Agentic AI enables LLM to dynamically reason, plan, and interact with tools to solve complex tasks. However, agentic workflows often require many iterative reasoning steps and tool invocations, leading to significant operational expense, end-to-end latency and failures due to hallucinations. This work introduces Agent Workflow Optimization (AWO), a framework that identifies and optimizes redundant tool execution patterns to improve the efficiency and robustness of agentic workflows. AWO analyzes existing workflow traces to discover recurring sequences of tool calls and transforms them into meta-tools, which are deterministic, composite tools that bundle multiple agent actions into a single invocation. Meta-tools bypass unnecessary intermediate LLM reasoning steps and reduce operational cost while also shortening execution paths, leading to fewer failures. Experiments on two agentic AI benchmarks show that AWO reduces the number of LLM calls up to 11.9% while also increasing the task success rate by up to 4.2 percent points.

Driven by the evolution toward 6G and AI-native edge intelligence, network operations increasingly require predictive and risk-aware adaptation under stringent computation and latency constraints. Network Traffic Matrix (TM), which characterizes flow volumes between nodes, is a fundamental signal for proactive traffic engineering. However, accurate TM forecasting remains challenging due to the stochastic, non-linear, and bursty nature of network dynamics. Existing discriminative models often suffer from over-smoothing and provide limited uncertainty awareness, leading to poor fidelity under extreme bursts. To address these limitations, we propose LEAD, a Large Language Model (LLM)-Enhanced Adapter-based conditional Diffusion model. First, LEAD adopts a "Traffic-to-Image" paradigm to transform traffic matrices into RGB images, enabling global dependency modeling via vision backbones. Then, we design a "Frozen LLM with Trainable Adapter" model, which efficiently captures temporal semantics with limited computational cost. Moreover, we propose a Dual-Conditioning Strategy to precisely guide a diffusion model to generate complex, dynamic network traffic matrices. Experiments on the Abilene and GEANT datasets demonstrate that LEAD outperforms all baselines. On the Abilene dataset, LEAD attains a remarkable 45.2% reduction in RMSE against the best baseline, with the error margin rising only marginally from 0.1098 at one-step to 0.1134 at 20-step predictions. Meanwhile, on the GEANT dataset, LEAD achieves a 0.0258 RMSE at 20-step prediction horizon which is 27.3% lower than the best baseline.

With the rapid advancement of video generation models such as Veo and Wan, the visual quality of synthetic content has reached a level where macro-level semantic errors and temporal inconsistencies are no longer prominent. However, this does not imply that the distinction between real and cutting-edge high-fidelity fake is untraceable. We argue that AI-generated videos are essentially products of a manifold-fitting process rather than a physical recording. Consequently, the pixel composition logic of consecutive adjacent frames residual in AI videos exhibits a structured and homogenous characteristic. We term this phenomenon `Manifold Projection Fluctuations' (MPF). Driven by this insight, we propose a hierarchical dual-path framework that operates as a sequential filtering process. The first, the Static Manifold Deviation Branch, leverages the refined perceptual boundaries of Large-Scale Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) to capture residual spatial anomalies or physical violations that deviate from the natural real-world manifold (off-manifold). For the remaining high-fidelity videos that successfully reside on-manifold and evade spatial detection, we introduce the Micro-Temporal Fluctuation Branch as a secondary, fine-grained filter. By analyzing the structured MPF that persists even in visually perfect sequences, our framework ensures that forgeries are exposed regardless of whether they manifest as global real-world manifold deviations or subtle computational fingerprints.

Long-horizon, repetitive workflows are common in professional settings, such as processing expense reports from receipts and entering student grades from exam papers. These tasks are often tedious for humans since they can extend to extreme lengths proportional to the size of the data to process. However, they are ideal for Computer-Use Agents (CUAs) due to their structured, recurring sub-workflows with logic that can be systematically learned. Identifying the absence of an evaluation benchmark as a primary bottleneck, we establish OS-Marathon, comprising 242 long-horizon, repetitive tasks across 2 domains to evaluate state-of-the-art (SOTA) agents. We then introduce a cost-effective method to construct a condensed demonstration using only few-shot examples to teach agents the underlying workflow logic, enabling them to execute similar workflows effectively on larger, unseen data collections. Extensive experiments demonstrate both the inherent challenges of these tasks and the effectiveness of our proposed method. Project website: https://os-marathon.github.io/.

