When retrieving a person from a video archive by voice and face, should the system be multimodal or not? In real-world broadcast archives, unlike curated benchmarks, a target may be heard but unseen, seen but unheard, or both. Fusing scores from an absent modality injects noise, degrading precision below the best unimodal system. We propose a query-adaptive framework that detects active modalities via cross-modal score consistency: when both modalities are active, files retrieved by one also score highly on the other; this agreement breaks down when a modality is absent. Classifiers driven by these cross-modal features achieve 89% detection accuracy. On the BBC Rewind corpus (with over 12,000 broadcast videos) the adaptive system attains 94.2% P@1, outperforming speaker-only (82.9%), face-only (93.4%), and fixed fusion (90.0%), recovering 64% of the gap to an oracle with ground-truth modality labels (96.6%).

The complex imbalanced label distribution poses a crucial challenge to multi-label classification, as most classifiers are biased towards the majority class and high-frequent labels. Oversampling is an efficient and flexible solution that augments instances to provide a more balanced training dataset for multi-label classifiers. Most existing oversampling methods create synthetic instances in a heuristic way that essentially relies on neighborhood information retrieved using Euclidean distance within the entire feature space. However, they fail to consider the varying semantic relevance of features to different labels, leading to label inconsistency among proximate neighbors and further introducing label confusion and overfitting to synthetic instances. To overcome the above issue, we propose a novel sampling approach called Label-Specific Distance-based Multi-Label Oversampling (LSDMLO) that creates more useful and well-labeled synthetic instances to address the imbalance in multi-label datasets. LSDMLO derives the label-specific distance to identify label-consistent neighbors based on the weighted pertinent feature space, which facilitates selecting seed instances that express more label correlations in boundary areas and generating synthetic instances aligned with the label distribution of original data. The comprehensive experiments verify that the proposed LSDMLO outperforms the state-of-the-art multi-label sampling approaches under various base classifiers.

A central goal of biomedicine is to understand, predict and ultimately control the dynamic mechanisms by which biological systems respond to perturbations, disease progression and therapeutic intervention. Although foundation models and large language models have accelerated biomedical data interpretation, most current systems remain focused on static pattern recognition rather than prospective simulation of biological futures. Here we propose biomedical world models as a paradigm for AI-driven discovery. These models learn latent representations of molecular, cellular, tissue and clinical states, together with intervention-conditioned dynamics that allow future trajectories to be simulated before actions are taken. We discuss how biomedical world models could function as data engines, environment simulators and scientific planning substrates across applications including virtual cells, organoids, virtual patients and surgical simulation. We outline the data infrastructure, evaluation benchmarks, safety constraints and governance frameworks required. Biomedical world models may provide a foundation for simulation-guided, closed-loop and experimentally actionable biomedical discovery.

Literary translation poses unique challenges due to the scarcity of high-quality annotated data and the need to balance expression fluency with literary effect. We present a multi-aspect iterative refinement framework that generates high-quality translation references and preference data through specialized LLM translators, each targeting a distinct quality dimension. We leverage the generated data for supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. Experiments show that our generated references outperform the original ground truth for SFT by 8.65 CEA100 points. For reinforcement learning, we find that DPO leads to performance degradation in this setting, while leveraging an explicit reward model for GRPO yields an additional 1.51 point improvement. We attribute this to the stability of two-stage training and GRPO's online exploration capability. Our resulting models, LitMT-8B and LitMT-14B, achieve 67.25 and 69.07 CEA100 respectively on the MetaphorTrans English-to-Chinese literary translation benchmark, competitive with Claude Sonnet 4.5 at 68.43, and demonstrate strong generalization to out-of-domain literary work (i.e., O. Henry).

Long-video question answering remains challenging for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), as answer-relevant evidence is often sparse, transient, and temporally dispersed across lengthy video contexts. Existing frame-centric approaches improve efficiency through uniform sampling, query-aware frame selection, visual-token compression, and adaptive resolution strategies. However, they still rely on isolated and fragmented frames as the fundamental evidence units, limiting VLMs' ability to effectively capture coherent event-level semantics. To address this limitation, we propose MemoryCard, a video-memory-based augmentation framework that organizes long videos into self-contained Memory Cards. Specifically, MemoryCard first performs a self-reading process over videos and aligned utterances to segment the video into semantically coherent units, each corresponding to a distinct topic or event. For each unit, it generates an event-level video gist and selects representative visual moments, which are then rendered into unified Memory Cards for retrieval and question answering. Experimental results demonstrate that MemoryCard consistently improves long-video QA performance under comparable visual-token budgets, achieving up to a 21.8% relative improvement in accuracy. All code is available at https://github.com/NEUIR/MemoryCard.

