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Research on automatic speaking assessment (ASA) has increasingly adopted multimodal speech large language models to assess learners' speaking performance. However, existing studies provide limited analysis of how acoustic and content information contribute to predictions and how stable the resulting performance is. We propose CASA, a simpler architecture combining Whisper-medium and Qwen3.5-2B that achieves state-of-the-art performance while providing a more interpretable separation between speech delivery and content. On the Speak & Improve Corpus 2025, CASA achieves a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.358, improving on the previous best RMSE while using approximately half the estimated inference parameters. The general-purpose architecture is designed for adaptation to other ASA corpora without structural changes and relies on three handcrafted fluency features. Through ablations and repeated runs, we analyze the individual and complementary contributions of acoustic and content information, examine performance variability, and demonstrate the potential of large language model reasoning for training-free content validation.

Autonomous vehicles depend on large safety-critical software stacks, where weaknesses reachable from adversarial inputs may affect steering, braking, or other control decisions. Static analysis can identify candidate sites, but dynamically confirming exploitability requires executable test artifacts that are difficult to construct manually. We investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can automate this process for Autoware, an open-source autonomous-driving stack. We perform compiler-precise static analysis across 185 packages, identifying 1,375 decision rules, 2,274 validation checks, and 482 input-to-safety-output flows, from which we derive a weakness taxonomy and sample 740 reachable sites. Two local open-weight LLMs, a no-static-context ablation, and a naive-template baseline generate 3,700 artifact sets, which are compiled against the real build under sanitizers, repaired through compiler-in-the-loop feedback, and fuzzed when executable. The main result is a build-integration failure taxonomy showing that 80% of first-shot compilation failures arise from dependency wiring rather than program logic. The reasoning model compiled 64% of harnesses on the first attempt, compared with 6% for the code-specialized model. Repair achieved full object-compileability for the reasoning model only through extensive stubbing; fewer than half of its harnesses reached the fuzzer, and all 37 observed crashes originated in stubbed code rather than Autoware. No candidate weakness was dynamically confirmed within budget. These results show that build integration, not candidate generation or fuzzing, is the primary barrier to reliable LLM-assisted dynamic analysis of full autonomous-vehicle software stacks.

On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as an effective paradigm for transferring knowledge between language models, where a student is trained to align its next-token distribution with the teacher's along its own trajectories. To provide dense supervision at tractable cost, many works minimize the reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the student and teacher's normalized distributions over the teacher's top-$k$ tokens. However, this normalized objective discards the information about tail probability: the total probability outside the teacher's top-$k$ tokens. As a result, the optimization can steadily increase the student's tail probability and entropy, empirically degrading downstream accuracy. To address this issue, we propose Tail-Aware Top-$k$ OPD (TA-OPD), a novel distillation method that restores the missing tail probability signal. In particular, TA-OPD minimizes the reverse KL divergence over the top-$k$ tokens plus a tail token that carries the tail probability. In effect, TA-OPD better aligns the student's next-token distribution with the teacher's, preventing the increase in tail probability and entropy caused by top-$k$ normalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of TA-OPD, improving Avg@8 by up to 8.05 points on common benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/HuipengHuang/TA-OPD.

Fake/synthetic images are increasingly prevalent, but it remains unclear whether Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) process real and fake images in the same internal manner. This work examines the hypothesis that CNNs represent real and fake images differently, such that fake images induce different hidden-layer activation patterns even when semantic content is preserved. The hypothesis is evaluated in scene recognition settings using trained CNN models. Dense-layer activations are extracted, and neurosymbolic methods assign semantic labels to selected neurons. For each real test image, corresponding fake images are generated with similar semantic content using object-label-guided text-to-image and image-to-image generation based on Stable Diffusion variants. Paired real-fake activation patterns are then compared statistically. Additional experiments with another dataset, CNN architecture, generative model, and JPEG/blur degradation analysis assess robustness. Results suggest that fake images evoke different hidden-neuron activations, and these differences are not explained only by simple image degradation. Overall, the findings indicate that real and fake images differ in CNN hidden-layer activation behavior at least in some settings, which opens the door for follow-up work on making use of this different behavior to improve fake image detection.

