Showing 1–50 of 122 results for author: Yin, R

Observation-Constrained Joint-Space Viewpoint Optimization for Robotic Inspection of Cylindrical Cavities

Authors: Yuezhong Wang, Rongshen Yin, Bichi Zhang, Sören Schwertfeger

Abstract: Inspection is a core capability in many mobile robotics applications, including industrial facility monitoring, infrastructure maintenance, agriculture, and search and rescue. Observing the bottom of a cylindrical cavity, as required by ASTM search-task benchmarks for response robots, presents a representative challenge: the robot must position its camera precisely while satisfying visibility, kin… ▽ More Inspection is a core capability in many mobile robotics applications, including industrial facility monitoring, infrastructure maintenance, agriculture, and search and rescue. Observing the bottom of a cylindrical cavity, as required by ASTM search-task benchmarks for response robots, presents a representative challenge: the robot must position its camera precisely while satisfying visibility, kinematic, and collision constraints. This paper presents a fully autonomous method for observation-constrained inspection of cylindrical cavities in robot joint space. Rather than prescribing a single Cartesian camera pose, the method represents the inspection objective as a set of valid viewing geometries, thereby avoiding the rejection of reachable viewpoints and configurations with poor joint-limit margins. An RGB perception front end estimates the opening center and directed cavity axis from semantic masks using arc-supported ellipse fitting together with body and side-generator cues. These estimates parameterize constraints on camera-axis alignment, lateral offset, and axial standoff. A multistart derivative-free search then optimizes robot joint configurations with lexicographic priority given to constraint satisfaction; feasible configurations are ranked according to motion economy, joint-limit margin, and view quality. The resulting candidates are evaluated by a collision-aware motion planner, and the executed camera pose is verified geometrically and using a ray-based estimate of bottom visibility. In Isaac Sim, the proposed method successfully completes 92 of 100 target configurations and attains 91.65% mean bottom visibility among executed trials, compared with 76 of 100 and 84.3% for a multistart coordinate-search baseline. Tabletop and Unitree A2-mounted experiments demonstrate the complete perception-planning-execution pipeline. △ Less

Submitted 17 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

RVANNS: Mixed-Precision Indexing and Locality-Aware Graph Traversal on RISC-V

Authors: Chengying Huan, Yudong Liu, Jianguo Wang, Lizheng Chen, Renling Yin, Weijia Chen, Ji Qi, Jiageng Yu, Junjie Xu, Jie Zhang, Chen Tian, Yanjun Wu

Abstract: Approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) on CPUs is increasingly constrained by candidate-vector movement and decoding rather than peak arithmetic throughput. Although the RISC-V Vector Extension (RVV) provides vector-length-agnostic execution and LMUL-based register grouping, generic low-precision decoding still incurs conversion overhead, while irregular graph traversal generates scattered acc… ▽ More Approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) on CPUs is increasingly constrained by candidate-vector movement and decoding rather than peak arithmetic throughput. Although the RISC-V Vector Extension (RVV) provides vector-length-agnostic execution and LMUL-based register grouping, generic low-precision decoding still incurs conversion overhead, while irregular graph traversal generates scattered accesses that degrade cache locality and memory-level parallelism. We present RVANNS, an RVV-oriented ANNS engine that jointly optimizes vector representation and graph locality. Its Mixed-Precision Multi-Layer Index (MPMI) represents each vector with a dense 8-bit affine base and sparse FP16/FP32 residuals, fusing reconstruction with distance accumulation and aligning widening with LMUL-sized register groups. ROrder co-locates likely co-visited graph nodes and sorts remapped adjacency lists, transforming scattered payload probes into denser, predominantly forward-moving address streams. Integrated into Milvus, RVANNS achieves 3.39x and 4.94x speedups over scalar execution on real 128-bit and 256-bit RVV processors, respectively. Under controlled HNSW configurations, it improves throughput by 2.27--2.76x over RVV SIMD+FP32 and by 1.18--1.59x over the corresponding AVX-512 and SVE baselines. On Cohere10M, it further delivers 1.82--2.27x higher QPS/W than the evaluated GPU baselines. △ Less

Submitted 9 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Is Forward Prediction Enough? Physical State Grounding for JEPA World Models

Authors: Haodong Yan, Jiaguan Zhu, Mingyuan Jia, Ruiqing Yin, Junjie He, Zhide Zhong, Junfeng Li, Jinxuan Lu, Hengtao Li, Tianran Zhang, Jiayi Chen, Wenxuan Song, Wen Chen, Yuxiang Gao, Haoang Li

Abstract: Learning structured and control-relevant latent representations remains a key challenge for world models. Recent JEPA-based world models learn action-conditioned predictive latent dynamics from observation sequences. However, their forward-prediction objectives do not explicitly enforce reliable identifiability of robot-centric physical state from individual latents or state changes from latent pa… ▽ More Learning structured and control-relevant latent representations remains a key challenge for world models. Recent JEPA-based world models learn action-conditioned predictive latent dynamics from observation sequences. However, their forward-prediction objectives do not explicitly enforce reliable identifiability of robot-centric physical state from individual latents or state changes from latent pairs, which can limit downstream planning and policy performance. We propose PSG-JEPA, a physically grounded JEPA world model that shapes its latent space with two complementary grounding objectives beyond forward prediction: grounding individual latents in robot proprioceptive state, and grounding latent pairs in multi-horizon joint-angle changes. Both objectives are applied only during training, leaving the inference architecture and computational cost unchanged. To comprehensively evaluate PSG-JEPA, we conduct experiments at three levels: (1) latent identifiability via probing, (2) goal-conditioned planning on frozen latents, and (3) policy learning in simulation and on a real robot. Experiments demonstrate that our PSG-JEPA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art latent world-model baselines at all three levels. △ Less

Submitted 7 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Celty: SpMspV GPU Kernel and SIMT Co-Design for Efficient Dual-Sparse LLM Inference

Authors: Ruokai Yin, Priyadarshini Panda

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on sparsity to reduce inference cost, but most prior work targets a single sparsity source-either weight or activation-and optimizes for batched multi-user inference. Dual-sparsity, which combines unstructured weight pruning with runtime activation sparsity, offers a compelling tradeoff among model size, accuracy, and latency for single-user decoding,… ▽ More Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on sparsity to reduce inference cost, but most prior work targets a single sparsity source-either weight or activation-and optimizes for batched multi-user inference. Dual-sparsity, which combines unstructured weight pruning with runtime activation sparsity, offers a compelling tradeoff among model size, accuracy, and latency for single-user decoding, but formulates as a Sparse Matrix-Sparse Vector (spMspV) workload that existing GPU kernels handle poorly. We propose Celty, a co-designed sparse format, GPU kernel, and SIMT microarchitecture for efficient spMspV in LLM inference. At the kernel level, Celty introduces a Run-Length Compressed CSC (RLC-CSC) format that enables vectorized loading of compressed weight columns and exploits both sparsity sources to skip unnecessary memory accesses, with shared memory used for scattered partial-product accumulation. At the microarchitecture level, the Celty Sparse SIMT Core integrates a pipelined RLC decoder to eliminate software-level index reconstruction and repurposes local register files for conflict-free accumulation-operating directly on the same RLC-CSC format without data layout changes. The Celty GPU kernel achieves up to 2.8x speedup over cuBLAS and 2.4x over Flash-LLM. With the Sparse SIMT Core, speedups reach up to 5.3x over cuBLAS at 70% dual-sparsity. △ Less

Submitted 2 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: ICCAD 2026. Will update with the camera-ready version once ready. The code is available on Github at https://github.com/RuokaiYin/Celty

The Boy Who Cried Wolf: Adversarial Misclassification of Safe Inputs as Unsafe in Multimodal Guardrails

Authors: Shuo Shi, Rui Yin, Naen Xu, Jiahao Chen, Chunyi Zhou, Tianyu Du, Zhihui Fu, Jun Wang, Zhaoxiang Wang, Shouling Ji

Abstract: Multimodal guard models have emerged as critical safety components for screening content in vision-language systems. While adversarial research has extensively studied jailbreaking attacks that produce false negatives, the inverse threat of inducing false positives on benign inputs remains unexplored. We introduce Unsafe Induction Attacks, where adversaries distribute imperceptibly perturbed safe… ▽ More Multimodal guard models have emerged as critical safety components for screening content in vision-language systems. While adversarial research has extensively studied jailbreaking attacks that produce false negatives, the inverse threat of inducing false positives on benign inputs remains unexplored. We introduce Unsafe Induction Attacks, where adversaries distribute imperceptibly perturbed safe images that trigger guard models to reject legitimate user requests, causing a "Boy Who Cried Wolf" effect that degrades service availability and erodes trust. This reveals an availability failure mode in deployed safety filters. To realize this threat under diverse user prompts, we propose Unsafe Semantic Distillation (USD), which aligns adversarial perturbations with distributional representations of unsafe content rather than prompt-specific instances. Evaluated on four state-of-the-art guard models across realistic user simulation scenarios, USD achieves 84% attack success rates, outperforming existing methods and exposing fundamental vulnerabilities in current multimodal safety architectures. △ Less

Submitted 2 August, 2026; originally announced August 2026.

Comments: Accepted by KDD 2026

Can LVLMs Uncover the Truth Behind Visual Illusions? An Analysis of Perceptual and Reasoning Capabilities

Authors: Liangjie Zhao, Jiaqing Lyu, Kexin Tang, Zecheng Fang, Rong Yin, Yulan Hu, Da Li, Jianing Li

Abstract: Large Vision Language Models have integrated reasoning capabilities, elevating cognitive performance to new levels. However, existing evaluations either focus solely on perception or rely on specific domains such as maths or coding. Evaluation for reasoning capabilities that align with an open-world environment is still required, especially one that considers perception and reasoning jointly. To b… ▽ More Large Vision Language Models have integrated reasoning capabilities, elevating cognitive performance to new levels. However, existing evaluations either focus solely on perception or rely on specific domains such as maths or coding. Evaluation for reasoning capabilities that align with an open-world environment is still required, especially one that considers perception and reasoning jointly. To bridge this gap, we propose to evaluate LVLMs by exploiting visual illusions as a diagnostic tool. Visual illusions are phenomena in which the human visual system misinterprets objective signals, resulting in an understanding that deviates from reality. We constructed IllusionReasoning, a benchmark of illusion images collected from the real world, incorporating diverse annotated question-answer pairs. Based on IllusionReasoning, we show that the reasoning capabilities of a wide range of LVLMs are not as advanced as claimed. Our work provides new insights into LVLMs and offers future direction for optimisation. △ Less

Submitted 30 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

BRIM: Workload-Balanced Dual-Sided Bit-Serial Sparse Inference Accelerator

Authors: Varun Manjunath, Ruokai Yin, Donghyun Lee, Arkapravo Ghosh, Priyadarshini Panda

