capabilities of LLMs. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{$LaRec$}, an efficient generative recommendation framework designed to unleash the potential of latent reasoning in LLMs. $LaRec$ consists of two core stages: First, we design Latent Pre-training that empowers LLMs with latent reasoning capabilities by providing rich supervisory signals to the latent space reasoning via step-level alignment and process direction alignment. Second, we introduce Personalized RL-tuning. Specifically, we construct a personalized Gaussian Mixture Distribution for each user based on their historical interests. By randomly sampling distinct reasoning starting points from this distribution during training, we guide the LLMs to traverse diverse reasoning paths within the latent space, enabling efficient exploration of user's multi-faceted interests. Experiments on multiple datasets show that $LaRec$ significantly outperforms existing baselines with comparable efficiency. △ Less

Submitted 27 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

DiTango: Cost-Effective Parallel Diffusion Generation with Selective Attention State Reuse

Authors: Yuyang Chen, Runxin Zhong, Zan Zong, Hengjie Li, Yuyang Jin, Jidong Zhai

Abstract: Recent advances in AI-generated content have driven widespread adoption of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) for high-resolution, long-duration content generation. While parallelization techniques accelerate diffusion inference, they face significant scalability challenges due to excessive communication overhead in multi-node environments. We observe that sequence partitions in Context Parallelism (… ▽ More Recent advances in AI-generated content have driven widespread adoption of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) for high-resolution, long-duration content generation. While parallelization techniques accelerate diffusion inference, they face significant scalability challenges due to excessive communication overhead in multi-node environments. We observe that sequence partitions in Context Parallelism (CP) exhibit distinct heterogeneity: spatially proximate partitions contribute more significantly to attention computation results. By mapping this heterogeneous pattern to hierarchical communication topology, we can access high-contribution partitions with reduced communication cost. This insight motivates our novel selective attention state mechanism that strategically balances partial attention computation and historical result reuse across denoising steps. We present DiTango, an efficient parallel framework for DiT generation. DiTango features an anchor-guided state selection planner that optimizes computation-reuse decisions for each partition, complemented by a runtime that orchestrates efficient state-centric operations. This design achieves superior system efficiency while preserving generation quality. Experimental evaluation on popular diffusion models demonstrates that DiTango achieves up to 1.9x end-to-end and 3.2x attention speedup with near-linear scaling in multi-node settings, while maintaining generation quality comparable to state-of-the-art approaches. △ Less

Submitted 17 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

ACM Class: C.1.4

Journal ref: The 35th International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC'26), July 13--16, 2026, Cleveland, OH, USA

Event-RGB Adaptive Tracking for Nighttime Highway Perception

Authors: Haidong Wang, Hengxing Cai, Wanlei Li, Xiaogang Xiong, Renxin Zhong

Abstract: Intelligent Transportation Systems deployed on highways predominantly rely on conventional RGB cameras for traffic perception and vehicle tracking. However, highway environments present unique challenges: the absence of artificial lighting infrastructure, combined with high vehicle velocities, results in severely degraded perception performance under low-light conditions. Specifically, nighttime s… ▽ More Intelligent Transportation Systems deployed on highways predominantly rely on conventional RGB cameras for traffic perception and vehicle tracking. However, highway environments present unique challenges: the absence of artificial lighting infrastructure, combined with high vehicle velocities, results in severely degraded perception performance under low-light conditions. Specifically, nighttime scenarios suffer from motion blur, insufficient exposure, and poor signal-to-noise ratios, which catastrophically impair the reliability of RGB-based sensing systems. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Joint Event-RGB Adaptive Tracking (JEAT) framework. Unlike existing multi-sensor trackers constrained by rigid, hard-coded prioritization, JEAT merges asynchronous event streams and RGB frames into a unified joint data association optimization. By employing an Adaptive Extended Kalman Filter to continuously estimate measurement noise via NIS statistics, the framework dynamically weights and fuses both modalities, optimally harnessing event streams during dark or high-speed motion while leveraging RGB frames under bright or static conditions. Furthermore, given the absence of publicly available datasets tailored for event-based highway perception with diverse environmental conditions, we present SEHN, a large-scale synthetic dataset generated using the CARLA simulator. Our dataset encompasses diverse environmental conditions (daytime, nighttime, nighttime with out artificial lighting) and varying traffic densities, providing synchronized RGB imagery and event streams to facilitate multi-modal fusion research. Our code and datasets will be available at https://github.com/haidongwang96/SEHN. △ Less

Submitted 13 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Compile, Then Page: Executable SOP Programs and a Capability-Gated Runtime for Procedural LLM Agents

Authors: Chenglin Yu, Li Yin, Qingxin Fan, Ying Yu, RunyangRay Zhong, Ming Li

Abstract: Enterprise agents must follow long-horizon, conditional, safety-critical standard operating procedures (SOPs). We compile machine-readable SOP constraints into executable pseudo-code and run them with a program-guided (PG) stack machine that pages the active frame while an LLM performs semantic execution. A three-arm SOPBench study across six models separates representation from runtime: compiled… ▽ More Enterprise agents must follow long-horizon, conditional, safety-critical standard operating procedures (SOPs). We compile machine-readable SOP constraints into executable pseudo-code and run them with a program-guided (PG) stack machine that pages the active frame while an LLM performs semantic execution. A three-arm SOPBench study across six models separates representation from runtime: compiled text never significantly hurts and gains up to 16.0 points where official prose underperforms. Runtime guidance is capability-gated. Two strong models independently show positive seven-domain PG contrasts (58:19 and 75:31 discordant pairs), whereas weak models are harmed. A full-program cursor ablation (active frame first, complete program retained) recovers much of the strong-model refusal gain; selective visibility adds a smaller improvement. Paired probe and audit measurements track this divide to spontaneous state discipline rather than reconstruction ability. On Bank the three primary arms rise from 70.4 to 86.4 to 92.8, with 100% refusal correctness. Practical guidance: compile first; enable active-frame paging only after a model-level discipline check. △ Less

Submitted 23 July, 2026; v1 submitted 13 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: 9 pages, 3 figures, 5 tables

ProgramTab: Boosting Table Reasoning of LLMs via Programmatic Paradigm

Authors: Pei Guo, Enjie Liu, Yunzhi Tan, Mochi Gao, Jianxin Zhang, Ruichao Zhong, Juntao Li, Bo Hu, Zang Li

Abstract: Table-based reasoning with large language models (LLMs), which requires reasoning based on natural language questions and structured tabular data, has gained widespread attention. However, a series of issues still constrain the application of this task. The previous approaches suffered from significant performance degradation when faced with large tables due to the difficulty of long text modeling… ▽ More Table-based reasoning with large language models (LLMs), which requires reasoning based on natural language questions and structured tabular data, has gained widespread attention. However, a series of issues still constrain the application of this task. The previous approaches suffered from significant performance degradation when faced with large tables due to the difficulty of long text modeling and the limitation of input length for LLMs. The text-to-SQL approach is used to efficiently extract key information from tables and generate smaller sub-tables. However, tabular data, especially web tables, often lack the necessary structure and consistency, making them unsuitable for performing mathematical logic operations using SQL queries. We propose the ProgramTab framework, which guides LLMs employing in-context learning to perform tabular data preprocessing with Python code, as well as the momentous contents extraction with row and column extraction and SQL generation. The experiment results on table reasoning datasets demonstrate that the ProgramTab framework effectively deals with table-based reasoning tasks and outperforms all LLM-based baselines. △ Less

Submitted 13 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: Large Language Models, Table Reasoning, In-context Learning

ACE: Agentic Control for Embodied Manipulation via Zero-shot Workflow Reasoning

Authors: Iok Tong Lei, QianZhi Li, Ying Jie Yap, Yujie Zhang, Rui Zhong, Haichao Gui, Xiaolong Liu, Zhidong Deng

Abstract: Open-ended tabletop manipulation requires agents to not only understand natural language but also adapt to dynamic environments and execution failures. We present ACE (Agentic Control for Embodied Manipulation), a zero-shot workflow reasoning framework for tabletop pick-and-place from natural language. Rather than relying on direct low-level action mapping, ACE combines agentic workflow reasoning… ▽ More Open-ended tabletop manipulation requires agents to not only understand natural language but also adapt to dynamic environments and execution failures. We present ACE (Agentic Control for Embodied Manipulation), a zero-shot workflow reasoning framework for tabletop pick-and-place from natural language. Rather than relying on direct low-level action mapping, ACE combines agentic workflow reasoning with two robot-facing executable skills: a visual grounding interface and a reusable pick-and-place primitive. To bridge semantic reasoning and physical control, the active sub-goal is grounded into a mask-mediated vision-action interface. This unified mask specifies the target object and destination, is tracked over time, exposed for human verification, and ultimately passed to a task-agnostic downstream policy for execution. Crucially, ACE operates in a closed loop supported by a multi-timescale memory. After an action is executed, the system automatically verifies whether the intended sub-goal succeeded, using the outcome to advance, retry, repair, or replan. This enables online adaptation to user corrections, scene changes, and physical failures. We evaluate ACE on logically complex, long-horizon tasks, including zero-shot multi-step equation formation with number cubes and constraint-based object retrieval. ACE demonstrates task-level zero-shot generalization on novel semantic constraints and randomized tabletop scenes without task-specific retraining. Specifically, while standard end-to-end baselines struggle to complete these logically demanding tasks, ACE achieves a 50% success rate in equation formation and a 70% success rate in constraint retrieval. This contrast demonstrates that explicit workflow reasoning and mask-mediated control offer a robust, practical route toward adaptable robotic manipulation. △ Less

Submitted 5 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: Preprint

UniSAE: Unified Speech Attribute Editing on Speaker, Emotion and Low-Level Content via Discrete Phonetic Posteriorgram Modelling

Authors: Chuanbo Zhu, Wuyou Zhou, Rongxiu Zhong, Shilei Zhang, Kun Qian, Yike Guo, Wei Xue

Abstract: Speech editing aims to modify specific portions of an utterance while preserving the remaining speech. Existing approaches primarily focus on word-level content modification and typically treat content, speaker, and emotion editing as separate tasks, limiting both editing granularity and flexibility. We propose UniSAE, a unified speech attribute editing framework which supports composable speaker,… ▽ More Speech editing aims to modify specific portions of an utterance while preserving the remaining speech. Existing approaches primarily focus on word-level content modification and typically treat content, speaker, and emotion editing as separate tasks, limiting both editing granularity and flexibility. We propose UniSAE, a unified speech attribute editing framework which supports composable speaker, emotion and content editing from sub-phoneme to word level within a single architecture. UniSAE introduces a Discrete Phonetic PosteriorGram (DPPG) representation that factorizes speech content into discrete tokens encoding phoneme identity, pronunciation variants, and duration, enabling direct phoneme- and sub-phoneme-level editing. For higher-level modifications, an autoregressive content transformer predicts edited DPPG sequences for word-level content editing. The edited sequences are rendered into speech by a diffusion-based acoustic decoder, conditioned on disentangled speaker and emotion representations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed unified framework supports precise speaker and emotion control, content editing at multiple granularities, and joint modification of all three attributes within a single framework. △ Less

Submitted 30 June, 2026; originally announced June 2026.

