Showing 1–50 of 1,415 results for author: Cheng, Y

Face-D(^2)CL: Multi-Domain Synergistic Representation with Dual Continual Learning for Facial DeepFake Detection

Authors: Yushuo Zhang, Yu Cheng, Yongkang Hu, Jiuan Zhou, Jiawei Chen, Yuan Xie, Zhaoxia Yin

Abstract: The rapid advancement of facial forgery techniques poses severe threats to public trust and information security, making facial DeepFake detection a critical research priority. Continual learning provides an effective approach to adapt facial DeepFake detection models to evolving forgery patterns. However, existing methods face two key bottlenecks in real-world continual learning scenarios: insuff… ▽ More The rapid advancement of facial forgery techniques poses severe threats to public trust and information security, making facial DeepFake detection a critical research priority. Continual learning provides an effective approach to adapt facial DeepFake detection models to evolving forgery patterns. However, existing methods face two key bottlenecks in real-world continual learning scenarios: insufficient feature representation and catastrophic forgetting. To address these issues, we propose Face-D(^2)CL, a framework for facial DeepFake detection. It leverages multi-domain synergistic representation to fuse spatial and frequency-domain features for the comprehensive capture of diverse forgery traces, and employs a dual continual learning mechanism that combines Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC), which distinguishes parameter importance for real versus fake samples, and Orthogonal Gradient Constraint (OGC), which ensures updates to task-specific adapters do not interfere with previously learned knowledge. This synergy enables the model to achieve a dynamic balance between robust anti-forgetting capabilities and agile adaptability to emerging facial forgery paradigms, all without relying on historical data replay. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses current SOTA approaches in both stability and plasticity, achieving 60.7% relative reduction in average detection error rate, respectively. On unseen forgery domains, it further improves the average detection AUC by 7.9% compared to the current SOTA method. △ Less

Submitted 9 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

A Full-Stack Performance Evaluation Infrastructure for 3D-DRAM-based LLM Accelerators

Authors: Cong Li, Chenhao Xue, Yi Ren, Xiping Dong, Yu Cheng, Yinbo Hu, Fujun Bai, Yixin Guo, Xiping Jiang, Qiang Wu, Zhi Yang, Zhe Cheng, Yuan Xie, Guangyu Sun

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit memory-intensive behavior during decoding, making it a key bottleneck in LLM inference. To accelerate decoding execution, hybrid-bonding-based 3D-DRAM has been adopted in LLM accelerators. While this emerging technology provides strong performance gains over existing hardware, current 3D-DRAM accelerators (3D-Accelerators) rely on closed-source evaluation tools… ▽ More Large language models (LLMs) exhibit memory-intensive behavior during decoding, making it a key bottleneck in LLM inference. To accelerate decoding execution, hybrid-bonding-based 3D-DRAM has been adopted in LLM accelerators. While this emerging technology provides strong performance gains over existing hardware, current 3D-DRAM accelerators (3D-Accelerators) rely on closed-source evaluation tools, limiting access to publicly available performance analysis methods. Moreover, existing designs are highly customized for specific scenarios, lacking a general and reusable full-stack modeling for 3D-Accelerators across diverse usecases. To bridge this fundamental gap, we present ATLAS, the first silicon-proven Architectural Three-dimesional-DRAM-based LLM Accelerator Simulation framework. Built on commercially deployed multi-layer 3D-DRAM technology, ATLAS introduces unified abstractions for both 3D-Accelerator system architecture and programming primitives to support arbitrary LLM inference scenarios. Validation against real silicon shows that ATLAS achieves $\le$8.57% simulation error and 97.26-99.96\% correlation with measured performance. Through design space exploration with ATLAS, we demonstrate its ability to guide architecture design and distill key takeaways for both 3D-DRAM memory system and 3D-Accelerator microarchitecture across scenarios. ATLAS will be open-sourced upon publication, enabling further research on 3D-Accelerators. △ Less

Submitted 9 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

AgentGate: A Lightweight Structured Routing Engine for the Internet of Agents

Authors: Yujun Cheng, Enfang Cui, Hao Qin, Zhiyuan Liang, Qi Xu

Abstract: The rapid development of AI agent systems is leading to an emerging Internet of Agents, where specialized agents operate across local devices, edge nodes, private services, and cloud platforms. Although recent efforts have improved agent naming, discovery, and interaction, efficient request dispatch remains an open systems problem under latency, privacy, and cost constraints. In this paper, we pre… ▽ More The rapid development of AI agent systems is leading to an emerging Internet of Agents, where specialized agents operate across local devices, edge nodes, private services, and cloud platforms. Although recent efforts have improved agent naming, discovery, and interaction, efficient request dispatch remains an open systems problem under latency, privacy, and cost constraints. In this paper, we present AgentGate, a lightweight structured routing engine for candidate-aware agent dispatch. Instead of treating routing as unrestricted text generation, AgentGate formulates it as a constrained decision problem and decomposes it into two stages: action decision and structural grounding. The first stage determines whether a query should trigger single-agent invocation, multi-agent planning, direct response, or safe escalation, while the second stage instantiates the selected action into executable outputs such as target agents, structured arguments, or multi-step plans. To adapt compact models to this setting, we further develop a routing-oriented fine-tuning scheme with candidate-aware supervision and hard negative examples. Experiments on a curated routing benchmark with several 3B--7B open-weight models show that compact models can provide competitive routing performance in constrained settings, and that model differences are mainly reflected in action prediction, candidate selection, and structured grounding quality. These results indicate that structured routing is a feasible design point for efficient and privacy-aware agent systems, especially when routing decisions must be made under resource-constrained deployment conditions. △ Less

Submitted 8 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

MedGemma 1.5 Technical Report

Authors: Andrew Sellergren, Chufan Gao, Fereshteh Mahvar, Timo Kohlberger, Fayaz Jamil, Madeleine Traverse, Alberto Tono, Bashir Sadjad, Lin Yang, Charles Lau, Liron Yatziv, Tiffany Chen, Bram Sterling, Kenneth Philbrick, Richa Tiwari, Yun Liu, Madhuram Jajoo, Chandrashekar Sankarapu, Swapnil Vispute, Harshad Purandare, Abhishek Bijay Mishra, Sam Schmidgall, Tao Tu, Anil Palepu, Chunjong Park , et al. (17 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: We introduce MedGemma 1.5 4B, the latest model in the MedGemma collection. MedGemma 1.5 expands on MedGemma 1 by integrating additional capabilities: high-dimensional medical imaging (CT/MRI volumes and histopathology whole slide images), anatomical localization via bounding boxes, multi-timepoint chest X-ray analysis, and improved medical document understanding (lab reports, electronic health rec… ▽ More We introduce MedGemma 1.5 4B, the latest model in the MedGemma collection. MedGemma 1.5 expands on MedGemma 1 by integrating additional capabilities: high-dimensional medical imaging (CT/MRI volumes and histopathology whole slide images), anatomical localization via bounding boxes, multi-timepoint chest X-ray analysis, and improved medical document understanding (lab reports, electronic health records). We detail the innovations required to enable these modalities within a single architecture, including new training data, long-context 3D volume slicing, and whole-slide pathology sampling. Compared to MedGemma 1 4B, MedGemma 1.5 4B demonstrates significant gains in these new areas, improving 3D MRI condition classification accuracy by 11% and 3D CT condition classification by 3% (absolute improvements). In whole slide pathology imaging, MedGemma 1.5 4B achieves a 47% macro F1 gain. Additionally, it improves anatomical localization with a 35% increase in Intersection over Union on chest X-rays and achieves a 4% macro accuracy for longitudinal (multi-timepoint) chest x-ray analysis. Beyond its improved multimodal performance over MedGemma 1, MedGemma 1.5 improves on text-based clinical knowledge and reasoning, improving by 5% on MedQA accuracy and 22% on EHRQA accuracy. It also achieves an average of 18% macro F1 on 4 different lab report information extraction datasets (EHR Datasets 2, 3, 4, and Mendeley Clinical Laboratory Test Reports). Taken together, MedGemma 1.5 serves as a robust, open resource for the community, designed as an improved foundation on which developers can create the next generation of medical AI systems. Resources and tutorials for building upon MedGemma 1.5 can be found at https://goo.gle/MedGemma. △ Less

Submitted 6 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

DeepStack: Scalable and Accurate Design Space Exploration for Distributed 3D-Stacked AI Accelerators

Authors: Zhiwen Mo, Guoyu Li, Hao Mark Chen, Yu Cheng, Zhengju Tang, Qianzhou Wang, Lei Wang, Shuang Liang, Lingxiao Ma, Xianqi Zhou, Yuxiao Guo, Wayne Luk, Jilong Xue, Hongxiang Fan

Abstract: Advances in hybrid bonding and packaging have driven growing interest in 3D DRAM-stacked accelerators with higher memory bandwidth and capacity. As LLMs scale to hundreds of billions or trillions of parameters, distributed inference across multiple 3D chips becomes essential. With cross-stack co-design increasingly critical, we propose DeepStack, an accurate and efficient performance model and too… ▽ More Advances in hybrid bonding and packaging have driven growing interest in 3D DRAM-stacked accelerators with higher memory bandwidth and capacity. As LLMs scale to hundreds of billions or trillions of parameters, distributed inference across multiple 3D chips becomes essential. With cross-stack co-design increasingly critical, we propose DeepStack, an accurate and efficient performance model and tool to enable early-stage system-hardware co-design space exploration (DSE) for distributed 3D-stacked AI systems. At the hardware level, DeepStack captures fine-grained 3D memory semantics such as transaction-aware bandwidth, bank activation constraints, buffering limitations, and thermal-power modeling. At the system level, DeepStack incorporates comprehensive parallelization strategies and execution scheduling for distributed LLM inference. With novel modeling techniques such as dual-stage network abstraction and tile-level compute-communication overlap, we achieve up to 100,000x faster runtime over state-of-the-art simulators at comparable accuracy, cross-validated against our in-house 3D designs, NS-3 backend (2.12%), and vLLM serving on 8xB200 GPUs (12.18%). With hierarchical design space search, DeepStack enables efficient exploration over 2.5x10^14 design points spanning 3D-stacked DRAM layers, DRAM vertical connectivity, interconnect, compute-memory allocation, and distributed scheduling. Compared with baseline designs, DeepStack achieves up to 9.5x higher throughput through co-optimized parallelism and 3D architecture search. Our DSE further reveals that batch size drives a more fundamental architectural divide than the prefill/decode distinction, and that parallelism strategy and hardware architecture are tightly coupled -- incomplete schedule search leads to permanently suboptimal silicon irrecoverable by software tuning. We intend to open source DeepStack to support future research. △ Less

Submitted 9 April, 2026; v1 submitted 6 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Comments: fix typo

Synthesis4AD: Synthetic Anomalies are All You Need for 3D Anomaly Detection

Authors: Yihan Sun, Yuqi Cheng, Junjie Zu, Yuxiang Tan, Guoyang Xie, Yucheng Wang, Yunkang Cao, Weiming Shen

