Daily Papers

Large Language Models (LLMs) are improving at an exceptional rate. With the advent of agentic workflows, multi-turn dialogue has become the de facto mode of interaction with LLMs for completing long and complex tasks. While LLM capabilities continue to improve, they remain increasingly susceptible to jailbreaking, especially in multi-turn scenarios where harmful intent can be subtly injected across the conversation to produce nefarious outcomes. While single-turn attacks have been extensively explored, adaptability, efficiency and effectiveness continue to remain key challenges for their multi-turn counterparts. To address these gaps, we present PLAGUE, a novel plug-and-play framework for designing multi-turn attacks inspired by lifelong-learning agents. PLAGUE dissects the lifetime of a multi-turn attack into three carefully designed phases (Primer, Planner and Finisher) that enable a systematic and information-rich exploration of the multi-turn attack family. Evaluations show that red-teaming agents designed using PLAGUE achieve state-of-the-art jailbreaking results, improving attack success rates (ASR) by more than 30% across leading models in a lesser or comparable query budget. Particularly, PLAGUE enables an ASR (based on StrongReject) of 81.4% on OpenAI's o3 and 67.3% on Claude's Opus 4.1, two models that are considered highly resistant to jailbreaks in safety literature. Our work offers tools and insights to understand the importance of plan initialization, context optimization and lifelong learning in crafting multi-turn attacks for a comprehensive model vulnerability evaluation.

Video-to-video editing involves editing a source video along with additional control (such as text prompts, subjects, or styles) to generate a new video that aligns with the source video and the provided control. Traditional methods have been constrained to certain editing types, limiting their ability to meet the wide range of user demands. In this paper, we introduce AnyV2V, a novel training-free framework designed to simplify video editing into two primary steps: (1) employing an off-the-shelf image editing model (e.g. InstructPix2Pix, InstantID, etc) to modify the first frame, (2) utilizing an existing image-to-video generation model (e.g. I2VGen-XL) for DDIM inversion and feature injection. In the first stage, AnyV2V can plug in any existing image editing tools to support an extensive array of video editing tasks. Beyond the traditional prompt-based editing methods, AnyV2V also can support novel video editing tasks, including reference-based style transfer, subject-driven editing, and identity manipulation, which were unattainable by previous methods. In the second stage, AnyV2V can plug in any existing image-to-video models to perform DDIM inversion and intermediate feature injection to maintain the appearance and motion consistency with the source video. On the prompt-based editing, we show that AnyV2V can outperform the previous best approach by 35\% on prompt alignment, and 25\% on human preference. On the three novel tasks, we show that AnyV2V also achieves a high success rate. We believe AnyV2V will continue to thrive due to its ability to seamlessly integrate the fast-evolving image editing methods. Such compatibility can help AnyV2V to increase its versatility to cater to diverse user demands.

In domains such as biomedicine, materials, and finance, high-stakes deployment of large language models (LLMs) requires injecting private, domain-specific knowledge that is proprietary, fast-evolving, and under-represented in public pretraining. However, the two dominant paradigms for private knowledge injection each have pronounced drawbacks: fine-tuning is expensive to iterate, and continual updates risk catastrophic forgetting and general-capability regression; retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) keeps the base model intact but is brittle in specialized private corpora due to chunk-induced evidence fragmentation, retrieval drift, and long-context pressure that yields query-dependent prompt inflation. Inspired by how multimodal LLMs align heterogeneous modalities into a shared semantic space, we propose Generation-Augmented Generation (GAG), which treats private expertise as an additional expert modality and injects it via a compact, representation-level interface aligned to the frozen base model, avoiding prompt-time evidence serialization while enabling plug-and-play specialization and scalable multi-domain composition with reliable selective activation. Across two private scientific QA benchmarks (immunology adjuvant and catalytic materials) and mixed-domain evaluations, GAG improves specialist performance over strong RAG baselines by 15.34% and 14.86% on the two benchmarks, respectively, while maintaining performance on six open general benchmarks and enabling near-oracle selective activation for scalable multi-domain deployment.