Fabric inspection in the garment industries of low-income economies remains largely manual, and commercial vision systems are priced beyond most small and medium mills. Because defects are sparse under controlled production, a natural response is a cascade: screen every frame with a cheap anomaly detector and invoke a full detector only on suspicious frames. We build such a cascade for four knit-fabric defect classes and deploy it end-to-end on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano with TensorRT FP16. Stage 1 is a compact convolutional autoencoder with decoder attention gates, an edge-weighted reconstruction loss, and feature-level distillation from a frozen YOLOv5n teacher; Stage 2 is YOLOv5n, invoked only on flagged frames. On a 249-image benchmark disjoint from detector training (20 defective, 229 non-defective), Stage 1 at a recall-prioritised threshold flags all 20 defective images (95% CI 0.83-1.00) at a false-positive rate of 49.3% (113/229), reducing false positives by 19.3% relative to a plain autoencoder (p=0.011). The parallel pipeline reaches 13.45 FPS against 9.86 FPS for a sequential YOLO-only loop. Our central finding comes from decomposing that 1.36x: 91% of it is attributable to overlapping JPEG decode with inference rather than to the cascade, which contributes only a 5.1% inference reduction at the measured forwarding rate p = 0.534. We further show that forwarding here is false-positive-limited rather than prevalence-limited - 85% of forwarded frames are false alarms - and quantify the 29-45% inference reduction attainable under tighter calibration. We report this as a caution for cascade speedups measured without controlling the data path, and position the system as AI-assisted triage rather than autonomous acceptance.

Recent breakthroughs in generative models have made text-to-voice generation (TTV) possible, enabling the synthesis of speech directly from textual voice descriptions. However, existing systems face two key challenges. First, they struggle to generate a diverse range of voices, spanning real-world human speakers and fictional characters. Second, they lack robust and flexible voice editing capabilities, such as voice cloning and the ability to modify attributes like emotion and tone. In this paper, we propose VoiceDesigner, a unified framework for text-to-voice generation and editing that supports diverse and controllable voice design. To tackle the above challenges, we propose solutions from two perspectives. First, we develop a hybrid data pipeline that leverages digital signal processing techniques and speech generation models to construct a diverse voice dataset covering both real-world and fictional voices. Second, we introduce a diffusion transformer with architectural improvements to better handle complex conditioning and enhance multi-task performance, enabling unified voice generation and editing. Through subjective and objective evaluations, VoiceDesigner achieves superior prompt alignment with both voice descriptions and editing instructions, while maintaining competitive perceptual quality and voice usability compared to state-of-the-art TTV models.

Natural-language interfaces to enterprise data must translate underspecified requests into governed, executable behavior while controlling invalid queries, policy failures, cost, and nondeterminism. SemPlan Benchmark evaluates this architectural design space with a deterministic synthetic bilingual benchmark containing 1,800 cases in English and Brazilian Portuguese; 1,200 cases form the frozen scientific evaluation subset. Four architectures are compared under the same model configuration: direct SQL generation (A1), a bounded tool-agent baseline (A2), structured semantic-request generation followed by deterministic planning and execution (A3), and a clarification/stateful semantic-plan variant (A4). Across 4,800 primary records, answer correctness was low in absolute terms: 22.25% for A1, 22.58% for A2, 25.67% for A3, and 24.25% for A4. A3 had the highest observed correctness and significantly exceeded A1, A2, and A4 in the pre-specified paired correctness analysis, while A1 retained the highest policy-correct rate and the lowest unsafe-or-invalid rate. A4 had the lowest mean API cost and lowest false-refusal rate. On a preselected 150-case stability subset, answer-correct repeatability ranged from 92.00% to 98.67%. The results support a trade-off interpretation rather than a universal ranking: additional structural constraints changed failure modes and efficiency, but did not monotonically improve correctness or solve ambiguity and multi-turn state consistency.