Open-vocabulary object detection seeks to identify novel object categories that were not part of the training data. Many knowledge distillation-based approaches have shown promising performance by transferring knowledge from pre-trained vision-language models to object detection. However, these methods often overlook structured, image-specific relationships between objects, such as interactions and spatial arrangements. This oversight can significantly restrict the effectiveness of detecting novel categories. To address this issue, we propose a Scene-guided Relational Modeling detection framework. This framework utilizes scene graphs to capture structured semantic and spatial relationships between candidate regions and their contextual objects. It explicitly models interactions among neighboring regions and incorporates a Relation Attention Module to implicitly amplify the key relational cues extracted from the scene graph. Furthermore, we present a scene-based textual alignment branch that distills category knowledge from captions to guide relational alignment. This approach facilitates a seamless integration of visual relations with semantic information for enhanced detection performance. Comprehensive experiments show that our model achieves superior performance compared to other OVOD methods, improving the AP for novel categories on COCO and LVIS datasets.

Estimating 2D camera motion is fundamental to computer vision and computational photography. Existing homography-based methods work well for planar scenes or pure rotation, but struggle with camera translation, depth variation, and local parallax; local homography and mesh-based models improve flexibility but still rely on piecewise planar assumptions. We introduce CamFlow+, a hybrid-basis framework that represents 2D camera motion directly in dense-flow space. CamFlow+ combines homography-derived physical bases, stochastic bases sampled from homography flows, and depth-translational bases derived from depth and camera intrinsics, relaxing the single-plane constraint while preserving camera-motion regularity. A depth-aware smoothness term further regularizes translation-induced parallax in continuous-depth regions while preserving motion changes near depth boundaries. We evaluate CamFlow+ on GHOF-Cam, a camera-motion benchmark that masks out dynamic objects and ill-posed occlusion regions in an optical-flow benchmark to isolate camera-induced motion. Experiments show that CamFlow+ improves sparse and dense camera-motion estimation. In digital video stabilization, CamFlow+ also improves global and local stability, achieving the best top-1 preference rate in a blind user study. Code and datasets will be available on the project page: https://lhaippp.github.io/CamFlow+.

Modeling dynamic facial expressions using 3D Gaussian representations remains challenging due to their unstructured nature. Conventional Gaussian avatar pipelines require extensive multiview and sequential expression data, limiting scalability and accessibility. In this work, we introduce Self-Adaptive Gaussian Expression (SAGE), a framework for self-learning expression-induced Gaussian deformations that enables high-fidelity, animatable avatars from minimal input data. Our method jointly optimizes 2D Gaussian surfels and a Signed Distance Field (SDF) to enforce compact, surface-aligned Gaussian distributions, while a self-supervised expression learning phase replaces long training sequences with geometric and appearance consistency constraints. This design allows flexible deployment across multiple reconstruction regimes: in the multiview setting, only a single frame (timestep) is required instead of thousands; in the monocular setting, only head rotations are needed without expression sequences; and in the one-shot setting, no pretraining or priors are necessary. Experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves reconstruction and animation quality comparable to state-of-the-art methods, while reducing data requirements by several orders of magnitude. Our results highlight the potential of self-supervised Gaussian deformation learning as a step toward accessible, data-efficient avatar creation.

Although artificial neural network (ANN) based speech enhancement (SE) methods demonstrate excellent performance, the high computational complexity and high energy consumption hinder their deployment in practical front-end processing tasks.} Currently, the spiking neural networks (SNNs) have shown potential in reducing power consumption. However, the discrete binary activation and complex spatio-temporal dynamics of SNNs often result in information loss. The current challenge therefore focuses on how to maintain performance and reduce computational complexity. To address this issue, this work propose a Dual-Branch Hybrid Neural (DBHN) Network. 1) In terms of network architecture: A dual-branch network integrating ANN and SNN was designed, where the SNN branch reduces power consumption while the ANN branch addresses information loss; The BandSplit and Time-Frequency (TF) -Mamba modules were developed to simultaneously compress energy consumption and enhance model performance; Spiking Feature Extraction Group (SFEG) and Information Transformation Block (ITB) components were implemented with residual connections to mitigate information loss while further refining feature representations. 2) To facilitate inter-branch information fusion: An Interaction module was designed to promote information exchange at various stages of the dual-branch network; A TF-Cross Attention-Fusion module was designed to perform time-frequency domain fusion of dual-branch information while data-adaptively guiding the SNN branch to retain more critical information. Results show that the proposed model maintains superior performance across three public datasets while achieving an average 7.5 fold reduction in computational complexity compared to baseline models.