Accurate material identification plays a crucial role in embodied AI systems, enabling a wide range of applications. However, current vision-based solutions are limited by the inherent constraints of optical sensors, while radio-frequency (RF) approaches, which can reveal intrinsic material properties, have received growing attention. Despite this progress, RF-based material identification remains hindered by the lack of large-scale public datasets and the limited benchmarking of learning-based approaches. In this work, we present RF-MatID, the first open-source, large-scale, wide-band, and geometry-diverse RF dataset for fine-grained material identification. RF-MatID includes 16 fine-grained categories grouped into 5 superclasses, spanning a broad frequency range from 4 to 43.5 GHz, and comprises 142k samples in both frequency- and time-domain representations. The dataset systematically incorporates controlled geometry perturbations, including variations in incidence angle and stand-off distance. We further establish a multi-setting, multi-protocol benchmark by evaluating state-of-the-art deep learning models, assessing both in-distribution performance and out-of-distribution robustness under cross-angle and cross-distance shifts. The 5 frequency-allocation protocols enable systematic frequency- and region-level analysis, thereby facilitating real-world deployment. RF-MatID aims to enable reproducible research, accelerate algorithmic advancement, foster cross-domain robustness, and support the development of real-world application in RF-based material identification.

Existing self-evolution methods overlook the influence of fine-grained reasoning steps, which leads to the reasoner-verifier gap. The computational inefficiency of Monte Carlo (MC) process supervision further exacerbates the difficulty in mitigating the gap. Motivated by the Error-Related Negativity (ERN), which the reasoner can localize error following incorrect decisions, guiding rapid adjustments, we propose a Self-Adaptive Process Optimization (SAPO) method for self-improvement in Small Language Models (SLMs). SAPO adaptively and efficiently introduces process supervision signals by actively minimizing the reasoner-verifier gap rather than relying on inefficient MC estimations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms most existing self-evolution methods on two challenging task types: mathematics and code. Additionally, to further investigate SAPO's impact on verifier performance, this work introduces two new benchmarks for process reward models in both mathematical and coding tasks.

Today, E-commerce sellers face several key challenges, including difficulties in discovering and effectively utilizing available programs and tools, and struggling to understand and utilize rich data from various tools. We therefore aim to develop Insight Agents (IA), a conversational multi-agent Data Insight system, to provide E-commerce sellers with personalized data and business insights through automated information retrieval. Our hypothesis is that IA will serve as a force multiplier for sellers, thereby driving incremental seller adoption by reducing the effort required and increase speed at which sellers make good business decisions. In this paper, we introduce this novel LLM-backed end-to-end agentic system built on a plan-and-execute paradigm and designed for comprehensive coverage, high accuracy, and low latency. It features a hierarchical multi-agent structure, consisting of manager agent and two worker agents: data presentation and insight generation, for efficient information retrieval and problem-solving. We design a simple yet effective ML solution for manager agent that combines Out-of-Domain (OOD) detection using a lightweight encoder-decoder model and agent routing through a BERT-based classifier, optimizing both accuracy and latency. Within the two worker agents, a strategic planning is designed for API-based data model that breaks down queries into granular components to generate more accurate responses, and domain knowledge is dynamically injected to to enhance the insight generator. IA has been launched for Amazon sellers in US, which has achieved high accuracy of 90% based on human evaluation, with latency of P90 below 15s.