Visual content is the dominant medium of communication, yet without audio descriptions (ADs), it remains inaccessible to blind and low-vision people. ADs narrate context-relevant visual events during natural audio pauses. Manually creating ADs is expensive, limiting coverage to a small fraction of available content. Most existing automatic AD generation methods frame the task as video clip captioning, requiring ground-truth timestamps and additional context cues such as character databases. Current benchmarks reinforce this framing, consisting of short video segments paired with automatic or task-mismatched annotations. We introduce StrAD, a benchmark for long-form AD generation on full-length videos spanning diverse genres such as movies, documentaries, short films, performances, and video games. We reformulate AD generation as streaming dense video captioning. Our approach processes full-length videos with a sliding window, inserting ADs into existing transcripts without ground-truth timestamps, and supports both fine-tuned models and zero-shot prompting of vision-language models. On the segment-level task with given timestamps, our fine-tuned StrAD-FT sets the state of the art on CMD-AD with 36.3 CIDEr (+10.0 over Shot-by-shot), establishes a reference point on StrAD (51.0 CIDEr), and remains competitive on MAD-Eval at 24.9 CIDEr. On the full-video streaming task, StrAD-FT reaches a SODA score of 2.4 against 1.1 for our zero-shot baseline StrAD-Zero, though both exhibit limitations in temporal localization and narrative coherence. While prior work has tackled full-video AD generation in an offline, multi-stage fashion, ours is the first streaming approach, generating ADs on the fly without ground-truth timestamps. StrAD makes progress on full-video AD generation measurable, a prerequisite for scaling accessibility.

Continuous physiological time series underpin modern clinical monitoring, yet many of the most informative signals are invasive, expensive, or simply unavailable for a given patient. Conditional generation offers a remedy: an absent signal can be synthesized from co-recorded signals and routine clinical variables. Existing generators, however, are built around a single conditioning modality and degrade when forced to handle the heterogeneous, irregularly missing mix of time-variant signals and static covariates seen in practice. We propose ReCoGen (Represent Conditions, then Generate), a two-stage framework that decouples multimodal condition representation from target generation. Stage I trains one masked autoencoder per modality, distilling each time-variant condition into a compact and missingness-tolerant token sequence. Stage II trains a flow-matching generator that fuses these tokens with static conditions to synthesize the target signal. Across three physiological benchmarks, including continuous glucose monitoring on AI-READI and arterial blood pressure generation on MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV, ReCoGen attains the best downstream utility on all sixteen (dataset, task, metric) settings, surpassing six representative conditional generators; on thirteen of them its utility also reaches or exceeds the utility measured on the real signal, a reference we read as an approximate anchor rather than a ceiling. Ablations trace the gains to the conditioning path: learnable cross-attention over the frozen per-modality encoders, and a dual token-plus-AdaLN route for the static conditions. ReCoGen thus turns routinely collected signals into informative surrogates for invasive or unavailable ones, a step toward less invasive, lower-cost continuous clinical monitoring.

Automating empirical research is a long-standing direction of AI. Recent automatic research (AutoResearch) agents bring this goal within reach, as modern LLMs show the capability to independently implement solutions and learn from the execution outcomes. Behind these gains, post-training (especially RL) plays a central role. In this paper, we identify a fundamental tension when scaling RL for these agents: the two components of every AutoResearch trajectory (agent generation and environment execution) scale in very different manners, since all generation shares compute through batching, while each execution occupies its exclusive sandbox and real machine time. As a result, the environment execution dominates the training cost and becomes the bottleneck as trajectories grow. To resolve this tension, we propose World Model RL (WMRL), which replaces environment execution with a world model to remove this bottleneck. Additionally, the world model can be imperfect, as its rewards are corrupted by bias and noise. Therefore, we further equip WMRL with two mitigations, Online Debiasing and Inverse-Variance Denoising, which offset the bias and suppress the noise respectively. Theoretically, we prove that both mitigations of WMRL strictly improve the convergence guarantee. Empirically, WMRL accelerates training by 3-4x on various tasks at different agent scales, while exceeding the performance of standard RL baselines. Moreover, our post-trained 4B and 9B agents outperform much larger open-weight agents of 48B and 120B on held-out benchmarks. Beyond AutoResearch, WMRL also transfers to post-training embodied VLA policies, which demonstrates the generalizability of our method.

In-vehicle music can serve as an adaptive interface to enhance driver experience, attention, and well-being. We present Drive-to-Music, a context-aware system that generates music in real time from multimodal driving signals. Using dashcam imagery and vehicle telemetry, the system extracts scene semantics and driving context, maps them to high-level musical descriptors, and conditions generative audio models to produce contextually aligned soundtracks. The architecture combines perception and generative components to translate visual and kinematic inputs into structured musical attributes and synthesize audio with low latency. It supports smooth transitions as driving conditions evolve, and to ensure robustness and deployment readiness, we incorporate constraint-based controls and safety checks across the generation pipeline. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of real-time, context-aware music generation in automotive settings, providing a foundation for personalized and adaptive in-vehicle audio experiences.