Ambient clinical scribes increasingly combine Automatic Speech Recognition with Large Language Models to automate documentation. However, traditional metrics like Word Error Rate mask systemic safety degradation. We present a paired acoustic stress test to isolate the causal impact of noise on clinical reasoning. For the same dialogues, we inject diverse noise types while keeping the downstream model configuration frozen. Crucially, we uncover a dangerous disconnect between signal fidelity and clinical safety. Stationary ambient noise increased the Word Error Rate by a negligible 0.71 percentage points yet nearly doubled the rate of unsafe outputs. Our analysis reveals that minor acoustic perturbations can invert clinical meaning without substantially inflating error rates. Furthermore, we demonstrate a lightweight mitigation strategy that mitigates safety degradation under noisy conditions without requiring model fine tuning.

Text-to-SQL maps natural language questions to executable SQL queries. Modern databases often contain large and complex schemas, making schema linking a critical step for accurate SQL generation. Existing methods either rely on full-schema generation, which leaves schema linking implicit within a large search space, or use a separate retriever trained with static gold-column supervision, whose targets may be suboptimal for the current generator policy. To address this issue, we propose Adaptive Co-optimization via Empirical Credit Assignment for Text-to-SQL (ACE-SQL), a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that jointly optimizes schema retrieval and SQL generation under execution feedback. ACE-SQL constructs an online column-set pool from generator rollouts and derives adaptive on-policy retrieval targets from the column set most frequently associated with execution-correct rollouts. This induces bidirectional adaptation, where the retriever adapts toward column sets that the generator can execute correctly, while the generator adapts to the retriever's evolving schema selections under execution feedback. With approximately 3k synthetic Text-to-SQL question-database pairs for RL training, ACE-SQL achieves 65.3% greedy execution accuracy on BIRD Dev while using 0.93k output tokens per query. The repository is available at https://github.com/xbchen1/ACE-SQL.

Performance variations in sensor arrays, caused by intrinsic differences or installation conditions, can lead to inconsistent results during shape sensing. To obtain accurate results, a large amount of data is usually required, and a separate model must be retrained for each sensor array, thereby increasing the cost and time of data acquisition, transmission, and computation. To address this issue, this work proposes an encoder-decoder architecture for surface shape sensing based on sparse strain sensors and further incorporates meta-learning and few-shot adaptation strategies to enable adaptation across different groups of sensor arrays. Experimental results demonstrate that, after the cross-sensor adaptation, a newly deployed sensor array achieves a sensing error of approximately 4.0 mm relying on less than 5.0% newly labeled data and requiring an adaptation time of under 1 second, which represents a substantial improvement from 23.0 mm error without adaptation and 20-minute data collection time required to train a new model. Moreover, the number of points with errors below 5.0 mm increased by more than 65.0%. These results indicate that the proposed method can substantially reduce the cost and training burden of surface shape sensing, and it has broad potential applications in soft robotics and wearable devices.

Large language models (LLMs) have fundamentally transformed the landscape of Natural Language Processing. Despite these advances, LLMs and LLM-based systems remain prone to a variety of failure modes. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems have emerged as a common deployment scenario seeking to both avoid the well known risk of the LLM "hallucinating" information, and to enable reasoning and question answering over proprietary information that the LLM did not have access to during training without resorting to expensive model fine-tuning. In this work, we explore the idea of using a lightweight graph structure with a relatively simple graph schema, to support the RAG subsystem via a dedicated toolset. We design an agentic system with a variety of vector search and graph query tools operating over a structured dataset based on a curated subset of English Wikipedia articles, and evaluate its performance on questions from MoNaCo, a challenging Wikipedia QA benchmark of complex query answering tasks. Our results show that the introduction of graph-based tools can significantly increase the precision and recall of factual correctness, can halve the number of hallucinated answers, and achieves the highest fine-grained truthfulness score among the three evaluated scenarios. All this with a modest increase in token usage.