RGBA images, with the additional alpha channel, are crucial for any application that needs blending, masking, or transparency effects, making them more versatile than standard RGB images. Nevertheless, existing image inpainting methods are designed exclusively for RGB images. Conventional approaches to transparent image inpainting typically involve placing a background underneath RGBA images and employing a two-stage process: image inpainting followed by image matting. This pipeline, however, struggles to preserve transparency consistency in edited regions, and matting can introduce jagged edges along transparency boundaries. To address these challenges, we propose Trans-Adapter, a plug-and-play adapter that enables diffusion-based inpainting models to process transparent images directly. Trans-Adapter also supports controllable editing via ControlNet and can be seamlessly integrated into various community models. To evaluate our method, we introduce LayerBench, along with a novel non-reference alpha edge quality evaluation metric for assessing transparency edge quality. We conduct extensive experiments on LayerBench to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Multimodal documents contain diverse elements, such as tables, figures, and layouts, which can complicate retrieval tasks. While current approaches typically combine dense visual embedding models with supervised rerankers to achieve high-precision retrieval, they face inherent limitations. First, the coarse-grained nature of dense embeddings tends to obfuscate explicit semantics, failing to leverage structurally salient information. Second, supervised reranking models suffer from generalization bottlenecks, as their performance heavily relies on domain-specific training data. Furthermore, existing benchmarks often lack diverse assessment dimensions and comprehensive relevance annotations, limiting reliable evaluation. To address these challenges, we propose DocRetriever, a plug-and-play framework. It enhances visual retrieval via a layout-aware sparse embedding technique, enabling effective hybrid encoding without the overhead of optical character recognition (OCR). We also introduce a generalizable reranker that leverages reasoning-augmented demonstrations and optimized sampling to improve accuracy in few-shot settings. Finally, we construct a new benchmark, MultiDocR, to enable more rigorous evaluation. Experiments across diverse benchmarks validate DocRetriever's superiority over state-of-the-art methods.

Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) is a widely used criterion for training supervised sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models. It enables learning the relations between input and output sequences, termed alignments, by marginalizing over perfect alignments (that yield the ground truth), at the expense of imperfect alignments. This binary differentiation of perfect and imperfect alignments falls short of capturing other essential alignment properties that hold significance in other real-world applications. Here we propose Align With Purpose, a general Plug-and-Play framework for enhancing a desired property in models trained with the CTC criterion. We do that by complementing the CTC with an additional loss term that prioritizes alignments according to a desired property. Our method does not require any intervention in the CTC loss function, enables easy optimization of a variety of properties, and allows differentiation between both perfect and imperfect alignments. We apply our framework in the domain of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and show its generality in terms of property selection, architectural choice, and scale of training dataset (up to 280,000 hours). To demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, we apply it to two unrelated properties: emission time and word error rate (WER). For the former, we report an improvement of up to 570ms in latency optimization with a minor reduction in WER, and for the latter, we report a relative improvement of 4.5% WER over the baseline models. To the best of our knowledge, these applications have never been demonstrated to work on a scale of data as large as ours. Notably, our method can be implemented using only a few lines of code, and can be extended to other alignment-free loss functions and to domains other than ASR.

Plug-and-play Image Restoration (IR) has been widely recognized as a flexible and interpretable method for solving various inverse problems by utilizing any off-the-shelf denoiser as the implicit image prior. However, most existing methods focus on discriminative Gaussian denoisers. Although diffusion models have shown impressive performance for high-quality image synthesis, their potential to serve as a generative denoiser prior to the plug-and-play IR methods remains to be further explored. While several other attempts have been made to adopt diffusion models for image restoration, they either fail to achieve satisfactory results or typically require an unacceptable number of Neural Function Evaluations (NFEs) during inference. This paper proposes DiffPIR, which integrates the traditional plug-and-play method into the diffusion sampling framework. Compared to plug-and-play IR methods that rely on discriminative Gaussian denoisers, DiffPIR is expected to inherit the generative ability of diffusion models. Experimental results on three representative IR tasks, including super-resolution, image deblurring, and inpainting, demonstrate that DiffPIR achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the FFHQ and ImageNet datasets in terms of reconstruction faithfulness and perceptual quality with no more than 100 NFEs. The source code is available at {https://github.com/yuanzhi-zhu/DiffPIR}