Existing screenshot-to-code systems face a trade-off between flexibility and controllability. Direct multimodal generation can hallucinate visible details, whereas structured pipelines reduce such errors through component-wise decomposition, predefined templates, and customized intermediate representations. These structures, however, introduce additional generative orchestration and restrict outputs to designs covered by the representation. We investigate whether selective tool grounding can improve the fidelity--efficiency trade-off of direct widget-to-code generation. We introduce WidgetGen, a lightweight tool-grounded framework that extracts observable text and color evidence, performs high-level layout and optional chart reasoning, and directly generates executable JavaScript XML (JSX). This design reduces reliance on component-wise generation while avoiding a fixed UI schema. Across six multimodal models and \(1{,}000\) held-out widgets, WidgetGen outperforms direct prompting and the structured Widget2Code pipeline on most visual reconstruction metrics, with consistent gains in area, legibility, and style. Finally, reconstruction-derived image-code pairs improve six Qwen-family open-weight models across every reported metric through supervised fine-tuning. These results establish WidgetGen as a strong lightweight baseline and show that selective evidence grounding offers an effective alternative to extensive representation constraints.

We formulate generative modeling as a path integral in which flow-based, diffusion-based, variational, and adversarial models arise as different evaluation principles for a single master action. Its Martin-Siggia-Rose-Janssen-de~Dominicis (MSRJD) form separates free from interacting probability flows and opens them to diagrammatic perturbation theory. The expansion yields a one-loop correction to deterministic samplers at no stochastic-sampling cost, which we validate on solvable and nonlinear drifts, where it reduces a 53 % tree-level error to 1.6 %. Imperfect learned scores enter as insertions and yield a response-weighted score-matching objective, and symmetry-equivariant drift design becomes an operator expansion with EFT power counting.

Memory is a core component of AI agents, enabling them to accumulate experience, maintain personalization, and adapt over long-term interactions. However, existing memory systems often remain fixed after development, limiting their ability to adapt their memory models, organization strategies, and procedural knowledge through continued use. We present MindMemOS, a portable and self-evolving memory operating layer that organizes open-world information using a unified entity property timestructure. MindMemOS supports scenario-adaptive memory modeling, higher-order pattern discovery, autonomous memory refinement, and continuous skill evolution. Its MindMemEvolve algorithm employs validation-driven evolutionary search to optimize memory schemas for target scenarios, whiledreaming consolidates accumulated memories by merging redundant records and resolving conflicts. In addition, implicit corrective feedback serves as a human-in-the-loop signal for identifying and revising potentially inaccurate or misaligned memories. Its MindSkillEvolve algorithm further transforms agent execution trajectories into reusable and progressively refined skills. MindMemOS achieves 94.03% accuracy on LOCOMO and 70.63% on PersonaMem. MindSkillEvolve improves SpreadsheetBench success by 9.2 percentage points over the initial-skill baseline.

Large language models (LLMs) cannot retain post-deployment experience without parameter updates. We introduce DIVE, a diversity-driven framework that enables frozen LLMs to improve by evolving persistent natural-language skills from task experience and verifier feedback. These skills encode reusable reasoning procedures, verification strategies, common failure modes, and output constraints and are both executed and revised by the same underlying model without access to a teacher model. Since natural-language skill evolution is a stochastic, non-convex search process, optimizing a single skill trajectory can overfit to sampled experience or converge to a suboptimal solution. DIVE mitigates this optimization variance by independently evolving multiple skill populations from bootstrapped experience, adaptively refining them through diverse transformations, and jointly selecting a complementary set of skills. Across six mathematical and logical reasoning tasks and multiple model families, DIVE consistently outperforms existing reasoning methods, prompt-optimization approaches, skill-development frameworks, and memory-based baselines. It achieves rapid self-improvement from accumulated experience, obtaining substantially larger performance gains with fewer rollouts than parameter-based methods such as SFT and GRPO, and prompt optimization with GEPA. Further, the resulting skills transfer across model scales and families, enabling smaller models such as GPT-5-nano to match or outperform larger counterparts, i.e., GPT-5, under conventional prompting. These results establish diversity-driven skill evolution as an effective, interpretable, and parameter-free approach to LLM self-improvement.