We develop a high-dimensional statistical theory of low-rank adaptation (LoRA) in attention models, capturing the interplay between pre-training and fine-tuning. We introduce a solvable framework in which a single-head attention layer is first pre-trained on a data-abundant task and subsequently adapted via a rank-one LoRA update on limited data. In the high-dimensional limit, both stages admit a sharp asymptotic characterization in terms of a finite set of order parameters, yielding explicit predictions for test errors and representation alignment. Our analysis shows that the impact of pre-training on LoRA is summarized by an effective noise term, from which we derive prescriptions for the optimal pre-training procedure. We also demonstrate a regime with a mismatch between the value of the test error and representation quality, and propose an application of our theory to active fine-tuning.

Creating lifelike digital humans with genuine social intelligence requires unifying cognitive reasoning and multimodal generation within a coherent framework. Current approaches treat these as separate tasks: Large Language Models excel at dialogue but lack embodied expression, while diffusion-based talking head models achieve visual fidelity but ignore social cognition. To bridge this gap, we propose a closed-loop dual-agent framework integrating perception, social reasoning, and expression into a continuous interaction cycle. The perception module analyzes partners' multimodal behaviors from video, while the social reasoning module infers hidden mental states through Theory of Mind and selects responses via an ensemble mechanism. The expression module then generates emotion-controllable dual-agent videos synthesizing both speaker speech and expression alongside listener reactive behaviors, capturing bidirectional dynamics absent in prior work. We construct a hierarchical Persona-Scenario dataset with psychologically grounded personas and private social goals to support evaluation under information asymmetry. Experiments on this dataset demonstrate competitive or superior performance on both dialogue quality and video generation metrics. Notably, our method surpasses even the full-information Script mode on key dialogue quality dimensions, suggesting that explicit mental state inference under uncertainty can elicit more thoughtful dialogue than unrestricted information access.

Long-horizon agents can archive large histories, but future answers still incur retrieval, rereading, and context costs. When retained memory misses answer-relevant evidence, the system must return to larger portions of the raw history. We study budgeted evidence survival: before the query is known, which source evidence should be retained so that it remains recoverable and usable under a fixed retained source-evidence token budget? We instantiate this setting as Budgeted Pre-Query Retention, where memory is written during ingestion and later read without access to the full raw stream. We introduce EMBER, a learned retention policy that constructs a compact, source-backed evidence state. EMBER stores evidence capsules: verbatim source excerpts paired with retrieval keys and update metadata, preserving both grounding and read-time access. Post-query outcome feedback trains the writer to preserve evidence across the ingestion-retrieval-answer chain. On LongMemEval-RR, our LongMemEval-derived retained-evidence protocol, EMBER-14B reaches 0.3017 F1 at the 8192-token retained-evidence comparison point, compared with 0.1765 for the strongest non-EMBER budgeted baseline. Across retained source-evidence budgets, EMBER improves F1, Retain-Recall, and Read-Recall, indicating that long-horizon memory depends on retaining evidence within the budget rather than rereading larger histories.

LLMs are increasingly deployed as Artificial Moral Advisors (AMA) in a variety of contexts: what kind of conversational patterns should they display? In this paper, we study how AMA can help their interlocutors "stay with the uncertainty". We propose three modes of uncertainty (Perspective-Multiplying, Tension-Preserving, Process-Reflecting) and compare them against three control conditions (Baseline, Persuasive, Sycophantic). A user-agent LLM engages in a dialogue on an ethical dilemma with an AMA following a specific uncertainty strategy, and completes pre- and post-conversation questionnaires. We further examine the effect of two persona prompt formats (Declarative and Narrative). We found that (1) no single model dominates as a simulated user agent, with open models aligning with human ambiguity through between-persona divergence and closed models through within-persona hedging; (2) declarative personas better capture initial stance diversity while narrative personas show more realistic belief revision; (3) all six AMA strategies produce distinguishable conversational patterns; and (4) uncertainty strategies differ not in how much stance revision they produce, but in the quality of engagement they sustain.