Pan-cancer screening in large-scale CT scans remains challenging for existing AI methods, primarily due to the difficulty of localizing diverse types of tiny lesions in large CT volumes. The extreme foreground-background imbalance significantly hinders models from focusing on diseased regions, while redundant focus on healthy regions not only decreases the efficiency but also increases false positives. Inspired by radiologists' glance and focus diagnostic strategy, we introduce GF-Screen, a Glance and Focus reinforcement learning framework for pan-cancer screening. GF-Screen employs a Glance model to localize the diseased regions and a Focus model to precisely segment the lesions, where segmentation results of the Focus model are leveraged to reward the Glance model via Reinforcement Learning (RL). Specifically, the Glance model crops a group of sub-volumes from the entire CT volume and learns to select the sub-volumes with lesions for the Focus model to segment. Given that the selecting operation is non-differentiable for segmentation training, we propose to employ the segmentation results to reward the Glance model. To optimize the Glance model, we introduce a novel group relative learning paradigm, which employs group relative comparison to prioritize high-advantage predictions and discard low-advantage predictions within sub-volume groups, not only improving efficiency but also reducing false positives. In this way, for the first time, we effectively extend cutting-edge RL techniques to tackle the specific challenges in pan-cancer screening. Extensive experiments on 16 internal and 7 external datasets across 9 lesion types demonstrated the effectiveness of GF-Screen. Notably, GF-Screen leads the public validation leaderboard of MICCAI FLARE25 pan-cancer challenge, surpassing the FLARE24 champion solution by a large margin (+25.6% DSC and +28.2% NSD).

Large Language Model (LLM)-powered Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems achieve strong performance with limited resources by linking a frozen speech encoder to a pretrained LLM via a lightweight connector. Prior work trains a separate connector per language, overlooking linguistic relatedness. We propose an efficient and novel connector-sharing strategy based on linguistic family membership, enabling one connector per family, and empirically validate its effectiveness across two multilingual LLMs and two real-world corpora spanning curated and crowd-sourced speech. Our results show that family-based connectors reduce parameter count while improving generalization across domains, offering a practical and scalable strategy for multilingual ASR deployment.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is a fundamental requirement for the reliable deployment of artificial intelligence applications in open-world environments. However, addressing the heterogeneous nature of OOD data, ranging from low-level corruption to semantic shifts, remains a complex challenge that single-stage detectors often fail to resolve. To address this issue, we propose SeNeDiF-OOD, a novel methodology based on Semantic Nested Dichotomy Fusion. This framework decomposes the detection task into a hierarchical structure of binary fusion nodes, where each layer is designed to integrate decision boundaries aligned with specific levels of semantic abstraction. To validate the proposed framework, we present a comprehensive case study using MonuMAI, a real-world architectural style recognition system exposed to an open environment. This application faces a diverse range of inputs, including non-monument images, unknown architectural styles, and adversarial attacks, making it an ideal testbed for our proposal. Through extensive experimental evaluation in this domain, results demonstrate that our hierarchical fusion methodology significantly outperforms traditional baselines, effectively filtering these diverse OOD categories while preserving in-distribution performance.

Cross-modal image translation remains brittle and inefficient. Standard diffusion approaches often rely on a single, global linear transfer between domains. We find that this shortcut forces the sampler to traverse off-manifold, high-cost regions, inflating the correction burden and inviting semantic drift. We refer to this shared failure mode as fixed-schedule domain transfer. In this paper, we embed domain-shift dynamics directly into the generative process. Our model predicts a spatially varying mixing field at every reverse step and injects an explicit, target-consistent restoration term into the drift. This in-step guidance keeps large updates on-manifold and shifts the model's role from global alignment to local residual correction. We provide a continuous-time formulation with an exact solution form and derive a practical first-order sampler that preserves marginal consistency. Empirically, across translation tasks in medical imaging, remote sensing, and electroluminescence semantic mapping, our framework improves structural fidelity and semantic consistency while converging in fewer denoising steps.