LUNA-AD: Lightweight Uncertainty-Aware Language Model with Lifelong Learning for Autonomous Driving

Authors: Ruoyu Yao, Pei Liu, Ruiguo Zhong, Mingxing Peng, Rui Yang, Jun Ma

Abstract: While large language models (LLMs) offer promising reasoning capabilities, their integration into safety-critical driving systems is hindered by limited reasoning diversity, high computational overhead, and static learning paradigms. To address these challenges, we propose LUNA-AD, a lightweight uncertainty-aware language model with lifelong learning for autonomous driving (AD). LUNA-AD features a… ▽ More While large language models (LLMs) offer promising reasoning capabilities, their integration into safety-critical driving systems is hindered by limited reasoning diversity, high computational overhead, and static learning paradigms. To address these challenges, we propose LUNA-AD, a lightweight uncertainty-aware language model with lifelong learning for autonomous driving (AD). LUNA-AD features a tri-system architecture that reconciles complex multimodal behavioral reasoning, efficient deployment, and continual refinement. We design a multi-agent analytical system to generate uncertainty-aware decision-making demonstrations through diverse hypothesis exploration. A dual-head lightweight heuristic model is distilled to unify the inference of decision distributions and textual explanations while enabling efficient deployment. Furthermore, a reflection-driven lifelong learning mechanism operates on multimodal decision outputs and preserves strategic diversity, allowing for the refinement of candidate decisions and rationales via closed-loop feedback to enhance driving robustness. Extensive experiments on nuPlan benchmarks demonstrate that LUNA-AD achieves state-of-the-art success rates under both non-reactive and reactive modes, with drastically reduced inference latency compared to existing knowledge-driven AD frameworks. △ Less

Submitted 7 June, 2026; originally announced June 2026.

Comments: 16 pages,9 figures

MemTrace: Tracing and Attributing Errors in Large Language Model Memory Systems

Authors: Xinle Deng, Ruobin Zhong, Hujin Peng, Xiaoben Lu, Yanzhe Wu, Guang Li, Buqiang Xu, Yunzhi Yao, Jizhan Fang, Haoliang Cao, Junjie Guo, Yuan Yuan, Ziqing Ma, Yuanqiang Yu, Rui Hu, Baohua Dong, Hangcheng Zhu, Ningyu Zhang

Abstract: Memory is essential for enabling large language models to support long-horizon reasoning, yet existing memory systems remain unreliable and difficult to debug. Tracing memory's dynamic evolution is crucial to understand how information is synthesized, propagated, or corrupted over time. In this work, we study the new problem of error tracing and attribution in LLM memory systems. We propose a nove… ▽ More Memory is essential for enabling large language models to support long-horizon reasoning, yet existing memory systems remain unreliable and difficult to debug. Tracing memory's dynamic evolution is crucial to understand how information is synthesized, propagated, or corrupted over time. In this work, we study the new problem of error tracing and attribution in LLM memory systems. We propose a novel framework that transforms memory pipelines into executable memory evolution graphs, enabling fine-grained tracing of operational information flow. We then construct MemTraceBench, a benchmark collected from representative memory systems such as Long-Context, RAG, Mem0, and EverMemOS, to systematically study memory failure modes. We further introduce an automatic attribution method that iteratively traces operation subgraphs to pinpoint the root cause of any failed case. Our analysis reveals that memory failures are systematic, stemming from operation-level issues like information loss and retrieval misalignment. Crucially, we leverage these fine-grained attribution signals to guide downstream prompt optimization, establishing a closed-loop system that automatically corrects faults and boosts end-task performance by up to 7.62%. Code will be released at https://github.com/zjunlp/MemTrace. △ Less

Submitted 16 July, 2026; v1 submitted 27 May, 2026; originally announced May 2026.

Comments: Ongoing work

Decision-Making with Lightweight Confidence-Aware Language Model for Autonomous Driving

Authors: Ruoyu Yao, Ruiguo Zhong, Pei Liu, Mingxing Peng, Rui Yang, Jun Ma

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) have demonstrated immense potential in autonomous driving (AD) by offering human-like reasoning and open-world generalization. However, the excessive computational overhead and high inference latency of these massive models severely hinder their deployment in resource-constrained AD systems. To address this challenge, we propose a novel deci… ▽ More Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) have demonstrated immense potential in autonomous driving (AD) by offering human-like reasoning and open-world generalization. However, the excessive computational overhead and high inference latency of these massive models severely hinder their deployment in resource-constrained AD systems. To address this challenge, we propose a novel decision-making framework utilizing a lightweight confidence-aware language model, which bridges the gap between complex multimodal intention reasoning and efficient inference. Specifically, we design a multi-agent collaborative workflow, comprising action voting, confidence assessment, and summarization agents, to generate high-quality, confidence-annotated decision demonstrations via explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. These demonstrations are then distilled into a lightweight language model featuring a dual-head architecture, enabling the joint prediction of decision probabilities and the generation of textual rationales. The distillation is realized via a confidence-aware fine-tuning strategy coupled with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to enhance the model's adaptability and data efficiency. Comprehensive closed-loop experiments on the nuPlan benchmark demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) success rates in both regular and long-tail scenarios while maintaining low inference latency. △ Less

Submitted 24 May, 2026; originally announced May 2026.

Comments: 8 Pages, 3 figures, ITSC 2026

SARA: Semantically Adaptive Relational Alignment for Video Diffusion Models

Authors: Jiesong Lian, Zixiang Zhou, Ruizhe Zhong, Yuan Zhou, Qinglin Lu, Rui Wang, Long Hu, Yixue Hao, Baoru Huang

Abstract: Recent video diffusion models (VDMs) synthesize visually convincing clips, yet still drop entities, mis-bind attributes, and weaken the interactions specified in the prompt. Representation-alignment objectives such as VideoREPA and MoAlign improve fine-grained text following by distilling spatio-temporal token relations from a frozen visual foundation model, but their pairwise supervision budget i… ▽ More Recent video diffusion models (VDMs) synthesize visually convincing clips, yet still drop entities, mis-bind attributes, and weaken the interactions specified in the prompt. Representation-alignment objectives such as VideoREPA and MoAlign improve fine-grained text following by distilling spatio-temporal token relations from a frozen visual foundation model, but their pairwise supervision budget is allocated by visual or motion cues rather than by how relevant each pair is to the prompt. We present SARA, Semantically Adaptive Relational Alignment, which keeps token-relation distillation (TRD) on a frozen VFM target and adds a text-conditioned saliency that decides which token pairs carry supervision. A lightweight Stage~1 aligner is trained with per-entity SAM~3.1 mask supervision and an InfoNCE regulariser, and its continuous saliency is fused into TRD through a pair-routing operator that assigns each token pair a weight whenever either of its two endpoints is salient, thereby routing supervision toward subject-subject and subject-background pairs and away from background-background ones. In the Wan2.2 continual-training setting, SARA improves both text alignment and motion quality over SFT, VideoREPA, and MoAlign on a 13-dimension VLM rubric, on the public VBench benchmarks, and in a blind user study. Project page: https://saradit.github.io/. △ Less

Submitted 9 June, 2026; v1 submitted 8 May, 2026; originally announced May 2026.

TimeMM: Time-as-Operator Spectral Filtering for Dynamic Multimodal Recommendation

Authors: Wei Yang, Rui Zhong, Zihan Lin, Xiaodan Wang, Cheng Chen, Huan Ren, Yao Hu

Abstract: Multimodal recommendation improves user modeling by integrating collaborative signals with heterogeneous item content. In real applications, user interests evolve over time and exhibit nonstationary dynamics, where different preference factors change at different rates. This challenge is amplified in multimodal settings because visual and textual cues can dominate decisions under different tempora… ▽ More Multimodal recommendation improves user modeling by integrating collaborative signals with heterogeneous item content. In real applications, user interests evolve over time and exhibit nonstationary dynamics, where different preference factors change at different rates. This challenge is amplified in multimodal settings because visual and textual cues can dominate decisions under different temporal regimes. Despite strong progress, most multimodal recommenders still rely on static interaction graphs or coarse temporal heuristics, which limits their ability to model continuous preference evolution with fine-grained temporal adaptation. To address these limitations, we propose TimeMM, a time-conditioned spectral filtering framework for dynamic multimodal recommendation. TimeMM instantiates Time-as-Operator by mapping interaction recency to a family of parametric temporal kernels that reweight edges on the user--item graph, producing component-specific representations without explicit eigendecomposition. To capture non-stationary interests, we introduce Adaptive Spectral Filtering that mixes the operator bank according to temporal context, yielding prediction-specific effective spectral responses. To account for modality-specific temporal sensitivity, we further propose Spectral-Aware Modality Routing that calibrates visual and textual contributions conditioned on the same temporal context. Finally, a ranking-space Spectral Diversity Regularization encourages complementary expert behaviors and prevents filter-bank collapse. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that TimeMM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art multimodal recommenders while maintaining linear-time scalability. △ Less

Submitted 28 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Not Another EHR: Reimagining Physician Information Needs with Generative AI Technology