Abstract: Bit-serial accelerators exploit bit-level sparsity to reduce DNN inference cost, but existing designs exploit sparsity on only one operand, bounding the speedup. Extending sparsity exploitation to both operands simultaneously yields compounding reductions in partial products but introduces a critical new bottleneck: workload imbalance. Because each concurrent weight - activation pair's execution c… ▽ More Bit-serial accelerators exploit bit-level sparsity to reduce DNN inference cost, but existing designs exploit sparsity on only one operand, bounding the speedup. Extending sparsity exploitation to both operands simultaneously yields compounding reductions in partial products but introduces a critical new bottleneck: workload imbalance. Because each concurrent weight - activation pair's execution cost depends on the product of two independently varying operand non-zero bit counts, pairs that must complete together finish at vastly different times, leaving faster computations idle. We show this limits PE utilization to 56 - 64% in existing dual-sided designs. We present BRIM, a hardware - software co-designed dual-sided bit-serial sparse accelerator that directly targets this bottleneck. BRIM combines two integrated mechanisms: 1) Cyclic-Balanced Pruning (CBP), a post-training weight optimization that reshapes weight representations based on profiled activation statistics to equalize expected workloads across concurrently processed pairs offline; and 2) Pairwise Slot Donation, a lightweight hardware mechanism that absorbs residual runtime imbalance with negligible area overhead. Evaluated across CNNs, ViTs, and LLMs under iso-area constraints, BRIM achieves over 90% PE utilization, up to 2.37x speedup, and up to 1.63x energy efficiency improvement over prior dual-sided designs. △ Less

Submitted 20 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

KronQ: LLM Quantization via Kronecker-Factored Hessian

Authors: Donghyun Lee, Yuhang Li, Ruokai Yin, Priyadarshini Panda

Abstract: Post-training quantization (PTQ) is a widely adopted technique for compressing large language models (LLMs) without retraining. Most existing second-order PTQ methods, including GPTQ, construct quantization objectives from input activation statistics, effectively assuming that all output channels contribute equally to the layer-wise reconstruction objective. We propose KronQ, a PTQ framework that… ▽ More Post-training quantization (PTQ) is a widely adopted technique for compressing large language models (LLMs) without retraining. Most existing second-order PTQ methods, including GPTQ, construct quantization objectives from input activation statistics, effectively assuming that all output channels contribute equally to the layer-wise reconstruction objective. We propose KronQ, a PTQ framework that challenges this assumption by introducing the gradient covariance into the quantization pipeline. Under the Kronecker-factored Hessian approximation, the quantization loss depends jointly on both the activation and gradient covariances, and KronQ exploits this at two complementary levels. (1) KronQ introduces bidirectional incoherence processing, extending the existing input-side random rotation to the output dimension using the gradient covariance, reducing weight magnitude variance across both input and output dimensions. (2) KronQ derives a new sensitivity metric for inter-layer mixed-precision allocation, driven by the gradient and activation Hessian traces. Notably, in the case of 2-bit weight-only quantization on LLaMA-3-70B, while GPTQ and GPTAQ diverge or produce degenerate quantizations (>2000 perplexity on WikiText-2), \KronQ{} achieves 7.93 perplexity. △ Less

Submitted 8 August, 2026; v1 submitted 8 July, 2026; originally announced July 2026.

Comments: COLM 2026

GUICrafter: Weakly-Supervised GUI Agent Leveraging Massive Unannotated Screenshots

Authors: Sunqi Fan, Lingshan Chen, Runqi Yin, Qingle Liu, Yongming Rao, Meng-Hao Guo, Shi-Min Hu

Abstract: Data, as the fundamental substrate of modern intelligence, has greatly driven the development of current foundation models. Naturally, researchers aim to extend this paradigm to the domain of GUI agents, hoping to build strong GUI agents through a similar paradigm. However, GUI agent data cannot be directly harvested from the internet, making it costly and difficult to collect at scale. As a resul… ▽ More Data, as the fundamental substrate of modern intelligence, has greatly driven the development of current foundation models. Naturally, researchers aim to extend this paradigm to the domain of GUI agents, hoping to build strong GUI agents through a similar paradigm. However, GUI agent data cannot be directly harvested from the internet, making it costly and difficult to collect at scale. As a result, current GUI agents suffer from poor cross-device generalization and limited visual grounding ability for fine-grained GUI elements. As an attempt to address data challenge in GUI agents, we propose GUICrafter, a weakly-supervised GUI agent leveraging massive unannotated screenshots to substantially reduce the reliance on expensive human annotations. GUICrafter explores a curriculum learning framework for training GUI agents through two progressive stages. First, the model learns visual grounding from large-scale unannotated screenshots and webpages, leveraging the rich contextual signals inherent in GUI interactions without human annotations. Then, in Stage 2, we leverage a small amount of high-quality data to calibrate the model via reinforcement learning. Experiments show that GUICrafter achieves competitive, or even superior, performance to advanced systems like UI-TARS while using only 0.1% of its data. Furthermore, under the same amount of annotated data, GUICrafter surpasses all previous methods such as GUI-R1. Code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/fansunqi/GUICrafter. △ Less

Submitted 28 June, 2026; originally announced June 2026.

Bridging VideoQA and Video-Guided Agentic Tasks via Generalized Keyframe Extraction

Authors: Sunqi Fan, Qingle Liu, Runqi Yin, Meng-Hao Guo, Shuojin Yang

Abstract: Video understanding is a fundamental capability for multimodal intelligence, and recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on Video Question Answering (VideoQA) benchmarks. However, existing benchmarks primarily evaluate whether models can perceive shallow visual cues, while rarely examining whether MLLMs can learn deeper knowledge or procedural skills fr… ▽ More Video understanding is a fundamental capability for multimodal intelligence, and recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on Video Question Answering (VideoQA) benchmarks. However, existing benchmarks primarily evaluate whether models can perceive shallow visual cues, while rarely examining whether MLLMs can learn deeper knowledge or procedural skills from video tutorials and generalize them to downstream long-horizon agentic tasks. To address this gap, we introduce VG-GUIBench (Video-Guided GUI Benchmark), a new benchmark designed to evaluate whether MLLM-based GUI agents can follow video tutorials to complete corresponding GUI interactive tasks. Furthermore, we observe that the performance of models on both VideoQA and video-guided agentic tasks critically depends on effective keyframe extraction. Based on this observation, we propose TASKER (Task-driven And Scene-aware Keyframe searchER), a keyframe extraction algorithm that jointly considers task relevance and scene dynamics to identify informative frames. Experimental results demonstrate that TASKER achieves significant performance improvements on both VideoQA and video-guided agentic task benchmarks, outperforming the best baseline by 2.0% on the EgoSchema fullset and 1.8% on the NExT-QA dataset, respectively. These results further highlight the potential of generalized keyframe extraction methods for video understanding tasks. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/VG-GUI-TASKER/VG-GUI-TASKER. △ Less

Submitted 28 June, 2026; originally announced June 2026.

Comments: Accepted by ECCV 2026. Project Page: https://vg-gui-tasker.github.io/

DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence

Authors: DeepSeek-AI, Anyi Xu, Bangcai Lin, Bing Xue, Bingxuan Wang, Bingzheng Xu, Bochao Wu, Bowei Zhang, Chaofan Lin, Chen Dong, Chenchen Ling, Chengda Lu, Chenggang Zhao, Chengqi Deng, Chengyu Hou, Chenhao Xu, Chenze Shao, Chong Ruan, Conner Sun, Damai Dai, Daya Guo, Dejian Yang, Deli Chen, Donghao Li, Dongjie Ji , et al. (294 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: We present a preview version of DeepSeek-V4 series, including two strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models -- DeepSeek-V4-Pro with 1.6T parameters (49B activated) and DeepSeek-V4-Flash with 284B parameters (13B activated) -- both supporting a context length of one million tokens. DeepSeek-V4 series incorporate several key upgrades in architecture and optimization: (1) a hybrid attention arc… ▽ More We present a preview version of DeepSeek-V4 series, including two strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models -- DeepSeek-V4-Pro with 1.6T parameters (49B activated) and DeepSeek-V4-Flash with 284B parameters (13B activated) -- both supporting a context length of one million tokens. DeepSeek-V4 series incorporate several key upgrades in architecture and optimization: (1) a hybrid attention architecture that combines Compressed Sparse Attention (CSA) and Heavily Compressed Attention (HCA) to improve long-context efficiency; (2) Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC) that enhance conventional residual connections; (3) and the Muon optimizer for faster convergence and greater training stability. We pre-train both models on more than 32T diverse and high-quality tokens, followed by a comprehensive post-training pipeline that unlocks and further enhances their capabilities. DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Max, the maximum reasoning effort mode of DeepSeek-V4-Pro, redefines the state-of-the-art for open models, outperforming its predecessors in core tasks. Meanwhile, DeepSeek-V4 series are highly efficient in long-context scenarios. In the one-million-token context setting, DeepSeek-V4-Pro requires only 27% of single-token inference FLOPs and 10% of KV cache compared with DeepSeek-V3.2. This enables us to routinely support one-million-token contexts, thereby making long-horizon tasks and further test-time scaling more feasible. The model checkpoints are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4. △ Less

Submitted 26 April, 2026; originally announced June 2026.

Multi-Stakeholder LLM Alignment: Decomposing Estimation from Aggregation

Authors: Lulu Zheng, Wenjin Yang, Xiangwen Zhang, Rong Yin, Yulan Hu, Zheng Pan, Xin Li

Abstract: Multi-stakeholder tasks require one output to satisfy users with conflicting preferences. Holistic LLM judges conflate utility estimation and utility aggregation, yielding unstable implicit weights. We show empirically and theoretically that this aggregation-specific \emph{weighting noise} can create large score shifts when stakeholder satisfaction is dispersed; in our experiments, these weight-in… ▽ More Multi-stakeholder tasks require one output to satisfy users with conflicting preferences. Holistic LLM judges conflate utility estimation and utility aggregation, yielding unstable implicit weights. We show empirically and theoretically that this aggregation-specific \emph{weighting noise} can create large score shifts when stakeholder satisfaction is dispersed; in our experiments, these weight-induced shifts also increase with stakeholder count. We propose \textsc{DecompR}: counterfactual-calibrated weights are fixed from query structure before candidate scoring, while per-role utilities are estimated independently, removing candidate-dependent weight drift and reducing estimation noise. △ Less

Submitted 26 May, 2026; originally announced May 2026.

LLM-as-a-Judge in Healthcare: A Scoping Analysis of Applications, Methods, and Human Alignment

Authors: Lingyao Li, Deyi Li, Chen Chen, Renkai Ma, Runlong Yu, Mingquan Lin, Rui Yin, Lizhou Fan, Cathy Shyr, Siyuan Ma, Mei Liu, Steven Bethard

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across healthcare applications, including clinical documentation, diagnostic reasoning, medicine recommendation, and medical education. Their outputs are largely unstructured clinical text, which is difficult to reliably evaluate at scale. LLM-as-a-Judge, in which an LLM evaluates another system's output against task-specific criteria, offers… ▽ More Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across healthcare applications, including clinical documentation, diagnostic reasoning, medicine recommendation, and medical education. Their outputs are largely unstructured clinical text, which is difficult to reliably evaluate at scale. LLM-as-a-Judge, in which an LLM evaluates another system's output against task-specific criteria, offers a scalable alternative and is increasingly used in clinical evaluation, yet its validity in healthcare remains underexamined. Existing reviews focus on general-purpose LLM evaluation or on risk framework, rather than systematically characterizing how LLM-as-a-Judge is applied in healthcare and how well their judgments align with human experts. We therefore conduct a PRISMA-guided comprehensive review of LLM-as-a-Judge applications in healthcare, searching five databases for studies published between January 2023 and February 2026. After screening 541 records, 134 studies meet the eligibility and are coded by health scenario, judge configuration, technical approach, and validation design. LLM-as-a-Judge is concentrated in clinical decision support, clinical natural language processing (NLP), medical knowledge and question answering (QA), and medical communication. OpenAI models are the most frequently used judges, and prompt engineering appears in nearly all studies, with ensemble, multi-agent, and retrieval-augmented designs as common extensions. Among studies reporting human validation, LLM judges often show moderate to strong alignment with expert judgments, although reliability varies substantially across tasks. Overall, this review positions LLM-as-a-Judge as a promising framework for scalable healthcare AI evaluation, while emphasizing that its clinical value depends on model design and rigorous validation. △ Less

Submitted 24 May, 2026; originally announced May 2026.