Style transfer in diffusion models enables controllable visual generation by injecting the style of a reference image. However, recent encoder-based methods, while efficient and tuning-free, often suffer from content leakage, where semantic elements from the style image undesirably appear in the output, impairing prompt fidelity and stylistic consistency. In this work, we introduce CleanStyle, a plug-and-play framework that filters out content-related noise from the style embedding without retraining. Motivated by empirical analysis, we observe that such leakage predominantly stems from the tail components of the style embedding, which are isolated via Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). To address this, we propose CleanStyleSVD (CS-SVD), which dynamically suppresses tail components using a time-aware exponential schedule, providing clean, style-preserving conditional embeddings throughout the denoising process. Furthermore, we present Style-Specific Classifier-Free Guidance (SS-CFG), which reuses the suppressed tail components to construct style-aware unconditional inputs. Unlike conventional methods that use generic negative embeddings (e.g., zero vectors), SS-CFG introduces targeted negative signals that reflect style-specific but prompt-irrelevant visual elements. This enables the model to effectively suppress these distracting patterns during generation, thereby improving prompt fidelity and enhancing the overall visual quality of stylized outputs. Our approach is lightweight, interpretable, and can be seamlessly integrated into existing encoder-based diffusion models without retraining. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CleanStyle substantially reduces content leakage, improves stylization quality and improves prompt alignment across a wide range of style references and prompts.

Recent advances in diffusion models have significantly improved image and video synthesis. In addition, several concept control methods have been proposed to enable fine-grained, continuous, and flexible control over free-form text prompts. However, these methods not only require intensive training time and GPU memory usage to learn the sliders or embeddings but also need to be retrained for different diffusion backbones, limiting their scalability and adaptability. To address these limitations, we introduce Text Slider, a lightweight, efficient and plug-and-play framework that identifies low-rank directions within a pre-trained text encoder, enabling continuous control of visual concepts while significantly reducing training time, GPU memory consumption, and the number of trainable parameters. Furthermore, Text Slider supports multi-concept composition and continuous control, enabling fine-grained and flexible manipulation in both image and video synthesis. We show that Text Slider enables smooth and continuous modulation of specific attributes while preserving the original spatial layout and structure of the input. Text Slider achieves significantly better efficiency: 5times faster training than Concept Slider and 47times faster than Attribute Control, while reducing GPU memory usage by nearly 2times and 4times, respectively.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable performance across various NLP tasks. However, they often generate incorrect or hallucinated information, which hinders their practical applicability in real-world scenarios. Human feedback has been shown to effectively enhance the factuality and quality of generated content, addressing some of these limitations. However, this approach is resource-intensive, involving manual input and supervision, which can be time-consuming and expensive. Moreover, it cannot be provided during inference, further limiting its practical utility in dynamic and interactive applications. In this paper, we introduce ReFeed, a novel pipeline designed to enhance LLMs by providing automatic retrieval feedback in a plug-and-play framework without the need for expensive fine-tuning. ReFeed first generates initial outputs, then utilizes a retrieval model to acquire relevant information from large document collections, and finally incorporates the retrieved information into the in-context demonstration for output refinement, thereby addressing the limitations of LLMs in a more efficient and cost-effective manner. Experiments on four knowledge-intensive benchmark datasets demonstrate our proposed ReFeed could improve over +6.0% under zero-shot setting and +2.5% under few-shot setting, compared to baselines without using retrieval feedback.

Generating high-fidelity human videos that match user-specified identities is important yet challenging in the field of generative AI. Existing methods often rely on an excessive number of training parameters and lack compatibility with other AIGC tools. In this paper, we propose Stand-In, a lightweight and plug-and-play framework for identity preservation in video generation. Specifically, we introduce a conditional image branch into the pre-trained video generation model. Identity control is achieved through restricted self-attentions with conditional position mapping, and can be learned quickly with only 2000 pairs. Despite incorporating and training just sim1\% additional parameters, our framework achieves excellent results in video quality and identity preservation, outperforming other full-parameter training methods. Moreover, our framework can be seamlessly integrated for other tasks, such as subject-driven video generation, pose-referenced video generation, stylization, and face swapping.