LLMs struggle with Semantic Inertia: the inability to inhibit pre-trained priors (e.g., "Lava is Dangerous") when dynamic, in-context rules contradict them. We probe this phenomenon using Baba Is You, where physical laws are mutable text rules, enabling precise evaluation of models' ability to override learned priors when rules change. We quantatively observe that larger models can exhibit inverse scaling: they perform worse than smaller models when natural language reasoning requires suppressing pre-trained associations (e.g., accepting "Lava is Safe"). Our analysis attributes this to natural language encoding, which entangles descriptive semantics and logical rules, leading to persistent hallucinations of familiar physics despite explicit contradictory rules. Here we show that representing dynamics as executable code, rather than descriptive text, reverses this trend and enables effective prior inhibition. We introduce Code-Grounded Vistas (LCV), which fine-tunes models on counterfactual pairs and identifies states with contradictory rules, thereby forcing attention to logical constraints rather than visual semantics. This training-time approach outperforms expensive inference-time search methods in both efficiency and accuracy. Our results demonstrate that representation fundamentally determines whether scaling improves or impairs contextual reasoning. This challenges the assumption that larger models are universally better, with implications for domains that require dynamic overriding of learned priors.

Understanding the curvature evolution of the loss landscape is fundamental to analyzing the training dynamics of neural networks. The most commonly studied measure, Hessian sharpness ($λ_{\max}^H$) -- the largest eigenvalue of the loss Hessian -- determines local training stability and interacts with the learning rate throughout training. Despite its significance in analyzing training dynamics, direct measurement of Hessian sharpness remains prohibitive for Large Language Models (LLMs) due to high computational cost. We analyze $\textit{critical sharpness}$ ($λ_c$), a computationally efficient measure requiring fewer than $10$ forward passes given the update direction $Δ\mathbfθ$. Critically, this measure captures well-documented Hessian sharpness phenomena, including progressive sharpening and Edge of Stability. Using this measure, we provide the first demonstration of these sharpness phenomena at scale, up to $7$B parameters, spanning both pre-training and mid-training of OLMo-2 models. We further introduce $\textit{relative critical sharpness}$ ($λ_c^{1\to 2}$), which quantifies the curvature of one loss landscape while optimizing another, to analyze the transition from pre-training to fine-tuning and guide data mixing strategies. Critical sharpness provides practitioners with a practical tool for diagnosing curvature dynamics and informing data composition choices at scale. More broadly, our work shows that scalable curvature measures can provide actionable insights for large-scale training.

Accurate prediction of traffic crash severity is critical for improving emergency response and public safety planning. Although recent large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, their single-agent architectures often struggle with heterogeneous, domain-specific crash data and tend to generate biased or unstable predictions. To address these limitations, this paper proposes TransportAgents, a hybrid multi-agent framework that integrates category-specific LLM reasoning with a multilayer perceptron (MLP) integration module. Each specialized agent focuses on a particular subset of traffic information, such as demographics, environmental context, or incident details, to produce intermediate severity assessments that are subsequently fused into a unified prediction. Extensive experiments on two complementary U.S. datasets, the Consumer Product Safety Risk Management System (CPSRMS) and the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS), demonstrate that TransportAgents consistently outperforms both traditional machine learning and advanced LLM-based baselines. Across three representative backbones, including closed-source models such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o, as well as open-source models such as LLaMA-3.3, the framework exhibits strong robustness, scalability, and cross-dataset generalizability. A supplementary distributional analysis further shows that TransportAgents produces more balanced and well-calibrated severity predictions than standard single-agent LLM approaches, highlighting its interpretability and reliability for safety-critical decision support applications.

Long-context inference enhances the reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), but incurs significant computational overhead. Token-oriented methods, such as pruning and skipping, have shown great promise in reducing inference latency, yet still suffer from inherently insufficient structure optimization, outdated selection criteria, and redundancy interference, resulting in suboptimal speed-accuracy trade-off. To address these issues, we propose a novel training-free framework dubbed Self-Predictive Token Skipping (SPTS), for efficient long-context LLM inference. Specifically, motivated by probing the influence of target layers prior to skipping, we design two selective token skipping strategies for typical structures, including Partial Attention Probing (PAP) for multi-head attention and Low-rank Transformation Probing (LTP) for feed forward network. The former selects informative tokens via partial forward attention computation, while the latter constructs a low-rank proxy network to predict token transformations. In addition, a Multi-Stage Delayed Pruning (MSDP) strategy reallocates skipping budgets and progressively removes redundant tokens across layers. Extensive experiments display the effectiveness of our method, achieving up to 2.46$\times$ and 2.29$\times$ speedups for prefilling and end-to-end generation, respectively, while maintaining state-of-the-art accuracy. We will release the source code upon acceptance.