Reward Hacking in the Era of Large Models: Mechanisms, Emergent Misalignment, Challenges

Authors: Xiaohua Wang, Muzhao Tian, Yuqi Zeng, Zisu Huang, Jiakang Yuan, Bowen Chen, Jingwen Xu, Mingbo Zhou, Wenhao Liu, Muling Wu, Zhengkang Guo, Qi Qian, Yifei Wang, Feiran Zhang, Ruicheng Yin, Shihan Dou, Changze Lv, Tao Chen, Kaitao Song, Xu Tan, Tao Gui, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang

Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and related alignment paradigms have become central to steering large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) toward human-preferred behaviors. However, these approaches introduce a systemic vulnerability: reward hacking, where models exploit imperfections in learned reward signals to maximize proxy objectives without fu… ▽ More Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and related alignment paradigms have become central to steering large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) toward human-preferred behaviors. However, these approaches introduce a systemic vulnerability: reward hacking, where models exploit imperfections in learned reward signals to maximize proxy objectives without fulfilling true task intent. As models scale and optimization intensifies, such exploitation manifests as verbosity bias, sycophancy, hallucinated justification, benchmark overfitting, and, in multimodal settings, perception--reasoning decoupling and evaluator manipulation. Recent evidence further suggests that seemingly benign shortcut behaviors can generalize into broader forms of misalignment, including deception and strategic gaming of oversight mechanisms. In this survey, we propose the Proxy Compression Hypothesis (PCH) as a unifying framework for understanding reward hacking. We formalize reward hacking as an emergent consequence of optimizing expressive policies against compressed reward representations of high-dimensional human objectives. Under this view, reward hacking arises from the interaction of objective compression, optimization amplification, and evaluator--policy co-adaptation. This perspective unifies empirical phenomena across RLHF, RLAIF, and RLVR regimes, and explains how local shortcut learning can generalize into broader forms of misalignment, including deception and strategic manipulation of oversight mechanisms. We further organize detection and mitigation strategies according to how they intervene on compression, amplification, or co-adaptation dynamics. By framing reward hacking as a structural instability of proxy-based alignment under scale, we highlight open challenges in scalable oversight, multimodal grounding, and agentic autonomy. △ Less

Submitted 15 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Comments: 42 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables

Compiling Activation Steering into Weights via Null-Space Constraints for Stealthy Backdoors

Authors: Rui Yin, Tianxu Han, Naen Xu, Changjiang Li, Ping He, Chunyi Zhou, Jun Wang, Zhihui Fu, Tianyu Du, Jinbao Li, Shouling Ji

Abstract: Safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world pipelines, yet this deployment also enlarges the supply-chain attack surface: adversaries can distribute backdoored checkpoints that behave normally under standard evaluation but jailbreak when a hidden trigger is present. Recent post-hoc weight-editing methods offer an efficient approach to injecting such backdoor… ▽ More Safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world pipelines, yet this deployment also enlarges the supply-chain attack surface: adversaries can distribute backdoored checkpoints that behave normally under standard evaluation but jailbreak when a hidden trigger is present. Recent post-hoc weight-editing methods offer an efficient approach to injecting such backdoors by directly modifying model weights to map a trigger to an attacker-specified response. However, existing methods typically optimize a token-level mapping that forces an affirmative prefix (e.g., ``Sure''), which does not guarantee sustained harmful output -- the model may begin with apparent agreement yet revert to safety-aligned refusal within a few decoding steps. We address this reliability gap by shifting the backdoor objective from surface tokens to internal representations. We extract a steering vector that captures the difference between compliant and refusal behaviors, and compile it into a persistent weight modification that activates only when the trigger is present. To preserve stealthiness and benign utility, we impose a null-space constraint so that the injected edit remains dormant on clean inputs. The method is efficient, requiring only a small set of examples and admitting a closed-form solution. Across multiple safety-aligned LLMs and jailbreak benchmarks, our method achieves high triggered attack success while maintaining non-triggered safety and general utility. △ Less

Submitted 14 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Comments: ACL 2026 Main Conference

Weather-Conditioned Branch Routing for Robust LiDAR-Radar 3D Object Detection

Authors: Hongsheng Li, Lingfeng Zhang, Zexian Yang, Liang Li, Rong Yin, Xiaoshuai Hao, Wenbo Ding

Abstract: Robust 3D object detection in adverse weather is highly challenging due to the varying reliability of different sensors. While existing LiDAR-4D radar fusion methods improve robustness, they predominantly rely on fixed or weakly adaptive pipelines, failing to dy-namically adjust modality preferences as environmental conditions change. To bridge this gap, we reformulate multi-modal perception as a… ▽ More Robust 3D object detection in adverse weather is highly challenging due to the varying reliability of different sensors. While existing LiDAR-4D radar fusion methods improve robustness, they predominantly rely on fixed or weakly adaptive pipelines, failing to dy-namically adjust modality preferences as environmental conditions change. To bridge this gap, we reformulate multi-modal perception as a weather-conditioned branch routing problem. Instead of computing a single fused output, our framework explicitly maintains three parallel 3D feature streams: a pure LiDAR branch, a pure 4D radar branch, and a condition-gated fusion branch. Guided by a condition token extracted from visual and semantic prompts, a lightweight router dynamically predicts sample-specific weights to softly aggregate these representations. Furthermore, to prevent branch collapse, we introduce a weather-supervised learning strategy with auxiliary classification and diversity regularization to enforce distinct, condition-dependent routing behaviors. Extensive experiments on the K-Radar benchmark demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, it provides explicit and highly interpretable insights into modality preferences, transparently revealing how adaptive routing robustly shifts reliance between LiDAR and 4D radar across diverse adverse-weather scenarios. The source code with be released. △ Less

Submitted 6 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

Optimal Brain Decomposition for Accurate LLM Low-Rank Approximation

Authors: Yuhang Li, Donghyun Lee, Ruokai Yin, Priyadarshini Panda

Abstract: Low-rank decomposition has emerged as an important problem in Large Language Model (LLM) fine-tuning and inference. Through Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), the weight matrix can be factorized into low-rank spaces optimally. Previously, a common practice was to decompose the weight in the activation-whitened space, and then achieve satisfying results. In this work, we propose Optimal Brain Deco… ▽ More Low-rank decomposition has emerged as an important problem in Large Language Model (LLM) fine-tuning and inference. Through Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), the weight matrix can be factorized into low-rank spaces optimally. Previously, a common practice was to decompose the weight in the activation-whitened space, and then achieve satisfying results. In this work, we propose Optimal Brain Decomposition LLM (OBD-LLM), which studies the decomposition problem in the model space by utilizing second-order Hessian information. Through a rigorous Kronecker-factorization of the Hessian, we show that the decomposition needs to consider both input and output information of the layer, and achieves much better decomposition results compared to input only method. Our loss-aware decomposition method involves a bi-directional whitening on the weight matrix. As a result, OBD-LLM is a closed-form solution for the optimal decomposition of weights in the language model. Remarkably, we achieve ~20-40\% better results than previous state-of-the-art decomposition methods, the SVD-LLM. △ Less

Submitted 1 April, 2026; originally announced April 2026.

DFM-VLA: Iterative Action Refinement for Robot Manipulation via Discrete Flow Matching

Authors: Jiayi Chen, Wenxuan Song, Jiaxin Fang, Ruiqing Yin, Jingbo Wang, Shuai Chen, Jieyuan Pei, Yikai Qin, Feifan Chen, Haodong Yan, Zhide Zhong, Wen Chen, Yan Wang, Yuxiang Gao, Haoang Li

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models that encode actions using a discrete tokenization scheme have been widely adopted for robotic manipulation, but existing decoding paradigms remain fundamentally limited. Whether actions are decoded sequentially by autoregressive VLAs or in parallel by discrete diffusion VLAs, once a token is generated, it is typically fixed and cannot be revised in subsequent it… ▽ More Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models that encode actions using a discrete tokenization scheme have been widely adopted for robotic manipulation, but existing decoding paradigms remain fundamentally limited. Whether actions are decoded sequentially by autoregressive VLAs or in parallel by discrete diffusion VLAs, once a token is generated, it is typically fixed and cannot be revised in subsequent iterations. Consequently, early token errors cannot be effectively corrected later. We propose DFM-VLA, a discrete flow matching VLA that iteratively refines action tokens. DFM-VLA models a token-level probability velocity field that dynamically updates the full action sequence across refinement iterations. We investigate two approaches to constructing the velocity field: an auxiliary velocity-head formulation and an embedding-guided formulation. To further improve prediction accuracy, we introduce a metric-aligned action tokenizer (MAAT) tailored to the coarse-to-fine nature of DFM, together with a two-stage decoding strategy. Extensive experiments on CALVIN, LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our project is available at https://chris1220313648.github.io/DFM-VLA/. △ Less

Submitted 6 August, 2026; v1 submitted 27 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Beyond Semantic Priors: Mitigating Optimization Collapse for Generalizable Visual Forensics

Authors: Jipeng Liu, Haichao Shi, Siyu Xing, Rong Yin, Xiao-Yu Zhang

Abstract: While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP have emerged as a dominant paradigm for generalizable deepfake detection, a representational disconnect remains: their semantic-centric pre-training is ill-suited for capturing non-semantic artifacts inherent to hyper-realistic synthesis. In this work, we identify a failure mode termed Optimization Collapse, where detectors trained with Sharpness-Aware… ▽ More While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP have emerged as a dominant paradigm for generalizable deepfake detection, a representational disconnect remains: their semantic-centric pre-training is ill-suited for capturing non-semantic artifacts inherent to hyper-realistic synthesis. In this work, we identify a failure mode termed Optimization Collapse, where detectors trained with Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) degenerate to random guessing on non-semantic forgeries once the perturbation radius exceeds a narrow threshold. To theoretically formalize this collapse, we propose the Critical Optimization Radius (COR) to quantify the geometric stability of the optimization landscape, and leverage the Gradient Signal-to-Noise Ratio (GSNR) to measure generalization potential. We establish a theorem proving that COR increases monotonically with GSNR, thereby revealing that the geometric instability of SAM optimization originates from degraded intrinsic generalization potential. This result identifies the layer-wise attenuation of GSNR as the root cause of Optimization Collapse in detecting non-semantic forgeries. Although naively reducing perturbation radius yields stable convergence under SAM, it merely treats the symptom without mitigating the intrinsic generalization degradation, necessitating enhanced gradient fidelity. Building on this insight, we propose the Contrastive Regional Injection Transformer (CoRIT), which integrates a computationally efficient Contrastive Gradient Proxy (CGP) with three training-free strategies: Region Refinement Mask to suppress CGP variance, Regional Signal Injection to preserve CGP magnitude, and Hierarchical Representation Integration to attain more generalizable representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoRIT mitigates optimization collapse and achieves state-of-the-art generalization across cross-domain and universal forgery benchmarks. △ Less

Submitted 25 March, 2026; originally announced March 2026.