Large vision-language models have endowed GUI agents with strong general capabilities for interface understanding and interaction. However, due to insufficient exposure to domain-specific software operation data during training, these agents exhibit significant domain bias - they lack familiarity with the specific operation workflows (planning) and UI element layouts (grounding) of particular applications, limiting their real-world task performance. In this paper, we present GUIDE (GUI Unbiasing via Instructional-Video Driven Expertise), a training-free, plug-and-play framework that resolves GUI agent domain bias by autonomously acquiring domain-specific expertise from web tutorial videos through a retrieval-augmented automated annotation pipeline. GUIDE introduces two key innovations. First, a subtitle-driven Video-RAG pipeline unlocks video semantics through subtitle analysis, performing progressive three-stage retrieval - domain classification, topic extraction, and relevance matching - to identify task-relevant tutorial videos. Second, a fully automated annotation pipeline built on an inverse dynamics paradigm feeds consecutive keyframes enhanced with UI element detection into VLMs, inferring the required planning and grounding knowledge that are injected into the agent's corresponding modules to address both manifestations of domain bias. Extensive experiments on OSWorld demonstrate GUIDE's generality as a plug-and-play component for both multi-agent systems and single-model agents. It consistently yields over 5% improvements and reduces execution steps - without modifying any model parameters or architecture - validating GUIDE as an architecture-agnostic enhancement to bridge GUI agent domain bias.

Controllable captioning is essential for precise multimodal alignment and instruction following, yet existing models often lack fine-grained control and reliable evaluation protocols. To address this gap, we present the AnyCap Project, an integrated solution spanning model, dataset, and evaluation. We introduce AnyCapModel (ACM), a lightweight plug-and-play framework that enhances the controllability of existing foundation models for omni-modal captioning without retraining the base model. ACM reuses the original captions from base models while incorporating user instructions and modality features to generate improved captions. To remedy the data scarcity in controllable multimodal captioning, we build AnyCapDataset (ACD), covering three modalities, 28 user-instruction types, and 300\,k high-quality data entries. We further propose AnyCapEval, a new benchmark that provides more reliable evaluation metrics for controllable captioning by decoupling content accuracy and stylistic fidelity. ACM markedly improves caption quality across a diverse set of base models on AnyCapEval. Notably, ACM-8B raises GPT-4o\'s content scores by 45\% and style scores by 12\%, and it also achieves substantial gains on widely used benchmarks such as MIA-Bench and VidCapBench.

Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong reasoning abilities, often amplified by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and reinforcement learning (RL). Although RL algorithms can substantially improve reasoning, they struggle to expand reasoning boundaries because they learn from their own reasoning trajectories rather than acquiring external knowledge. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) offers complementary benefits but typically requires large-scale data and risks overfitting. Recent attempts to combine SFT and RL face three main challenges: data inefficiency, algorithm-specific designs, and catastrophic forgetting. We propose a plug-and-play framework that dynamically integrates SFT into RL by selecting challenging examples for SFT. This approach reduces SFT data requirements and remains agnostic to the choice of RL or SFT algorithm. To mitigate catastrophic forgetting of RL-acquired skills during SFT, we select high-entropy tokens for loss calculation and freeze parameters identified as critical for RL. Our method achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) reasoning performance using only 1.5% of the SFT data and 20.4% of the RL data used by prior SoTA, providing an efficient and plug-and-play solution for combining SFT and RL in reasoning post-training.

Current Vision-Language Models struggle with hours-long videos because processing full-length visual sequences induces prohibitive token explosion and attention dilution. To overcome this, we introduce MemDreamer to decouple perception and reasoning, shifting long-video understanding into an agentic exploration process. As a plug-and-play framework, it incrementally streams videos to construct a Hierarchical Graph Memory, a top-down three-tier architecture for semantic abstraction, anchored by a foundational graph capturing spatiotemporal and causal relations. During inference, the reasoning model employs agentic tool-augmented retrieval, navigating hierarchies, searching nodes, and traversing logical edges via an Observation-Reason-Action loop. Experiments show MemDreamer achieves SOTA results across four mainstream benchmarks, narrowing the gap with human experts to only 3.7 points. It constrains the reasoning context window to merely 2% of full-context ingestion while delivering a 12.5 point absolute accuracy gain. Furthermore, statistical analysis uncovers a strong positive linear correlation between an VLM's performance on logic reasoning and long-video understanding benchmarks, establishing agentic capability scaling as a new paradigm for multimodal comprehension.