Abstract: Industrial 3D anomaly detection performance is fundamentally constrained by the scarcity and long-tailed distribution of abnormal samples. To address this challenge, we propose Synthesis4AD, an end-to-end paradigm that leverages large-scale, high-fidelity synthetic anomalies to learn more discriminative representations for 3D anomaly detection. At the core of Synthesis4AD is 3D-DefectStudio, a sof… ▽ More Industrial 3D anomaly detection performance is fundamentally constrained by the scarcity and long-tailed distribution of abnormal samples. To address this challenge, we propose Synthesis4AD, an end-to-end paradigm that leverages large-scale, high-fidelity synthetic anomalies to learn more discriminative representations for 3D anomaly detection. At the core of Synthesis4AD is 3D-DefectStudio, a software platform built upon the controllable synthesis engine MPAS, which injects geometrically realistic defects guided by higher-dimensional support primitives while simultaneously generating accurate point-wise anomaly masks. Furthermore, Synthesis4AD incorporates a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to interpret product design information and automatically translate it into executable anomaly synthesis instructions, enabling scalable and knowledge-driven anomalous data generation. To improve the robustness and generalization of the downstream detector on unstructured point clouds, Synthesis4AD further introduces a training pipeline based on spatial-distribution normalization and geometry-faithful data augmentations, which alleviates the sensitivity of Point Transformer architectures to absolute coordinates and improves feature learning under realistic data variations. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on Real3D-AD, MulSen-AD, and a real-world industrial parts dataset. The proposed synthesis method MPAS and the interactive system 3D-DefectStudio will be publicly released at https://github.com/hustCYQ/Synthesis4AD. △ Less

Submitted 6 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Memory Intelligence Agent

Authors: Jingyang Qiao, Weicheng Meng, Yu Cheng, Zhihang Lin, Zhizhong Zhang, Xin Tan, Jingyu Gong, Kun Shao, Yuan Xie

Abstract: Deep research agents (DRAs) integrate LLM reasoning with external tools. Memory systems enable DRAs to leverage historical experiences, which are essential for efficient reasoning and autonomous evolution. Existing methods rely on retrieving similar trajectories from memory to aid reasoning, while suffering from key limitations of ineffective memory evolution and increasing storage and retrieval c… ▽ More Deep research agents (DRAs) integrate LLM reasoning with external tools. Memory systems enable DRAs to leverage historical experiences, which are essential for efficient reasoning and autonomous evolution. Existing methods rely on retrieving similar trajectories from memory to aid reasoning, while suffering from key limitations of ineffective memory evolution and increasing storage and retrieval costs. To address these problems, we propose a novel Memory Intelligence Agent (MIA) framework, consisting of a Manager-Planner-Executor architecture. Memory Manager is a non-parametric memory system that can store compressed historical search trajectories. Planner is a parametric memory agent that can produce search plans for questions. Executor is another agent that can search and analyze information guided by the search plan. To build the MIA framework, we first adopt an alternating reinforcement learning paradigm to enhance cooperation between the Planner and the Executor. Furthermore, we enable the Planner to continuously evolve during test-time learning, with updates performed on-the-fly alongside inference without interrupting the reasoning process. Additionally, we establish a bidirectional conversion loop between parametric and non-parametric memories to achieve efficient memory evolution. Finally, we incorporate a reflection and an unsupervised judgment mechanisms to boost reasoning and self-evolution in the open world. Extensive experiments across eleven benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of MIA. △ Less

Submitted 7 April, 2026; v1 submitted 6 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

The Eleventh NTIRE 2026 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report

Authors: Bin Ren, Hang Guo, Yan Shu, Jiaqi Ma, Ziteng Cui, Shuhong Liu, Guofeng Mei, Lei Sun, Zongwei Wu, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Salman Khan, Radu Timofte, Yawei Li, Hongyuan Yu, Pufan Xu, Chen Wu, Long Peng, Jiaojiao Yi, Siyang Yi, Yuning Cui, Jingyuan Xia, Xing Mou, Keji He, Jinlin Wu, Zongang Gao , et al. (38 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: This paper reviews the NTIRE 2026 challenge on efficient single-image super-resolution with a focus on the proposed solutions and results. The aim of this challenge is to devise a network that reduces one or several aspects, such as runtime, parameters, and FLOPs, while maintaining PSNR of around 26.90 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_valid dataset, and 26.99 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_test dataset. The challenge… ▽ More This paper reviews the NTIRE 2026 challenge on efficient single-image super-resolution with a focus on the proposed solutions and results. The aim of this challenge is to devise a network that reduces one or several aspects, such as runtime, parameters, and FLOPs, while maintaining PSNR of around 26.90 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_valid dataset, and 26.99 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_test dataset. The challenge had 95 registered participants, and 15 teams made valid submissions. They gauge the state-of-the-art results for efficient single-image super-resolution. △ Less

Submitted 3 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Comments: CVPR 2026 NTIRE Workshop Paper, Efficient Super Resolution Technical Report

From Broad Exploration to Stable Synthesis: Entropy-Guided Optimization for Autoregressive Image Generation

Authors: Han Song, Yucheng Zhou, Jianbing Shen, Yu Cheng

Abstract: Combining Chain-of-Thought (CoT) with Reinforcement Learning (RL) improves text-to-image (T2I) generation, yet the underlying interaction between CoT's exploration and RL's optimization remains unclear. We present a systematic entropy-based analysis that yields three key insights: (1) CoT expands the generative exploration space, while RL contracts it toward high-reward regions; (2) final reward i… ▽ More Combining Chain-of-Thought (CoT) with Reinforcement Learning (RL) improves text-to-image (T2I) generation, yet the underlying interaction between CoT's exploration and RL's optimization remains unclear. We present a systematic entropy-based analysis that yields three key insights: (1) CoT expands the generative exploration space, while RL contracts it toward high-reward regions; (2) final reward is strongly negatively correlated with both the mean and variance of image-token entropy, highlighting the need to reduce uncertainty and instability; and (3) the entropy of the textual CoT directly governs downstream image quality, with lower-entropy CoTs leading to better generations. Motivated by these findings, we propose Entropy-Guided Group Relative Policy Optimization (EG-GRPO), a fine-tuning strategy that reallocates optimization budget by uncertainty: low-entropy tokens are excluded from reward-driven updates to preserve stability, while high-entropy tokens receive an entropy bonus that encourages structured exploration without collapse. Experiments on standard T2I benchmarks demonstrate that EG-GRPO achieves state-of-the-art performance. △ Less

Submitted 12 March, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

SenseMath: Do LLMs Have Number Sense? Evaluating Shortcut Use, Judgment, and Generation

Authors: Haomin Zhuang, Xiangqi Wang, Yili Shen, Ying Cheng, Xiangliang Zhang

Abstract: Large language models often default to step-by-step computation even when efficient numerical shortcuts are available. This raises a basic question: do they exhibit number sense in a human-like behavioral sense, i.e., the ability to recognize numerical structure, apply shortcuts when appropriate, and avoid them when they are not? We introduce SenseMath, a controlled benchmark for evaluating struct… ▽ More Large language models often default to step-by-step computation even when efficient numerical shortcuts are available. This raises a basic question: do they exhibit number sense in a human-like behavioral sense, i.e., the ability to recognize numerical structure, apply shortcuts when appropriate, and avoid them when they are not? We introduce SenseMath, a controlled benchmark for evaluating structure-sensitive numerical reasoning in LLMs. SenseMath contains 4,800 items spanning eight shortcut categories and four digit scales, with matched strong-shortcut, weak-shortcut, and control variants. It supports three evaluation settings of increasing cognitive demand: Shortcut Use (whether models can apply shortcuts on shortcut-amenable problems); Applicability Judgment (whether they can recognize when a shortcut is appropriate or misleading); and Problem Generation (whether they can generate new problem items that correctly admit a given type of shortcut). Our evaluation across five LLMs, ranging from GPT-4o-mini to Llama-3.1-8B, shows a consistent pattern: when explicitly prompted, models readily adopt shortcut strategies and achieve substantial accuracy gains on shortcut-amenable items (up to 15%), yet under standard chain-of-thought prompting they spontaneously employ such strategies in fewer than 40% of cases, even when they demonstrably possess the requisite capability. Moreover, this competence is confined to the Use level; models systematically over-generalise shortcuts to problems where they do not apply, and fail to generate valid shortcut-bearing problems from scratch. Together, these results suggest that current LLMs exhibit procedural shortcut fluency without the structural understanding of when and why shortcuts work that underlies human number sense. △ Less

Submitted 2 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Unify-Agent: A Unified Multimodal Agent for World-Grounded Image Synthesis

Authors: Shuang Chen, Quanxin Shou, Hangting Chen, Yucheng Zhou, Kaituo Feng, Wenbo Hu, Yi-Fan Zhang, Yunlong Lin, Wenxuan Huang, Mingyang Song, Dasen Dai, Bolin Jiang, Manyuan Zhang, Shi-Xue Zhang, Zhengkai Jiang, Lucas Wang, Zhao Zhong, Yu Cheng, Nanyun Peng

Abstract: Unified multimodal models provide a natural and promising architecture for understanding diverse and complex real-world knowledge while generating high-quality images. However, they still rely primarily on frozen parametric knowledge, which makes them struggle with real-world image generation involving long-tail and knowledge-intensive concepts. Inspired by the broad success of agents on real-worl… ▽ More Unified multimodal models provide a natural and promising architecture for understanding diverse and complex real-world knowledge while generating high-quality images. However, they still rely primarily on frozen parametric knowledge, which makes them struggle with real-world image generation involving long-tail and knowledge-intensive concepts. Inspired by the broad success of agents on real-world tasks, we explore agentic modeling to address this limitation. Specifically, we present Unify-Agent, a unified multimodal agent for world-grounded image synthesis, which reframes image generation as an agentic pipeline consisting of prompt understanding, multimodal evidence searching, grounded recaptioning, and final synthesis. To train our model, we construct a tailored multimodal data pipeline and curate 143K high-quality agent trajectories for world-grounded image synthesis, enabling effective supervision over the full agentic generation process. We further introduce FactIP, a benchmark covering 12 categories of culturally significant and long-tail factual concepts that explicitly requires external knowledge grounding. Extensive experiments show that our proposed Unify-Agent substantially improves over its base unified model across diverse benchmarks and real world generation tasks, while approaching the world knowledge capabilities of the strongest closed-source models. As an early exploration of agent-based modeling for world-grounded image synthesis, our work highlights the value of tightly coupling reasoning, searching, and generation for reliable open-world agentic image synthesis. △ Less

Submitted 1 April, 2026; v1 submitted 31 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: Project Page: https://github.com/shawn0728/Unify-Agent

GEMS: Agent-Native Multimodal Generation with Memory and Skills

Authors: Zefeng He, Siyuan Huang, Xiaoye Qu, Yafu Li, Tong Zhu, Yu Cheng, Yang Yang