Gastric-X: A Multimodal Multi-Phase Benchmark Dataset for Advancing Vision-Language Models in Gastric Cancer Analysis

Authors: Sheng Lu, Hao Chen, Rui Yin, Juyan Ba, Yu Zhang, Yuanzhe Li

Abstract: Recent vision-language models (VLMs) have shown strong generalization and multimodal reasoning abilities in natural domains. However, their application to medical diagnosis remains limited by the lack of comprehensive and structured datasets that capture real clinical workflows. To advance the development of VLMs for clinical applications, particularly in gastric cancer, we introduce Gastric-X, a… ▽ More Recent vision-language models (VLMs) have shown strong generalization and multimodal reasoning abilities in natural domains. However, their application to medical diagnosis remains limited by the lack of comprehensive and structured datasets that capture real clinical workflows. To advance the development of VLMs for clinical applications, particularly in gastric cancer, we introduce Gastric-X, a large-scale multimodal benchmark for gastric cancer analysis providing 1.7K cases. Each case in Gastric-X includes paired resting and dynamic CT scans, endoscopic image, a set of structured biochemical indicators, expert-authored diagnostic notes, and bounding box annotations of tumor regions, reflecting realistic clinical conditions. We systematically examine the capability of recent VLMs on five core tasks: Visual Question Answering (VQA), report generation, cross-modal retrieval, disease classification, and lesion localization. These tasks simulate critical stages of clinical workflow, from visual understanding and reasoning to multimodal decision support. Through this evaluation, we aim not only to assess model performance but also to probe the nature of VLM understanding: Can current VLMs meaningfully correlate biochemical signals with spatial tumor features and textual reports? We envision Gastric-X as a step toward aligning machine intelligence with the cognitive and evidential reasoning processes of physicians, and as a resource to inspire the development of next-generation medical VLMs. △ Less

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

Comments: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026

Decomposing Large-Scale Ising Problems on FPGAs: A Hybrid Hardware Approach

Authors: Ruihong Yin, Yue Zheng, Chaohui Li, Ahmet Efe, Abhimanyu Kumar, Ziqing Zeng, Ulya R. Karpuzcu, Sachin S. Sapatnekar, Chris H. Kim

Abstract: Emerging analog computing substrates, such as oscillator-based Ising machines, offer rapid convergence times for combinatorial optimization but often suffer from limited scalability due to physical implementation constraints. To tackle real-world problems involving thousands of variables, problem decomposition is required; however, performing this step on standard CPUs introduces significant laten… ▽ More Emerging analog computing substrates, such as oscillator-based Ising machines, offer rapid convergence times for combinatorial optimization but often suffer from limited scalability due to physical implementation constraints. To tackle real-world problems involving thousands of variables, problem decomposition is required; however, performing this step on standard CPUs introduces significant latency, preventing the high-speed solver from operating at full capacity. This work presents a heterogeneous system that offloads the decomposition workload to an FPGA, tightly integrated with a custom 28nm Ising solver. By migrating the decomposition logic to reconfigurable hardware and utilizing parallel processing elements, the system minimizes the communication latency typically associated with host-device interactions. Our evaluation demonstrates that this co-design approach effectively bridges the speed gap between digital preprocessing and analog solving, achieving nearly 2$\times$ speedup and an energy efficiency improvement of over two orders of magnitude compared to optimized software baselines running on modern CPUs. △ Less

Submitted 17 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

AISA: Awakening Intrinsic Safety Awareness in Large Language Models against Jailbreak Attacks

Authors: Weiming Song, Xuan Xie, Ruiping Yin

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak prompts that elicit harmful or policy-violating outputs, while many existing defenses rely on expensive fine-tuning, intrusive prompt rewriting, or external guardrails that add latency and can degrade helpfulness. We present AISA, a lightweight, single-pass defense that activates safety behaviors already latent inside the model rather tha… ▽ More Large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak prompts that elicit harmful or policy-violating outputs, while many existing defenses rely on expensive fine-tuning, intrusive prompt rewriting, or external guardrails that add latency and can degrade helpfulness. We present AISA, a lightweight, single-pass defense that activates safety behaviors already latent inside the model rather than treating safety as an add-on. AISA first localizes intrinsic safety awareness via spatiotemporal analysis and shows that intent-discriminative signals are broadly encoded, with especially strong separability appearing in the scaled dot-product outputs of specific attention heads near the final structural tokens before generation. Using a compact set of automatically selected heads, AISA extracts an interpretable prompt-risk score with minimal overhead, achieving detector-level performance competitive with strong proprietary baselines on small (7B) models. AISA then performs logits-level steering: it modulates the decoding distribution in proportion to the inferred risk, ranging from normal generation for benign prompts to calibrated refusal for high-risk requests -- without changing model parameters, adding auxiliary modules, or requiring multi-pass inference. Extensive experiments spanning 13 datasets, 12 LLMs, and 14 baselines demonstrate that AISA improves robustness and transfer while preserving utility and reducing false refusals, enabling safer deployment even for weakly aligned or intentionally risky model variants. △ Less

Submitted 13 February, 2026; originally announced February 2026.

Stability as a Liability:Systematic Breakdown of Linguistic Structure in LLMs

Authors: Xianzhe Meng, Qiangsheng Zeng, Ling Luo, Qinghan Yang, Jiarui Hao, Wenbo Wu, Qinyu Wang, Rui Yin, Lin Qi, Renzhi Lu

Abstract: Training stability is typically regarded as a prerequisite for reliable optimization in large language models. In this work, we analyze how stabilizing training dynamics affects the induced generation distribution. We show that under standard maximum likelihood training, stable parameter trajectories lead stationary solutions to approximately minimize the forward KL divergence to the empirical dis… ▽ More Training stability is typically regarded as a prerequisite for reliable optimization in large language models. In this work, we analyze how stabilizing training dynamics affects the induced generation distribution. We show that under standard maximum likelihood training, stable parameter trajectories lead stationary solutions to approximately minimize the forward KL divergence to the empirical distribution, while implicitly reducing generative entropy. As a consequence, the learned model can concentrate probability mass on a limited subset of empirical modes, exhibiting systematic degeneration despite smooth loss convergence. We empirically validate this effect using a controlled feedback-based training framework that stabilizes internal generation statistics, observing consistent low-entropy outputs and repetitive behavior across architectures and random seeds. It indicates that optimization stability and generative expressivity are not inherently aligned, and that stability alone is an insufficient indicator of generative quality. △ Less

Submitted 7 February, 2026; v1 submitted 26 January, 2026; originally announced January 2026.

Extractive summarization on a CMOS Ising machine

Authors: Ziqing Zeng, Abhimanyu Kumar, Ahmet Efe, Ruihong Yin, Chris H. Kim, Ulya R. Karpuzcu, Sachin S. Sapatnekar

Abstract: Extractive summarization (ES) aims to generate a concise summary by selecting a subset of sentences from a document while maximizing relevance and minimizing redundancy. Although modern ES systems achieve high accuracy using powerful neural models, their deployment typically relies on CPU or GPU infrastructures that are energy-intensive and poorly suited for real-time inference in resource-constra… ▽ More Extractive summarization (ES) aims to generate a concise summary by selecting a subset of sentences from a document while maximizing relevance and minimizing redundancy. Although modern ES systems achieve high accuracy using powerful neural models, their deployment typically relies on CPU or GPU infrastructures that are energy-intensive and poorly suited for real-time inference in resource-constrained environments. In this work, we explore the feasibility of implementing McDonald-style extractive summarization on a low-power CMOS coupled oscillator-based Ising machine (COBI) that supports integer-valued, all-to-all spin couplings. We first propose a hardware-aware Ising formulation that reduces the scale imbalance between local fields and coupling terms, thereby improving robustness to coefficient quantization: this method can be applied to any problem formulation that requires k of n variables to be chosen. We then develop a complete ES pipeline including (i) stochastic rounding and iterative refinement to compensate for precision loss, and (ii) a decomposition strategy that partitions a large ES problem into smaller Ising subproblems that can be efficiently solved on COBI and later combined. Experimental results on the CNN/DailyMail dataset show that our pipeline can produce high-quality summaries using only integer-coupled Ising hardware with limited precision. COBI achieves 3-4.5x runtime speedups compared to a brute-force method, which is comparable to software Tabu search, and two to three orders of magnitude reductions in energy, while maintaining competitive summary quality. These results highlight the potential of deploying CMOS Ising solvers for real-time, low-energy text summarization on edge devices. △ Less

Submitted 23 January, 2026; v1 submitted 16 January, 2026; originally announced January 2026.

Learning Patient-Specific Disease Dynamics with Latent Flow Matching for Longitudinal Imaging Generation

Authors: Hao Chen, Rui Yin, Yifan Chen, Qi Chen, Chao Li

Abstract: Understanding disease progression is a central clinical challenge with direct implications for early diagnosis and personalized treatment. While recent generative approaches have attempted to model progression, key mismatches remain: disease dynamics are inherently continuous and monotonic, yet latent representations are often scattered, lacking semantic structure, and diffusion-based models disru… ▽ More Understanding disease progression is a central clinical challenge with direct implications for early diagnosis and personalized treatment. While recent generative approaches have attempted to model progression, key mismatches remain: disease dynamics are inherently continuous and monotonic, yet latent representations are often scattered, lacking semantic structure, and diffusion-based models disrupt continuity with random denoising process. In this work, we propose to treat the disease dynamic as a velocity field and leverage Flow Matching (FM) to align the temporal evolution of patient data. Unlike prior methods, it captures the intrinsic dynamic of disease, making the progression more interpretable. However, a key challenge remains: in latent space, Auto-Encoders (AEs) do not guarantee alignment across patients or correlation with clinical-severity indicators (e.g., age and disease conditions). To address this, we propose to learn patient-specific latent alignment, which enforces patient trajectories to lie along a specific axis, with magnitude increasing monotonically with disease severity. This leads to a consistent and semantically meaningful latent space. Together, we present $Δ$-LFM, a framework for modeling patient-specific latent progression with flow matching. Across three longitudinal MRI benchmarks, $Δ$-LFM demonstrates strong empirical performance and, more importantly, offers a new framework for interpreting and visualizing disease dynamics. △ Less

Submitted 17 June, 2026; v1 submitted 9 December, 2025; originally announced December 2025.