We propose GLASS, a framework for composable acoustic style control in zero-shot autoregressive text-to-speech (TTS) that learns controls from post-generation rewards rather than style labels. In zero-shot TTS, a speaker prompt often entangles speaker identity with prosodic attributes such as speaking rate and pitch, making it difficult to change style without changing the prompt itself. GLASS instead treats each acoustic attribute as a reward-defined control direction. For each control axis, GLASS freezes the TTS backbone and trains one lightweight LoRA adapter with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), using speech-token length and mean F0 as style rewards and WER as an intelligibility anchor. Because each control is represented as a LoRA weight update, independently trained adapters can be swapped, interpolated, and composed through linear LoRA arithmetic without retraining the backbone. Experiments on speaking rate and pitch control show targeted style shifts while preserving naturalness, speaker similarity, and intelligibility, and demonstrate smooth interpolation and multi-axis composition across independently trained adapters.

Retry-based objectives such as pass@K and max@K optimize the best return obtained from multiple sampled trajectories, and recent work has shown that they can promote exploration without explicit exploration bonuses. In discrete action spaces, ReMax was shown to do so by adapting to return uncertainty. In this work, we introduce pathwise derivative estimators for retry objectives and use them to extend ReMax to continuous action spaces. We study the resulting learning dynamics and show that, even with deterministic rewards, ReMax can encourage stochastic exploration by reshaping the policy-gradient landscape. In particular, it alters gradients both in direction, biasing updates toward higher policy entropy, and in magnitude, damping gradients and slowing convergence. We further show that Adam's adaptive normalization can mitigate this damping, depending on its numerical stabilization parameter. Empirically, we instantiate this objective as ReMax Actor-Critic (ReMAC), an off-policy actor--critic algorithm that optimizes the ReMax objective using a pathwise derivative estimator. Our experiments show that ReMAC can promote higher policy entropy without entropy regularization and achieves performance comparable to SAC.

Long-horizon LLM agents require reinforcement learning methods that can assign credit to intermediate decisions under sparse and delayed rewards. Recent group-based methods such as GiGPO improve over GRPO by constructing step-level advantages at repeated anchor states. However, we show that such dense credit can be statistically unreliable: under limited rollouts, rare but lucky actions may receive overly large advantages, producing divergent anchor bias and late-stage training oscillation. We propose Evidence-Calibrated Policy Optimization (ECPO), a critic-free policy optimization algorithm that calibrates step-level credit before policy updates. ECPO combines Evidence-Calibrated Action Advantage, which groups rollouts by canonical actions and shrinks low-count estimates, with Variance-Gated Credit Weighting, which suppresses anchor states dominated by within-action noise. Experiments on ALFWorld and WebShop with Qwen2.5-1.5B/7B show that ECPO consistently outperforms strong baselines, improving GiGPO by +5.2/+7.3 success points on ALFWorld/WebShop with Qwen2.5-1.5B while adding only 0.1% additional advantage-computation overhead.

Dataset condensation aims to construct compact datasets from real data via synthesis or selection. However, existing approaches are ill-suited for diffusion model training: synthetic data generation often yields low-fidelity samples unsuitable for authentic modeling, while real subset selection typically fails to preserve the distributional geometry required by diffusion likelihood objectives. To address this, we propose to reformulate real subset selection as a geometry-aware distribution alignment problem. By incorporating one-sided partial optimal transport, our method selectively aligns a compact subset with the full data distribution while allowing unmatched mass in low-density regions, ensuring the preserved geometric structure necessary for effective diffusion model training. To further ensure distributional fidelity, we complement geometric alignment with lightweight feature-statistics and semantic consistency regularization. An efficient two-stage discrete optimization strategy is proposed to achieve this alignment objective. Extensive experiments across diffusion variants, subset sizes, image resolutions, and training rounds show that our method achieves superior fidelity and distributional coverage in diffusion model training. Codes are available at https://github.com/2018cx/GADC.

Agile humanoid locomotion across diverse challenging terrain demands both wide perceptual coverage and precise local geometry understanding. Motivated by the way humans selectively look at relevant terrain during locomotion, we introduce TAGA, a Terrain-aware Active Gaze learning framework for Attention-based humanoid control. By fusing vision, proprioception, and motion commands, our framework guides the model to learn anticipatory cues and actively attend to specific areas of the height scan, selectively using these informative regions for the downstream network. This adaptively increases the information density of observations under tight onboard computational constraints, thus enabling fine-grained perceptive locomotion over larger-scale terrains. We find that such gaze behaviors can naturally emerge through reinforcement learning alone, without requiring additional supervision or explicit guidance, significantly improve training efficiency. As a result, the trained policy demonstrates robust and generalizable locomotion in simulation and on hardware, including reliable terrain-aware foothold selection, elevated-platform traversal, competitive sparse-foothold traversal, and the largest reported real-world gap traversal distance of 1.2m among perceptive humanoid locomotion systems, while maintaining stability under severe perceptual disturbances and environmental interference.