Abstract: Recent multimodal generation models have achieved remarkable progress on general-purpose generation tasks, yet continue to struggle with complex instructions and specialized downstream tasks. Inspired by the success of advanced agent frameworks such as Claude Code, we propose \textbf{GEMS} (Agent-Native Multimodal \textbf{GE}neration with \textbf{M}emory and \textbf{S}kills), a framework that push… ▽ More Recent multimodal generation models have achieved remarkable progress on general-purpose generation tasks, yet continue to struggle with complex instructions and specialized downstream tasks. Inspired by the success of advanced agent frameworks such as Claude Code, we propose \textbf{GEMS} (Agent-Native Multimodal \textbf{GE}neration with \textbf{M}emory and \textbf{S}kills), a framework that pushes beyond the inherent limitations of foundational models on both general and downstream tasks. GEMS is built upon three core components. Agent Loop introduces a structured multi-agent framework that iteratively improves generation quality through closed-loop optimization. Agent Memory provides a persistent, trajectory-level memory that hierarchically stores both factual states and compressed experiential summaries, enabling a global view of the optimization process while reducing redundancy. Agent Skill offers an extensible collection of domain-specific expertise with on-demand loading, allowing the system to effectively handle diverse downstream applications. Across five mainstream tasks and four downstream tasks, evaluated on multiple generative backends, GEMS consistently achieves significant performance gains. Most notably, it enables the lightweight 6B model Z-Image-Turbo to surpass the state-of-the-art Nano Banana 2 on GenEval2, demonstrating the effectiveness of agent harness in extending model capabilities beyond their original limits. △ Less

Submitted 30 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: Project Page: https://gems-gen.github.io

ViviDoc: Generating Interactive Documents through Human-Agent Collaboration

Authors: Yinghao Tang, Yupeng Xie, Yingchaojie Feng, Tingfeng Lan, Jiale Lao, Yue Cheng, Wei Chen

Abstract: Interactive documents help readers engage with complex ideas through dynamic visualization, interactive animations, and exploratory interfaces. However, creating such documents remains costly, as it requires both domain expertise and web development skills. Recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents can automate content creation, but directly applying them to interactive document generation of… ▽ More Interactive documents help readers engage with complex ideas through dynamic visualization, interactive animations, and exploratory interfaces. However, creating such documents remains costly, as it requires both domain expertise and web development skills. Recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents can automate content creation, but directly applying them to interactive document generation often produces outputs that are difficult to control. To address this, we present ViviDoc, to the best of our knowledge the first work to systematically address interactive document generation. ViviDoc introduces a multi-agent pipeline (Planner, Styler, Executor, Evaluator). To make the generation process controllable, we provide three levels of human control: (1) the Document Specification (DocSpec) with SRTC Interaction Specifications (State, Render, Transition, Constraint) for structured planning, (2) a content-aware Style Palette for customizing writing and interaction styles, and (3) chat-based editing for iterative refinement. We also construct ViviBench, a benchmark of 101 topics derived from real-world interactive documents across 11 domains, along with a taxonomy of 8 interaction types and a 4-dimensional automated evaluation framework validated against human ratings (Pearson r > 0.84). Experiments show that ViviDoc achieves the highest content richness and interaction quality in both automated and human evaluation. A 12-person user study confirms that the system is easy to use, provides effective control over the generation process, and produces documents that satisfy users. △ Less

Submitted 29 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

ExFusion: Efficient Transformer Training via Multi-Experts Fusion

Authors: Jiacheng Ruan, Daize Dong, Xiaoye Qu, Tong Zhu, Ting Liu, Yuzhuo Fu, Yu Cheng, Suncheng Xiang

Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models substantially improve performance by increasing the capacity of dense architectures. However, directly training MoE models requires considerable computational resources and introduces extra overhead in parameter storage and deployment. Therefore, it is critical to develop an approach that leverages the multi-expert capability of MoE to enhance performance while incu… ▽ More Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models substantially improve performance by increasing the capacity of dense architectures. However, directly training MoE models requires considerable computational resources and introduces extra overhead in parameter storage and deployment. Therefore, it is critical to develop an approach that leverages the multi-expert capability of MoE to enhance performance while incurring minimal additional cost. To this end, we propose a novel pre-training approach, termed ExFusion, which improves the efficiency of Transformer training through multi-expert fusion. Specifically, during the initialization phase, ExFusion upcycles the feed-forward network (FFN) of the Transformer into a multi-expert configuration, where each expert is assigned a weight for later parameter fusion. During training, these weights allow multiple experts to be fused into a single unified expert equivalent to the original FFN, which is subsequently used for forward computation. As a result, ExFusion introduces multi-expert characteristics into the training process while incurring only marginal computational cost compared to standard dense training. After training, the learned weights are used to integrate multi-experts into a single unified expert, thereby eliminating additional overhead in storage and deployment. Extensive experiments on a variety of computer vision and natural language processing tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. △ Less

Submitted 29 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: Accepted by IEEE TMM2026

Let the Agent Steer: Closed-Loop Ranking Optimization via Influence Exchange

Authors: Yin Cheng, Liao Zhou, Xiyu Liang, Dihao Luo, Tewei Lee, Kailun Zheng, Weiwei Zhang, Mingchen Cai, Jian Dong, Andy Zhang

Abstract: Recommendation ranking is fundamentally an influence allocation problem: a sorting formula distributes ranking influence among competing factors, and the business outcome depends on finding the optimal "exchange rates" among them. However, offline proxy metrics systematically misjudge how influence reallocation translates to online impact, with asymmetric bias across metrics that a single calibrat… ▽ More Recommendation ranking is fundamentally an influence allocation problem: a sorting formula distributes ranking influence among competing factors, and the business outcome depends on finding the optimal "exchange rates" among them. However, offline proxy metrics systematically misjudge how influence reallocation translates to online impact, with asymmetric bias across metrics that a single calibration factor cannot correct. We present Sortify, the first fully autonomous LLM-driven ranking optimization agent deployed in a large-scale production recommendation system. The agent reframes ranking optimization as continuous influence exchange, closing the full loop from diagnosis to parameter deployment without human intervention. It addresses structural problems through three mechanisms: (1) a dual-channel framework grounded in Savage's Subjective Expected Utility (SEU) that decouples offline-online transfer correction (Belief channel) from constraint penalty adjustment (Preference channel); (2) an LLM meta-controller operating on framework-level parameters rather than low-level search variables; (3) a persistent Memory DB with 7 relational tables for cross-round learning. Its core metric, Influence Share, provides a decomposable measure where all factor contributions sum to exactly 100%. Sortify has been deployed across two markets. In Country A, the agent pushed GMV from -3.6% to +9.2% within 7 rounds with peak orders reaching +12.5%. In Country B, a cold-start deployment achieved +4.15% GMV/UU and +3.58% Ads Revenue in a 7-day A/B test, leading to full production rollout. △ Less

Submitted 9 April, 2026; v1 submitted 29 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

A Dataset of Nonlinear Equations for Subdivision

Authors: Juan Xu, Huilong Lai, Yingying Cheng, Wenqiang Yang, Changbo Chen

Abstract: In this paper, we report on the largest labelled dataset constructed so far for solving zero-dimensional square nonlinear systems with subdivision-based methods. A brief, non-exhaustive survey with emphasis on the literature from the past two decades is also provided to accompany with the dataset. The value of the dataset has been demonstrated through benchmarking several solvers as well as being… ▽ More In this paper, we report on the largest labelled dataset constructed so far for solving zero-dimensional square nonlinear systems with subdivision-based methods. A brief, non-exhaustive survey with emphasis on the literature from the past two decades is also provided to accompany with the dataset. The value of the dataset has been demonstrated through benchmarking several solvers as well as being used for learning to classify the real roots of nonlinear parametric systems. △ Less

Submitted 28 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: 49 pages, 11 figures

Project Imaging-X: A Survey of 1000+ Open-Access Medical Imaging Datasets for Foundation Model Development

Authors: Zhongying Deng, Cheng Tang, Ziyan Huang, Jiashi Lin, Ying Chen, Junzhi Ning, Chenglong Ma, Jiyao Liu, Wei Li, Yinghao Zhu, Shujian Gao, Yanyan Huang, Sibo Ju, Yanzhou Su, Pengcheng Chen, Wenhao Tang, Tianbin Li, Haoyu Wang, Yuanfeng Ji, Hui Sun, Shaobo Min, Liang Peng, Feilong Tang, Haochen Xue, Rulin Zhou , et al. (102 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: Foundation models have demonstrated remarkable success across diverse domains and tasks, primarily due to the thrive of large-scale, diverse, and high-quality datasets. However, in the field of medical imaging, the curation and assembling of such medical datasets are highly challenging due to the reliance on clinical expertise and strict ethical and privacy constraints, resulting in a scarcity of… ▽ More Foundation models have demonstrated remarkable success across diverse domains and tasks, primarily due to the thrive of large-scale, diverse, and high-quality datasets. However, in the field of medical imaging, the curation and assembling of such medical datasets are highly challenging due to the reliance on clinical expertise and strict ethical and privacy constraints, resulting in a scarcity of large-scale unified medical datasets and hindering the development of powerful medical foundation models. In this work, we present the largest survey to date of medical image datasets, covering over 1,000 open-access datasets with a systematic catalog of their modalities, tasks, anatomies, annotations, limitations, and potential for integration. Our analysis exposes a landscape that is modest in scale, fragmented across narrowly scoped tasks, and unevenly distributed across organs and modalities, which in turn limits the utility of existing medical image datasets for developing versatile and robust medical foundation models. To turn fragmentation into scale, we propose a metadata-driven fusion paradigm (MDFP) that integrates public datasets with shared modalities or tasks, thereby transforming multiple small data silos into larger, more coherent resources. Building on MDFP, we release an interactive discovery portal that enables end-to-end, automated medical image dataset integration, and compile all surveyed datasets into a unified, structured table that clearly summarizes their key characteristics and provides reference links, offering the community an accessible and comprehensive repository. By charting the current terrain and offering a principled path to dataset consolidation, our survey provides a practical roadmap for scaling medical imaging corpora, supporting faster data discovery, more principled dataset creation, and more capable medical foundation models. △ Less

Submitted 28 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: 157 pages, 19 figures, 26 tables. Project repo: \url{https://github.com/uni-medical/Project-Imaging-X}

Brain-inspired AI for Edge Intelligence: a systematic review

Authors: Yingchao Cheng, Meijia Wang, Zhifeng Hao, Rajkumar Buyya

Abstract: While Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) promise to circumvent the severe Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) constraints of edge intelligence, the field currently faces a "Deployment Paradox" where theoretical energy gains are frequently negated by the inefficiencies of mapping asynchronous, event-driven dynamics onto traditional von Neumann substrates. Transcending the reductionism of algorithm-only revi… ▽ More While Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) promise to circumvent the severe Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) constraints of edge intelligence, the field currently faces a "Deployment Paradox" where theoretical energy gains are frequently negated by the inefficiencies of mapping asynchronous, event-driven dynamics onto traditional von Neumann substrates. Transcending the reductionism of algorithm-only reviews, this survey adopts a rigorous system-level hardware-software co-design perspective to examine the 2020-2025 trajectory, specifically targeting the "last mile" technologies - from quantization methodologies to hybrid architectures - that translate biological plausibility into silicon reality. We critically dissect the interplay between training complexity (the dichotomy of direct learning vs. conversion), the "memory wall" bottlenecking stateful neuronal updates, and the critical software gap in neuromorphic compilation toolchains. Finally, we envision a roadmap to reconcile the fundamental "Sync-Async Mismatch," proposing the development of a standardized Neuromorphic OS as the foundational layer for realizing a ubiquitous, energy-autonomous Green Cognitive Substrate. △ Less

Submitted 19 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Multimodal Dataset Distillation via Phased Teacher Models