Recently, advanced large language models (LLMs) have emerged at an increasingly rapid pace. However, when faced with complex problems, most users are often unable to provide accurate and effective prompts to interact with LLMs, thus limiting the performance of LLMs. To address this challenge, we propose Prompt-R1, an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework that uses a small-scale LLM to collaborate with large-scale LLMs, replacing user interaction to solve problems better. This collaboration is cast as a multi-turn prompt interaction, where the small-scale LLM thinks and generates prompts, and the large-scale LLM performs complex reasoning. A dual-constrained reward is designed to optimize for correctness, generation quality, and reasoning accuracy. Prompt-R1 provides a plug-and-play framework that supports both inference and training with various large-scale LLMs. Experiments on multiple public datasets show that Prompt-R1 significantly outperforms baseline models across tasks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/QwenQKing/Prompt-R1.

In this paper, the LCVO modular method is proposed for the Visual Question Answering (VQA) Grounding task in the vision-language multimodal domain. This approach relies on a frozen large language model (LLM) as intermediate mediator between the off-the-shelf VQA model and the off-the-shelf Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVD) model, where the LLM transforms and conveys textual information between the two modules based on a designed prompt. LCVO establish an integrated plug-and-play framework without the need for any pre-training process. This framework can be deployed for VQA Grounding tasks under low computational resources. The modularized model within the framework allows application with various state-of-the-art pre-trained models, exhibiting significant potential to be advance with the times. Experimental implementations were conducted under constrained computational and memory resources, evaluating the proposed method's performance on benchmark datasets including GQA, CLEVR, and VizWiz-VQA-Grounding. Comparative analyses with baseline methods demonstrate the robust competitiveness of LCVO.

Although contrastive and other representation-learning methods have long been explored in vision and NLP, their adoption in modern time series forecasters remains limited. We believe they hold strong promise for this domain. To unlock this potential, we explicitly align past and future representations, thereby bridging the distributional gap between input histories and future targets. To this end, we introduce TimeAlign, a lightweight, plug-and-play framework that establishes a new representation paradigm, distinct from contrastive learning, by aligning auxiliary features via a simple reconstruction task and feeding them back into any base forecaster. Extensive experiments across eight benchmarks verify its superior performance. Further studies indicate that the gains arise primarily from correcting frequency mismatches between historical inputs and future outputs. Additionally, we provide two theoretical justifications for how reconstruction improves forecasting generalization and how alignment increases the mutual information between learned representations and predicted targets. The code is available at https://github.com/TROUBADOUR000/TimeAlign.

Large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models excel at open-domain synthesis but still struggle with precise text rendering, especially for multi-line layouts, dense typography, and long-tailed scripts such as Chinese. Prior solutions typically require costly retraining or rigid external layout constraints, which can degrade aesthetics and limit flexibility. We propose FreeText, a training-free, plug-and-play framework that improves text rendering by exploiting intrinsic mechanisms of Diffusion Transformer (DiT) models. FreeText decomposes the problem into where to write and what to write. For where to write, we localize writing regions by reading token-wise spatial attribution from endogenous image-to-text attention, using sink-like tokens as stable spatial anchors and topology-aware refinement to produce high-confidence masks. For what to write, we introduce Spectral-Modulated Glyph Injection (SGMI), which injects a noise-aligned glyph prior with frequency-domain band-pass modulation to strengthen glyph structure and suppress semantic leakage (rendering the concept instead of the word). Extensive experiments on Qwen-Image, FLUX.1-dev, and SD3 variants across longText-Benchmark, CVTG, and our CLT-Bench show consistent gains in text readability while largely preserving semantic alignment and aesthetic quality, with modest inference overhead.