Long-running LLM agents act through tools, and a single step can send an email, merge a pull request, or wire a payment. The steering decision is the pre-commit choice at that boundary: proceed, or hold for human or policy review. We introduce SteerBench-Work, an incident-anchored, bidirectional benchmark for that decision in workplace agents across developer operations, customer service, finance, legal, medical, HR, and security. Release v2026-05 contains 106 scenarios anchored in public incidents, paired evidence-reversed mirrors, and calibration controls, with labels split nearly evenly between proceed and hold so the two error directions get near-identical numbers of chances. A model sees the proposed action and the available evidence, returns a gate decision, and is scored on whether it crosses or holds the boundary correctly. Across 30 model conditions the failures run almost entirely in one direction: models wrongly hold authorized, evidence-cleared work on 28.1% of opportunities and wrongly allow unsafe work on 1.0%. The hardest cases are risk-resolved commits, where signed or structured evidence has already cleared a real risk trigger, and models score markedly worse on evidence-reversed mirrors of famous incidents (63.8%) than on the incidents themselves (98.5%). General capability is not the same as steering calibration: higher-capability models often over-refuse at the commit boundary, and more reasoning can repair a weak gate while leaving a calibrated one flat. The public leaderboard is at steerbench.com.

Multi-AUV ad-hoc network-based target tracking requires networked autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to cooperatively track maneuvering targets under constrained acoustic communication, dynamic topology, and uncertain ocean disturbances. Although multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) enables decentralized coordination through centralized training, existing methods suffer from high-dimensional joint state-action modeling, noise-sensitive policy generation, leading to unstable training and degraded tracking. To address these issues, we propose VGG-MADiffRL, a value-gradient-guided multi-agent diffusion RL algorithm, and MDCA, a diffusion?based hierarchical control architecture. Leveraging underwater mission characteristics, we model sonar detection mechanisms and ocean current disturbances, formulating cooperative tracking for multi-AUV ad-hoc networks as an MDP. The proposed MDCA constitutes a three-tier closed-loop control framework: a global intelligent control layer, a local online training layer, and a physical action execution layer. This structure enables synergistic optimization across task allocation, local decision processes, and execution feedback. Within MDCA, the local online training layer is the policy learning framework; VGG-MADiffRL builds on diffusion policies and incorporates value gradients to guide action generation in the reverse denoising process, steering the generated actions towards higher expected returns. It employs twin value networks with joint optimization and soft target updates to mitigate overestimation and training oscillations, promoting more stable convergence. Experimental results show that VGG-MADiffRL consistently achieves faster convergence, higher tracking accuracy, and smoother training dynamics in cooperative tracking scenarios, validating its effectiveness and practical engineering value in dynamic underwater settings.

Large language model agents deployed without a central controller are often assumed to require communication to coordinate their actions. We ask what remains possible without it: when independent instances of the same model cannot communicate, can they still reason about their counterparts well enough to exceed the standard game-theoretic baseline for uncoordinated play? We introduce a benchmark of one-shot, no-communication games in which each of thirteen language models is told only that its counterparts are running the same model and is evaluated against the Nash equilibrium of the underlying game. In two-player matrix games spanning seven archetypes and two to ten actions per player, two frontier-hosted models consistently exceed their Nash benchmark, approaching the optimal joint outcome in several archetypes, while most open-weight models achieve only partial gains that vary sharply by game structure. Performance degrades substantially in team-based games with four or more interchangeable agents, particularly as the action space grows, suggesting that whatever capability drives self-play gains in dyadic games does not transfer to larger multi-agent teams.