Foundation models mark a profound paradigm shift in time series modeling, with task-specific models being superseded by general-purpose zero-shot models. Yet, current approaches primarily focus on forecasting, while real-world time series are often irregularly and partially observed, requiring models that can jointly forecast, impute missing values, and handle degraded sampling conditions. To address these challenges, we introduce TS-ICL, a novel probabilistic In-Context Learning encoder--regressor Transformer that unifies forecasting and imputation. TS-ICL formulates time series tasks as timestamp-aligned regression and naturally incorporates covariates by training on synthetic dependency structures generated from a novel causal data prior. Empirically, TS-ICL achieves a new state-of-the-art in imputation, while remaining competitive with leading forecasting foundation models across both univariate and covariate-aware benchmarks. It shows particularly strong performance in forecasting with partially observed look-back windows.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves large language model (LLM) answer quality by grounding generation in external evidence, but processing retrieved contexts makes the prefill stage a dominant serving cost. RAG cache fusion reduces this cost by reusing precomputed key-value (KV) caches for retrieved chunks and selectively recomputing tokens under the current prompt. Existing selectors, however, face a dilemma between quality and efficiency: fast query-agnostic or final-layer query-to-context selectors can miss request-relevant evidence, whereas full-view query-aware selectors require broad context and layer visibility before recomputation and therefore stall the layer-wise cache-fusion pipeline. We present QCFuse, a compressed-view query-aware selector for RAG cache fusion. QCFuse uses chunk-anchor query probing to condition user-query states on compact per-chunk anchors and critical-layer profiling to identify recomputation tokens without all-layer inspection. We implement QCFuse in SGLang and evaluate it on four open-weight LLMs across six datasets. QCFuse reaches full-prefill-level quality. At matched quality, QCFuse achieves an average prefill-time speedup of 1.7x over full prefill and 1.5x over ProphetKV, the strongest quality-preserving baseline.

Current evaluations for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) overwhelmingly focus on utility-driven objectives, leaving model behavior under logic-neutral scenarios largely underexplored. Stochasticity is essential in scenarios where multiple actions are equally valid, such as recommending travel itineraries or daily schedules where multiple options have similar utility. In such settings, deterministic policies may lead to repetitive behaviors and reduced coverage of valid alternatives. To bridge this gap, we propose RandomBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate whether MLLMs can maintain distributionally neutral behavior when selecting among equivalent options. We further introduce three metrics, including RI, BCI, BII, to quantify entropy and distributional bias. Experiments reveal a pervasive phenomenon termed Stochastic Collapse, where MLLMs fail to maintain uniform randomness under explicit random instructions, with top-1 probabilities reaching 97% from the ideal one quarter baseline and RI dropping to 0.068 in Claude Sonnet 4.6. Extensive ablation studies further demonstrate that these deviations persist across languages and representation formats, highlighting the robustness of distributional collapse in logic-neutral decision settings.

Humanoid robots hold great promise for operating in human-centered environments, yet ladder climbing remains one of the most challenging tasks due to sparse footholds and handholds, complex whole-body coordination, and sensitivity to perception and control errors. We present \textbf{LadderMan}, a unified system that enables humanoid robots to robustly climb diverse ladders and perform manipulation under such constrained conditions. Our climbing policy is built on a scalable two-stage learning pipeline, where we use hybrid motion tracking to learn multiple climbing experts from a single reference motion, and distill these experts into a unified depth-based visuomotor climbing policy via hybrid imitation and reinforcement learning. To enable real-world deployment, we leverage vision foundation models to bridge the sim-to-real gap in depth perception. Building on the learned climbing policy, we further train a separate manipulation policy using a dual-agent formulation, allowing stable on-ladder manipulation via teleoperation. Experiments demonstrate that LadderMan achieves robust ladder climbing across a wide range of geometries, successfully transfers to real-world hardware in a zero-shot manner, and supports various manipulation tasks under challenging ladder constraints. Video results are available at https://ladderman-robot.github.io .