Score distillation sampling (SDS), the methodology in which the score from pretrained 2D diffusion models is distilled into 3D representation, has recently brought significant advancements in text-to-3D generation task. However, this approach is still confronted with critical geometric inconsistency problems such as the Janus problem. Starting from a hypothesis that such inconsistency problems may be induced by multiview inconsistencies between 2D scores predicted from various viewpoints, we introduce GSD, a simple and general plug-and-play framework for incorporating 3D consistency and therefore geometry awareness into the SDS process. Our methodology is composed of three components: 3D consistent noising, designed to produce 3D consistent noise maps that perfectly follow the standard Gaussian distribution, geometry-based gradient warping for identifying correspondences between predicted gradients of different viewpoints, and novel gradient consistency loss to optimize the scene geometry toward producing more consistent gradients. We demonstrate that our method significantly improves performance, successfully addressing the geometric inconsistency problems in text-to-3D generation task with minimal computation cost and being compatible with existing score distillation-based models. Our project page is available at https://ku-cvlab.github.io/GSD/.

Vision-Language-Action models have achieved remarkable progress in robotic manipulation, yet they suffer from a critical limitation: a lack of 3D scene understanding. This deficiency manifests as three intertwined challenges: weak extraction of 3D spatial positions without enforcing multi-view consistency, inadequate 3D instance understanding, and fragile reasoning under occlusion. Although mature 3D perception methods exist, their direct integration into VLA pipelines is hindered by architectural incompatibility and by heavy reliance on costly instance-level annotations. To address the above challenges, we propose 3DVLA, a plug-and-play framework that injects robust 3D reasoning into pretrained VLAs without requiring extra manual labels or discarding VLM priors. Specifically, 3DVLA tackles the three challenges through: (1) pervasive 3D feature encoding with explicit multi-view consistency constraints across all modalities and a Spatially-Conditioned Geometry Aggregation method, (2) an instance estimation module with high-level instance tokens for 3D instance awareness, and (3) a masked self-supervised 3D encoding branch that retains its predictor for visual token completion to handle occlusions. We integrate 3DVLA with multiple VLA baselines and evaluate on LIBERO-Plus and RoboTwin 2.0. Results show consistent and significant gains in manipulation performance, validating both the effectiveness and plug-and-play compatibility of our approach.

Modern scene text recognition systems often depend on large end-to-end architectures that require extensive training and are prohibitively expensive for real-time scenarios. In such cases, the deployment of heavy models becomes impractical due to constraints on memory, computational resources, and latency. To address these challenges, we propose a novel, training-free plug-and-play framework that leverages the strengths of pre-trained text recognizers while minimizing redundant computations. Our approach uses context-based understanding and introduces an attention-based segmentation stage, which refines candidate text regions at the pixel level, improving downstream recognition. Instead of performing traditional text detection that follows a block-level comparison between feature map and source image and harnesses contextual information using pretrained captioners, allowing the framework to generate word predictions directly from scene context.Candidate texts are semantically and lexically evaluated to get a final score. Predictions that meet or exceed a pre-defined confidence threshold bypass the heavier process of end-to-end text STR profiling, ensuring faster inference and cutting down on unnecessary computations. Experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that our paradigm achieves performance on par with state-of-the-art systems, yet requires substantially fewer resources.

In recent years, video generation has seen significant advancements. However, challenges still persist in generating complex motions and interactions. To address these challenges, we introduce ReVision, a plug-and-play framework that explicitly integrates parameterized 3D physical knowledge into a pretrained conditional video generation model, significantly enhancing its ability to generate high-quality videos with complex motion and interactions. Specifically, ReVision consists of three stages. First, a video diffusion model is used to generate a coarse video. Next, we extract a set of 2D and 3D features from the coarse video to construct a 3D object-centric representation, which is then refined by our proposed parameterized physical prior model to produce an accurate 3D motion sequence. Finally, this refined motion sequence is fed back into the same video diffusion model as additional conditioning, enabling the generation of motion-consistent videos, even in scenarios involving complex actions and interactions. We validate the effectiveness of our approach on Stable Video Diffusion, where ReVision significantly improves motion fidelity and coherence. Remarkably, with only 1.5B parameters, it even outperforms a state-of-the-art video generation model with over 13B parameters on complex video generation by a substantial margin. Our results suggest that, by incorporating 3D physical knowledge, even a relatively small video diffusion model can generate complex motions and interactions with greater realism and controllability, offering a promising solution for physically plausible video generation.