Strategic reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) within long-horizon environments is often limited by inconsistent subgoals. In these settings, finite attention resources prevent the model from maintaining strategic coherence over thousands of steps. This limitation leads to strategic drift, where localized decisions fail to sustain a coherent trajectory across reasoning. To address this, we introduce EpicStar, a framework that enables agents to learn memory as policy to tackle long-horizon reasoning. Specifically, the agent maintains a bank of successful past episodes as a heuristic alongside a working memory to track short-term environmental changes. During inference, a dynamic gating mechanism determines whether to execute a retrieved action directly or to perform new reasoning through a contextual fusion of the retrieved episodes and current working memory. Utilizing StarCraft II as the testbed, we evaluated EpicStar against diverse opponent styles. It significantly outperforms baseline methods, achieving higher win rates while consuming an order of magnitude fewer tokens, and it maintains this advantage consistently across difficulty levels and opponent strategies. Our findings provide compelling evidence that structured cross-episode memory is essential for enabling LLM agents to perform robust, long-term strategic execution in dynamic, autonomous settings.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have recently attracted increasing attention as an energy-efficient learning paradigm. Existing works also propose temporally and fully local online SNN training algorithms to address memory and computation overhead. However, they do not consider whether the algorithmic advantages can be effectively translated into real-device efficiency. To address this challenge, we present Lonic, an algorithm-hardware co-design for energy-efficient and scalable fully local online supervised SNN learning. On the algorithm side, we implement an INT4 low-precision training algorithm for fully local online SNN learning while maintaining accuracy. On the hardware side, to leverage the benefits of the proposed algorithm, we introduce reconfigurable multiplier-free integer PE arrays, dual-optimization zero-gating strategy, temporal prefix-accelerated local learning dataflow, and low-precision weight movement to significantly improve training efficiency. Compared to Apple M4 and Nvidia V100 GPUs, Lonic achieves average energy efficiency improvements of 17.44x and 66.28x, respectively, along with speedups of 3.25x and 1.02x, respectively. Moreover, Lonic achieves 15.95x (14.64x) and 1.52x (7.28x) energy efficiency (area efficiency) over ASIC TPU-like and H2Learn accelerators, respectively. The code for Lonic is available at https://github.com/peilin-chen/Lonic.

Top-k selection is a fundamental computational primitive with applications spanning databases, information retrieval, signal processing, and modern machine learning workloads, including sparse activations and attention pruning. As data sizes grow, existing approaches become inefficient: exact methods incur high memory and compute overhead, while approximate methods often rely on brittle heuristics that degrade under adversarial or heavy-tailed inputs. In this paper, we introduce Prof-K, a fast, scalable, and distribution-agnostic top-k algorithm with probabilistic correctness guarantees. Prof-K performs a single-pass filtering procedure: a small random sample estimates an adaptive threshold, the N input elements are streamed once into a compact buffer, and an exact top-k routine on this buffer recovers the true top-k elements with probability at least 1 - $ε$, where $ε$ > 0 is user specified. We derive high-probability guarantees for correctness and buffer size, together with an approximately optimal sample size that minimizes overhead as a function of N and k. Empirically, Prof-K achieves 1.5x-10x speedups over the highly optimized PyTorch topk and recent RadiK implementations, with the largest gains in the large-scale, small-to-moderate-k regime where prior methods struggle most. Unlike previous approaches, these guarantees hold independently of the input distribution, ensuring robustness to adversarial settings. By relaxing the recall target (e.g., recovering 95% of the true top-k values), Prof-K additionally provides a principled accuracy-speed trade-off. We further demonstrate its impact on training BatchTopK Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), where top-k selection constitutes a significant portion of the training cost.

GPU kernel agents and GPU programming languages have advanced separately, leaving expert kernels difficult to reproduce. Agents usually treat the compiler as a fixed black box and receive only errors, correctness outcomes, and timing, while existing DSLs either hide critical scheduling decisions or expose them through difficult layout abstractions. We present CAKE, a compiler-agent co-design in which agents author CAKE IR, a typed, hardware-explicit schedule representation. CAKE exposes warp roles, memory movement, synchronization, and pipelines while supporting verification, cost modeling, and localized diagnostics. The harness itself evolves: recurring failures become verifier rules, IR primitives, model calibrations, and reusable optimization tactics. In matched implementation-hidden Flash-KMeans clean starts on B200, the best CAKE IR candidate at an 80-million-token budget runs at 1.144x the tuned FlashML baseline, compared with 0.928x for direct CUDA/PTX. Beyond this benchmark, agent-generated Kimi Delta Attention achieves a 2.05x geometric-mean speedup over official FlashKDA and passes end-to-end serving validation. Dispatcher-backed KNN and KMeans improve performance by 1.42x to 2.12x across more than 400 shapes, and four kernel changes are available as upstream PRs. CAKE targets NVIDIA GPUs from Ampere through Blackwell and separates single-shape evolution from library generalization and dispatch.