Authors: Shengbin Guo, Hang Zhao, Senqiao Yang, Chenyang Jiang, Yuhang Cheng, Xiangru Peng, Rui Shao, Zhuotao Tian

Abstract: Multimodal dataset distillation aims to construct compact synthetic datasets that enable efficient compression and knowledge transfer from large-scale image-text data. However, existing approaches often fail to capture the complex, dynamically evolving knowledge embedded in the later training stages of teacher models. This limitation leads to degraded student performance and compromises the qualit… ▽ More Multimodal dataset distillation aims to construct compact synthetic datasets that enable efficient compression and knowledge transfer from large-scale image-text data. However, existing approaches often fail to capture the complex, dynamically evolving knowledge embedded in the later training stages of teacher models. This limitation leads to degraded student performance and compromises the quality of the distilled data. To address critical challenges such as pronounced cross-stage performance gaps and unstable teacher trajectories, we propose Phased Teacher Model with Shortcut Trajectory (PTM-ST) -- a novel phased distillation framework. PTM-ST leverages stage-aware teacher modeling and a shortcut-based trajectory construction strategy to accurately fit the teacher's learning dynamics across distinct training phases. This enhances both the stability and expressiveness of the distillation process. Through theoretical analysis and comprehensive experiments, we show that PTM-ST significantly mitigates optimization oscillations and inter-phase knowledge gaps, while also reducing storage overhead. Our method consistently surpasses state-of-the-art baselines on Flickr30k and COCO, achieving up to 13.5% absolute improvement and an average gain of 9.53% on Flickr30k. Code: https://github.com/Previsior/PTM-ST. △ Less

Submitted 26 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: Accepted to ICLR 2026

SDD-YOLO: A Small-Target Detection Framework for Ground-to-Air Anti-UAV Surveillance with Edge-Efficient Deployment

Authors: Pengyu Chen, Haotian Sa, Yiwei Hu, Yuhan Cheng, Junbo Wang

Abstract: Detecting small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) from a ground-to-air (G2A) perspective presents significant challenges, including extremely low pixel occupancy, cluttered aerial backgrounds, and strict real-time constraints. Existing YOLO-based detectors are primarily optimized for general object detection and often lack adequate feature resolution for sub-pixel targets, while introducing complexi… ▽ More Detecting small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) from a ground-to-air (G2A) perspective presents significant challenges, including extremely low pixel occupancy, cluttered aerial backgrounds, and strict real-time constraints. Existing YOLO-based detectors are primarily optimized for general object detection and often lack adequate feature resolution for sub-pixel targets, while introducing complexities during deployment. In this paper, we propose SDD-YOLO, a small-target detection framework tailored for G2A anti-UAV surveillance. To capture fine-grained spatial details critical for micro-targets, SDD-YOLO introduces a P2 high-resolution detection head operating at 4 times downsampling. Furthermore, we integrate the recent architectural advancements from YOLO26, including a DFL-free, NMS-free architecture for streamlined inference, and the MuSGD hybrid training strategy with ProgLoss and STAL, which substantially mitigates gradient oscillation on sparse small-target signals. To support our evaluation, we construct DroneSOD-30K, a large-scale G2A dataset comprising approximately 30,000 annotated images covering diverse meteorological conditions. Experiments demonstrate that SDD-YOLO-n achieves a mAP@0.5 of 86.0% on DroneSOD-30K, surpassing the YOLOv5n baseline by 7.8 percentage points. Extensive inference analysis shows our model attains 226 FPS on an NVIDIA RTX 5090 and 35 FPS on an Intel Xeon CPU, demonstrating exceptional efficiency for future edge deployment. △ Less

Submitted 26 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Intern-S1-Pro: Scientific Multimodal Foundation Model at Trillion Scale

Authors: Yicheng Zou, Dongsheng Zhu, Lin Zhu, Tong Zhu, Yunhua Zhou, Peiheng Zhou, Xinyu Zhou, Dongzhan Zhou, Zhiwang Zhou, Yuhao Zhou, Bowen Zhou, Zhanping Zhong, Zhijie Zhong, Haiteng Zhao, Penghao Zhao, Xiaomeng Zhao, Zhiyuan Zhao, Yechen Zhang, Jin Zhang, Wenwei Zhang, Hongjie Zhang, Zhuo Zhang, Wenlong Zhang, Bo Zhang, Chao Zhang , et al. (152 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: We introduce Intern-S1-Pro, the first one-trillion-parameter scientific multimodal foundation model. Scaling to this unprecedented size, the model delivers a comprehensive enhancement across both general and scientific domains. Beyond stronger reasoning and image-text understanding capabilities, its intelligence is augmented with advanced agent capabilities. Simultaneously, its scientific expertis… ▽ More We introduce Intern-S1-Pro, the first one-trillion-parameter scientific multimodal foundation model. Scaling to this unprecedented size, the model delivers a comprehensive enhancement across both general and scientific domains. Beyond stronger reasoning and image-text understanding capabilities, its intelligence is augmented with advanced agent capabilities. Simultaneously, its scientific expertise has been vastly expanded to master over 100 specialized tasks across critical science fields, including chemistry, materials, life sciences, and earth sciences. Achieving this massive scale is made possible by the robust infrastructure support of XTuner and LMDeploy, which facilitates highly efficient Reinforcement Learning (RL) training at the 1-trillion parameter level while ensuring strict precision consistency between training and inference. By seamlessly integrating these advancements, Intern-S1-Pro further fortifies the fusion of general and specialized intelligence, working as a Specializable Generalist, demonstrating its position in the top tier of open-source models for general capabilities, while outperforming proprietary models in the depth of specialized scientific tasks. △ Less

Submitted 2 April, 2026; v1 submitted 26 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Project and Generate: Divergence-Free Neural Operators for Incompressible Flows

Authors: Xigui Li, Hongwei Zhang, Ruoxi Jiang, Deshu Chen, Chensen Lin, Limei Han, Yuan Qi, Xin Guo, Yuan Cheng

Abstract: Learning-based models for fluid dynamics often operate in unconstrained function spaces, leading to physically inadmissible, unstable simulations. While penalty-based methods offer soft regularization, they provide no structural guarantees, resulting in spurious divergence and long-term collapse. In this work, we introduce a unified framework that enforces the incompressible continuity equation as… ▽ More Learning-based models for fluid dynamics often operate in unconstrained function spaces, leading to physically inadmissible, unstable simulations. While penalty-based methods offer soft regularization, they provide no structural guarantees, resulting in spurious divergence and long-term collapse. In this work, we introduce a unified framework that enforces the incompressible continuity equation as a hard, intrinsic constraint for both deterministic and generative modeling. First, to project deterministic models onto the divergence-free subspace, we integrate a differentiable spectral Leray projection grounded in the Helmholtz-Hodge decomposition, which restricts the regression hypothesis space to physically admissible velocity fields. Second, to generate physically consistent distributions, we show that simply projecting model outputs is insufficient when the prior is incompatible. To address this, we construct a divergence-free Gaussian reference measure via a curl-based pushforward, ensuring the entire probability flow remains subspace-consistent by construction. Experiments on 2D Navier-Stokes equations demonstrate exact incompressibility up to discretization error and substantially improved stability and physical consistency. △ Less

Submitted 25 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

NeuroSeg Meets DINOv3: Transferring 2D Self-Supervised Visual Priors to 3D Neuron Segmentation via DINOv3 Initialization

Authors: Yik San Cheng, Runkai Zhao, Weidong Cai

Abstract: 2D visual foundation models, such as DINOv3, a self-supervised model trained on large-scale natural images, have demonstrated strong zero-shot generalization, capturing both rich global context and fine-grained structural cues. However, an analogous 3D foundation model for downstream volumetric neuroimaging remains lacking, largely due to the challenges of 3D image acquisition and the scarcity of… ▽ More 2D visual foundation models, such as DINOv3, a self-supervised model trained on large-scale natural images, have demonstrated strong zero-shot generalization, capturing both rich global context and fine-grained structural cues. However, an analogous 3D foundation model for downstream volumetric neuroimaging remains lacking, largely due to the challenges of 3D image acquisition and the scarcity of high-quality annotations. To address this gap, we propose to adapt the 2D visual representations learned by DINOv3 to a 3D biomedical segmentation model, enabling more data-efficient and morphologically faithful neuronal reconstruction. Specifically, we design an inflation-based adaptation strategy that inflates 2D filters into 3D operators, preserving semantic priors from DINOv3 while adapting to 3D neuronal volume patches. In addition, we introduce a topology-aware skeleton loss to explicitly enforce structural fidelity of graph-based neuronal arbor reconstruction. Extensive experiments on four neuronal imaging datasets, including two from BigNeuron and two public datasets, NeuroFly and CWMBS, demonstrate consistent improvements in reconstruction accuracy over SoTA methods, with average gains of 2.9% in Entire Structure Average, 2.8% in Different Structure Average, and 3.8% in Percentage of Different Structure. Code: https://github.com/yy0007/NeurINO. △ Less

Submitted 24 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: 17 pages, 12 figures, and 11 tables. Accepted to CVPR 2026

Model Evolution Under Zeroth-Order Optimization: A Neural Tangent Kernel Perspective

Authors: Chen Zhang, Yuxin Cheng, Chenchen Ding, Shuqi Wang, Jingreng Lei, Runsheng Yu, Yik-Chung WU, Ngai Wong

Abstract: Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization enables memory-efficient training of neural networks by estimating gradients via forward passes only, eliminating the need for backpropagation. However, the stochastic nature of gradient estimation significantly obscures the training dynamics, in contrast to the well-characterized behavior of first-order methods under Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) theory. To address th… ▽ More Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization enables memory-efficient training of neural networks by estimating gradients via forward passes only, eliminating the need for backpropagation. However, the stochastic nature of gradient estimation significantly obscures the training dynamics, in contrast to the well-characterized behavior of first-order methods under Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) theory. To address this, we introduce the Neural Zeroth-order Kernel (NZK) to describe model evolution in function space under ZO updates. For linear models, we prove that the expected NZK remains constant throughout training and depends explicitly on the first and second moments of the random perturbation directions. This invariance yields a closed-form expression for model evolution under squared loss. We further extend the analysis to linearized neural networks. Interpreting ZO updates as kernel gradient descent via NZK provides a novel perspective for potentially accelerating convergence. Extensive experiments across synthetic and real-world datasets (including MNIST, CIFAR-10, and Tiny ImageNet) validate our theoretical results and demonstrate acceleration when using a single shared random vector. △ Less

Submitted 22 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: ICLR 2026 Workshop on Scientific Methods for Understanding Deep Learning (20 pages, 18 figures)

Skilled AI Agents for Embedded and IoT Systems Development

Authors: Yiming Li, Yuhan Cheng, Mingchen Ma, Yihang Zou, Ningyuan Yang, Wei Cheng, Hai "Helen" Li, Yiran Chen, Tingjun Chen