Although large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant success in various tasks, they often struggle with hallucination problems, especially in scenarios requiring deep and responsible reasoning. These issues could be partially addressed by introducing external knowledge graphs (KG) in LLM reasoning. In this paper, we propose a new LLM-KG integrating paradigm ``LLMotimesKG'' which treats the LLM as an agent to interactively explore related entities and relations on KGs and perform reasoning based on the retrieved knowledge. We further implement this paradigm by introducing a new approach called Think-on-Graph (ToG), in which the LLM agent iteratively executes beam search on KG, discovers the most promising reasoning paths, and returns the most likely reasoning results. We use a number of well-designed experiments to examine and illustrate the following advantages of ToG: 1) compared with LLMs, ToG has better deep reasoning power; 2) ToG has the ability of knowledge traceability and knowledge correctability by leveraging LLMs reasoning and expert feedback; 3) ToG provides a flexible plug-and-play framework for different LLMs, KGs and prompting strategies without any additional training cost; 4) the performance of ToG with small LLM models could exceed large LLM such as GPT-4 in certain scenarios and this reduces the cost of LLM deployment and application. As a training-free method with lower computational cost and better generality, ToG achieves overall SOTA in 6 out of 9 datasets where most previous SOTAs rely on additional training.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) are ignorant of the up-to-date knowledge, such as LLaVA series, because they cannot be updated frequently due to the large amount of resources required, and therefore fail in many cases. For example, if a LVLM was released on January 2024, and it wouldn't know the detailed plot of the new movie Dune 2, which wasn't released until February 2024. To solve the problem, a promising solution is to provide LVLMs with up-to-date knowledge via internet search during inference, i.e., internet-augmented generation (IAG), which is already integrated in some closed-source commercial LVLMs such as GPT-4V. However, the specific mechanics underpinning them remain a mystery. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-play framework, for augmenting existing LVLMs in handling visual question answering (VQA) about up-to-date knowledge, dubbed UDKAG. A hierarchical filtering model is trained to effectively and efficiently find the most helpful content from the websites returned by a search engine to prompt LVLMs with up-to-date knowledge. To train the model and evaluate our framework's performance, we propose a pipeline to automatically generate news-related VQA samples to construct a dataset, dubbed UDK-VQA. A multi-model voting mechanism is introduced to label the usefulness of website/content for VQA samples to construct the training set. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, outperforming GPT-4V by about 25% in accuracy.

Recent work on domain-specific reasoning with large language models (LLMs) often relies on training-intensive approaches that require parameter updates. While activation steering has emerged as a parameter efficient alternative, existing methods apply static, manual interventions that fail to adapt to the dynamic nature of complex reasoning. To address this limitation, we propose RISER (Router-based Intervention for Steerable Enhancement of Reasoning), a plug-and-play intervention framework that adaptively steers LLM reasoning in activation space. RISER constructs a library of reusable reasoning vectors and employs a lightweight Router to dynamically compose them for each input. The Router is optimized via reinforcement learning under task-level rewards, activating latent cognitive primitives in an emergent and compositional manner. Across seven diverse benchmarks, RISER yields 3.4-6.5% average zero-shot accuracy improvements over the base model while surpassing CoT-style reasoning with 2-3x higher token efficiency and robust accuracy gains. Further analysis shows that RISER autonomously combines multiple vectors into interpretable, precise control strategies, pointing toward more controllable and efficient LLM reasoning.