Large language models increasingly need to generate structured outputs that conform to predefined schemas, with one common constraint being selection from a finite set of valid strings. Current constrained decoding systems handle this through general-purpose grammar compilation, which becomes prohibitively slow as the number of valid values grows into the thousands, a cardinality wall. We introduce the trie automaton, a specialized mechanism that exploits finite-set structure (shared prefixes, bounded depth, known cardinality) via Aho-Corasick multi-pattern matching to precompute per-node token masks. The trie achieves 7X faster per-step valid-token computation (0.65 us vs. 5.8 us) compared to XGrammar, one of the primary backends in vLLM and SGLang, and 2--6.5X faster compilation at K >= 300. Because precomputed masks enable a stateless serving path that bypasses the guided decoding pipeline, this advantage compounds in batch serving: end-to-end vLLM throughput reaches 219 req/s vs. XGrammar's 7.5 req/s at batch size 256 (29X). The 29X combines the algorithmic speedup with integration-path savings that only precomputed masks can unlock. Across seven tokenizer families (32K--262K vocabulary), the trie maintains sub-100ms compilation up to K = 10,000 and flat per-step cost regardless of set size, while guaranteeing 100% output validity.

Transformers owe much of their strong long-context retrieval capability to a token-level memory that grows with context length. This flexibility, however, incurs a quadratic computation complexity during training and a key--value cache that grows linearly during autoregressive inference. Recurrent alternatives offer efficient decoding by compressing the entire history into a fixed-size state, but often underperform on recall-intensive tasks since earlier associations usually get overwritten by subsequent updates, and only the most recent contextual information is retained. In this paper, we introduce Memory-Anchor Routing across Context History (MARCH), a network architecture that effectively scales state-space models beyond a fixed-size dimension, while maintaining computational efficiency over long-sequences. MARCH periodically caches cumulative recurrent-state checkpoints as state anchors and associates each anchor with a compact, content-conditioned anchor key. This lets MARCH maintain a memory bank, which can grow as context length increases, providing a controllable trade-off between historical resolution and memory cost. At each token, MARCH produces an anchor query to attend all causally available state anchors, and the output is calculated as an attention-style aggregation over all historical anchors along the current state. We show that after standard pretraining, MARCH consistently outperforms multiple linear attention variants across commonsense reasoning, LongBench, and in-context retrieval. These results demonstrate that content-routed state caching substantially strengthens recurrent long-range memory while preserving its native computation path.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable breakthroughs across various applications. However, their architectures remain inefficient in pretraining due to two main limitations: (i) self-attention lacks an explicit inductive bias for locality, leading to redundant modeling of sequence-internal local information; (ii) mixture-of-experts (MoE) implicitly couples knowledge storage with computational pathways, hindering flexible access to sequence-external global knowledge. To overcome these limitations, we propose LoKiFormer, a novel LLM architecture that augments the standard decoder with two dedicated modules: 1) Local Fusion Attention (LFA), which incorporates a convolutional fusion to attention, explicitly capturing local patterns and allowing the attention to operate on more informative representations; 2) Knowledge Memory Module (KMM), which introduces a parametric key-value memory that explicitly stores global knowledge in addressable slots, decoupling storage from computation and enabling direct knowledge retrieval. Together, these modules enable LoKiFormer to achieve more efficient and effective integration of information at both levels. Experimental results show that LoKiFormer converges 1.33x faster in pre-training than baseline models, underscoring its superiority over existing LLM architectures.

Achieving effective self-correction, where models verify and correct their own mistakes, remains a fundamental challenge for large language models (LLMs). In this work, we propose Self-Fix Step-DPO (SFS-DPO), a reinforcement learning based, two-stage framework for step-level self-verification and self-correction. The first stage strengthens step-level reasoning via step-level preference optimization, while the second stage explicitly trains models to self-verify and self-correct. We further introduce a teacher-assisted variant, SFS-DPO-R, which incorporates explanatory rationales for error verification to provide stronger corrective signals. Comprehensive in-domain and out-of-domain evaluations across multiple LLMs demonstrate that SFS-DPO and SFS-DPO-R consistently outperform prior step-level training baselines. Our analysis further reveals improvements in self-correction frequency and effectiveness, highlighting the importance of strengthening step-level reasoning for robust performance.