Comments: ICLR 2026 accepted

Assessing the Human-Likeness of LLM-Driven Digital Twins in Simulating Health Care System Trust

Authors: Yuzhou Wu, Mingyang Wu, Di Liu, Rong Yin, Kang Li

Abstract: Serving as an emerging and powerful tool, Large Language Model (LLM)-driven Human Digital Twins are showing great potential in healthcare system research. However, its actual simulation ability for complex human psychological traits, such as distrust in the healthcare system, remains unclear. This research gap particularly impacts health professionals' trust and usage of LLM-based Artificial Intel… ▽ More Serving as an emerging and powerful tool, Large Language Model (LLM)-driven Human Digital Twins are showing great potential in healthcare system research. However, its actual simulation ability for complex human psychological traits, such as distrust in the healthcare system, remains unclear. This research gap particularly impacts health professionals' trust and usage of LLM-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems in assisting their routine work. In this study, based on the Twin-2K-500 dataset, we systematically evaluated the simulation results of the LLM-driven human digital twin using the Health Care System Distrust Scale (HCSDS) with an established human-subject sample, analyzing item-level distributions, summary statistics, and demographic subgroup patterns. Results showed that the simulated responses by the digital twin were significantly more centralized with lower variance and had fewer selections of extreme options (all p<0.001). While the digital twin broadly reproduces human results in major demographic patterns, such as age and gender, it exhibits relatively low sensitivity in capturing minor differences in education levels. The LLM-based digital twin simulation has the potential to simulate population trends, but it also presents challenges in making detailed, specific distinctions in subgroups of human beings. This study suggests that the current LLM-driven Digital Twins have limitations in modeling complex human attitudes, which require careful calibration and validation before applying them in inferential analyses or policy simulations in health systems engineering. Future studies are necessary to examine the emotional reasoning mechanism of LLMs before their use, particularly for studies that involve simulations sensitive to social topics, such as human-automation trust. △ Less

Submitted 26 October, 2025; originally announced December 2025.

Comments: 6 pages, 1 figure may be published in IISE Annual Conference & Expo 2026

Fast SceneScript: Fast and Accurate Language-Based 3D Scene Understanding via Multi-Token Prediction

Authors: Ruihong Yin, Xuepeng Shi, Oleksandr Bailo, Marco Manfredi, Theo Gevers

Abstract: Recent perception-generalist approaches based on language models have achieved state-of-the-art results across diverse tasks, including 3D scene layout estimation and 3D object detection, via unified architecture and interface. However, these approaches rely on autoregressive next-token prediction, which is inherently slow. In this work, we introduce Fast SceneScript, a novel structured language m… ▽ More Recent perception-generalist approaches based on language models have achieved state-of-the-art results across diverse tasks, including 3D scene layout estimation and 3D object detection, via unified architecture and interface. However, these approaches rely on autoregressive next-token prediction, which is inherently slow. In this work, we introduce Fast SceneScript, a novel structured language model for accurate and efficient 3D scene understanding. Our method employs multi-token prediction (MTP) to reduce the number of autoregressive iterations and significantly accelerate inference. While MTP improves speed, unreliable token predictions can significantly reduce accuracy. To filter out unreliable tokens, we adapt self-speculative decoding (SSD) for structured language models and introduce confidence-guided decoding (CGD) with an improved scoring mechanism for token reliability. Furthermore, we design a parameter-efficient mechanism that reduces the parameter overhead of MTP. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that Fast SceneScript can generate up to 9 tokens per decoder inference step without compromising accuracy, while adding only $\sim7.5\%$ additional parameters. △ Less

Submitted 31 March, 2026; v1 submitted 5 December, 2025; originally announced December 2025.

Comments: Accepted to CVPR 2026

MD-SNN: Membrane Potential-aware Distillation on Quantized Spiking Neural Network

Authors: Donghyun Lee, Abhishek Moitra, Youngeun Kim, Ruokai Yin, Priyadarshini Panda

Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a promising and energy-efficient alternative to conventional neural networks, thanks to their sparse binary activation. However, they face challenges regarding memory and computation overhead due to complex spatio-temporal dynamics and the necessity for multiple backpropagation computations across timesteps during training. To mitigate this overhead, compressio… ▽ More Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a promising and energy-efficient alternative to conventional neural networks, thanks to their sparse binary activation. However, they face challenges regarding memory and computation overhead due to complex spatio-temporal dynamics and the necessity for multiple backpropagation computations across timesteps during training. To mitigate this overhead, compression techniques such as quantization are applied to SNNs. Yet, naively applying quantization to SNNs introduces a mismatch in membrane potential, a crucial factor for the firing of spikes, resulting in accuracy degradation. In this paper, we introduce Membrane-aware Distillation on quantized Spiking Neural Network (MD-SNN), which leverages membrane potential to mitigate discrepancies after weight, membrane potential, and batch normalization quantization. To our knowledge, this study represents the first application of membrane potential knowledge distillation in SNNs. We validate our approach on various datasets, including CIFAR10, CIFAR100, N-Caltech101, and TinyImageNet, demonstrating its effectiveness for both static and dynamic data scenarios. Furthermore, for hardware efficiency, we evaluate the MD-SNN with SpikeSim platform, finding that MD-SNNs achieve 14.85X lower energy-delay-area product (EDAP), 2.64X higher TOPS/W, and 6.19X higher TOPS/mm2 compared to floating point SNNs at iso-accuracy on N-Caltech101 dataset. △ Less

Submitted 2 January, 2026; v1 submitted 3 December, 2025; originally announced December 2025.

Comments: DATE 2026

DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Models

Authors: DeepSeek-AI, Aixin Liu, Aoxue Mei, Bangcai Lin, Bing Xue, Bingxuan Wang, Bingzheng Xu, Bochao Wu, Bowei Zhang, Chaofan Lin, Chen Dong, Chengda Lu, Chenggang Zhao, Chengqi Deng, Chenhao Xu, Chong Ruan, Damai Dai, Daya Guo, Dejian Yang, Deli Chen, Erhang Li, Fangqi Zhou, Fangyun Lin, Fucong Dai, Guangbo Hao , et al. (239 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: We introduce DeepSeek-V3.2, a model that harmonizes high computational efficiency with superior reasoning and agent performance. The key technical breakthroughs of DeepSeek-V3.2 are as follows: (1) DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA): We introduce DSA, an efficient attention mechanism that substantially reduces computational complexity while preserving model performance in long-context scenarios. (2)… ▽ More We introduce DeepSeek-V3.2, a model that harmonizes high computational efficiency with superior reasoning and agent performance. The key technical breakthroughs of DeepSeek-V3.2 are as follows: (1) DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA): We introduce DSA, an efficient attention mechanism that substantially reduces computational complexity while preserving model performance in long-context scenarios. (2) Scalable Reinforcement Learning Framework: By implementing a robust reinforcement learning protocol and scaling post-training compute, DeepSeek-V3.2 performs comparably to GPT-5. Notably, our high-compute variant, DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale, surpasses GPT-5 and exhibits reasoning proficiency on par with Gemini-3.0-Pro, achieving gold-medal performance in both the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) and the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). (3) Large-Scale Agentic Task Synthesis Pipeline: To integrate reasoning into tool-use scenarios, we developed a novel synthesis pipeline that systematically generates training data at scale. This methodology facilitates scalable agentic post-training, yielding substantial improvements in generalization and instruction-following robustness within complex, interactive environments. △ Less

Submitted 2 December, 2025; originally announced December 2025.

Sleep Apnea Detection on a Wireless Multimodal Wearable Device Without Oxygen Flow Using a Mamba-based Deep Learning Approach

Authors: Dominik Luszczynski, Richard Fei Yin, Nicholas Afonin, Andrew S. P. Lim

Abstract: Objectives: We present and evaluate a Mamba-based deep-learning model for diagnosis and event-level characterization of sleep disordered breathing based on signals from the ANNE One, a non-intrusive dual-module wireless wearable system measuring chest electrocardiography, triaxial accelerometry, chest and finger temperature, and finger phototplethysmography. Methods: We obtained concurrent PSG a… ▽ More Objectives: We present and evaluate a Mamba-based deep-learning model for diagnosis and event-level characterization of sleep disordered breathing based on signals from the ANNE One, a non-intrusive dual-module wireless wearable system measuring chest electrocardiography, triaxial accelerometry, chest and finger temperature, and finger phototplethysmography. Methods: We obtained concurrent PSG and wearable sensor recordings from 384 adults attending a tertiary care sleep laboratory. Respiratory events in the PSG were manually annotated in accordance with AASM guidelines. Wearable sensor and PSG recordings were automatically aligned based on the ECG signal, alignment confirmed by visual inspection, and PSG-derived respiratory event labels were used to train and evaluate a deep sequential neural network based on the Mamba architecture. Results: In 57 recordings in our test set (mean age 56, mean AHI 10.8, 43.86\% female) the model-predicted AHI was highly correlated with that derived form the PSG labels (R=0.95, p=8.3e-30, men absolute error 2.83). This performance did not vary with age or sex. At a threshold of AHI$>$5, the model had a sensitivity of 0.96, specificity of 0.87, and kappa of 0.82, and at a threshold of AHI$>$15, the model had a sensitivity of 0.86, specificity of 0.98, and kappa of 0.85. At the level of 30-sec epochs, the model had a sensitivity of 0.93 and specificity of 0.95, with a kappa of 0.68 regarding whether any given epoch contained a respiratory event. Conclusions: Applied to data from the ANNE One, a Mamba-based deep learning model can accurately predict AHI and identify SDB at clinically relevant thresholds, achieves good epoch- and event-level identification of individual respiratory events, and shows promise at physiological characterization of these events including event type (central vs. other) and event duration. △ Less

Submitted 30 November, 2025; originally announced December 2025.

Comments: 29 pages, 14 figures. Authors Dominik Luszczynski, Richard Fei Yin and Nicholas Afonin contributed equally

On Solving Structured SAT on Ising Machines: A Semiprime Factorization Study

Authors: Ahmet Efe, Hüsrev Cılasun, Abhimanyu Kumar, Nafisa Sadaf Prova, Ziqing Zeng, Tahmida Islam, Ruihong Yin, Chaohui Li, Peter Kreye, Chris Kim, Sachin S. Sapatnekar, Ulya R. Karpuzcu

Abstract: Ising machines are emerging as a new technology for solving various classes of computationally hard problems of practical importance, yet their limits on structured SAT workloads, representative of numerous real-world applications, remain unexplored. We present the first systematic study of such problems, using semiprime factorization as a representative case. Our results show that highly restrict… ▽ More Ising machines are emerging as a new technology for solving various classes of computationally hard problems of practical importance, yet their limits on structured SAT workloads, representative of numerous real-world applications, remain unexplored. We present the first systematic study of such problems, using semiprime factorization as a representative case. Our results show that highly restrictive, 'tight' constraints, when mapped into optimization form, fundamentally distort Ising dynamics, and that these distortions are amplified when problems are decomposed to fit within limited hardware. We propose a hybrid approach that offloads constraint-heavy components to classical preprocessing while reserving the computationally challenging part for the Ising machine. Structured SAT represents a crucial step toward real-world applications, which remain out of reach today due to Ising machine limitations. Our findings reveal that constraint handling is a central obstacle and highlight hybrid hardware-software approaches as the path forward to unlocking the long-term potential of Ising machines. We conduct our evaluation on the manufactured Ising chips and demonstrate that our flow more than doubles the solvable problem size on a 45-spin all-to-all Ising chip, from 8-bit (94 variables) to 11-bit (190 variables), without hardware changes. △ Less

Submitted 25 November, 2025; originally announced November 2025.