This paper examines algorithmic lookism-the systematic preferential treatment based on physical appearance-in text-to-image (T2I) generative AI and a downstream gender classification task. Through the analysis of 26,400 synthetic faces created with Stable Diffusion 2.1 and 3.5 Medium, we demonstrate how generative AI models systematically associate facial attractiveness with positive attributes and vice-versa, mirroring socially constructed biases rather than evidence-based correlations. Furthermore, we find significant gender bias in three gender classification algorithms depending on the attributes of the input faces. Our findings reveal three critical harms: (1) the systematic encoding of attractiveness-positive attribute associations in T2I models; (2) gender disparities in classification systems, where women's faces, particularly those generated with negative attributes, suffer substantially higher misclassification rates than men's; and (3) intensifying aesthetic constraints in newer models through age homogenization, gendered exposure patterns, and geographic reductionism. These convergent patterns reveal algorithmic lookism as systematic infrastructure operating across AI vision systems, compounding existing inequalities through both representation and recognition. Disclaimer: This work includes visual and textual content that reflects stereotypical associations between physical appearance and socially constructed attributes, including gender, race, and traits associated with social desirability. Any such associations found in this study emerge from the biases embedded in generative AI systems-not from empirical truths or the authors' views.

As AI agents become increasingly autonomous, widely deployed in consequential contexts, and efficacious in bringing about real-world impacts, ensuring that their decisions are not only instrumentally effective but also normatively aligned has become critical. We introduce a neuro-symbolic reason-based containment architecture, Governor for Reason-Aligned ContainmEnt (GRACE), that decouples normative reasoning from instrumental decision-making and can contain AI agents of virtually any design. GRACE restructures decision-making into three modules: a Moral Module (MM) that determines permissible macro actions via deontic logic-based reasoning; a Decision-Making Module (DMM) that encapsulates the target agent while selecting instrumentally optimal primitive actions in accordance with derived macro actions; and a Guard that monitors and enforces moral compliance. The MM uses a reason-based formalism providing a semantic foundation for deontic logic, enabling interpretability, contestability, and justifiability. Its symbolic representation enriches the DMM's informational context and supports formal verification and statistical guarantees of alignment enforced by the Guard. We demonstrate GRACE on an example of a LLM therapy assistant, showing how it enables stakeholders to understand, contest, and refine agent behavior.

Model merging combines multiple models into a single model with aggregated capabilities, making it a powerful tool for large language model (LLM) development. However, scaling model merging is challenging: performance depends on the choice of merge operator, model subset, and merge order, often requiring expensive merge-and-evaluate searches. In this work, we introduce SimMerge, a predictive merge-selection method that identifies high-performing merges using inexpensive, task-agnostic similarity signals between models. Given a small set of unlabeled probes, SimMerge extracts functional and structural features to predict the performance of candidate two-way merges, enabling merge operator, order and model subset selection without iterative evaluation. We show that SimMerge consistently outperforms the best fixed merge operator across 7B-parameter LLMs and generalizes to multi-way merges and 111B-parameter LLMs without retraining. We further introduce a bandit variant that supports adding new tasks and operators online. Our results suggest that learning how to merge enables scalable model composition when checkpoint catalogs are large and evaluation budgets are limited.

Optimizing LLM-based agentic workflows is challenging for scaling AI capabilities. Current methods rely on coarse, end-to-end evaluation signals and lack fine-grained signals on where to refine, often resulting in inefficient or low-impact modifications. To address these limitations, we propose JudgeFlow, an Evaluation-Judge-Optimization-Update pipeline. We incorporate reusable, configurable logic blocks into agentic workflows to capture fundamental forms of logic. On top of this abstraction, we design a dedicated Judge module that inspects execution traces particularly failed runs and assigns rank-based responsibility scores to problematic blocks. These fine-grained diagnostic signals are then leveraged by an LLM-based optimizer, which focuses modifications on the most problematic block in the workflow. Our approach improves sample efficiency, enhances interpretability through block-level diagnostics, and provides a scalable foundation for automating increasingly complex agentic workflows. We evaluate JudgeFlow on mathematical reasoning and code generation benchmarks, where JudgeFlow achieves superior performance and efficiency compared to existing methods.