Authors: Ruican Zhong, Jiachen Li, Gary Hsieh, David W. McDonald, Selin S. Everett, Alyssa Unell, Jonathan Carlson, Katie Claveau, Noel Codella, Khalil Malik, Scott Mackie, Eduardo Olvera, Scott Saponas, Eric Horvitz, David Rhew, Jim Weinstein, Jacob Gross, Amanda K. Hall

Abstract: Electronic health records (EHRs) have improved data accessibility but have also introduced cognitive burden for physicians, given the sheer volume and complexity of the data involved. Advances in large language models (LLMs) create new opportunities to rethink how clinicians interact with medical data through dynamic, adaptive interfaces. In this position paper, we explore how generative AI can su… ▽ More Electronic health records (EHRs) have improved data accessibility but have also introduced cognitive burden for physicians, given the sheer volume and complexity of the data involved. Advances in large language models (LLMs) create new opportunities to rethink how clinicians interact with medical data through dynamic, adaptive interfaces. In this position paper, we explore how generative AI can support physicians' information needs by enabling more dynamic interactions with patient data. Through semi-structured interviews with internal physicians at Microsoft, we identify key challenges in data navigation and synthesis, and characterize clinicians' information needs during diagnostic workflows. We further examine how physicians conceptualize AI can help their work process and how these mental models shape expectations for interaction and trust. Based on these insights, we discuss design considerations for generative user interfaces that support clinician-centered workflows. △ Less

Submitted 23 March, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

StructMem: Structured Memory for Long-Horizon Behavior in LLMs

Authors: Buqiang Xu, Yijun Chen, Jizhan Fang, Ruobin Zhong, Yunzhi Yao, Yuqi Zhu, Lun Du, Shumin Deng

Abstract: Long-term conversational agents need memory systems that capture relationships between events, not merely isolated facts, to support temporal reasoning and multi-hop question answering. Current approaches face a fundamental trade-off: flat memory is efficient but fails to model relational structure, while graph-based memory enables structured reasoning at the cost of expensive and fragile construc… ▽ More Long-term conversational agents need memory systems that capture relationships between events, not merely isolated facts, to support temporal reasoning and multi-hop question answering. Current approaches face a fundamental trade-off: flat memory is efficient but fails to model relational structure, while graph-based memory enables structured reasoning at the cost of expensive and fragile construction. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{StructMem}, a structure-enriched hierarchical memory framework that preserves event-level bindings and induces cross-event connections. By temporally anchoring dual perspectives and performing periodic semantic consolidation, StructMem improves temporal reasoning and multi-hop performance on \texttt{LoCoMo}, while substantially reducing token usage, API calls, and runtime compared to prior memory systems, see https://github.com/zjunlp/LightMem . △ Less

Submitted 23 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Comments: Accepted by ACL 2026 main conference

Automated Logging Is Language-Sensitive: A Multilingual Benchmark and Empirical Study of LLMs

Authors: Renyi Zhong, Yichen Li, Yulun Wu, Jinxi Kuang, Yintong Huo, Michael R. Lyu

Abstract: Logging statements are central to debugging, failure diagnosis, and production observability, yet writing them requires developers to decide where to place a logging statement, which API and severity level to use, and what runtime information to expose. Automated logging aims to reduce this burden, but existing evidence remains dominated by Java-centric repository-snapshot dataset. It is therefore… ▽ More Logging statements are central to debugging, failure diagnosis, and production observability, yet writing them requires developers to decide where to place a logging statement, which API and severity level to use, and what runtime information to expose. Automated logging aims to reduce this burden, but existing evidence remains dominated by Java-centric repository-snapshot dataset. It is therefore unclear whether conclusions about model behavior and model selection generalize across programming-language ecosystems or realistic code evolution. This paper presents MultiLogBench, a multilingual benchmark and empirical study spanning six programming language ecosystems. MultiLogBench contains 63,965 production-code repository-snapshot instances, 744 revision-history cases where developers introduce logging statements during maintenance, and a paired transformed revision-history branch for robustness analysis. Using seven contemporary large language models under a unified protocol, we evaluate logging-site localization, framework-anchor matching, severity prediction, message generation, variable recovery, and cascaded overall quality. Results show clear cross-language variation: framework-anchor matching is the most language-sensitive component, loop and nested-callable sites are the hardest structural contexts, and model rankings are stable only at the top tier. These patterns persist at a coarse level on revision-history data, while transformed inputs do not cause a broad same-direction performance collapse. Overall, MultiLogBench shows that robust claims about automated logging require multilingual evaluation and maintenance-oriented validation. △ Less

Submitted 5 August, 2026; v1 submitted 19 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Nemotron 3 Super: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning

Authors: NVIDIA, :, Aakshita Chandiramani, Aaron Blakeman, Abdullahi Olaoye, Abhibha Gupta, Abhilash Somasamudramath, Abhinav Khattar, Adeola Adesoba, Adi Renduchintala, Adil Asif, Aditya Agrawal, Aditya Vavre, Ahmad Kiswani, Aishwarya Padmakumar, Ajay Hotchandani, Akanksha Shukla, Akhiad Bercovich, Aleksander Ficek, Aleksandr Shaposhnikov, Alex Gronskiy, Alex Kondratenko, Alex Neefus, Alex Steiner, Alex Yang , et al. (522 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: We describe the pre-training, post-training, and quantization of Nemotron 3 Super, a 120 billion (active 12 billion) parameter hybrid Mamba-Attention Mixture-of-Experts model. Nemotron 3 Super is the first model in the Nemotron 3 family to 1) be pre-trained in NVFP4, 2) leverage LatentMoE, a new Mixture-of-Experts architecture that optimizes for both accuracy per FLOP and accuracy per parameter, a… ▽ More We describe the pre-training, post-training, and quantization of Nemotron 3 Super, a 120 billion (active 12 billion) parameter hybrid Mamba-Attention Mixture-of-Experts model. Nemotron 3 Super is the first model in the Nemotron 3 family to 1) be pre-trained in NVFP4, 2) leverage LatentMoE, a new Mixture-of-Experts architecture that optimizes for both accuracy per FLOP and accuracy per parameter, and 3) include MTP layers for inference acceleration through native speculative decoding. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Super on 25 trillion tokens followed by post-training using supervised fine tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). The final model supports up to 1M context length and achieves comparable accuracy on common benchmarks, while also achieving up to 2.2x and 7.5x higher inference throughput compared to GPT-OSS-120B and Qwen3.5-122B, respectively. Nemotron 3 Super datasets, along with the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, are open-sourced on HuggingFace. △ Less

Submitted 14 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

G-ICSO-NAS: Shifting Gears between Gradient and Swarm for Robust Neural Architecture Search

Authors: Xingbang Du, Enzhi Zhang, Rui Zhong, Yang Cao, Masaharu Munetomo

Abstract: Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has become a pivotal technique in automated machine learning. Evolutionary Algorithm (EA)-based methods demonstrate superior search quality but suffer from prohibitive computational costs, while gradient-based approaches like DARTS offer high efficiency but are prone to premature convergence and performance collapse. To bridge this gap, we propose G-ICSO-NAS, a hyb… ▽ More Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has become a pivotal technique in automated machine learning. Evolutionary Algorithm (EA)-based methods demonstrate superior search quality but suffer from prohibitive computational costs, while gradient-based approaches like DARTS offer high efficiency but are prone to premature convergence and performance collapse. To bridge this gap, we propose G-ICSO-NAS, a hybrid framework implementing a three-stage optimization strategy. The Warm-up Phase pre-trains supernet weights ($w$) via differentiable methods while architecture parameters ($α$) remain frozen. The Exploration Phase adopts a hybrid co-optimization mechanism: an Improved Competitive Swarm Optimizer (ICSO) with diversity-aware fitness navigates the architecture space to update $α$, while gradient descent concurrently updates $w$. The Stability Phase employs fine-grained gradient-based search with early stopping to converge to the optimal architecture. By synergizing ICSO's global navigation capability with differentiable methods' efficiency, G-ICSO-NAS achieves remarkable performance with minimal cost. In the context of the DARTS search space, an accuracy of 97.46\% is achieved on CIFAR-10 with a computational budget of just 0.15 GPU-Days. The method also exhibits strong transfer potential, recording accuracies of 83.1\% (CIFAR-100) and 75.02\% (ImageNet). Furthermore, regarding the NAS-Bench-201 benchmark, G-ICSO-NAS is shown to deliver state-of-the-art results across all evaluated datasets. △ Less

Submitted 1 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Comments: Accepted at the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), WCCI 2026. This is a preprint version

SqueezeComposer: Temporal Speed-up is A Simple Trick for Long-form Music Composing

Authors: Jianyi Chen, Rongxiu Zhong, Shilei Zhang, Kun Qian, Jinglei Liu, Yike Guo, Wei Xue

Abstract: Composing coherent long-form music remains a significant challenge due to the complexity of modeling long-range dependencies and the prohibitive memory and computational requirements associated with lengthy audio representations. In this work, we propose a simple yet powerful trick: we assume that AI models can understand and generate time-accelerated (speeded-up) audio at rates such as 2x, 4x, or… ▽ More Composing coherent long-form music remains a significant challenge due to the complexity of modeling long-range dependencies and the prohibitive memory and computational requirements associated with lengthy audio representations. In this work, we propose a simple yet powerful trick: we assume that AI models can understand and generate time-accelerated (speeded-up) audio at rates such as 2x, 4x, or even 8x. By first generating a high-speed version of the music, we greatly reduce the temporal length and resource requirements, making it feasible to handle long-form music that would otherwise exceed memory or computational limits. The generated audio is then restored to its original speed, recovering the full temporal structure. This temporal speed-up and slow-down strategy naturally follows the principle of hierarchical generation from abstract to detailed content, and can be conveniently applied to existing music generation models to enable long-form music generation. We instantiate this idea in SqueezeComposer, a framework that employs diffusion models for generation in the accelerated domain and refinement in the restored domain. We validate the effectiveness of this approach on two tasks: long-form music generation, which evaluates temporal-wise control (including continuation, completion, and generation from scratch), and whole-song singing accompaniment generation, which evaluates track-wise control. Experimental results demonstrate that our simple temporal speed-up trick enables efficient, scalable, and high-quality long-form music generation. Audio samples are available at https://SqueezeComposer.github.io/. △ Less