The Alignment Paradox of Medical Large Language Models in Infertility Care: Decoupling Algorithmic Improvement from Clinical Decision-making Quality

Authors: Dou Liu, Ying Long, Sophia Zuoqiu, Kaipeng Xie, Runze Yang, Di Liu, Kang Li, Yiting Lin, Hanyi Liu, Rong Yin, Tian Tang

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in clinical decision support, yet aligning them with the multifaceted reasoning pathways of real-world medicine remains a major challenge. Using more than 8,000 infertility treatment records, we systematically evaluate four alignment strategies: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), Group Relative Policy Optimizati… ▽ More Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in clinical decision support, yet aligning them with the multifaceted reasoning pathways of real-world medicine remains a major challenge. Using more than 8,000 infertility treatment records, we systematically evaluate four alignment strategies: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), and In-Context Learning (ICL) through a dual-layer framework combining automatic benchmarks with blinded doctor-in-the-loop assessments. GRPO achieves the highest algorithmic accuracy across multiple decision layers, confirming the value of reinforcement-based optimization for structured prediction tasks. However, clinicians consistently prefer the SFT model, citing clearer reasoning processes (p = 0.035) and higher therapeutic feasibility (p = 0.019). In blinded pairwise comparisons, SFT attains the highest winning rate (51.2%), outperforming both GRPO (26.2%) and even physicians' original decisions (22.7%). These results reveal an alignment paradox: algorithmic improvements do not necessarily translate into higher clinical trust, and may diverge from human-centered preferences. Our findings highlight the need for alignment strategies that prioritize clinically interpretable and practically feasible reasoning, rather than solely optimizing decision-level accuracy. △ Less

Submitted 22 November, 2025; originally announced November 2025.

Comments: 22 pages 5 figures

Towards Scalable Oversight via Partitioned Human Supervision

Authors: Ren Yin, Takashi Ishida, Masashi Sugiyama

Abstract: As artificial intelligence (AI) systems approach and surpass expert human performance across a broad range of tasks, obtaining high-quality human supervision for evaluation and training becomes increasingly challenging. Our focus is on tasks that require deep knowledge and skills of multiple domains, where this bottleneck is severe. Unfortunately, even the best human experts are knowledgeable only… ▽ More As artificial intelligence (AI) systems approach and surpass expert human performance across a broad range of tasks, obtaining high-quality human supervision for evaluation and training becomes increasingly challenging. Our focus is on tasks that require deep knowledge and skills of multiple domains, where this bottleneck is severe. Unfortunately, even the best human experts are knowledgeable only in a single narrow area, and will not be able to evaluate the correctness of advanced AI systems on such superhuman tasks. However, based on their narrow expertise, humans may provide a weak signal, i.e., a complementary label indicating an option that is incorrect. For example, a cardiologist could state that ''this is not related to any cardiovascular disease,'' even if they cannot identify the true disease. Based on this weak signal, we propose a scalable oversight framework that enables us to evaluate frontier AI systems without the need to prepare the ground truth. We derive an unbiased estimator of top-1 accuracy from complementary labels and quantify how many complementary labels are needed to match the variance of ordinary labels. We further introduce two estimators to combine scarce ordinary labels with abundant complementary labels. We provide finite-sample deviation guarantees for both complementary-only and the mixed estimators. Empirically, we show that we can evaluate the output of large language models without the ground truth, if we have complementary labels. We further show that we can train an AI system with such weak signals: we show how we can design an agentic AI system automatically that can improve itself with this partitioned human supervision. Our code is available at https://github.com/R-Yin-217/Towards-Scalable-Oversight-via-Partitioned-Human-Supervision. △ Less

Submitted 24 February, 2026; v1 submitted 25 October, 2025; originally announced October 2025.

Comments: ICLR 2026 camera ready version

Reliability of Large Language Model Generated Clinical Reasoning in Assisted Reproductive Technology: Blinded Comparative Evaluation Study

Authors: Dou Liu, Ying Long, Sophia Zuoqiu, Di Liu, Kang Li, Yiting Lin, Hanyi Liu, Rong Yin, Tian Tang

Abstract: Creating high-quality clinical Chains-of-Thought (CoTs) is crucial for explainable medical Artificial Intelligence (AI) while constrained by data scarcity. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) can synthesize medical data, their clinical reliability remains unverified. This study evaluates the reliability of LLM-generated CoTs and investigates prompting strategies to enhance their quality. In a bl… ▽ More Creating high-quality clinical Chains-of-Thought (CoTs) is crucial for explainable medical Artificial Intelligence (AI) while constrained by data scarcity. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) can synthesize medical data, their clinical reliability remains unverified. This study evaluates the reliability of LLM-generated CoTs and investigates prompting strategies to enhance their quality. In a blinded comparative study, senior clinicians in Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) evaluated CoTs generated via three distinct strategies: Zero-shot, Random Few-shot (using shallow examples), and Selective Few-shot (using diverse, high-quality examples). These expert ratings were compared against evaluations from a state-of-the-art AI model (GPT-4o). The Selective Few-shot strategy significantly outperformed other strategies across all human evaluation metrics (p < .001). Critically, the Random Few-shot strategy offered no significant improvement over the Zero-shot baseline, demonstrating that low-quality examples are as ineffective as no examples. The success of the Selective strategy is attributed to two principles: "Gold-Standard Depth" (reasoning quality) and "Representative Diversity" (generalization). Notably, the AI evaluator failed to discern these critical performance differences. The clinical reliability of synthetic CoTs is dictated by strategic prompt curation, not the mere presence of examples. We propose a "Dual Principles" framework as a foundational methodology to generate trustworthy data at scale. This work offers a validated solution to the data bottleneck and confirms the indispensable role of human expertise in evaluating high-stakes clinical AI. △ Less

Submitted 17 October, 2025; originally announced October 2025.

SenWave: A Fine-Grained Multi-Language Sentiment Analysis Dataset Sourced from COVID-19 Tweets

Authors: Qiang Yang, Xiuying Chen, Changsheng Ma, Rui Yin, Xin Gao, Xiangliang Zhang

Abstract: The global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for a comprehensive understanding of public sentiment and reactions. Despite the availability of numerous public datasets on COVID-19, some reaching volumes of up to 100 billion data points, challenges persist regarding the availability of labeled data and the presence of coarse-grained or inappropriate sentiment labels. In this p… ▽ More The global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for a comprehensive understanding of public sentiment and reactions. Despite the availability of numerous public datasets on COVID-19, some reaching volumes of up to 100 billion data points, challenges persist regarding the availability of labeled data and the presence of coarse-grained or inappropriate sentiment labels. In this paper, we introduce SenWave, a novel fine-grained multi-language sentiment analysis dataset specifically designed for analyzing COVID-19 tweets, featuring ten sentiment categories across five languages. The dataset comprises 10,000 annotated tweets each in English and Arabic, along with 30,000 translated tweets in Spanish, French, and Italian, derived from English tweets. Additionally, it includes over 105 million unlabeled tweets collected during various COVID-19 waves. To enable accurate fine-grained sentiment classification, we fine-tuned pre-trained transformer-based language models using the labeled tweets. Our study provides an in-depth analysis of the evolving emotional landscape across languages, countries, and topics, revealing significant insights over time. Furthermore, we assess the compatibility of our dataset with ChatGPT, demonstrating its robustness and versatility in various applications. Our dataset and accompanying code are publicly accessible on the repository\footnote{https://github.com/gitdevqiang/SenWave}. We anticipate that this work will foster further exploration into fine-grained sentiment analysis for complex events within the NLP community, promoting more nuanced understanding and research innovations. △ Less

Submitted 9 October, 2025; originally announced October 2025.

Comments: 13 pages, 13 figures, 6 tables

SATER: A Self-Aware and Token-Efficient Approach to Routing and Cascading

Authors: Yuanzhe Shen, Yide Liu, Zisu Huang, Ruicheng Yin, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across diverse tasks, yet their effectiveness frequently depends on costly commercial APIs or cloud services. Model selection thus entails a critical trade-off between performance and cost: high-performing LLMs typically incur substantial expenses, whereas budget-friendly small language models (SLMs) are constrained by limited capabil… ▽ More Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across diverse tasks, yet their effectiveness frequently depends on costly commercial APIs or cloud services. Model selection thus entails a critical trade-off between performance and cost: high-performing LLMs typically incur substantial expenses, whereas budget-friendly small language models (SLMs) are constrained by limited capabilities. Current research primarily proposes two routing strategies: pre-generation routing and cascade routing. Both approaches have distinct characteristics, with cascade routing typically offering superior cost-effectiveness and accuracy despite its higher latency. To further address the limitations of both approaches, we introduce SATER, a dual-mode compatible approach that fine-tunes models through shortest-response preference optimization and a confidence-aware rejection mechanism. SATER significantly reduces redundant outputs and response times, while improving both the performance of pre-generation routing and the efficiency of cascade routing. Experiments across three SLMs and six datasets, varying in type and complexity, demonstrate that SATER achieves comparable performance while consistently reducing computational costs by over 50\% and cascade latency by over 80\%. △ Less

Submitted 4 October, 2025; originally announced October 2025.

Comments: Accepted to EMNLP 2025 Main

SSTAG: Structure-Aware Self-Supervised Learning Method for Text-Attributed Graphs

Authors: Ruyue Liu, Rong Yin, Xiangzhen Bo, Xiaoshuai Hao, Yong Liu, Jinwen Zhong, Can Ma, Weiping Wang

Abstract: Large scale pretrained models have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV), showcasing remarkable cross domain generalization abilities. However, in graph learning, models are typically trained on individual graph datasets, limiting their capacity to transfer knowledge across different graphs and tasks. This approach also heavily relies on large volumes of annotat… ▽ More Large scale pretrained models have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV), showcasing remarkable cross domain generalization abilities. However, in graph learning, models are typically trained on individual graph datasets, limiting their capacity to transfer knowledge across different graphs and tasks. This approach also heavily relies on large volumes of annotated data, which presents a significant challenge in resource-constrained settings. Unlike NLP and CV, graph structured data presents unique challenges due to its inherent heterogeneity, including domain specific feature spaces and structural diversity across various applications. To address these challenges, we propose a novel structure aware self supervised learning method for Text Attributed Graphs (SSTAG). By leveraging text as a unified representation medium for graph learning, SSTAG bridges the gap between the semantic reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the structural modeling capabilities of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Our approach introduces a dual knowledge distillation framework that co-distills both LLMs and GNNs into structure-aware multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), enhancing the scalability of large-scale TAGs. Additionally, we introduce an in-memory mechanism that stores typical graph representations, aligning them with memory anchors in an in-memory repository to integrate invariant knowledge, thereby improving the model's generalization ability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SSTAG outperforms state-of-the-art models on cross-domain transfer learning tasks, achieves exceptional scalability, and reduces inference costs while maintaining competitive performance. △ Less

Submitted 24 September, 2025; originally announced October 2025.