This work introduces Adaptive Density Fields (ADF), a geometric attention framework that formulates spatial aggregation as a query-conditioned, metric-induced attention operator in continuous space. By reinterpreting spatial influence as geometry-preserving attention grounded in physical distance, ADF bridges concepts from adaptive kernel methods and attention mechanisms. Scalability is achieved via FAISS-accelerated inverted file indices, treating approximate nearest-neighbor search as an intrinsic component of the attention mechanism. We demonstrate the framework through a case study on aircraft trajectory analysis in the Chengdu region, extracting trajectory-conditioned Zones of Influence (ZOI) to reveal recurrent airspace structures and localized deviations.

Audio-language models have recently demonstrated strong zero-shot capabilities by leveraging natural-language supervision to classify audio events without labeled training data. Yet, their performance is highly sensitive to the wording of text prompts, with small variations leading to large fluctuations in accuracy. Prior work has mitigated this issue through prompt learning or prompt ensembling. However, these strategies either require annotated data or fail to account for the fact that some prompts may negatively impact performance. In this work, we present an entropy-guided prompt weighting approach that aims to find a robust combination of prompt contributions to maximize prediction confidence. To this end, we formulate a tailored objective function that minimizes prediction entropy to yield new prompt weights, utilizing low-entropy as a proxy for high confidence. Our approach can be applied to individual samples or a batch of audio samples, requiring no additional labels and incurring negligible computational overhead. Experiments on five audio classification datasets covering environmental, urban, and vocal sounds, demonstrate consistent gains compared to classical prompt ensembling methods in a zero-shot setting, with accuracy improvements 5-times larger across the whole benchmark.

Contact-rich manipulation requires reliable estimation of extrinsic contacts-the interactions between a grasped object and its environment which provide essential contextual information for planning, control, and policy learning. However, existing approaches often rely on restrictive assumptions, such as predefined contact types, fixed grasp configurations, or camera calibration, that hinder generalization to novel objects and deployment in unstructured environments. In this paper, we present UNIC, a unified multimodal framework for extrinsic contact estimation that operates without any prior knowledge or camera calibration. UNIC directly encodes visual observations in the camera frame and integrates them with proprioceptive and tactile modalities in a fully data-driven manner. It introduces a unified contact representation based on scene affordance maps that captures diverse contact formations and employs a multimodal fusion mechanism with random masking, enabling robust multimodal representation learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UNIC performs reliably. It achieves a 9.6 mm average Chamfer distance error on unseen contact locations, performs well on unseen objects, remains robust under missing modalities, and adapts to dynamic camera viewpoints. These results establish extrinsic contact estimation as a practical and versatile capability for contact-rich manipulation. The overview and hardware experiment videos are at https://youtu.be/xpMitkxN6Ls?si=7Vgj-aZ_P1wtnWZN

The application of machine learning on healthcare data is often hindered by the lack of standardized and semantically explicit representation, leading to limited interoperability and reproducibility across datasets and experiments. The Medical Event Data Standard (MEDS) addresses these issues by introducing a minimal, event-centric data model designed for reproducible machine-learning workflows from health data. However, MEDS is defined as a data-format specification and does not natively provide integration with the Semantic Web ecosystem. In this article, we introduce MEDS-OWL, a lightweight OWL ontology that provides formal concepts and relations to represent MEDS datasets as RDF graphs. Additionally, we implemented meds2rdf, a Python conversion library that transforms MEDS events into RDF graphs, ensuring conformance with the ontology. We evaluate the proposed approach on two datasets: a synthetic clinical cohort describing care pathways for ruptured intracranial aneurysms, and a real-world subset of MIMIC-IV. To assess semantic consistency, we performed a SHACL validation against the resulting knowledge graphs. The first release of MEDS-OWL comprises 13 classes, 10 object properties, 20 data properties, and 24 OWL axioms. Combined with meds2rdf, it enables data transformation into FAIR-aligned datasets, provenance-aware publishing, and interoperability of event-based clinical data. By bridging MEDS with the Semantic Web, this work contributes a reusable semantic layer for event-based clinical data and establishes a robust foundation for subsequent graph-based analytics.