Submitted 22 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: Under Review

SkillNet: Create, Evaluate, and Connect AI Skills

Authors: Yuan Liang, Ruobin Zhong, Haoming Xu, Chen Jiang, Yi Zhong, Runnan Fang, Jia-Chen Gu, Shumin Deng, Yunzhi Yao, Mengru Wang, Shuofei Qiao, Yida Xue, Xin Xu, Tongtong Wu, Kun Wang, Yang Liu, Zhen Bi, Jungang Lou, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Hangcheng Zhu, Gang Yu, Haiwen Hong, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Chenxi Wang , et al. (25 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: Current AI agents can flexibly invoke tools and execute complex tasks, yet their long-term advancement is hindered by the lack of systematic accumulation and transfer of skills. Without a unified mechanism for skill consolidation, agents frequently ``reinvent the wheel'', rediscovering solutions in isolated contexts without leveraging prior strategies. To address this challenge, we introduce Skill… ▽ More Current AI agents can flexibly invoke tools and execute complex tasks, yet their long-term advancement is hindered by the lack of systematic accumulation and transfer of skills. Without a unified mechanism for skill consolidation, agents frequently ``reinvent the wheel'', rediscovering solutions in isolated contexts without leveraging prior strategies. To address this challenge, we introduce SkillNet, an open infrastructure for creating, evaluating, and organizing AI skills at scale. SkillNet structures skills within a unified ontology that supports creating skills from heterogeneous sources, establishing rich relational connections, and performing multi-dimensional evaluation across Safety, Completeness, Executability, Maintainability, and Cost-awareness. Our infrastructure integrates a repository of over 600,000 skills, an interactive platform, and a versatile Python toolkit. Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and ScienceWorld show 40% higher average rewards and 30% fewer execution steps across multiple backbone models. Furthermore, SkillNet-Gym benchmarks skill retrieval, utilization, and composition, while SkillNet-Fabric enables task-specific skill routing through lightweight Wikis. By formalizing skills as evolving, composable assets, SkillNet provides a robust foundation for agents to move from transient experience to durable mastery. △ Less

Submitted 19 August, 2026; v1 submitted 26 February, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: http://skillnet.openkg.cn/; add SkillNet-Gym, a benchmark for evaluating skill retrieval, utilization, composition, and SkillNet-Fabric for task-specific skill routing through lightweight Wikis

Euphonium: Steering Video Flow Matching via Process Reward Gradient Guided Stochastic Dynamics

Authors: Ruizhe Zhong, Jiesong Lian, Xiaoyue Mi, Zixiang Zhou, Yuan Zhou, Qinglin Lu, Junchi Yan

Abstract: While online Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a crucial technique for aligning flow matching models with human preferences, current approaches are hindered by inefficient exploration during training rollouts. Relying on undirected stochasticity and sparse outcome rewards, these methods struggle to discover high-reward samples, resulting in data-inefficient and slow optimization. To address th… ▽ More While online Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a crucial technique for aligning flow matching models with human preferences, current approaches are hindered by inefficient exploration during training rollouts. Relying on undirected stochasticity and sparse outcome rewards, these methods struggle to discover high-reward samples, resulting in data-inefficient and slow optimization. To address these limitations, we propose Euphonium, a novel framework that steers generation via process reward gradient guided dynamics. Our key insight is to formulate the sampling process as a theoretically principled Stochastic Differential Equation that explicitly incorporates the gradient of a Process Reward Model into the flow drift. This design enables dense, step-by-step steering toward high-reward regions, advancing beyond the unguided exploration in prior works, and theoretically encompasses existing sampling methods (e.g., Flow-GRPO, DanceGRPO) as special cases. We further derive a distillation objective that internalizes the guidance signal into the flow network, eliminating inference-time dependency on the reward model. We instantiate this framework with a Dual-Reward Group Relative Policy Optimization algorithm, combining latent process rewards for efficient credit assignment with pixel-level outcome rewards for final visual fidelity. Experiments on text-to-video generation show that Euphonium achieves better alignment compared to existing methods while accelerating training convergence by 1.66x. Our code is available at https://github.com/zerzerzerz/Euphonium △ Less

Submitted 6 February, 2026; v1 submitted 4 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

FITMM: Adaptive Frequency-Aware Multimodal Recommendation via Information-Theoretic Representation Learning

Authors: Wei Yang, Rui Zhong, Yiqun Chen, Shixuan Li, Heng Ping, Chi Lu, Peng Jiang

Abstract: Multimodal recommendation aims to enhance user preference modeling by leveraging rich item content such as images and text. Yet dominant systems fuse modalities in the spatial domain, obscuring the frequency structure of signals and amplifying misalignment and redundancy. We adopt a spectral information-theoretic view and show that, under an orthogonal transform that approximately block-diagonaliz… ▽ More Multimodal recommendation aims to enhance user preference modeling by leveraging rich item content such as images and text. Yet dominant systems fuse modalities in the spatial domain, obscuring the frequency structure of signals and amplifying misalignment and redundancy. We adopt a spectral information-theoretic view and show that, under an orthogonal transform that approximately block-diagonalizes bandwise covariances, the Gaussian Information Bottleneck objective decouples across frequency bands, providing a principled basis for separate-then-fuse paradigm. Building on this foundation, we propose FITMM, a Frequency-aware Information-Theoretic framework for multimodal recommendation. FITMM constructs graph-enhanced item representations, performs modality-wise spectral decomposition to obtain orthogonal bands, and forms lightweight within-band multimodal components. A residual, task-adaptive gate aggregates bands into the final representation. To control redundancy and improve generalization, we regularize training with a frequency-domain IB term that allocates capacity across bands (Wiener-like shrinkage with shut-off of weak bands). We further introduce a cross-modal spectral consistency loss that aligns modalities within each band. The model is jointly optimized with the standard recommendation loss. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that FITMM consistently and significantly outperforms advanced baselines. △ Less

Submitted 29 January, 2026; originally announced January 2026.

RulePlanner: All-in-One Reinforcement Learner for Unifying Design Rules in 3D Floorplanning

Authors: Ruizhe Zhong, Xingbo Du, Junchi Yan

Abstract: Floorplanning determines the coordinate and shape of each module in Integrated Circuits. With the scaling of technology nodes, in floorplanning stage especially 3D scenarios with multiple stacked layers, it has become increasingly challenging to adhere to complex hardware design rules. Current methods are only capable of handling specific and limited design rules, while violations of other rules r… ▽ More Floorplanning determines the coordinate and shape of each module in Integrated Circuits. With the scaling of technology nodes, in floorplanning stage especially 3D scenarios with multiple stacked layers, it has become increasingly challenging to adhere to complex hardware design rules. Current methods are only capable of handling specific and limited design rules, while violations of other rules require manual and meticulous adjustment. This leads to labor-intensive and time-consuming post-processing for expert engineers. In this paper, we propose an all-in-one deep reinforcement learning-based approach to tackle these challenges, and design novel representations for real-world IC design rules that have not been addressed by previous approaches. Specifically, the processing of various hardware design rules is unified into a single framework with three key components: 1) novel matrix representations to model the design rules, 2) constraints on the action space to filter out invalid actions that cause rule violations, and 3) quantitative analysis of constraint satisfaction as reward signals. Experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and validity of our approach. Furthermore, transferability is well demonstrated on unseen circuits. Our framework is extensible to accommodate new design rules, thus providing flexibility to address emerging challenges in future chip design. Code will be available at: https://github.com/Thinklab-SJTU/EDA-AI △ Less

Submitted 26 May, 2026; v1 submitted 29 January, 2026; originally announced January 2026.

Comments: ICML 2026

PaperTok: Exploring the Use of Generative AI for Creating Short-form Videos for Research Communication

Authors: Meziah Ruby Cristobal, Hyeonjeong Byeon, Tze-Yu Chen, Ruoxi Shang, Donghoon Shin, Ruican Zhong, Tony Zhou, Gary Hsieh

Abstract: The dissemination of scholarly research is critical, yet researchers often lack the time and skills to create engaging content for popular media such as short-form videos. To address this gap, we explore the use of generative AI to help researchers transform their academic papers into accessible video content. Informed by a formative study with science communicators and content creators (N=8), we… ▽ More The dissemination of scholarly research is critical, yet researchers often lack the time and skills to create engaging content for popular media such as short-form videos. To address this gap, we explore the use of generative AI to help researchers transform their academic papers into accessible video content. Informed by a formative study with science communicators and content creators (N=8), we designed PaperTok, an end-to-end system that automates the initial creative labor by generating script options and corresponding audiovisual content from a source paper. Researchers can then refine based on their preferences with further prompting. A mixed-methods user study (N=18) and crowdsourced evaluation (N=100) demonstrate that PaperTok's workflow can help researchers create engaging and informative short-form videos. We also identified the need for more fine-grained controls in the creation process. To this end, we offer implications for future generative tools that support science outreach. △ Less

Submitted 26 January, 2026; originally announced January 2026.

ACM Class: H.5.2; I.2.7

Journal ref: In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26), Apr 13-17, 2026, Barcelona, Spain. ACM, New York, NY, USA

Why Does the LLM Stop Computing: An Empirical Study of User-Reported Failures in Open-Source LLMs

Authors: Guangba Yu, Zirui Wang, Yujie Huang, Renyi Zhong, Yuedong Zhong, Yilun Wang, Michael R. Lyu

Abstract: The democratization of open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) allows users to fine-tune and deploy models on local infrastructure but exposes them to a First Mile deployment landscape. Unlike black-box API consumption, the reliability of user-managed orchestration remains a critical blind spot. To bridge this gap, we conduct the first large-scale empirical study of 705 real-world failures from t… ▽ More The democratization of open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) allows users to fine-tune and deploy models on local infrastructure but exposes them to a First Mile deployment landscape. Unlike black-box API consumption, the reliability of user-managed orchestration remains a critical blind spot. To bridge this gap, we conduct the first large-scale empirical study of 705 real-world failures from the open-source DeepSeek, Llama, and Qwen ecosystems. Our analysis reveals a paradigm shift: white-box orchestration relocates the reliability bottleneck from model algorithmic defects to the systemic fragility of the deployment stack. We identify three key phenomena: (1) Diagnostic Divergence: runtime crashes distinctively signal infrastructure friction, whereas incorrect functionality serves as a signature for internal tokenizer defects. (2) Systemic Homogeneity: Root causes converge across divergent series, confirming reliability barriers are inherent to the shared ecosystem rather than specific architectures. (3) Lifecycle Escalation: Barriers escalate from intrinsic configuration struggles during fine-tuning to compounded environmental incompatibilities during inference. Supported by our publicly available dataset, these insights provide actionable guidance for enhancing the reliability of the LLM landscape. △ Less

Submitted 20 January, 2026; originally announced January 2026.