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) and agentic systems have shown promise for automated software development, but applying them to hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) embedded and Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems remains challenging due to the tight coupling between software logic and physical hardware behavior. Code that compiles successfully may still fail when deployed on real devices because of timing constr… ▽ More Large language models (LLMs) and agentic systems have shown promise for automated software development, but applying them to hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) embedded and Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems remains challenging due to the tight coupling between software logic and physical hardware behavior. Code that compiles successfully may still fail when deployed on real devices because of timing constraints, peripheral initialization requirements, or hardware-specific behaviors. To address this challenge, we introduce a skills-based agentic framework for HIL embedded development together with IoT-SkillsBench, a benchmark designed to systematically evaluate AI agents in real embedded programming environments. IoT-SkillsBench spans three representative embedded platforms, 23 peripherals, and 42 tasks across three difficulty levels, where each task is evaluated under three agent configurations (no-skills, LLM-generated skills, and human-expert skills) and validated through real hardware execution. Across 378 hardware validated experiments, we show that concise human-expert skills with structured expert knowledge enable near-perfect success rates across platforms. △ Less

Submitted 19 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Generalized Stock Price Prediction for Multiple Stocks Combined with News Fusion

Authors: Pei-Jun Liao, Hung-Shin Lee, Yao-Fei Cheng, Li-Wei Chen, Hung-yi Lee, Hsin-Min Wang

Abstract: Predicting stock prices presents challenges in financial forecasting. While traditional approaches such as ARIMA and RNNs are prevalent, recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer alternative methodologies. This paper introduces an approach that integrates LLMs with daily financial news for stock price prediction. To address the challenge of processing news data and identifying rele… ▽ More Predicting stock prices presents challenges in financial forecasting. While traditional approaches such as ARIMA and RNNs are prevalent, recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer alternative methodologies. This paper introduces an approach that integrates LLMs with daily financial news for stock price prediction. To address the challenge of processing news data and identifying relevant content, we utilize stock name embeddings within attention mechanisms. Specifically, we encode news articles using a pre-trained LLM and implement three attention-based pooling techniques -- self-attentive, cross-attentive, and position-aware self-attentive pooling -- to filter news based on stock relevance. The filtered news embeddings, combined with historical stock prices, serve as inputs to the prediction model. Unlike prior studies that focus on individual stocks, our method trains a single generalized model applicable across multiple stocks. Experimental results demonstrate a 7.11% reduction in Mean Absolute Error (MAE) compared to the baseline, indicating the utility of stock name embeddings for news filtering and price forecasting within a generalized framework. △ Less

Submitted 8 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: Accepted to Journal of Information Science and Engineering (JISE)

PRIOR: Perceptive Learning for Humanoid Locomotion with Reference Gait Priors

Authors: Chenxi Han, Shilu He, Yi Cheng, Linqi Ye, Houde Liu

Abstract: Training perceptive humanoid locomotion policies that traverse complex terrains with natural gaits remains an open challenge, typically demanding multi-stage training pipelines, adversarial objectives, or extensive real-world calibration. We present PRIOR, an efficient and reproducible framework built on Isaac Lab that achieves robust terrain traversal with human-like gaits through a simple yet ef… ▽ More Training perceptive humanoid locomotion policies that traverse complex terrains with natural gaits remains an open challenge, typically demanding multi-stage training pipelines, adversarial objectives, or extensive real-world calibration. We present PRIOR, an efficient and reproducible framework built on Isaac Lab that achieves robust terrain traversal with human-like gaits through a simple yet effective design: (i) a parametric gait generator that supplies stable reference trajectories derived from motion capture without adversarial training, (ii) a GRU-based state estimator that infers terrain geometry directly from egocentric depth images via self-supervised heightmap reconstruction, and (iii) terrain-adaptive footstep rewards that guide foot placement toward traversable regions. Through systematic analysis of depth image resolution trade-offs, we identify configurations that maximize terrain fidelity under real-time constraints, substantially reducing perceptual overhead without degrading traversal performance. Comprehensive experiments across terrains of varying difficulty-including stairs, boxes, and gaps-demonstrate that each component yields complementary and essential performance gains, with the full framework achieving a 100% traversal success rate. We will open-source the complete PRIOR framework, including the training pipeline, parametric gait generator, and evaluation benchmarks, to serve as a reproducible foundation for humanoid locomotion research on Isaac Lab. △ Less

Submitted 19 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: https://prior-iros2026.github.io/

SeqTG: Scalable Combinatorial Test Generation via Sequential Integer Linear Programming

Authors: Sitong Yang, Wanying Bao, Yinyin Song, Yueting Cheng, Qian Li, Chao Wei

Abstract: Combinatorial Testing (CT) is essential for detecting interaction-triggered faults, yet generating minimal Covering Arrays under complex constraints remains an unresolved NP-hard challenge. Current greedy algorithms are highly scalable but suffer from severe ``diminishing returns'': they efficiently cover initial interactions but produce bloated, redundant test suites when struggling to pack the f… ▽ More Combinatorial Testing (CT) is essential for detecting interaction-triggered faults, yet generating minimal Covering Arrays under complex constraints remains an unresolved NP-hard challenge. Current greedy algorithms are highly scalable but suffer from severe ``diminishing returns'': they efficiently cover initial interactions but produce bloated, redundant test suites when struggling to pack the final few difficult pairs. While exact mathematical programming could theoretically address this inefficiency, it has historically been intractable due to combinatorial explosion. In this paper, we pioneer the application of exact mathematical modeling to CT by introducing SeqTG, a scalable framework based on Sequential Integer Linear Programming (ILP). To circumvent the scalability barrier, SeqTG employs a novel Warm-Start strategy: a rapid greedy initialization first clears the ``easy'' interactions, allowing the rigorous ILP solver to exclusively optimize the fragmented, difficult-to-cover remainder. The pipeline operates in three stages: (1) a Constraint-First phase grouping must-include requirements via graph partitioning; (2) an Incremental Optimization phase targeting the remaining interactions with sequential ILP; and (3) a Global Minimization phase eliminating redundancies via set-covering. Extensive evaluations across standard benchmarks and 200 large-scale configurations validate the framework's efficacy. The results demonstrate that SeqTG effectively eradicates late-stage bloat, achieving state-of-the-art test suite compactness and strict constraint adherence. △ Less

Submitted 14 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Can We Trust LLMs on Memristors? Diving into Reasoning Ability under Non-Ideality

Authors: Taiqiang Wu, Yuxin Cheng, Chenchen Ding, Runming Yang, Xincheng Feng, Wenyong Zhou, Zhengwu Liu, Ngai Wong

Abstract: Memristor-based analog compute-in-memory (CIM) architectures provide a promising substrate for the efficient deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs), owing to superior energy efficiency and computational density. However, these architectures suffer from precision issues caused by intrinsic non-idealities of memristors. In this paper, we first conduct a comprehensive investigation into the impac… ▽ More Memristor-based analog compute-in-memory (CIM) architectures provide a promising substrate for the efficient deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs), owing to superior energy efficiency and computational density. However, these architectures suffer from precision issues caused by intrinsic non-idealities of memristors. In this paper, we first conduct a comprehensive investigation into the impact of such typical non-idealities on LLM reasoning. Empirical results indicate that reasoning capability decreases significantly but varies for distinct benchmarks. Subsequently, we systematically appraise three training-free strategies, including thinking mode, in-context learning, and module redundancy. We thus summarize valuable guidelines, i.e., shallow layer redundancy is particularly effective for improving robustness, thinking mode performs better under low noise levels but degrades at higher noise, and in-context learning reduces output length with a slight performance trade-off. Our findings offer new insights into LLM reasoning under non-ideality and practical strategies to improve robustness. △ Less

Submitted 13 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: 7 figures, 3 tables

Privacy-Preserving Federated Fraud Detection in Payment Transactions with NVIDIA FLARE

Authors: Holger R. Roth, Sarthak Tickoo, Mayank Kumar, Isaac Yang, Andrew Liu, Amit Varshney, Sayani Kundu, Iustina Vintila, Peter Madsgaard, Juraj Milcak, Chester Chen, Yan Cheng, Andrew Feng, Jeff Savio, Vikram Singh, Craig Stancill, Gloria Wan, Evan Powell, Anwar Ul Haq, Sudhir Upadhyay, Jisoo Lee

Abstract: Fraud-related financial losses continue to rise, while regulatory, privacy, and data-sovereignty constraints increasingly limit the feasibility of centralized fraud detection systems. Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling collaborative model training across institutions without sharing raw transaction data. Yet, its practical effectiveness under realistic, non-II… ▽ More Fraud-related financial losses continue to rise, while regulatory, privacy, and data-sovereignty constraints increasingly limit the feasibility of centralized fraud detection systems. Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling collaborative model training across institutions without sharing raw transaction data. Yet, its practical effectiveness under realistic, non-IID financial data distributions remains insufficiently validated. In this work, we present a multi-institution, industry-oriented proof-of-concept study evaluating federated anomaly detection for payment transactions using the NVIDIA FLARE framework. We simulate a realistic federation of heterogeneous financial institutions, each observing distinct fraud typologies and operating under strict data isolation. Using a deep neural network trained via federated averaging (FedAvg), we demonstrate that federated models achieve a mean F1-score of 0.903 - substantially outperforming locally trained models (0.643) and closely approaching centralized training performance (0.925), while preserving full data sovereignty. We further analyze convergence behavior, showing that strong performance is achieved within 10 federated communication rounds, highlighting the operational viability of FL in latency- and cost-sensitive financial environments. To support deployment in regulated settings, we evaluate model interpretability using Shapley-based feature attribution and confirm that federated models rely on semantically coherent, domain-relevant decision signals. Finally, we incorporate sample-level differential privacy via DP-SGD and demonstrate favorable privacy-utility trade-offs... △ Less

Submitted 13 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: 16 pages, 6 figures, 5 tables, technical report

Nuanced Emotion Recognition Based on a Segment-based MLLM Framework Leveraging Qwen3-Omni for AH Detection

Authors: Liang Tang, Hongda Li, Jiayu Zhang, Long Chen, Shuxian Li, Siqi Pei, Tiaonan Duan, Yuhao Cheng

Abstract: Emotion recognition in videos is a pivotal task in affective computing, where identifying subtle psychological states such as Ambivalence and Hesitancy holds significant value for behavioral intervention and digital health. Ambivalence and Hesitancy states often manifest through cross-modal inconsistencies such as discrepancies between facial expressions, vocal tones, and textual semantics, posing… ▽ More Emotion recognition in videos is a pivotal task in affective computing, where identifying subtle psychological states such as Ambivalence and Hesitancy holds significant value for behavioral intervention and digital health. Ambivalence and Hesitancy states often manifest through cross-modal inconsistencies such as discrepancies between facial expressions, vocal tones, and textual semantics, posing a substantial challenge for automated recognition. This paper proposes a recognition framework that integrates temporal segment modeling with Multimodal Large Language Models. To address computational efficiency and token constraints in long video processing, we employ a segment-based strategy, partitioning videos into short clips with a maximum duration of 5 seconds. We leverage the Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B model, fine-tuned on the BAH dataset using LoRA and full-parameter strategies via the MS-Swift framework, enabling the model to synergistically analyze visual and auditory signals. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves an accuracy of 85.1% on the test set, significantly outperforming existing benchmarks and validating the superior capability of Multimodal Large Language Models in capturing complex and nuanced emotional conflicts. The code is released at https://github.com/dlnn123/A-H-Detection-with-Qwen-Omni.git. △ Less

Submitted 23 March, 2026; v1 submitted 12 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: 5 pages, 1 figures