Online 3D Bin Packing (3D-BP) with robotic arms is crucial for reducing transportation and labor costs in modern logistics. While Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown strong performance, it often fails to adapt to real-world short-term distribution shifts, which arise as different batches of goods arrive sequentially, causing performance drops. We argue that the short-term lookahead information available in modern logistics systems is key to mitigating this issue, especially during distribution shifts. We formulate online 3D-BP with lookahead parcels as a Model Predictive Control (MPC) problem and adapt the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) framework to solve it. Our framework employs a dynamic exploration prior that automatically balances a learned RL policy and a robust random policy based on the lookahead characteristics. Additionally, we design an auxiliary reward to penalize long-term spatial waste from individual placements. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving over 10\% gains under distributional shifts, 4\% average improvement in online deployment, and up to more than 8\% in the best case--demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework.

The INTERSPEECH 2025 Challenge on Multilingual Conversational Speech Language Models (MLC-SLM) promotes multilingual conversational ASR with large language models (LLMs). Our previous SHNU-mASR system adopted a competitive parallel-speech-encoder architecture that integrated Whisper and mHuBERT with an LLM. However, it faced two challenges: simple feature concatenation may not fully exploit complementary information, and the performance gap between LLM-based ASR and end-to-end(E2E) encoder-decoder ASR remained unexplored. In this work, we present an enhanced LLM-based ASR framework that combines fine-tuned Whisper and mHuBERT encoders with an LLM to enrich speech representations. We first evaluate E2E Whisper models with LoRA and full fine-tuning on the MLC-SLM ASR task, and then propose cross-attention-based fusion mechanisms for the parallel-speech-encoder. On the official evaluation set of the MLC-SLM Challenge, our system achieves a CER/WER of 10.69%, ranking on par with the top-ranked Track 1 systems, even though it uses only 1,500 hours of baseline training data compared with their large-scale training sets. Nonetheless, we find that our final LLM-based ASR still does not match the performance of a fine-tuned E2E Whisper model, providing valuable empirical guidance for future Speech-LLM design. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/1535176727/MLC-SLM.

In digital imaging, image demosaicing is a crucial first step which recovers the RGB information from a color filter array (CFA). Oftentimes, deep learning is utilized to perform image demosaicing. Given that most modern digital imaging applications occur on mobile platforms, applying deep learning to demosaicing requires lightweight and efficient networks. Isotropic networks, also known as residual-in-residual networks, have been often employed for image demosaicing and joint-demosaicing-and-denoising (JDD). Most demosaicing isotropic networks avoid spatial downsampling entirely, and thus are often prohibitively expensive computationally for mobile applications. Contrary to previous isotropic network designs, this paper claims that spatial downsampling to a signficant degree can improve the efficiency and performance of isotropic networks. To validate this claim, we design simple fully convolutional networks with and without downsampling using a mathematical architecture design technique adapted from DeepMAD, and find that downsampling improves empirical performance. Additionally, empirical testing of the downsampled variant, JD3Net, of our fully convolutional networks reveals strong empirical performance on a variety of image demosaicing and JDD tasks.

Generating realistic, dyadic talking head video requires ultra-low latency. Existing chunk-based methods require full non-causal context windows, introducing significant delays. This high latency critically prevents the immediate, non-verbal feedback required for a realistic listener. To address this, we present DyStream, a flow matching-based autoregressive model that could generate video in real-time from both speaker and listener audio. Our method contains two key designs: (1) we adopt a stream-friendly autoregressive framework with flow-matching heads for probabilistic modeling, and (2) We propose a causal encoder enhanced by a lookahead module to incorporate short future context (e.g., 60 ms) to improve quality while maintaining low latency. Our analysis shows this simple-and-effective method significantly surpass alternative causal strategies, including distillation and generative encoder. Extensive experiments show that DyStream could generate video within 34 ms per frame, guaranteeing the entire system latency remains under 100 ms. Besides, it achieves state-of-the-art lip-sync quality, with offline and online LipSync Confidence scores of 8.13 and 7.61 on HDTF, respectively. The model, weights and codes are available.