AirNav: A Large-Scale UAV Vision-and-Language Navigation Dataset with Natural and Diverse Instructions

Authors: Hengxing Cai, Yijie Rao, Ligang Huang, Zanyang Zhong, Jinhan Dong, Jingjun Tan, Changhao Nai, Jue Hou, Wenhao Lu, Renxin Zhong

Abstract: Existing UAV vision-and-language navigation (VLN) benchmarks rarely provide realistic aerial scenes, natural process-level instructions, and sufficient scale simultaneously, making it difficult to systematically train and evaluate UAV VLN agents under realistic settings. To address this, we propose \textbf{AirNav}, a large-scale benchmark built on real urban aerial data, comprising 137K navigation… ▽ More Existing UAV vision-and-language navigation (VLN) benchmarks rarely provide realistic aerial scenes, natural process-level instructions, and sufficient scale simultaneously, making it difficult to systematically train and evaluate UAV VLN agents under realistic settings. To address this, we propose \textbf{AirNav}, a large-scale benchmark built on real urban aerial data, comprising 137K navigation samples with natural and diverse instructions generated via a human--LLM collaborative pipeline with 10 user personas. We conduct a systematic evaluation of representative approaches on AirNav, ranging from traditional models to multimodal large language models (MLLMs), under unified metrics with open-source implementations. We further propose \textbf{AirVLN-R1}, trained via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT), achieving state-of-the-art performance with a 51.82\% success rate on the test-unseen split. Real-world experiments on a physical UAV platform provide preliminary evidence of sim-to-real transferability, and our dataset and code are publicly available. △ Less

Submitted 15 May, 2026; v1 submitted 7 January, 2026; originally announced January 2026.

SoliReward: Mitigating Susceptibility to Reward Hacking and Annotation Noise in Video Generation Reward Models

Authors: Jiesong Lian, Ruizhe Zhong, Zixiang Zhou, Xiaoyue Mi, Long Hu, Yuan Zhou, Qinglin Lu, Yixue Hao, Junchi Yan

Abstract: Post-training alignment of video generation models with human preferences is a critical goal. Developing effective Reward Models (RMs) for this process faces significant methodological hurdles. Current data collection paradigms, reliant on in-prompt pairwise annotations, suffer from labeling noise. Concurrently, the architectural design of VLM-based RMs, particularly their output mechanisms, remai… ▽ More Post-training alignment of video generation models with human preferences is a critical goal. Developing effective Reward Models (RMs) for this process faces significant methodological hurdles. Current data collection paradigms, reliant on in-prompt pairwise annotations, suffer from labeling noise. Concurrently, the architectural design of VLM-based RMs, particularly their output mechanisms, remains underexplored. Furthermore, RM is susceptible to reward hacking in post-training. To mitigate these limitations, we propose SoliReward, a systematic framework for video RM training. Our framework first sources high-quality, cost-efficient data via single-item binary annotations, then constructs preference pairs using a cross-prompt pairing strategy. Architecturally, we employ a Hierarchical Progressive Query Attention mechanism to enhance feature aggregation. Finally, we introduce a modified BT loss that explicitly accommodates win-tie scenarios. This approach regularizes the RM's score distribution for positive samples, providing more nuanced preference signals to alleviate over-focus on a small number of top-scoring samples. Our approach is validated on benchmarks evaluating physical plausibility, subject deformity, and semantic alignment, demonstrating improvements in direct RM evaluation metrics and in the efficacy of post-training on video generation models. Code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/lian700/SoliReward. △ Less

Submitted 16 March, 2026; v1 submitted 17 December, 2025; originally announced December 2025.

Comments: 16 pages, 9 figures

OPAL: Operator-Programmed Algorithms for Landscape-Aware Black-Box Optimization

Authors: Junbo Jacob Lian, Mingyang Yu, Kaichen Ouyang, Shengwei Fu, Rui Zhong, Yujun Zhang, Jun Zhang, Huiling Chen

Abstract: Black-box optimization often relies on evolutionary and swarm algorithms whose performance is highly problem dependent. We view an optimizer as a short program over a small vocabulary of search operators and learn this operator program separately for each problem instance. We instantiate this idea in Operator-Programmed Algorithms (OPAL), a landscape-aware framework for continuous black-box optimi… ▽ More Black-box optimization often relies on evolutionary and swarm algorithms whose performance is highly problem dependent. We view an optimizer as a short program over a small vocabulary of search operators and learn this operator program separately for each problem instance. We instantiate this idea in Operator-Programmed Algorithms (OPAL), a landscape-aware framework for continuous black-box optimization that uses a small design budget with a standard differential evolution baseline to probe the landscape, builds a $k$-nearest neighbor graph over sampled points, and encodes this trajectory with a graph neural network. A meta-learner then maps the resulting representation to a phase-wise schedule of exploration, restart, and local search operators. On the CEC~2017 test suite, a single meta-trained OPAL policy is statistically competitive with state-of-the-art adaptive differential evolution variants and achieves significant improvements over simpler baselines under nonparametric tests. Ablation studies on CEC~2017 justify the choices for the design phase, the trajectory graph, and the operator-program representation, while the meta-components add only modest wall-clock overhead. Overall, the results indicate that operator-programmed, landscape-aware per-instance design is a practical way forward beyond ad hoc metaphor-based algorithms in black-box optimization. △ Less

Submitted 14 December, 2025; originally announced December 2025.

Comments: Source code, experiment scripts, and results are publicly available at https://github.com/junbolian/OPAL. The real-world application part hasn't been done yet

Synthetic Cognitive Walkthrough: Aligning Large Language Model Performance with Human Cognitive Walkthrough

Authors: Ruican Zhong, David W. McDonald, Gary Hsieh

Abstract: Conducting usability testing like cognitive walkthrough (CW) can be costly. Recent developments in large language models (LLMs), with visual reasoning and UI navigation capabilities, present opportunities to automate CW. We explored whether LLMs (GPT-4 and Gemini-2.5-pro) can simulate human behavior in CW by comparing their walkthroughs with human participants. While LLMs could navigate interfaces… ▽ More Conducting usability testing like cognitive walkthrough (CW) can be costly. Recent developments in large language models (LLMs), with visual reasoning and UI navigation capabilities, present opportunities to automate CW. We explored whether LLMs (GPT-4 and Gemini-2.5-pro) can simulate human behavior in CW by comparing their walkthroughs with human participants. While LLMs could navigate interfaces and provide reasonable rationales, their behavior differed from humans. LLM-prompted CW achieved higher task completion rates than humans and followed more optimal navigation paths, while identifying fewer potential failure points. However, follow-up studies demonstrated that with additional prompting, LLMs can predict human-identified failure points, aligning their performance with human participants. Our work highlights that while LLMs may not replicate human behaviors exactly, they can be leveraged for scaling usability walkthroughs and providing UI insights, offering a valuable complement to traditional usability testing. △ Less

Submitted 3 December, 2025; originally announced December 2025.

Structured Spectral Reasoning for Frequency-Adaptive Multimodal Recommendation

Authors: Wei Yang, Rui Zhong, Yiqun Chen, Chi Lu, Peng Jiang

Abstract: Multimodal recommendation aims to integrate collaborative signals with heterogeneous content such as visual and textual information, but remains challenged by modality-specific noise, semantic inconsistency, and unstable propagation over user-item graphs. These issues are often exacerbated by naive fusion or shallow modeling strategies, leading to degraded generalization and poor robustness. While… ▽ More Multimodal recommendation aims to integrate collaborative signals with heterogeneous content such as visual and textual information, but remains challenged by modality-specific noise, semantic inconsistency, and unstable propagation over user-item graphs. These issues are often exacerbated by naive fusion or shallow modeling strategies, leading to degraded generalization and poor robustness. While recent work has explored the frequency domain as a lens to separate stable from noisy signals, most methods rely on static filtering or reweighting, lacking the ability to reason over spectral structure or adapt to modality-specific reliability. To address these challenges, we propose a Structured Spectral Reasoning (SSR) framework for frequency-aware multimodal recommendation. Our method follows a four-stage pipeline: (i) Decompose graph-based multimodal signals into spectral bands via graph-guided transformations to isolate semantic granularity; (ii) Modulate band-level reliability with spectral band masking, a training-time masking with a prediction-consistency objective that suppresses brittle frequency components; (iii) Fuse complementary frequency cues using hyperspectral reasoning with low-rank cross-band interaction; and (iv) Align modality-specific spectral features via contrastive regularization to promote semantic and structural consistency. Experiments on three real-world benchmarks show consistent gains over strong baselines, particularly under sparse and cold-start settings. Additional analyses indicate that structured spectral modeling improves robustness and provides clearer diagnostics of how different bands contribute to performance. △ Less

Submitted 29 January, 2026; v1 submitted 1 December, 2025; originally announced December 2025.