Generative Horcrux: Designing AI Carriers for Afterlife Selves

Authors: Zhen-Chi Lai, Yu-Ting Cheng, Pei-Ying Lin, Chiao-Wei Ho, Janet Yi-Ching Huang

Abstract: As generative AI technologies rapidly advance, AI agents are gaining the ability not only to collect data and perform tasks but also to respond to environments and evolve over time. This shift opens new possibilities for reimagining digital legacy - raising critical questions about how we remember, commemorate, and interact with the traces of the deceased. The forms of these AI agents are particul… ▽ More As generative AI technologies rapidly advance, AI agents are gaining the ability not only to collect data and perform tasks but also to respond to environments and evolve over time. This shift opens new possibilities for reimagining digital legacy - raising critical questions about how we remember, commemorate, and interact with the traces of the deceased. The forms of these AI agents are particularly important, as they act as vessels for digital legacies - much like urns for ashes. We will ask: What kinds of devices or representations would we want to store our digital selves or legacies in? How do we envision future generations interacting with these forms? The question is not only about the function of these agents or the object's role as a storage vessel but also the meaning it carries, the memories it preserves, and its connection to the extended notion of our "Generative Horcrux." This three-hour in-person workshop invites design practitioners and researchers from diverse backgrounds to explore the emerging landscape of generative AI agent-based digital legacy. This workshop uses fiction and hands on prototyping to explore how AI agents might reconfigure memory, identity, and posthumous presence in future sociotechnical worlds. We anticipate that this session will foster interdisciplinary dialogue and contribute conceptually and methodologically to HCI, design research, and AI ethics. △ Less

Submitted 13 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: 6 pages

Journal ref: Proceedings of IASDR 2025: Design Next

Developing Foundation Models for Universal Segmentation from 3D Whole-Body Positron Emission Tomography

Authors: Yichi Zhang, Le Xue, Wenbo Zhang, Lanlan Li, Feiyang Xiao, Yuchen Liu, Xiaohui Zhang, Hongwei Zhang, Shuqi Wang, Gang Feng, Liling Peng, Xin Gao, Yuanfan Xu, Yuan Qi, Kuangyu Shi, Hong Zhang, Yuan Cheng, Mei Tian, Zixin Hu

Abstract: Positron emission tomography (PET) is a key nuclear medicine imaging modality that visualizes radiotracer distributions to quantify in vivo physiological and metabolic processes, playing an irreplaceable role in disease management. Despite its clinical importance, the development of deep learning models for quantitative PET image analysis remains severely limited, driven by both the inherent segme… ▽ More Positron emission tomography (PET) is a key nuclear medicine imaging modality that visualizes radiotracer distributions to quantify in vivo physiological and metabolic processes, playing an irreplaceable role in disease management. Despite its clinical importance, the development of deep learning models for quantitative PET image analysis remains severely limited, driven by both the inherent segmentation challenge from PET's paucity of anatomical contrast and the high costs of data acquisition and annotation. To bridge this gap, we develop generalist foundational models for universal segmentation from 3D whole-body PET imaging. We first build the largest and most comprehensive PET dataset to date, comprising 11041 3D whole-body PET scans with 59831 segmentation masks for model development. Based on this dataset, we present SegAnyPET, an innovative foundational model with general-purpose applicability to diverse segmentation tasks. Built on a 3D architecture with a prompt engineering strategy for mask generation, SegAnyPET enables universal and scalable organ and lesion segmentation, supports efficient human correction with minimal effort, and enables a clinical human-in-the-loop workflow. Extensive evaluations on multi-center, multi-tracer, multi-disease datasets demonstrate that SegAnyPET achieves strong zero-shot performance across a wide range of segmentation tasks, highlighting its potential to advance the clinical applications of molecular imaging. △ Less

Submitted 12 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

The Curse and Blessing of Mean Bias in FP4-Quantized LLM Training

Authors: Hengjie Cao, Zhendong Huang, Mengyi Chen, Yifeng Yang, Fanqi Yu, Ruijun Huang, Fang Dong, Xin Zhang, Jixian Zhou, Anrui Chen, Mingzhi Dong, Yujiang Wang, Jinlong Hou, Qin Lv, Yuan Cheng, Tun Lu, Fan Yang, Li Shang

Abstract: Large language models trained on natural language exhibit pronounced anisotropy: a small number of directions concentrate disproportionate energy, while the remaining dimensions form a broad semantic tail. In low-bit training regimes, this geometry becomes numerically unstable. Because blockwise quantization scales are determined by extreme elementwise magnitudes, dominant directions stretch the d… ▽ More Large language models trained on natural language exhibit pronounced anisotropy: a small number of directions concentrate disproportionate energy, while the remaining dimensions form a broad semantic tail. In low-bit training regimes, this geometry becomes numerically unstable. Because blockwise quantization scales are determined by extreme elementwise magnitudes, dominant directions stretch the dynamic range, compressing long-tail semantic variation into narrow numerical bins. We show that this instability is primarily driven by a coherent rank-one mean bias, which constitutes the dominant component of spectral anisotropy in LLM representations. This mean component emerges systematically across layers and training stages and accounts for the majority of extreme activation magnitudes, making it the principal driver of dynamic-range inflation under low precision. Crucially, because the dominant instability is rank-one, it can be eliminated through a simple source-level mean-subtraction operation. This bias-centric conditioning recovers most of the stability benefits of SVD-based spectral methods while requiring only reduction operations and standard quantization kernels. Empirical results on FP4 (W4A4G4) training show that mean removal substantially narrows the loss gap to BF16 and restores downstream performance, providing a hardware-efficient path to stable low-bit LLM training. △ Less

Submitted 11 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Fish Audio S2 Technical Report

Authors: Shijia Liao, Yuxuan Wang, Songting Liu, Yifan Cheng, Ruoyi Zhang, Tianyu Li, Shidong Li, Yisheng Zheng, Xingwei Liu, Qingzheng Wang, Zhizhuo Zhou, Jiahua Liu, Xin Chen, Dawei Han

Abstract: We introduce Fish Audio S2, an open-sourced text-to-speech system featuring multi-speaker, multi-turn generation, and, most importantly, instruction-following control via natural-language descriptions. To scale training, we develop a multi-stage training recipe together with a staged data pipeline covering video captioning and speech captioning, voice-quality assessment, and reward modeling. To pu… ▽ More We introduce Fish Audio S2, an open-sourced text-to-speech system featuring multi-speaker, multi-turn generation, and, most importantly, instruction-following control via natural-language descriptions. To scale training, we develop a multi-stage training recipe together with a staged data pipeline covering video captioning and speech captioning, voice-quality assessment, and reward modeling. To push the frontier of open-source TTS, we release our model weights, fine-tuning code, and an SGLang-based inference engine. The inference engine is production-ready for streaming, achieving an RTF of 0.195 and a time-to-first-audio below 100 ms.Our code and weights are available on GitHub (https://github.com/fishaudio/fish-speech) and Hugging Face (https://huggingface.co/fishaudio/s2-pro). We highly encourage readers to visit https://fish.audio to try custom voices. △ Less

Submitted 11 March, 2026; v1 submitted 9 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

PhaForce: Phase-Scheduled Visual-Force Policy Learning with Slow Planning and Fast Correction for Contact-Rich Manipulation

Authors: Mingxin Wang, Zhirun Yue, Renhao Lu, Yizhe Li, Zihan Wang, Guoping Pan, Kangkang Dong, Jun Cheng, Yi Cheng, Houde Liu

Abstract: Contact-rich manipulation requires not only vision-dominant task semantics but also closed-loop reactions to force/torque (F/T) transients. Yet, generative visuomotor policies are typically constrained to low-frequency updates due to inference latency and action chunking, underutilizing F/T for control-rate feedback. Furthermore, existing force-aware methods often inject force continuously and ind… ▽ More Contact-rich manipulation requires not only vision-dominant task semantics but also closed-loop reactions to force/torque (F/T) transients. Yet, generative visuomotor policies are typically constrained to low-frequency updates due to inference latency and action chunking, underutilizing F/T for control-rate feedback. Furthermore, existing force-aware methods often inject force continuously and indiscriminately, lacking an explicit mechanism to schedule when / how much / where to apply force across different task phases. We propose PhaForce, a phase-scheduled visual--force policy that coordinates low-rate chunk-level planning and high-rate residual correction via a unified contact/phase schedule. PhaForce comprises (i) a contact-aware phase predictor (CAP) that estimates contact probability and phase belief, (ii) a Slow diffusion planner that performs dual-gated visual--force fusion with orthogonal residual injection to preserve vision semantics while conditioning on force, and (iii) a Fast corrector that applies control-rate phase-routed residuals in interpretable corrective subspaces for within-chunk micro-adjustments. Across multiple real-robot contact-rich tasks, PhaForce achieves an average success rate of 86% (+40 pp over baselines), while also substantially improving contact quality by regulating interaction forces and exhibiting robust adaptability to OOD geometric shifts. △ Less

Submitted 9 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

WaDi: Weight Direction-aware Distillation for One-step Image Synthesis

Authors: Lei Wang, Yang Cheng, Senmao Li, Ge Wu, Yaxing Wang, Jian Yang

Abstract: Despite the impressive performance of diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion (SD) in image generation, their slow inference limits practical deployment. Recent works accelerate inference by distilling multi-step diffusion into one-step generators. To better understand the distillation mechanism, we analyze U-Net/DiT weight changes between one-step students and their multi-step teacher counterpa… ▽ More Despite the impressive performance of diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion (SD) in image generation, their slow inference limits practical deployment. Recent works accelerate inference by distilling multi-step diffusion into one-step generators. To better understand the distillation mechanism, we analyze U-Net/DiT weight changes between one-step students and their multi-step teacher counterparts. Our analysis reveals that changes in weight direction significantly exceed those in weight norm, highlighting it as the key factor during distillation. Motivated by this insight, we propose the Low-rank Rotation of weight Direction (LoRaD), a parameter-efficient adapter tailored to one-step diffusion distillation. LoRaD is designed to model these structured directional changes using learnable low-rank rotation matrices. We further integrate LoRaD into Variational Score Distillation (VSD), resulting in Weight Direction-aware Distillation (WaDi)-a novel one-step distillation framework. WaDi achieves state-of-the-art FID scores on COCO 2014 and COCO 2017 while using only approximately 10% of the trainable parameters of the U-Net/DiT. Furthermore, the distilled one-step model demonstrates strong versatility and scalability, generalizing well to various downstream tasks such as controllable generation, relation inversion, and high-resolution synthesis. △ Less

Submitted 9 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: Accepted to CVPR 2026;Code:https://github.com/gudaochangsheng/WaDi

UIS-Digger: Towards Comprehensive Research Agent Systems for Real-world Unindexed Information Seeking

Authors: Chang Liu, Chuqiao Kuang, Tianyi Zhuang, Yuxin Cheng, Huichi Zhou, Xiaoguang Li, Lifeng Shang