Comments: Accepted by NeurIPS 2025

A Hierarchical Adaptive Diffusion Model for Flexible Protein-Protein Docking

Authors: Rujie Yin, Yang Shen

Abstract: Structural prediction of protein-protein interactions is important to understand the molecular basis of cellular interactions, but it still faces major challenges when significant conformational changes are present. We propose a generative framework of hierarchical adaptive diffusion to improve accuracy and efficiency in such cases. It is hierarchical in separating global inter-protein rigid-body… ▽ More Structural prediction of protein-protein interactions is important to understand the molecular basis of cellular interactions, but it still faces major challenges when significant conformational changes are present. We propose a generative framework of hierarchical adaptive diffusion to improve accuracy and efficiency in such cases. It is hierarchical in separating global inter-protein rigid-body motions and local intra-protein flexibility in diffusion processes, and the distinct local and global noise schedules are designed to mimic the induced-fit effect. It is adaptive in conditioning the local flexibility schedule on predicted levels of conformational change, allowing faster flexing for larger anticipated conformational changes. Furthermore, it couples the local and global diffusion processes through a common score and confidence network with sequence, evolution, structure, and dynamics features as inputs, and maintains rotational or translational invariance or equivariance in outputs. It builds on our newly curated DIPS-AF dataset of nearly 39,000 examples for pre-training. Experiments on the independent docking benchmark dataset DB5.5 show that our model outperforms an AlphaFold2-like iterative transformer (GeoDock) and a diffusion model (DiffDock-PP) in both rigid and flexible cases, with larger improvements in more flexible cases. Ablation studies prove the importance of adaptive schedules, dynamics features, and pre-training. Additional analyses and case studies reveal remaining gaps in sampling, scoring, and conformational resolution. △ Less

Submitted 24 September, 2025; originally announced September 2025.

High Clockrate Free-space Optical In-Memory Computing

Authors: Yuanhao Liang, James Wang, Kaiwen Xue, Xinyi Ren, Ran Yin, Shaoyuan Ou, Lian Zhou, Yuan Li, Tobias Heuser, Niels Heermeier, Ian Christen, James A. Lott, Stephan Reitzenstein, Mengjie Yu, Zaijun Chen

Abstract: The ability to process and act on data in real time is increasingly critical for applications ranging from autonomous vehicles, three-dimensional environmental sensing and remote robotics. However, the deployment of deep neural networks (DNNs) in edge devices is hindered by the lack of energy-efficient scalable computing hardware. Here, we introduce a fanout spatial time-of-flight optical neural n… ▽ More The ability to process and act on data in real time is increasingly critical for applications ranging from autonomous vehicles, three-dimensional environmental sensing and remote robotics. However, the deployment of deep neural networks (DNNs) in edge devices is hindered by the lack of energy-efficient scalable computing hardware. Here, we introduce a fanout spatial time-of-flight optical neural network (FAST-ONN) that calculates billions of convolutions per second with ultralow latency and power consumption. This is enabled by the combination of high-speed dense arrays of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) for input modulation with spatial light modulators of high pixel counts for in-memory weighting. In a three-dimensional optical system, parallel differential readout allows signed weight values accurate inference in a single shot. The performance is benchmarked with feature extraction in You-Only-Look-Once (YOLO) for convolution at 100 million frames per second (MFPS), and in-system backward propagation training with photonic reprogrammability. The VCSEL transmitters are implementable in any free-space optical computing systems to improve the clockrate to over gigahertz. The high scalability in device counts and channel parallelism enables a new avenue to scale up free space computing hardware. △ Less

Submitted 23 September, 2025; originally announced September 2025.

Comments: 16 pages, 5 figures (main); 8 pages, 3 figures (Supplementary Information)

Learning to Shard: RL for Co-optimizing the Parallelism Degrees and Per-operator Sharding Dimensions in Distributed LLM Inference

Authors: Ruokai Yin, Sattwik Deb Mishra, Xuan Zuo, Hokchhay Tann, Preyas Shah, Apala Guha

Abstract: Distributed LLM inference requires careful coordination of parallelization strategies across hundreds to thousands of NPUs to meet production SLOs. Current systems like Megatron-LM rely on static heuristics that separately configure parallelism degrees and per-operator sharding dimensions, leaving significant performance on the table as models scale and hardware topologies diversify. We introduce… ▽ More Distributed LLM inference requires careful coordination of parallelization strategies across hundreds to thousands of NPUs to meet production SLOs. Current systems like Megatron-LM rely on static heuristics that separately configure parallelism degrees and per-operator sharding dimensions, leaving significant performance on the table as models scale and hardware topologies diversify. We introduce Learn to Shard, to our knowledge, the first RL-based approach to co-optimize both coarse-grained parallelism degrees and fine-grained per-operator sharding dimensions for distributed LLM inference. Our method employs an attention-based policy over an elite history that learns from high-performing strategies to efficiently navigate the vast combinatorial search space. Evaluated on H100 clusters with MoE models up to 1.6T parameters, Learn to Shard achieves up to 3.5x throughput improvement over metaheuristic baselines and 1.06x over Megatron heuristics. △ Less

Submitted 29 August, 2025; originally announced September 2025.

IntentionReasoner: Facilitating Adaptive LLM Safeguards through Intent Reasoning and Selective Query Refinement

Authors: Yuanzhe Shen, Zisu Huang, Zhengkang Guo, Yide Liu, Guanxu Chen, Ruicheng Yin, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang

Abstract: The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has driven their adoption across diverse domains, yet their ability to generate harmful content poses significant safety challenges. While extensive research has focused on mitigating harmful outputs, such efforts often come at the cost of excessively rejecting harmless prompts. Striking a balance among safety, over-refusal, and utility remains… ▽ More The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has driven their adoption across diverse domains, yet their ability to generate harmful content poses significant safety challenges. While extensive research has focused on mitigating harmful outputs, such efforts often come at the cost of excessively rejecting harmless prompts. Striking a balance among safety, over-refusal, and utility remains a critical challenge. In this work, we introduce IntentionReasoner, a novel safeguard mechanism that leverages a dedicated guard model to perform intent reasoning, multi-level safety classification, and query rewriting to neutralize potentially harmful intent in edge-case queries. Specifically, we first construct a comprehensive dataset comprising approximately 163,000 queries, each annotated with intent reasoning, safety labels, and rewritten versions. Supervised fine-tuning is then applied to equip the guard model with foundational capabilities in format adherence, intent analysis, and safe rewriting. Finally, we apply a tailored multi-reward optimization strategy that integrates rule-based heuristics and reward model signals within a reinforcement learning framework to further enhance performance. Extensive experiments show that IntentionReasoner excels in multiple safeguard benchmarks, generation quality evaluations, and jailbreak attack scenarios, significantly enhancing safety while effectively reducing over-refusal rates and improving the quality of responses. △ Less

Submitted 27 August, 2025; originally announced August 2025.

Comments: 17 pages, 9 figures

DiffAxE: Diffusion-driven Hardware Accelerator Generation and Design Space Exploration

Authors: Arkapravo Ghosh, Abhishek Moitra, Abhiroop Bhattacharjee, Ruokai Yin, Priyadarshini Panda

Abstract: Design space exploration (DSE) is critical for developing optimized hardware architectures, especially for AI workloads such as deep neural networks (DNNs) and large language models (LLMs), which require specialized acceleration. As model complexity grows, accelerator design spaces have expanded to O(10^17), becoming highly irregular, non-convex, and exhibiting many-to-one mappings from design con… ▽ More Design space exploration (DSE) is critical for developing optimized hardware architectures, especially for AI workloads such as deep neural networks (DNNs) and large language models (LLMs), which require specialized acceleration. As model complexity grows, accelerator design spaces have expanded to O(10^17), becoming highly irregular, non-convex, and exhibiting many-to-one mappings from design configurations to performance metrics. This complexity renders direct inverse derivation infeasible and necessitates heuristic or sampling-based optimization. Conventional methods - including Bayesian optimization, gradient descent, reinforcement learning, and genetic algorithms - depend on iterative sampling, resulting in long runtimes and sensitivity to initialization. Deep learning-based approaches have reframed DSE as classification using recommendation models, but remain limited to small-scale (O(10^3)), less complex design spaces. To overcome these constraints, we propose a generative approach that models hardware design as 1-D image synthesis conditioned on target performance, enabling efficient learning of non-differentiable, non-bijective hardware-performance mappings. Our framework achieves 0.86% lower generation error than Bayesian optimization with a 17000x speedup, and outperforms GANDSE with 30% lower error at only 1.83x slower search. We further extend the method to a structured DSE setting, attaining 9.8% lower energy-delay product (EDP) and 6% higher performance, with up to 145.6x and 1312x faster search compared to existing optimization methods on O(10^17) design spaces. For LLM inference, our method achieves 3.37x and 7.75x lower EDP on a 32nm ASIC and Xilinx Ultrascale+ VPU13 FPGA, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art DOSA framework. △ Less

Submitted 20 July, 2026; v1 submitted 13 August, 2025; originally announced August 2025.

Comments: Accepted at ICCAD 2026

What Really Matters for Robust Multi-Sensor HD Map Construction?

Authors: Xiaoshuai Hao, Yuting Zhao, Yuheng Ji, Luanyuan Dai, Peng Hao, Dingzhe Li, Shuai Cheng, Rong Yin

Abstract: High-definition (HD) map construction methods are crucial for providing precise and comprehensive static environmental information, which is essential for autonomous driving systems. While Camera-LiDAR fusion techniques have shown promising results by integrating data from both modalities, existing approaches primarily focus on improving model accuracy and often neglect the robustness of perceptio… ▽ More High-definition (HD) map construction methods are crucial for providing precise and comprehensive static environmental information, which is essential for autonomous driving systems. While Camera-LiDAR fusion techniques have shown promising results by integrating data from both modalities, existing approaches primarily focus on improving model accuracy and often neglect the robustness of perception models, which is a critical aspect for real-world applications. In this paper, we explore strategies to enhance the robustness of multi-modal fusion methods for HD map construction while maintaining high accuracy. We propose three key components: data augmentation, a novel multi-modal fusion module, and a modality dropout training strategy. These components are evaluated on a challenging dataset containing 10 days of NuScenes data. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed methods significantly enhance the robustness of baseline methods. Furthermore, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the clean validation set of the NuScenes dataset. Our findings provide valuable insights for developing more robust and reliable HD map construction models, advancing their applicability in real-world autonomous driving scenarios. Project website: https://robomap-123.github.io. △ Less

Submitted 2 July, 2025; originally announced July 2025.

Comments: Accepted by IROS 2025

SafeMap: Robust HD Map Construction from Incomplete Observations

Authors: Xiaoshuai Hao, Lingdong Kong, Rong Yin, Pengwei Wang, Jing Zhang, Yunfeng Diao, Shu Zhao

Abstract: Robust high-definition (HD) map construction is vital for autonomous driving, yet existing methods often struggle with incomplete multi-view camera data. This paper presents SafeMap, a novel framework specifically designed to secure accuracy even when certain camera views are missing. SafeMap integrates two key components: the Gaussian-based Perspective View Reconstruction (G-PVR) module and the D… ▽ More Robust high-definition (HD) map construction is vital for autonomous driving, yet existing methods often struggle with incomplete multi-view camera data. This paper presents SafeMap, a novel framework specifically designed to secure accuracy even when certain camera views are missing. SafeMap integrates two key components: the Gaussian-based Perspective View Reconstruction (G-PVR) module and the Distillation-based Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) Correction (D-BEVC) module. G-PVR leverages prior knowledge of view importance to dynamically prioritize the most informative regions based on the relationships among available camera views. Furthermore, D-BEVC utilizes panoramic BEV features to correct the BEV representations derived from incomplete observations. Together, these components facilitate the end-to-end map reconstruction and robust HD map generation. SafeMap is easy to implement and integrates seamlessly into existing systems, offering a plug-and-play solution for enhanced robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that SafeMap significantly outperforms previous methods in both complete and incomplete scenarios, highlighting its superior performance and reliability. △ Less

Submitted 1 July, 2025; originally announced July 2025.