Video Generation Models Are Good Latent Reward Models

Authors: Xiaoyue Mi, Wenqing Yu, Jiesong Lian, Shibo Jie, Ruizhe Zhong, Zijun Liu, Guozhen Zhang, Zixiang Zhou, Zhiyong Xu, Yuan Zhou, Qinglin Lu, Fan Tang

Abstract: Reward feedback learning (ReFL) has proven effective for aligning image generation with human preferences. However, its extension to video generation faces significant challenges. Existing video reward models rely on vision-language models designed for pixel-space inputs, confining ReFL optimization to near-complete denoising steps after computationally expensive VAE decoding. This pixel-space app… ▽ More Reward feedback learning (ReFL) has proven effective for aligning image generation with human preferences. However, its extension to video generation faces significant challenges. Existing video reward models rely on vision-language models designed for pixel-space inputs, confining ReFL optimization to near-complete denoising steps after computationally expensive VAE decoding. This pixel-space approach incurs substantial memory overhead and increased training time, and its late-stage optimization lacks early-stage supervision, refining only visual quality rather than fundamental motion dynamics and structural coherence. In this work, we show that pre-trained video generation models are naturally suited for reward modeling in the noisy latent space, as they are explicitly designed to process noisy latent representations at arbitrary timesteps and inherently preserve temporal information through their sequential modeling capabilities. Accordingly, we propose Process Reward Feedback Learning~(PRFL), a framework that conducts preference optimization entirely in latent space, enabling efficient gradient backpropagation throughout the full denoising chain without VAE decoding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PRFL significantly improves alignment with human preferences, while achieving substantial reductions in memory consumption and training time compared to RGB ReFL. △ Less

Submitted 9 January, 2026; v1 submitted 26 November, 2025; originally announced November 2025.

AutoLogger: A Multi-Agent Framework for the End-to-End Automated Logging

Authors: Renyi Zhong, Yintong Huo, Wenwei Gu, Yichen Li, Michael R. Lyu

Abstract: Software logging is critical for system observability, yet developers face a dual crisis of costly overlogging and risky underlogging. Existing automated logging tools often overlook the fundamental whether-to-log decision and struggle with the composite nature of logging. In this paper, we propose Autologger, a novel hybrid framework that addresses the complete the end-to-end logging pipeline. Au… ▽ More Software logging is critical for system observability, yet developers face a dual crisis of costly overlogging and risky underlogging. Existing automated logging tools often overlook the fundamental whether-to-log decision and struggle with the composite nature of logging. In this paper, we propose Autologger, a novel hybrid framework that addresses the complete the end-to-end logging pipeline. Autologger first employs a fine-tuned classifier, the Judger, to accurately determine if a method requires new logging statements. If logging is needed, a multi-agent system is activated. The system includes specialized agents: a Locator dedicated to determining where to log, and a Generator focused on what to log. These agents work together, utilizing our designed program analysis and retrieval tools. We evaluate Autologger on a large corpus from three mature open-source projects against state-of-the-art baselines. Our results show that Autologger achieves 96.63\% F1-score on the crucial whether-to-log decision. In an end-to-end setting, Autologger improves the overall quality of generated logging statements by 16.13\% over the strongest baseline, as measured by an LLM-as-a-judge score. We also demonstrate that our framework is generalizable, consistently boosting the performance of various backbone LLMs. △ Less

Submitted 5 August, 2026; v1 submitted 23 November, 2025; originally announced November 2025.

PASS-Enhanced MEC: Joint Optimization of Task Offloading and Uplink PASS Beamforming

Authors: Zhaoming Hu, Ruikang Zhong, Xidong Mu, Dengao Li, Yuanwei Liu

Abstract: A pinching-antenna system (PASS)-enhanced mobile edge computing (MEC) architecture is investigated to improve the task offloading efficiency and latency performance in dynamic wireless environments. By leveraging dielectric waveguides and flexibly adjustable pinching antennas, PASS establishes short-distance line-of-sight (LoS) links while effectively mitigating the significant path loss and poten… ▽ More A pinching-antenna system (PASS)-enhanced mobile edge computing (MEC) architecture is investigated to improve the task offloading efficiency and latency performance in dynamic wireless environments. By leveraging dielectric waveguides and flexibly adjustable pinching antennas, PASS establishes short-distance line-of-sight (LoS) links while effectively mitigating the significant path loss and potential signal blockage, making it a promising solution for high-frequency MEC systems. We formulate a network latency minimization problem to joint optimize uplink PASS beamforming and task offloading. The resulting problem is modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP) and solved via the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method. To address the instability introduced by the $\max$ operator in the objective function, we propose a load balancing-aware proximal policy optimization (LBPPO) algorithm. LBPPO incorporates both node-level and waveguide-level load balancing information into the policy design, maintaining computational and transmission delay equilibrium, respectively. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed PASS-enhanced MEC with adaptive uplink PASS beamforming exhibit stronger convergence capability than fixed-PA baselines and conventional MIMO-assisted MEC, especially in scenarios with a large number of UEs or high transmit power. △ Less

Submitted 26 October, 2025; originally announced October 2025.

SusBench: An Online Benchmark for Evaluating Dark Pattern Susceptibility of Computer-Use Agents

Authors: Longjie Guo, Chenjie Yuan, Mingyuan Zhong, Robert Wolfe, Ruican Zhong, Yue Xu, Bingbing Wen, Hua Shen, Lucy Lu Wang, Alexis Hiniker

Abstract: As LLM-based computer-use agents (CUAs) begin to autonomously interact with real-world interfaces, understanding their vulnerability to manipulative interface designs becomes increasingly critical. We introduce SusBench, an online benchmark for evaluating the susceptibility of CUAs to UI dark patterns, designs that aim to manipulate or deceive users into taking unintentional actions. Drawing nine… ▽ More As LLM-based computer-use agents (CUAs) begin to autonomously interact with real-world interfaces, understanding their vulnerability to manipulative interface designs becomes increasingly critical. We introduce SusBench, an online benchmark for evaluating the susceptibility of CUAs to UI dark patterns, designs that aim to manipulate or deceive users into taking unintentional actions. Drawing nine common dark pattern types from existing taxonomies, we developed a method for constructing believable dark patterns on real-world consumer websites through code injections, and designed 313 evaluation tasks across 55 websites. Our study with 29 participants showed that humans perceived our dark pattern injections to be highly realistic, with the vast majority of participants not noticing that these had been injected by the research team. We evaluated five state-of-the-art CUAs on the benchmark. We found that both human participants and agents are particularly susceptible to the dark patterns of Preselection, Trick Wording, and Hidden Information, while being resilient to other overt dark patterns. Our findings inform the development of more trustworthy CUAs, their use as potential human proxies in evaluating deceptive designs, and the regulation of an online environment increasingly navigated by autonomous agents. △ Less

Submitted 23 February, 2026; v1 submitted 13 October, 2025; originally announced October 2025.

Comments: Accepted as a full paper to IUI 2026

HumanoidExo: Scalable Whole-Body Humanoid Manipulation via Wearable Exoskeleton

Authors: Rui Zhong, Yizhe Sun, Junjie Wen, Jinming Li, Chuang Cheng, Wei Dai, Zhiwen Zeng, Huimin Lu, Yichen Zhu, Yi Xu

Abstract: A significant bottleneck in humanoid policy learning is the acquisition of large-scale, diverse datasets, as collecting reliable real-world data remains both difficult and cost-prohibitive. To address this limitation, we introduce HumanoidExo, a novel system that transfers human motion to whole-body humanoid data. HumanoidExo offers a high-efficiency solution that minimizes the embodiment gap betw… ▽ More A significant bottleneck in humanoid policy learning is the acquisition of large-scale, diverse datasets, as collecting reliable real-world data remains both difficult and cost-prohibitive. To address this limitation, we introduce HumanoidExo, a novel system that transfers human motion to whole-body humanoid data. HumanoidExo offers a high-efficiency solution that minimizes the embodiment gap between the human demonstrator and the robot, thereby tackling the scarcity of whole-body humanoid data. By facilitating the collection of more voluminous and diverse datasets, our approach significantly enhances the performance of humanoid robots in dynamic, real-world scenarios. We evaluated our method across three challenging real-world tasks: table-top manipulation, manipulation integrated with stand-squat motions, and whole-body manipulation. Our results empirically demonstrate that HumanoidExo is a crucial addition to real-robot data, as it enables the humanoid policy to generalize to novel environments, learn complex whole-body control from only five real-robot demonstrations, and even acquire new skills (i.e., walking) solely from HumanoidExo data. △ Less

Submitted 3 October, 2025; originally announced October 2025.

CoPlanner: An Interactive Motion Planner with Contingency-Aware Diffusion for Autonomous Driving

Authors: Ruiguo Zhong, Ruoyu Yao, Pei Liu, Xiaolong Chen, Rui Yang, Jun Ma

Abstract: Accurate trajectory prediction and motion planning are crucial for autonomous driving systems to navigate safely in complex, interactive environments characterized by multimodal uncertainties. However, current generation-then-evaluation frameworks typically construct multiple plausible trajectory hypotheses but ultimately adopt a single most likely outcome, leading to overconfident decisions and a… ▽ More Accurate trajectory prediction and motion planning are crucial for autonomous driving systems to navigate safely in complex, interactive environments characterized by multimodal uncertainties. However, current generation-then-evaluation frameworks typically construct multiple plausible trajectory hypotheses but ultimately adopt a single most likely outcome, leading to overconfident decisions and a lack of fallback strategies that are vital for safety in rare but critical scenarios. Moreover, the usual decoupling of prediction and planning modules could result in socially inconsistent or unrealistic joint trajectories, especially in highly interactive traffic. To address these challenges, we propose a contingency-aware diffusion planner (CoPlanner), a unified framework that jointly models multi-agent interactive trajectory generation and contingency-aware motion planning. Specifically, the pivot-conditioned diffusion mechanism anchors trajectory sampling on a validated, shared short-term segment to preserve temporal consistency, while stochastically generating diverse long-horizon branches that capture multimodal motion evolutions. In parallel, we design a contingency-aware multi-scenario scoring strategy that evaluates candidate ego trajectories across multiple plausible long-horizon evolution scenarios, balancing safety, progress, and comfort. This integrated design preserves feasible fallback options and enhances robustness under uncertainty, leading to more realistic interaction-aware planning. Extensive closed-loop experiments on the nuPlan benchmark demonstrate that CoPlanner consistently surpasses state-of-the-art methods on both Val14 and Test14 datasets, achieving significant improvements in safety and comfort under both reactive and non-reactive settings. Code and model will be made publicly available upon acceptance. △ Less

Submitted 21 September, 2025; originally announced September 2025.