Abstract: Recent advancements in LLM-based information-seeking agents have achieved record-breaking performance on established benchmarks. However, these agents remain heavily reliant on search-engine-indexed knowledge, leaving a critical blind spot: Unindexed Information Seeking (UIS). This paper identifies and explores the UIS problem, where vital information is not captured by search engine crawlers, suc… ▽ More Recent advancements in LLM-based information-seeking agents have achieved record-breaking performance on established benchmarks. However, these agents remain heavily reliant on search-engine-indexed knowledge, leaving a critical blind spot: Unindexed Information Seeking (UIS). This paper identifies and explores the UIS problem, where vital information is not captured by search engine crawlers, such as overlooked content, dynamic webpages, and embedded files. Despite its significance, UIS remains an underexplored challenge. To address this gap, we introduce UIS-QA, the first dedicated UIS benchmark, comprising 110 expert-annotated QA pairs. Notably, even state-of-the-art agents experience a drastic performance drop on UIS-QA (e.g., from 70.90 on GAIA and 46.70 on BrowseComp-zh to 24.55 on UIS-QA), underscoring the severity of the problem. To mitigate this, we propose UIS-Digger, a novel multi-agent framework that incorporates dual-mode browsing and enables simultaneous webpage searching and file parsing. With a relatively small $\sim$30B-parameter backbone LLM optimized using SFT and RFT training strategies, UIS-Digger sets a strong baseline at 27.27\%, outperforming systems integrating sophisticated LLMs such as O3 and GPT-4.1. This demonstrates the importance of proactive interaction with unindexed sources for effective and comprehensive information-seeking. Our work not only uncovers a fundamental limitation in current agent evaluation paradigms but also provides the first toolkit for advancing UIS research, defining a new and promising direction for robust information-seeking systems. The dataset has been released at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/UIS-Digger/UIS-QA. △ Less

Submitted 17 March, 2026; v1 submitted 9 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: 21 pages, 5 figures, ICLR 2026

Perception-Aware Multimodal Spatial Reasoning from Monocular Images

Authors: Yanchun Cheng, Rundong Wang, Xulei Yang, Alok Prakash, Daniela Rus, Marcelo H Ang Jr, ShiJie Li

Abstract: Spatial reasoning from monocular images is essential for autonomous driving, yet current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) still struggle with fine-grained geometric perception, particularly under large scale variation and ambiguous object appearance. We propose a simple yet effective perception-aware multimodal reasoning framework that equips VLMs with explicit object-centric grounding ability. Inste… ▽ More Spatial reasoning from monocular images is essential for autonomous driving, yet current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) still struggle with fine-grained geometric perception, particularly under large scale variation and ambiguous object appearance. We propose a simple yet effective perception-aware multimodal reasoning framework that equips VLMs with explicit object-centric grounding ability. Instead of relying on textual bounding-box outputs, each referred object is represented using all Visual Reference Tokens (VRTs) within its spatial extent, enabling visual evidence and textual reasoning to be processed jointly in a unified token space. To further strengthen cross-modal interaction, we construct a Multimodal Chain-of-Thought (MM-CoT) dataset that injects aligned visual and textual reasoning signals. A deterministic ordering strategy is introduced to make supervision over inherently unordered VRT sets fully compatible with the VLM's autoregressive next-token prediction. With only standard supervised fine-tuning, our method achieves substantial improvements on the SURDS benchmark, outperforming previous approaches - including those using RL-based post-training - by a large margin across both single-object and multi-object tasks. These results demonstrate that accurate perception and multimodal reasoning are mutually reinforcing, and together form the key to robust spatial understanding in challenging monocular driving scenarios. △ Less

Submitted 6 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

ChatShopBuddy: Towards Reliable Conversational Shopping Agents via Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Yiruo Cheng, Kelong Mao, Tianhao Li, Jiejun Tan, Ji-Rong Wen, Zhicheng Dou

Abstract: Conversational shopping agents represent a critical consumer-facing application of Large Language Model (LLM)-powered agents, yet how to effectively apply post-training Reinforcement Learning (RL) to optimize such agents remains underexplored. This work investigates RL-based optimization for shopping agents in real-world scenarios, where agents must simultaneously satisfy multiple interdependent o… ▽ More Conversational shopping agents represent a critical consumer-facing application of Large Language Model (LLM)-powered agents, yet how to effectively apply post-training Reinforcement Learning (RL) to optimize such agents remains underexplored. This work investigates RL-based optimization for shopping agents in real-world scenarios, where agents must simultaneously satisfy multiple interdependent objectives spanning objective metrics (product correctness), subjective qualities (persuasiveness), outcome rewards (final response quality), and process rewards (tool efficiency). We present a complete methodology to address this challenge. Specifically, we first construct SmartShopBench, a benchmark that captures diverse shopping intents with a hierarchical evaluation that decomposes complex quality requirements into measurable levels. Building on this evaluation framework, we design Hierarchical Reward Modeling (HRM) to structure mixed reward types through conditional gating that reflects their logical dependencies. To enable efficient training, we further propose Dynamic Contrastive Policy Optimization (DCPO), which balances response quality with operational efficiency through dynamic trajectory selection based on reward and reasoning length. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our RL-trained agent, namely ChatShopBuddy, consistently outperforms larger models relying on generic reasoning, achieving superior stability rather than merely higher peaks. Our work provides valuable guidance for applying RL to real-world conversational agents. △ Less

Submitted 6 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

MemSifter: Offloading LLM Memory Retrieval via Outcome-Driven Proxy Reasoning

Authors: Jiejun Tan, Zhicheng Dou, Liancheng Zhang, Yuyang Hu, Yiruo Cheng, Ji-Rong Wen

Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for long-duration tasks, maintaining effective long-term memory has become a critical challenge. Current methods often face a trade-off between cost and accuracy. Simple storage methods often fail to retrieve relevant information, while complex indexing methods (such as memory graphs) require heavy computation and can cause information loss. Fu… ▽ More As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for long-duration tasks, maintaining effective long-term memory has become a critical challenge. Current methods often face a trade-off between cost and accuracy. Simple storage methods often fail to retrieve relevant information, while complex indexing methods (such as memory graphs) require heavy computation and can cause information loss. Furthermore, relying on the working LLM to process all memories is computationally expensive and slow. To address these limitations, we propose MemSifter, a novel framework that offloads the memory retrieval process to a small-scale proxy model. Instead of increasing the burden on the primary working LLM, MemSifter uses a smaller model to reason about the task before retrieving the necessary information. This approach requires no heavy computation during the indexing phase and adds minimal overhead during inference. To optimize the proxy model, we introduce a memory-specific Reinforcement Learning (RL) training paradigm. We design a task-outcome-oriented reward based on the working LLM's actual performance in completing the task. The reward measures the actual contribution of retrieved memories by mutiple interactions with the working LLM, and discriminates retrieved rankings by stepped decreasing contributions. Additionally, we employ training techniques such as Curriculum Learning and Model Merging to improve performance. We evaluated MemSifter on eight LLM memory benchmarks, including Deep Research tasks. The results demonstrate that our method meets or exceeds the performance of existing state-of-the-art approaches in both retrieval accuracy and final task completion. MemSifter offers an efficient and scalable solution for long-term LLM memory. We have open-sourced the model weights, code, and training data to support further research. △ Less

Submitted 2 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/plageon/MemSifter

ProSMA-UNet: Decoder Conditioning for Proximal-Sparse Skip Feature Selection

Authors: Chun-Wun Cheng, Yanqi Cheng, Peiyuan Jing, Guang Yang, Javier A. Montoya-Zegarra, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb, Angelica I. Aviles-Rivero

Abstract: Medical image segmentation commonly relies on U-shaped encoder-decoder architectures such as U-Net, where skip connections preserve fine spatial detail by injecting high-resolution encoder features into the decoder. However, these skip pathways also propagate low-level textures, background clutter, and acquisition noise, allowing irrelevant information to bypass deeper semantic filtering -- an iss… ▽ More Medical image segmentation commonly relies on U-shaped encoder-decoder architectures such as U-Net, where skip connections preserve fine spatial detail by injecting high-resolution encoder features into the decoder. However, these skip pathways also propagate low-level textures, background clutter, and acquisition noise, allowing irrelevant information to bypass deeper semantic filtering -- an issue that is particularly detrimental in low-contrast clinical imaging. Although attention gates have been introduced to address this limitation, they typically produce dense sigmoid masks that softly reweight features rather than explicitly removing irrelevant activations. We propose ProSMA-UNet (Proximal-Sparse Multi-Scale Attention U-Net), which reformulates skip gating as a decoder-conditioned sparse feature selection problem. ProSMA constructs a multi-scale compatibility field using lightweight depthwise dilated convolutions to capture relevance across local and contextual scales, then enforces explicit sparsity via an $\ell_1$ proximal operator with learnable per-channel thresholds, yielding a closed-form soft-thresholding gate that can remove noisy responses. To further suppress semantically irrelevant channels, ProSMA incorporates decoder-conditioned channel gating driven by global decoder context. Extensive experiments on challenging 2D and 3D benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with particularly large gains ($\approx20$\%) on difficult 3D segmentation tasks. Project page: https://math-ml-x.github.io/ProSMA-UNet/ △ Less

Submitted 4 March, 2026; v1 submitted 3 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Generative Visual Chain-of-Thought for Image Editing

Authors: Zijin Yin, Tiankai Hang, Yiji Cheng, Shiyi Zhang, Runze He, Yu Xu, Chunyu Wang, Bing Li, Zheng Chang, Kongming Liang, Qinglin Lu, Zhanyu Ma

Abstract: Existing image editing methods struggle to perceive where to edit, especially under complex scenes and nuanced spatial instructions. To address this issue, we propose Generative Visual Chain-of-Thought (GVCoT), a unified framework that performs native visual reasoning by first generating spatial cues to localize the target region and then executing the edit. Unlike prior text-only CoT or tool-depe… ▽ More Existing image editing methods struggle to perceive where to edit, especially under complex scenes and nuanced spatial instructions. To address this issue, we propose Generative Visual Chain-of-Thought (GVCoT), a unified framework that performs native visual reasoning by first generating spatial cues to localize the target region and then executing the edit. Unlike prior text-only CoT or tool-dependent visual CoT paradigms, GVCoT jointly optimizes visual tokens generated during the reasoning and editing phases in an end-to-end manner. This way fosters the emergence of innate spatial reasoning ability and enables more effective utilization of visual-domain cues. The main challenge of training GCVoT lies in the scarcity of large-scale editing data with precise edit region annotations; to this end, we construct GVCoT-Edit-Instruct, a dataset of 1.8M high-quality samples spanning 19 tasks. We adopt a progressive training strategy: supervised fine-tuning to build foundational localization ability in reasoning trace before final editing, followed by reinforcement learning to further improve reasoning and editing quality. Finally, we introduce SREdit-Bench, a new benchmark designed to comprehensively stress-test models under sophisticated scenes and fine-grained referring expressions. Experiments demonstrate that GVCoT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models on SREdit-Bench and ImgEdit. We hope our GVCoT will inspire future research toward interpretable and precise image editing. △ Less

Submitted 16 March, 2026; v1 submitted 2 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: Project page: https://pris-cv.github.io/GVCoT/

FoSS: Modeling Long Range Dependencies and Multimodal Uncertainty in Trajectory Prediction via Fourier State Space Integration