Large language models (LLMs) drive significant financial innovations, yet their high-concurrency deployment is severely bottlenecked by KV cache memory overhead, which inflates infrastructure costs and throttles scalability. To address this, we propose YouZhi-LLM, a highly efficient financial LLM empowered by a comprehensive structural transition and training pipeline natively built on the Huawei Ascend ecosystem. At its algorithmic core, YouZhi-LLM features a layer-adaptive GQA-to-MLA transition framework that dynamically assigns per-layer FreqFold sizes, maximizing KV-cache compression while minimizing perplexity degradation. To recover representation capacity and inject domain expertise, the Ascend-based training pipeline seamlessly integrates generalized knowledge distillation with financial-specific supervised fine-tuning. Evaluations demonstrate the superiority of this systematic approach, with the adaptive transition reducing perplexity degradation by up to 35% over uniform baselines. Crucially, when evaluated on Ascend NPUs via vLLM-Ascend, the massive KV-cache reduction translates directly into deployment efficiency. Compared to their respective base models, YouZhi-7B yields a 12.3% improvement in average financial benchmark score alongside a 2.69$\times$ increase in maximum concurrency; similarly, YouZhi-14B achieves a 7.0% accuracy gain and a 2.43$\times$ concurrency boost, establishing a new paradigm for cost-effective, high-throughput financial inference.

We investigate the extent to which the language processing of LLMs resembles human cognitive processes, focusing on a human cognitive bias called the $\textit{neglect-zero effect}$. This effect refers to the human tendency to ignore $\textit{zero-models}$, which are configurations that render a proposition vacuously true by virtue of an empty set. We focus on two types of inferences driven by the neglect-zero effect, and examine how LLMs process these inferences by comparing their behavior with that in an inference that does not involve the neglect-zero effect. For this purpose, we employ a paradigm based on $\textit{structural priming}$, where recent exposure to a preceding sentence (the $\textit{prime}$) facilitates the processing of a subsequent sentence (the $\textit{target}$) due to their structural similarity. We prepare primes to force LLMs to consider the zero-model, and analyze whether they also consider it in the target. The results suggest that the neglect-zero effect may not occur in the LLMs analyzed in this study. Our code is available at https://github.com/ynklab/neglect_zero

Grokking suggests that fitting the training data and learning a simple underlying rule may occur on different time scales. We formalize this phenomenon by separating the fast decay of the classification loss from the slower simplification of the learned representation, and we call the resulting pair of stopping times two training clocks. For deep linear networks, we show that a post-margin gap-growth or one-step tail-contraction condition reduces the cross-entropy loss to level epsilon on a logarithmic time scale. In contrast, when layerwise weight decay is present, the induced regularization on the end-to-end map can be expressed as a Schatten-type penalty; under a sharp late-time Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz tail, this structural energy closes on a polynomial time scale. The two clocks, therefore, separate fitting from representation simplification. We then explain how the same mechanism can appear in ReLU MLPs. In regions where the activation patterns on the training set remain fixed, the network reduces to a linear model in the active coordinates. In a two-layer ReLU embedding model, chain-rule estimates further show that the classifier head can receive larger effective gradients than the embedding block under controlled downstream norms. This supports a two-stage mechanism in which the classifier fits first, while the representation continues to simplify later. We use modular addition as the main experimental setting. The deep linear theory provides the rigorous core of the analysis. But the ReLU results are formulated as conditional reductions that account for empirical behavior without claiming a global proof for nonlinear training dynamics.

Latent reasoning has emerged as a promising alternative to discrete Chain-of-Thought (CoT) in large language models (LLMs), enabling more expressive reasoning by operating over continuous representations. However, the inherently deterministic nature of continuous representations limits policy exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). To address this, we propose TARPO (Token-Wise Latent-Explicit Reasoning via Action-Routing Policy Optimization), a pure RL framework that adaptively switches between discrete token generation and continuous latent reasoning at each step. TARPO introduces a lightweight action head router that observes the current hidden state and samples a routing decision from a binary mode-selection space, preserving the stochasticity of discrete token sampling from the vocabulary. The LLM backbone and router are jointly optimized end-to-end with a shared group-relative advantage signal. Extensive experiments across Qwen2.5 (from 1.5B to 7B) and Llama-3.1-8B backbones demonstrate that TARPO consistently outperforms existing explicit and latent reasoning RL baselines across diverse benchmarks. Further analysis shows that TARPO learns adaptive token-wise switching behaviors while maintaining stable training dynamics. Our code is available at https://github.com/NKU-LITI/TARPO-master.