CancerGUIDE: Cancer Guideline Understanding via Internal Disagreement Estimation

Authors: Alyssa Unell, Noel C. F. Codella, Sam Preston, Peniel Argaw, Wen-wai Yim, Zelalem Gero, Cliff Wong, Rajesh Jena, Eric Horvitz, Amanda K. Hall, Ruican Rachel Zhong, Jiachen Li, Shrey Jain, Mu Wei, Matthew Lungren, Hoifung Poon

Abstract: The National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) provides evidence-based guidelines for cancer treatment. Translating complex patient presentations into guideline-compliant treatment recommendations is time-intensive, requires specialized expertise, and is prone to error. Advances in large language model (LLM) capabilities promise to reduce the time required to generate treatment recommendations a… ▽ More The National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) provides evidence-based guidelines for cancer treatment. Translating complex patient presentations into guideline-compliant treatment recommendations is time-intensive, requires specialized expertise, and is prone to error. Advances in large language model (LLM) capabilities promise to reduce the time required to generate treatment recommendations and improve accuracy. We present an LLM agent-based approach to automatically generate guideline-concordant treatment trajectories for patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Our contributions are threefold. First, we construct a novel longitudinal dataset of 121 cases of NSCLC patients that includes clinical encounters, diagnostic results, and medical histories, each expertly annotated with the corresponding NCCN guideline trajectories by board-certified oncologists. Second, we demonstrate that existing LLMs possess domain-specific knowledge that enables high-quality proxy benchmark generation for both model development and evaluation, achieving strong correlation (Spearman coefficient r=0.88, RMSE = 0.08) with expert-annotated benchmarks. Third, we develop a hybrid approach combining expensive human annotations with model consistency information to create both the agent framework that predicts the relevant guidelines for a patient, as well as a meta-classifier that verifies prediction accuracy with calibrated confidence scores for treatment recommendations (AUROC=0.800), a critical capability for communicating the accuracy of outputs, custom-tailoring tradeoffs in performance, and supporting regulatory compliance. This work establishes a framework for clinically viable LLM-based guideline adherence systems that balance accuracy, interpretability, and regulatory requirements while reducing annotation costs, providing a scalable pathway toward automated clinical decision support. △ Less

Submitted 6 November, 2025; v1 submitted 8 September, 2025; originally announced September 2025.

TrackRec: Iterative Alternating Feedback with Chain-of-Thought via Preference Alignment for Recommendation

Authors: Yu Xia, Rui Zhong, Zeyu Song, Wei Yang, Junchen Wan, Qingpeng Cai, Chi Lu, Peng Jiang

Abstract: The extensive world knowledge and powerful reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have attracted significant attention in recommendation systems (RS). Specifically, The chain of thought (CoT) has been shown to improve the performance of LLMs on complex reasoning tasks for RS. However, due to the fact that LLMs often suffer from hallucination issues, there is no guarantee that their… ▽ More The extensive world knowledge and powerful reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have attracted significant attention in recommendation systems (RS). Specifically, The chain of thought (CoT) has been shown to improve the performance of LLMs on complex reasoning tasks for RS. However, due to the fact that LLMs often suffer from hallucination issues, there is no guarantee that their reasoning CoT is effective. A key challenge is to further enhance the recommendation capabilities of LLMs through effective CoT reasonings. Therefore, we propose \textbf{TrackRec}, a framework designed to enhance reasoning capabilities of LLMs for RS. TrackRec specifically focuses on accurately inferring recommendation CoT \textbf{(RecCoT)} for user preference using the knowledge from LLMs. This RecCoT can serve both as an explanation for the LLM's completion of recommendation tasks and as auxiliary features to assist recommendation models in accomplishing recommendation tasks. TrackRec consists of a RecCoT generator $(G)$ and a RecCoT validator $(V)$. Furthermore, we design alternating feedback learning mechanism that $G$ undergoes direct preference optimization via feedback from $V$ to produce increasingly accurate RecCoT aligned with $V$'s standards. Meanwhile, $V$ is fine-tuned using the inference feedback from $G$ to enhance its validation capabilities in alignment with recommendation tasks. Through iterative alternating feedback learning between $G$ and $V$, TrackRec continuously improves the user preference analysis capability of $G$ and the validation capacity of $V$. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showing that it surpasses state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, TrackRec has been deployed on a lagre advertising platform with hundreds of millions of users, achieving substantial gains. △ Less

Submitted 21 August, 2025; originally announced August 2025.

SA-GCS: Semantic-Aware Gaussian Curriculum Scheduling for UAV Vision-Language Navigation

Authors: Hengxing Cai, Jinhan Dong, Yijie Rao, Jingcheng Deng, Jingjun Tan, Qien Chen, Haidong Wang, Zhen Wang, Shiyu Huang, Agachai Sumalee, Renxin Zhong

Abstract: Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) aims to enable agents to accurately localize targets and plan flight paths in complex environments based on natural language instructions, with broad applications in intelligent inspection, disaster rescue, and urban monitoring. Recent progress in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has provided strong semantic understanding for this task, w… ▽ More Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) aims to enable agents to accurately localize targets and plan flight paths in complex environments based on natural language instructions, with broad applications in intelligent inspection, disaster rescue, and urban monitoring. Recent progress in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has provided strong semantic understanding for this task, while reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising post-training strategy to further improve generalization. However, existing RL methods often suffer from inefficient use of training data, slow convergence, and insufficient consideration of the difficulty variation among training samples, which limits further performance improvement. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{Semantic-Aware Gaussian Curriculum Scheduling (SA-GCS)}, a novel training framework that systematically integrates Curriculum Learning (CL) into RL. SA-GCS employs a Semantic-Aware Difficulty Estimator (SA-DE) to quantify the complexity of training samples and a Gaussian Curriculum Scheduler (GCS) to dynamically adjust the sampling distribution, enabling a smooth progression from easy to challenging tasks. This design significantly improves training efficiency, accelerates convergence, and enhances overall model performance. Extensive experiments on the CityNav benchmark demonstrate that SA-GCS consistently outperforms strong baselines across all metrics, achieves faster and more stable convergence, and generalizes well across models of different scales, highlighting its robustness and scalability. The implementation of our approach is publicly available. △ Less

Submitted 1 August, 2025; originally announced August 2025.

R4ec: A Reasoning, Reflection, and Refinement Framework for Recommendation Systems

Authors: Hao Gu, Rui Zhong, Yu Xia, Wei Yang, Chi Lu, Peng Jiang, Kun Gai

Abstract: Harnessing Large Language Models (LLMs) for recommendation systems has emerged as a prominent avenue, drawing substantial research interest. However, existing approaches primarily involve basic prompt techniques for knowledge acquisition, which resemble System-1 thinking. This makes these methods highly sensitive to errors in the reasoning path, where even a small mistake can lead to an incorrect… ▽ More Harnessing Large Language Models (LLMs) for recommendation systems has emerged as a prominent avenue, drawing substantial research interest. However, existing approaches primarily involve basic prompt techniques for knowledge acquisition, which resemble System-1 thinking. This makes these methods highly sensitive to errors in the reasoning path, where even a small mistake can lead to an incorrect inference. To this end, in this paper, we propose $R^{4}$ec, a reasoning, reflection and refinement framework that evolves the recommendation system into a weak System-2 model. Specifically, we introduce two models: an actor model that engages in reasoning, and a reflection model that judges these responses and provides valuable feedback. Then the actor model will refine its response based on the feedback, ultimately leading to improved responses. We employ an iterative reflection and refinement process, enabling LLMs to facilitate slow and deliberate System-2-like thinking. Ultimately, the final refined knowledge will be incorporated into a recommendation backbone for prediction. We conduct extensive experiments on Amazon-Book and MovieLens-1M datasets to demonstrate the superiority of $R^{4}$ec. We also deploy $R^{4}$ec on a large scale online advertising platform, showing 2.2\% increase of revenue. Furthermore, we investigate the scaling properties of the actor model and reflection model. △ Less

Submitted 10 August, 2025; v1 submitted 23 July, 2025; originally announced July 2025.

Comments: Accepted by Recsys25

X-Intelligence 3.0: Training and Evaluating Reasoning LLM for Semiconductor Display

Authors: Xiaolin Yan, Yangxing Liu, Jiazhang Zheng, Chi Liu, Mingyu Du, Caisheng Chen, Haoyang Liu, Ming Ding, Yuan Li, Qiuping Liao, Linfeng Li, Zhili Mei, Siyu Wan, Li Li, Ruyi Zhong, Jiangling Yu, Xule Liu, Huihui Hu, Jiameng Yue, Ruohui Cheng, Qi Yang, Liangqing Wu, Ke Zhu, Chi Zhang, Chufei Jing , et al. (31 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have recently achieved significant advances in reasoning and demonstrated their advantages in solving challenging problems. Yet, their effectiveness in the semiconductor display industry remains limited due to a lack of domain-specific training and expertise. To bridge this gap, we present X-Intelligence 3.0, the first high-performance reasoning model specifically deve… ▽ More Large language models (LLMs) have recently achieved significant advances in reasoning and demonstrated their advantages in solving challenging problems. Yet, their effectiveness in the semiconductor display industry remains limited due to a lack of domain-specific training and expertise. To bridge this gap, we present X-Intelligence 3.0, the first high-performance reasoning model specifically developed for the semiconductor display industry. This model is designed to deliver expert-level understanding and reasoning for the industry's complex challenges. Leveraging a carefully curated industry knowledge base, the model undergoes supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to enhance its reasoning and comprehension capabilities. To further accelerate development, we implemented an automated evaluation framework that simulates expert-level assessments. We also integrated a domain-specific retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) mechanism, resulting in notable performance gains on benchmark datasets. Despite its relatively compact size of 32 billion parameters, X-Intelligence 3.0 outperforms SOTA DeepSeek-R1-671B across multiple evaluations. This demonstrates its exceptional efficiency and establishes it as a powerful solution to the longstanding reasoning challenges faced by the semiconductor display industry. △ Less

Submitted 22 July, 2025; v1 submitted 18 July, 2025; originally announced July 2025.