Authors: Yizhou Huang, Gengze Jiang, Yihua Cheng, Kezhi Wang

Abstract: Accurate trajectory prediction is vital for safe autonomous driving, yet existing approaches struggle to balance modeling power and computational efficiency. Attention-based architectures incur quadratic complexity with increasing agents, while recurrent models struggle to capture long-range dependencies and fine-grained local dynamics. Building upon this, we present FoSS, a dual-branch framework… ▽ More Accurate trajectory prediction is vital for safe autonomous driving, yet existing approaches struggle to balance modeling power and computational efficiency. Attention-based architectures incur quadratic complexity with increasing agents, while recurrent models struggle to capture long-range dependencies and fine-grained local dynamics. Building upon this, we present FoSS, a dual-branch framework that unifies frequency-domain reasoning with linear-time sequence modeling. The frequency-domain branch performs a discrete Fourier transform to decompose trajectories into amplitude components encoding global intent and phase components capturing local variations, followed by a progressive helix reordering module that preserves spectral order; two selective state-space submodules, Coarse2Fine-SSM and SpecEvolve-SSM, refine spectral features with O(N) complexity. In parallel, a time-domain dynamic selective SSM reconstructs self-attention behavior in linear time to retain long-range temporal context. A cross-attention layer fuses temporal and spectral representations, while learnable queries generate multiple candidate trajectories, and a weighted fusion head expresses motion uncertainty. Experiments on Argoverse 1 and Argoverse 2 benchmarks demonstrate that FoSS achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while reducing computation by 22.5% and parameters by over 40%. Comprehensive ablations confirm the necessity of each component. △ Less

Submitted 1 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Comments: Accepted by CVPR 2026

A Deployable Bio-inspired Compliant Leg Design for Enhanced Leaping in Quadruped Robots

Authors: Yiyang Chen, Yuxin Liu, Jinzheng Zhou, Fanxin Wang, Qinglei Bu, Jie Sun, Yikun Cheng

Abstract: Quadruped robots are becoming increasingly essential for various applications, including industrial inspection and catastrophe search and rescue. These scenarios require robots to possess enhanced agility and obstacle-navigation skills. Nonetheless, the performance of current platforms is often constrained by insufficient peak motor power, limiting their ability to perform explosive jumps. To addr… ▽ More Quadruped robots are becoming increasingly essential for various applications, including industrial inspection and catastrophe search and rescue. These scenarios require robots to possess enhanced agility and obstacle-navigation skills. Nonetheless, the performance of current platforms is often constrained by insufficient peak motor power, limiting their ability to perform explosive jumps. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a bio-inspired method that emulates the energy-storage mechanism found in froghopper legs. We designed a Deployable Compliant Leg (DCL) utilizing a specialized 3D-printed elastic material, Polyether block amide (PEBA), featuring a lightweight internal lattice structure. This structure functions analogously to biological tendons, storing elastic energy during the robot's squatting phase and rapidly releasing it to augment motor output during the leap. The proposed mechanical design significantly enhances the robot's vertical jumping capability. Through finite element analysis (FEA) and experimental validation, we demonstrate a relative performance improvement of 17.1% in vertical jumping height. △ Less

Submitted 1 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

WildGHand: Learning Anti-Perturbation Gaussian Hand Avatars from Monocular In-the-Wild Videos

Authors: Hanhui Li, Xuan Huang, Wanquan Liu, Yuhao Cheng, Long Chen, Yiqiang Yan, Xiaodan Liang, Chenqiang Gao

Abstract: Despite recent progress in 3D hand reconstruction from monocular videos, most existing methods rely on data captured in well-controlled environments and therefore degrade in real-world settings with severe perturbations, such as hand-object interactions, extreme poses, illumination changes, and motion blur. To tackle these issues, we introduce WildGHand, an optimization-based framework that enable… ▽ More Despite recent progress in 3D hand reconstruction from monocular videos, most existing methods rely on data captured in well-controlled environments and therefore degrade in real-world settings with severe perturbations, such as hand-object interactions, extreme poses, illumination changes, and motion blur. To tackle these issues, we introduce WildGHand, an optimization-based framework that enables self-adaptive 3D Gaussian splatting on in-the-wild videos and produces high-fidelity hand avatars. WildGHand incorporates two key components: (i) a dynamic perturbation disentanglement module that explicitly represents perturbations as time-varying biases on 3D Gaussian attributes during optimization, and (ii) a perturbation-aware optimization strategy that generates per-frame anisotropic weighted masks to guide optimization. Together, these components allow the framework to identify and suppress perturbations across both spatial and temporal dimensions. We further curate a dataset of monocular hand videos captured under diverse perturbations to benchmark in-the-wild hand avatar reconstruction. Extensive experiments on this dataset and two public datasets demonstrate that WildGHand achieves state-of-the-art performance and substantially improves over its base model across multiple metrics (e.g., up to a $15.8\%$ relative gain in PSNR and a $23.1\%$ relative reduction in LPIPS). Our implementation and dataset are available at https://github.com/XuanHuang0/WildGHand. △ Less

Submitted 24 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

Using Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Semantic Segmentation for Pulmonary Embolism Detection in Computed Tomography Pulmonary Angiogram (CTPA) Images

Authors: Wen-Liang Lin, Yun-Chien Cheng

Abstract: While deep learning has demonstrated considerable promise in computer-aided diagnosis for pulmonary embolism (PE), practical deployment in Computed Tomography Pulmonary Angiography (CTPA) is often hindered by "domain shift" and the prohibitive cost of expert annotations. To address these challenges, an unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) framework is proposed, utilizing a Transformer backbone and… ▽ More While deep learning has demonstrated considerable promise in computer-aided diagnosis for pulmonary embolism (PE), practical deployment in Computed Tomography Pulmonary Angiography (CTPA) is often hindered by "domain shift" and the prohibitive cost of expert annotations. To address these challenges, an unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) framework is proposed, utilizing a Transformer backbone and a Mean-Teacher architecture for cross-center semantic segmentation. The primary focus is placed on enhancing pseudo-label reliability by learning deep structural information within the feature space. Specifically, three modules are integrated and designed for this task: (1) a Prototype Alignment (PA) mechanism to reduce category-level distribution discrepancies; (2) Global and Local Contrastive Learning (GLCL) to capture both pixel-level topological relationships and global semantic representations; and (3) an Attention-based Auxiliary Local Prediction (AALP) module designed to reinforce sensitivity to small PE lesions by automatically extracting high-information slices from Transformer attention maps. Experimental validation conducted on cross-center datasets (FUMPE and CAD-PE) demonstrates significant performance gains. In the FUMPE -> CAD-PE task, the IoU increased from 0.1152 to 0.4153, while the CAD-PE -> FUMPE task saw an improvement from 0.1705 to 0.4302. Furthermore, the proposed method achieved a 69.9% Dice score in the CT -> MRI cross-modality task on the MMWHS dataset without utilizing any target-domain labels for model selection, confirming its robustness and generalizability for diverse clinical environments. △ Less

Submitted 23 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

Cut Less, Fold More: Model Compression through the Lens of Projection Geometry

Authors: Olga Saukh, Dong Wang, Haris Šikić, Yun Cheng, Lothar Thiele

Abstract: Compressing neural networks without retraining is vital for deployment at scale. We study calibration-free compression through the lens of projection geometry: structured pruning is an axis-aligned projection, whereas model folding performs a low-rank projection via weight clustering. We formalize both as orthogonal operators and show that, within a rank distance of one, folding provably yields sm… ▽ More Compressing neural networks without retraining is vital for deployment at scale. We study calibration-free compression through the lens of projection geometry: structured pruning is an axis-aligned projection, whereas model folding performs a low-rank projection via weight clustering. We formalize both as orthogonal operators and show that, within a rank distance of one, folding provably yields smaller parameter reconstruction error, and under mild smoothness assumptions, smaller functional perturbations than pruning. At scale, we evaluate >1000 checkpoints spanning ResNet18, PreActResNet18, ViT-B/32, and CLIP ViT-B/32 on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-1K, covering diverse training hyperparameters (optimizers, learning rates, augmentations, regularization, sharpness-aware training), as well as multiple LLaMA-family 60M and 130M parameter models trained on C4. We show that folding typically achieves higher post-compression accuracy, with the largest gains at moderate-high compression. The gap narrows and occasionally reverses at specific training setups. Our results position folding as a geometry-aware, calibration-free alternative to pruning that is often superior in practice and principled in theory. △ Less

Submitted 20 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

Comments: Accepted by ICLR 2026

A Contrastive Learning Framework Empowered by Attention-based Feature Adaptation for Street-View Image Classification

Authors: Qi You, Yitai Cheng, Zichao Zeng, James Haworth

Abstract: Street-view image attribute classification is a vital downstream task of image classification, enabling applications such as autonomous driving, urban analytics, and high-definition map construction. It remains computationally demanding whether training from scratch, initialising from pre-trained weights, or fine-tuning large models. Although pre-trained vision-language models such as CLIP offer r… ▽ More Street-view image attribute classification is a vital downstream task of image classification, enabling applications such as autonomous driving, urban analytics, and high-definition map construction. It remains computationally demanding whether training from scratch, initialising from pre-trained weights, or fine-tuning large models. Although pre-trained vision-language models such as CLIP offer rich image representations, existing adaptation or fine-tuning methods often rely on their global image embeddings, limiting their ability to capture fine-grained, localised attributes essential in complex, cluttered street scenes. To address this, we propose CLIP-MHAdapter, a variant of the current lightweight CLIP adaptation paradigm that appends a bottleneck MLP equipped with multi-head self-attention operating on patch tokens to model inter-patch dependencies. With approximately 1.4 million trainable parameters, CLIP-MHAdapter achieves superior or competitive accuracy across eight attribute classification tasks on the Global StreetScapes dataset, attaining new state-of-the-art results while maintaining low computational cost. The code is available at https://github.com/SpaceTimeLab/CLIP-MHAdapter. △ Less

Submitted 18 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

A2H: Agent-to-Human Protocol for AI Agent

Authors: Zhiyuan Liang, Enfang Cui, Qian Wei, Rui She, Tianzheng Li, Minxin Guo, Yujun Cheng

Abstract: AI agents are increasingly deployed as autonomous systems capable of planning, tool use, and multi-agent collaboration across complex tasks. However, existing agent-related protocols focus on agent-to-agent interactions, leaving humans as external observers rather than integrated participants within the agent systems. This limitation arises from the lack of a standardized mechanism for agents to d… ▽ More AI agents are increasingly deployed as autonomous systems capable of planning, tool use, and multi-agent collaboration across complex tasks. However, existing agent-related protocols focus on agent-to-agent interactions, leaving humans as external observers rather than integrated participants within the agent systems. This limitation arises from the lack of a standardized mechanism for agents to discover, address, and interact with humans across heterogeneous messaging platforms. In this paper, we propose the A2H (Agent-to-Human) protocol, a unified protocol that enables humans to be registered, discovered, and communicated with by AI agents as resolvable entities within agent systems. A2H contributes three key components: (1) Human Card for registering human identities via resolvable domain names, making them discoverable to agents; (2) Formal Communication Schema defines when, why, and how agents contact with human;(3) Unified Messaging Abstraction standardizes diverse communication medias and transforms complex JSON outputs into human-friendly formats. This work establishes a foundational protocol for integrating humans into agent ecosystems, advancing AI agents from isolated autonomous systems toward truly human-connected intelligent infrastructures. △ Less

Submitted 31 December, 2025; originally announced February 2026.