Post-deployment machine learning algorithms often influence the environments they act in, and thus shift the underlying dynamics that the standard reinforcement learning (RL) methods ignore. While designing optimal algorithms in this performative setting has recently been studied in supervised learning, the RL counterpart remains under-explored. In this paper, we prove the performative counterparts of the performance difference lemma and the policy gradient theorem in RL, and further introduce the Performative Policy Gradient algorithm (PePG). PePG is the first policy gradient algorithm designed to account for performativity in RL. Under softmax parametrisation, and also with and without entropy regularisation, we prove that PePG converges to performatively optimal policies, i.e. policies that remain optimal under the distribution shifts induced by themselves. Thus, PePG significantly extends the prior works in Performative RL that achieves performative stability but not optimality. Furthermore, our empirical analysis on standard performative RL environments validate that PePG outperforms the existing performative RL algorithms aiming for stability.

Predicting multiphysics dynamics is computationally expensive and challenging due to the severe coupling of multi-scale, heterogeneous physical processes. While neural surrogates promise a paradigm shift, the field currently suffers from an "illusion of mastery", as repeatedly emphasized in top-tier commentaries: existing evaluations overly rely on simplified, low-dimensional proxies, which fail to expose the models' inherent fragility in realistic regimes. To bridge this critical gap, we present REALM (REalistic AI Learning for Multiphysics), a rigorous benchmarking framework designed to test neural surrogates on challenging, application-driven reactive flows. REALM features 11 high-fidelity datasets spanning from canonical multiphysics problems to complex propulsion and fire safety scenarios, alongside a standardized end-to-end training and evaluation protocol that incorporates multiphysics-aware preprocessing and a robust rollout strategy. Using this framework, we systematically benchmark over a dozen representative surrogate model families, including spectral operators, convolutional models, Transformers, pointwise operators, and graph/mesh networks, and identify three robust trends: (i) a scaling barrier governed jointly by dimensionality, stiffness, and mesh irregularity, leading to rapidly growing rollout errors; (ii) performance primarily controlled by architectural inductive biases rather than parameter count; and (iii) a persistent gap between nominal accuracy metrics and physically trustworthy behavior, where models with high correlations still miss key transient structures and integral quantities. Taken together, REALM exposes the limits of current neural surrogates on realistic multiphysics flows and offers a rigorous testbed to drive the development of next-generation physics-aware architectures.

We introduce VL-JEPA, a vision-language model built on a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA). Instead of autoregressively generating tokens as in classical VLMs, VL-JEPA predicts continuous embeddings of the target texts. By learning in an abstract representation space, the model focuses on task-relevant semantics while abstracting away surface-level linguistic variability. In a strictly controlled comparison against standard token-space VLM training with the same vision encoder and training data, VL-JEPA achieves stronger performance while having 50% fewer trainable parameters. At inference time, a lightweight text decoder is invoked only when needed to translate VL-JEPA predicted embeddings into text. We show that VL-JEPA natively supports selective decoding that reduces the number of decoding operations by 2.85x while maintaining similar performance compared to non-adaptive uniform decoding. Beyond generation, the VL-JEPA's embedding space naturally supports open-vocabulary classification, text-to-video retrieval, and discriminative VQA without any architecture modification. On eight video classification and eight video retrieval datasets, the average performance VL-JEPA surpasses that of CLIP, SigLIP2, and Perception Encoder. At the same time, the model achieves comparable performance as classical VLMs (InstructBLIP, QwenVL) on four VQA datasets: GQA, TallyQA, POPE and POPEv2, despite only having 1.6B parameters.