Comments: Accepted by ICML 2025

Benchmarking Generalizable Bimanual Manipulation: RoboTwin Dual-Arm Collaboration Challenge at CVPR 2025 MEIS Workshop

Authors: Tianxing Chen, Kaixuan Wang, Zhaohui Yang, Yuhao Zhang, Zanxin Chen, Baijun Chen, Wanxi Dong, Ziyuan Liu, Dong Chen, Tianshuo Yang, Haibao Yu, Xiaokang Yang, Yusen Qin, Zhiqiang Xie, Yao Mu, Ping Luo, Tian Nian, Weiliang Deng, Yiheng Ge, Yibin Liu, Zixuan Li, Dehui Wang, Zhixuan Liang, Haohui Xie, Rijie Zeng , et al. (74 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: Embodied Artificial Intelligence (Embodied AI) is an emerging frontier in robotics, driven by the need for autonomous systems that can perceive, reason, and act in complex physical environments. While single-arm systems have shown strong task performance, collaborative dual-arm systems are essential for handling more intricate tasks involving rigid, deformable, and tactile-sensitive objects. To ad… ▽ More Embodied Artificial Intelligence (Embodied AI) is an emerging frontier in robotics, driven by the need for autonomous systems that can perceive, reason, and act in complex physical environments. While single-arm systems have shown strong task performance, collaborative dual-arm systems are essential for handling more intricate tasks involving rigid, deformable, and tactile-sensitive objects. To advance this goal, we launched the RoboTwin Dual-Arm Collaboration Challenge at the 2nd MEIS Workshop, CVPR 2025. Built on the RoboTwin Simulation platform (1.0 and 2.0) and the AgileX COBOT-Magic Robot platform, the competition consisted of three stages: Simulation Round 1, Simulation Round 2, and a final Real-World Round. Participants totally tackled 17 dual-arm manipulation tasks, covering rigid, deformable, and tactile-based scenarios. The challenge attracted 64 global teams and over 400 participants, producing top-performing solutions like SEM and AnchorDP3 and generating valuable insights into generalizable bimanual policy learning. This report outlines the competition setup, task design, evaluation methodology, key findings and future direction, aiming to support future research on robust and generalizable bimanual manipulation policies. The Challenge Webpage is available at https://robotwin-benchmark.github.io/cvpr-2025-challenge/. △ Less

Submitted 2 July, 2025; v1 submitted 29 June, 2025; originally announced June 2025.

Comments: Challenge Webpage: https://robotwin-benchmark.github.io/cvpr-2025-challenge/

DuoGPT: Training-free Dual Sparsity through Activation-aware Pruning in LLMs

Authors: Ruokai Yin, Yuhang Li, Donghyun Lee, Priyadarshini Panda

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) deliver strong performance but are difficult to deploy due to high memory and compute costs. While pruning reduces these demands, most methods ignore activation sparsity observed at runtime. We reinterpret activation sparsity as dynamic structured weight sparsity and propose DuoGPT, a unified framework that constructs dual-sparse (spMspV) workloads by combining unstruc… ▽ More Large language models (LLMs) deliver strong performance but are difficult to deploy due to high memory and compute costs. While pruning reduces these demands, most methods ignore activation sparsity observed at runtime. We reinterpret activation sparsity as dynamic structured weight sparsity and propose DuoGPT, a unified framework that constructs dual-sparse (spMspV) workloads by combining unstructured weight pruning with activation sparsity. To preserve accuracy, we extend the Optimal Brain Compression (OBC) framework with activation-aware calibration and introduce output residuals from the dense model as correction terms. We further optimize the solution for efficient GPU execution, enabling scalability to billion-parameter LLMs. Evaluations on LLaMA-2 and LLaMA-3 show that DuoGPT outperforms state-of-the-art structured pruning methods by up to 9.17% accuracy at an iso-speedup of 1.39$\times$ compared to the baseline dense model. Code is available at Github. △ Less

Submitted 12 November, 2025; v1 submitted 25 June, 2025; originally announced June 2025.

Comments: NeurIPS 2025. The code is available on Github (see hyperlink in the paper)

Memba: Membrane-driven Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Mamba

Authors: Donghyun Lee, Yuhang Li, Ruokai Yin, Shiting Xiao, Priyadarshini Panda

Abstract: State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as powerful alternatives to attention-based Transformers, with Mamba demonstrating impressive efficiency and scalability. As these models grow increasingly larger, the need for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods becomes critical to adapt pre-trained Mamba to downstream tasks without prohibitive computational costs. However, previous approaches sim… ▽ More State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as powerful alternatives to attention-based Transformers, with Mamba demonstrating impressive efficiency and scalability. As these models grow increasingly larger, the need for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods becomes critical to adapt pre-trained Mamba to downstream tasks without prohibitive computational costs. However, previous approaches simply apply traditional Transformer-tailored PEFT methods without addressing the unique temporal processing dynamics of SSMs. To address this limitation, we propose Memba, a membrane-driven PEFT approach specifically designed for Mamba. Memba introduces Leaky Integrate Membrane (LIM) neurons as bio-inspired gating mechanisms that naturally accumulate membrane potentials over time, enhancing selective information retention. By strategically combining LIM neurons with Low-Rank Adaptations (LoRA) and cross-layer membrane transfer, our approach significantly improves Mamba's temporal modeling capabilities. Extensive experiments across language and vision tasks demonstrate that Memba achieves substantial improvements over existing PEFT methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Intelligent-Computing-Lab-Yale/Memba. △ Less

Submitted 1 March, 2026; v1 submitted 22 June, 2025; originally announced June 2025.

Comments: ICLR 2026

Improving Continual Pre-training Through Seamless Data Packing

Authors: Ruicheng Yin, Xuan Gao, Changze Lv, Xiaohua Wang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang

Abstract: Continual pre-training has demonstrated significant potential in enhancing model performance, particularly in domain-specific scenarios. The most common approach for packing data before continual pre-training involves concatenating input texts and splitting them into fixed-length sequences. While straightforward and efficient, this method often leads to excessive truncation and context discontinui… ▽ More Continual pre-training has demonstrated significant potential in enhancing model performance, particularly in domain-specific scenarios. The most common approach for packing data before continual pre-training involves concatenating input texts and splitting them into fixed-length sequences. While straightforward and efficient, this method often leads to excessive truncation and context discontinuity, which can hinder model performance. To address these issues, we explore the potential of data engineering to enhance continual pre-training, particularly its impact on model performance and efficiency. We propose Seamless Packing (SP), a novel data packing strategy aimed at preserving contextual information more effectively and enhancing model performance. Our approach employs a sliding window technique in the first stage that synchronizes overlapping tokens across consecutive sequences, ensuring better continuity and contextual coherence. In the second stage, we adopt a First-Fit-Decreasing algorithm to pack shorter texts into bins slightly larger than the target sequence length, thereby minimizing padding and truncation. Empirical evaluations across various model architectures and corpus domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, outperforming baseline method in 99% of all settings. Code is available at https://github.com/Infernus-WIND/Seamless-Packing. △ Less

Submitted 29 May, 2025; v1 submitted 28 May, 2025; originally announced May 2025.

Comments: Accepted to ACL 2025 Findings

Multi-Modal Molecular Representation Learning via Structure Awareness

Authors: Rong Yin, Ruyue Liu, Xiaoshuai Hao, Xingrui Zhou, Yong Liu, Can Ma, Weiping Wang

Abstract: Accurate extraction of molecular representations is a critical step in the drug discovery process. In recent years, significant progress has been made in molecular representation learning methods, among which multi-modal molecular representation methods based on images, and 2D/3D topologies have become increasingly mainstream. However, existing these multi-modal approaches often directly fuse info… ▽ More Accurate extraction of molecular representations is a critical step in the drug discovery process. In recent years, significant progress has been made in molecular representation learning methods, among which multi-modal molecular representation methods based on images, and 2D/3D topologies have become increasingly mainstream. However, existing these multi-modal approaches often directly fuse information from different modalities, overlooking the potential of intermodal interactions and failing to adequately capture the complex higher-order relationships and invariant features between molecules. To overcome these challenges, we propose a structure-awareness-based multi-modal self-supervised molecular representation pre-training framework (MMSA) designed to enhance molecular graph representations by leveraging invariant knowledge between molecules. The framework consists of two main modules: the multi-modal molecular representation learning module and the structure-awareness module. The multi-modal molecular representation learning module collaboratively processes information from different modalities of the same molecule to overcome intermodal differences and generate a unified molecular embedding. Subsequently, the structure-awareness module enhances the molecular representation by constructing a hypergraph structure to model higher-order correlations between molecules. This module also introduces a memory mechanism for storing typical molecular representations, aligning them with memory anchors in the memory bank to integrate invariant knowledge, thereby improving the model generalization ability. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of MMSA, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MoleculeNet benchmark, with average ROC-AUC improvements ranging from 1.8% to 9.6% over baseline methods. △ Less

Submitted 11 May, 2025; v1 submitted 9 May, 2025; originally announced May 2025.

Comments: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP) 2025

Talk Before You Retrieve: Agent-Led Discussions for Better RAG in Medical QA

Authors: Xuanzhao Dong, Wenhui Zhu, Hao Wang, Xiwen Chen, Peijie Qiu, Rui Yin, Yi Su, Yalin Wang

Abstract: Medical question answering (QA) is a reasoning-intensive task that remains challenging for large language models (LLMs) due to hallucinations and outdated domain knowledge. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) provides a promising post-training solution by leveraging external knowledge. However, existing medical RAG systems suffer from two key limitations: (1) a lack of modeling for human-like rea… ▽ More Medical question answering (QA) is a reasoning-intensive task that remains challenging for large language models (LLMs) due to hallucinations and outdated domain knowledge. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) provides a promising post-training solution by leveraging external knowledge. However, existing medical RAG systems suffer from two key limitations: (1) a lack of modeling for human-like reasoning behaviors during information retrieval, and (2) reliance on suboptimal medical corpora, which often results in the retrieval of irrelevant or noisy snippets. To overcome these challenges, we propose Discuss-RAG, a plug-and-play module designed to enhance the medical QA RAG system through collaborative agent-based reasoning. Our method introduces a summarizer agent that orchestrates a team of medical experts to emulate multi-turn brainstorming, thereby improving the relevance of retrieved content. Additionally, a decision-making agent evaluates the retrieved snippets before their final integration. Experimental results on four benchmark medical QA datasets show that Discuss-RAG consistently outperforms MedRAG, especially significantly improving answer accuracy by up to 16.67% on BioASQ and 12.20% on PubMedQA. The code is available at: https://github.com/LLM-VLM-GSL/Discuss-RAG. △ Less

Submitted 29 April, 2025; originally announced April 2025.