Comments: Technical Report

Towards Designing Social Interventions For Online Climate Change Denialism Discussions

Authors: Ruican Zhong, Shruti Phadke, Beth Goldberg, Tanushree Mitra

Abstract: As conspiracy theories gain traction, it has become crucial to research effective intervention strategies that can foster evidence and science-based discussions in conspiracy theory communities online. This study presents a novel framework using insider language to contest conspiracy theory ideology in climate change denialism on Reddit. Focusing on discussions in two Reddit communities, our resea… ▽ More As conspiracy theories gain traction, it has become crucial to research effective intervention strategies that can foster evidence and science-based discussions in conspiracy theory communities online. This study presents a novel framework using insider language to contest conspiracy theory ideology in climate change denialism on Reddit. Focusing on discussions in two Reddit communities, our research investigates reactions to pro-social and evidence-based intervention messages for two cohorts of users: climate change deniers and climate change supporters. Specifically, we combine manual and generative AI-based methods to craft intervention messages and deploy the interventions as replies on Reddit posts and comments through transparently labeled bot accounts. On the one hand, we find that evidence-based interventions with neutral language foster positive engagement, encouraging open discussions among believers of climate change denialism. On the other, climate change supporters respond positively, actively participating and presenting additional evidence. Our study contributes valuable insights into the process and challenges of automatically delivering interventions in conspiracy theory communities on social media, and helps inform future research on social media interventions. △ Less

Submitted 10 August, 2025; v1 submitted 9 July, 2025; originally announced July 2025.

Journal ref: Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 9, 7, Article CSCW251 (November 2025)

Synthetic Heuristic Evaluation: A Comparison between AI- and Human-Powered Usability Evaluation

Authors: Ruican Zhong, David W. McDonald, Gary Hsieh

Abstract: Usability evaluation is crucial in human-centered design but can be costly, requiring expert time and user compensation. In this work, we developed a method for synthetic heuristic evaluation using multimodal LLMs' ability to analyze images and provide design feedback. Comparing our synthetic evaluations to those by experienced UX practitioners across two apps, we found our evaluation identified 7… ▽ More Usability evaluation is crucial in human-centered design but can be costly, requiring expert time and user compensation. In this work, we developed a method for synthetic heuristic evaluation using multimodal LLMs' ability to analyze images and provide design feedback. Comparing our synthetic evaluations to those by experienced UX practitioners across two apps, we found our evaluation identified 73% and 77% of usability issues, which exceeded the performance of 5 experienced human evaluators (57% and 63%). Compared to human evaluators, the synthetic evaluation's performance maintained consistent performance across tasks and excelled in detecting layout issues, highlighting potential attentional and perceptual strengths of synthetic evaluation. However, synthetic evaluation struggled with recognizing some UI components and design conventions, as well as identifying across screen violations. Additionally, testing synthetic evaluations over time and accounts revealed stable performance. Overall, our work highlights the performance differences between human and LLM-driven evaluations, informing the design of synthetic heuristic evaluations. △ Less

Submitted 3 July, 2025; originally announced July 2025.

CCISolver: End-to-End Detection and Repair of Method-Level Code-Comment Inconsistency

Authors: Renyi Zhong, Yintong Huo, Wenwei Gu, Jinxi Kuang, Zhihan Jiang, Guangba Yu, Yichen Li, David Lo, Michael R. Lyu

Abstract: Comments within code serve as a crucial foundation for software documentation, facilitating developers to communicate and understand the code effectively. However, code-comment inconsistency (CCI) can negatively affect software development, testing, and maintenance. Recent efforts to mitigate this issue have emerged, but existing studies often suffer from inaccurate datasets and inadequate solutio… ▽ More Comments within code serve as a crucial foundation for software documentation, facilitating developers to communicate and understand the code effectively. However, code-comment inconsistency (CCI) can negatively affect software development, testing, and maintenance. Recent efforts to mitigate this issue have emerged, but existing studies often suffer from inaccurate datasets and inadequate solutions, weakening their practical effectiveness. In this study, we first conduct a quantitative analysis of existing datasets, revealing a substantial portion of sampled data are mislabeled. To address these data limitations, we introduce CCIBench, a refined dataset comprising high-quality data, to support the training and evaluation of method-level CCI methods. Furthermore, we present an innovative end-to-end LLM-based framework, CCISolver, designed to improve code quality by identifying and rectifying CCIs. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate CCISolver's superior performance. For detection, it establishes a new state-of-the-art with an F1-score of 89.54%. In fixing task, it achieves a remarkable 18.84% relative improvement in GLEU score over the strongest baseline. This superiority is confirmed by human evaluation, where CCISolver's fixing success rate of 0.6533 significantly surpasses existing methods. Critically, in a practical end-to-end setting, CCISolver's innovative architecture is approximately 36% faster for inference than the baseline model, underscoring its scalability and real-world applicability. △ Less

Submitted 25 June, 2025; originally announced June 2025.

Comments: This manuscript is under review

MM-R5: MultiModal Reasoning-Enhanced ReRanker via Reinforcement Learning for Document Retrieval

Authors: Mingjun Xu, Jinhan Dong, Jue Hou, Zehui Wang, Sihang Li, Zhifeng Gao, Renxin Zhong, Hengxing Cai

Abstract: Multimodal document retrieval systems enable information access across text, images, and layouts, benefiting various domains like document-based question answering, report analysis, and interactive content summarization. Rerankers improve retrieval precision by reordering retrieved candidates. However, current multimodal reranking methods remain underexplored, with significant room for improvement… ▽ More Multimodal document retrieval systems enable information access across text, images, and layouts, benefiting various domains like document-based question answering, report analysis, and interactive content summarization. Rerankers improve retrieval precision by reordering retrieved candidates. However, current multimodal reranking methods remain underexplored, with significant room for improvement in both training strategies and overall effectiveness. Moreover, the lack of explicit reasoning makes it difficult to analyze and optimize these methods further. In this paper, We propose MM-R5, a MultiModal Reasoning-Enhanced ReRanker via Reinforcement Learning for Document Retrieval, aiming to provide a more effective and reliable solution for multimodal reranking tasks. MM-R5 is trained in two stages: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). In the SFT stage, we focus on improving instruction-following and guiding the model to generate complete and high-quality reasoning chains. To support this, we introduce a novel data construction strategy that produces rich, high-quality reasoning data. In the RL stage, we design a task-specific reward framework, including a reranking reward tailored for multimodal candidates and a composite template-based reward to further refine reasoning quality. We conduct extensive experiments on MMDocIR, a challenging public benchmark spanning multiple domains. MM-R5 achieves state-of-the-art performance on most metrics and delivers comparable results to much larger models on the remaining ones. Moreover, compared to the best retrieval-only method, MM-R5 improves recall@1 by over 4%. These results validate the effectiveness of our reasoning-enhanced training pipeline. Our code is available at https://github.com/i2vec/MM-R5 . △ Less

Submitted 22 June, 2025; v1 submitted 14 June, 2025; originally announced June 2025.

KPIRoot+: An Efficient Integrated Framework for Anomaly Detection and Root Cause Analysis in Large-Scale Cloud Systems

Authors: Wenwei Gu, Renyi Zhong, Guangba Yu, Xinying Sun, Jinyang Liu, Yintong Huo, Zhuangbin Chen, Jianping Zhang, Jiazhen Gu, Yongqiang Yang, Michael R. Lyu

Abstract: To ensure the reliability of cloud systems, their performance is monitored using KPIs (key performance indicators). When issues arise, root cause localization identifies KPIs responsible for service degradation, aiding in quick diagnosis and resolution. Traditional methods rely on similarity calculations, which can be ineffective in complex, interdependent cloud environments. While deep learning-b… ▽ More To ensure the reliability of cloud systems, their performance is monitored using KPIs (key performance indicators). When issues arise, root cause localization identifies KPIs responsible for service degradation, aiding in quick diagnosis and resolution. Traditional methods rely on similarity calculations, which can be ineffective in complex, interdependent cloud environments. While deep learning-based approaches model these dependencies better, they often face challenges such as high computational demands and lack of interpretability. To address these issues, KPIRoot is proposed as an efficient method combining similarity and causality analysis. It uses symbolic aggregate approximation for compact KPI representation, improving analysis efficiency. However, deployment in Cloud H revealed two drawbacks: 1) threshold-based anomaly detection misses some performance anomalies, and 2) SAX representation fails to capture intricate variation trends. KPIRoot+ addresses these limitations, outperforming eight state-of-the-art baselines by 2.9% to 35.7%, while reducing time cost by 34.7%. We also share our experience deploying KPIRoot in a large-scale cloud provider's production environment. △ Less

Submitted 4 June, 2025; originally announced June 2025.

Toward Structured Knowledge Reasoning: Contrastive Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Experience

Authors: Jiawei Gu, Ziting Xian, Yuanzhen Xie, Ye Liu, Enjie Liu, Ruichao Zhong, Mochi Gao, Yunzhi Tan, Bo Hu, Zang Li

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on plain text tasks but underperform on structured data like tables and databases. Potential challenges arise from their underexposure during pre-training and rigid text-to-structure transfer mechanisms. Unlike humans who seamlessly apply learned patterns across data modalities, LLMs struggle to infer implicit relationships embedded in tabula… ▽ More Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on plain text tasks but underperform on structured data like tables and databases. Potential challenges arise from their underexposure during pre-training and rigid text-to-structure transfer mechanisms. Unlike humans who seamlessly apply learned patterns across data modalities, LLMs struggle to infer implicit relationships embedded in tabular formats, especially in the absence of explicit structural guidance. To bridge this cognitive gap, we introduce Contrastive Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Experience (CoRE), a framework that builds experience memory representations and enhances generalization through contrastive In-Context Learning (ICL) to simulate human-like knowledge transfer. Experiments on Text-to-SQL and TableQA show CoRE significantly improves performance, achieving average gains of 3.44% and 4.24%, with up to 17.2% on challenging tasks. Our Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-generated Experience Memory expands training data 8-9x, enhancing diversity and domain coverage. This training-free and continual method propels LLMs toward structured knowledge expertise. △ Less

Submitted 24 July, 2025; v1 submitted 1 June, 2025; originally announced June 2025.

Comments: ACL 2025 Findings