This work addresses the challenge of open-vocabulary instance segmentation (OVIS) and open-set panoptic segmentation (OSPS), which aim to recognize both predefined and unseen object categories without exhaustive human annotations. Existing methods often suffer from noisy pseudo-masks, limited visual-textual grounding, and difficulty handling synonyms or out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. To overcome these challenges, we propose a multimodal framework that leverages pre-trained vision-language models for automatic pseudo-label generation, CLIP-guided synonym filtering, and GPT-based caption reconstruction. In our target-vocabulary-assisted pseudo-labeling setting, the framework first constructs pseudo segmentation masks, descriptive captions, and semantically aligned synonym sets using Grounded SAM, LLaVA, and CLIP, providing multimodal supervision without manual annotation. We then enhance visual-textual alignment through three complementary training objectives: an extended grounding loss that incorporates visually grounded synonyms, a semantic consistency loss, and a generative caption reconstruction loss. Extensive experiments on the COCO dataset demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches under this protocol, achieving substantial improvements on both OVIS and OSPS benchmarks.

Large language model (LLM) agents integrated with external tools are vulnerable to indirect prompt injections embedded in environmental states. However, existing studies largely rely on manually implemented or reused environments, stochastic LLM-based tool simulation, and predefined injection locations, limiting scalable security research across broader domains. To bridge this gap, we propose **ToolHazard**, a scalable adversarial environment synthesis framework that reduces human engineering and supports expansion with additional seed domains and compute. Through an Environment Simulator, an Attacker Agent, and a User Simulator, ToolHazard synthesizes executable stateful environments, discovers viable injection points and generates environment-specific payloads, and constructs state-grounded long-horizon tasks. Based on ToolHazard, we build **ToolHazard-Bench** for stress-testing agents under complex workflows and diverse environmental attacks. Experiments reveal substantial agent vulnerabilities and show that injection timing and placement affect attack effectiveness. Moreover, ToolHazard-generated alignment data improves security on both ToolHazard-Bench and AgentDojo while preserving benign task utility.

We consider the setting of Normalizing flows with approximate inverses, an established paradigm spanning both full-dimensional ($d=D$) and bottleneck ($d<D$) settings, and group these models under the term flow autoencoders. We present a theoretical investigation into their training dynamics and prove that the proposed loss used by existing approaches is suboptimal; specifically, both encoder and decoder surrogates must be optimized in alignment with reconstruction loss. Guided by these insights, we propose Normalizing Autoencoder (NAE), which employs a novel conditional loss that aligns the surrogate loss gradient with that of reconstruction loss, directly improving upon the current standard. Extensive experiments across molecule generation, tabular data, and image benchmarks demonstrate that NAE achieves state of the art performance. Our work highlights the importance of loss alignment in flow autoencoders and establishes NAE as a powerful generative framework.

On-policy rollout methods such as GRPO are central to post-training of large language models, yet they frequently suffer from training instabilities, cross-task capability degradation, and response-length inflation. Although prior work has characterized the subspace geometry of aggregate updates, the stepwise variation of this geometry and its relationship to model performance remain unclear. We introduce Principal-Subspace Overlap, a dimension-corrected measure of individual rollout updates relative to the dominant singular subspaces of pretrained weights. Despite low average overlap, transient spikes often precede performance degradation. To address this, we propose GCPO (Geometrically Constrained Policy Optimization), which applies hard bilateral orthogonal projections to constrain updates to the complementary subspaces, preventing such excursions by construction. Across mathematical reasoning, code generation, and tool-use tasks on Qwen3-8B and GLM4-9B, GCPO consistently outperforms GRPO and recent variants, including DAPO and GSPO, improving over the base models and the strongest baseline by up to 27.69 and 2.37 points, respectively. Furthermore, GCPO preserves general capabilities, eliminates response-length inflation, and stabilizes policy entropy. Our findings provide a new diagnostic lens and a principled design perspective for stable reinforcement learning post-training.