Open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD) aims to detect both seen and unseen categories, yet existing methods often struggle to generalize to novel objects due to limited integration of global and local contextual cues. We propose DetRefiner, a simple yet effective plug-and-play framework that learns to fuse global and local features to refine open-vocabulary detection. DetRefiner processes global image features and patch-level image features from foundational models (e.g., DINOv3) through a lightweight Transformer encoder. The encoder produces a class vector capturing image-level attributes and patch vectors representing local region attributes, from which attribute reliability is inferred to recalibrate the base model's confidence. Notably, DetRefiner is trained independently of the base OVOD model, requiring neither access to its internal features nor retraining. At inference, it operates solely on the base detector's predictions, producing auxiliary calibration scores that are merged with the base detector's scores to yield the final refined confidence. Despite this simplicity, DetRefiner consistently enhances multiple OVOD models across COCO, LVIS, ODinW13, and Pascal VOC, achieving gains of up to +10.1 AP on novel categories. These results highlight that learning to fuse global and local representations offers a powerful and general mechanism for advancing open-world object detection. Our codes and models are available at https://github.com/hitachi-rd-cv/detrefiner.

Multi-vector models dominate Visual Document Retrieval (VDR) due to their fine-grained matching capabilities, but their high storage and computational costs present a major barrier to practical deployment. In this paper, we propose ColChunk, a plug-and-play framework that introduces multimodal late chunking to construct efficient, contextualized multi-vectors. Unlike existing pruning or fixed-token approaches, ColChunk employs hierarchical clustering on patch-level embeddings, fused with a 2D position prior to ensure spatial-semantic coherence. This adaptive grouping allows for a content-aware representation that preserves global context while drastically reducing the vector count. Evaluations across 24 VDR datasets demonstrate ColChunk achieves over a 90% reduction in storage requirements while simultaneously delivering a 9-point average improvement in nDCG@5 across representative single-vector models. ColChunk provides a practical solution for balancing retrieval accuracy and efficiency in visual document systems.

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a key technique for compressing large-scale language models (LLMs), yet prevailing logit-based methods typically employ static strategies that are misaligned with the dynamic learning process of student models. These methods typically treat all tokens indiscriminately and apply a single, fixed temperature, resulting in suboptimal knowledge transfer. To address these limitations, we propose LLM-Oriented Token-Adaptive Knowledge Distillation (AdaKD), a novel framework that adapts the distillation process to the real-time learning state of each token. AdaKD consists of two synergistic modules driven by a unified token difficulty metric. First, our Loss-Driven Adaptive Token Focusing (LATF) module dynamically adjusts the distillation focus by monitoring the student's learning stability, concentrating computational resources on the most valuable tokens at each training phase. Second, we introduce Inverse Difficulty Temperature Scaling (IDTS), a counterintuitive yet effective token-level temperature strategy. It employs low temperatures for difficult tokens for targeted error correction, and high temperatures for easy tokens to encourage students to learn from the teacher's complete and smooth output distribution, thereby enhancing generalization. As a plug-and-play framework, AdaKD can consistently improve the performance of various distillation methods on multiple model architectures and benchmarks.

Diffusion-based video generation can create realistic videos, yet existing image- and text-based conditioning fails to offer precise motion control. Prior methods for motion-conditioned synthesis typically require model-specific fine-tuning, which is computationally expensive and restrictive. We introduce Time-to-Move (TTM), a training-free, plug-and-play framework for motion- and appearance-controlled video generation with image-to-video (I2V) diffusion models. Our key insight is to use crude reference animations obtained through user-friendly manipulations such as cut-and-drag or depth-based reprojection. Motivated by SDEdit's use of coarse layout cues for image editing, we treat the crude animations as coarse motion cues and adapt the mechanism to the video domain. We preserve appearance with image conditioning and introduce dual-clock denoising, a region-dependent strategy that enforces strong alignment in motion-specified regions while allowing flexibility elsewhere, balancing fidelity to user intent with natural dynamics. This lightweight modification of the sampling process incurs no additional training or runtime cost and is compatible with any backbone. Extensive experiments on object and camera motion benchmarks show that TTM matches or exceeds existing training-based baselines in realism and motion control. Beyond this, TTM introduces a unique capability: precise appearance control through pixel-level conditioning, exceeding the limits of text-only prompting. Visit our project page for video examples and code: https://time-to-move.github.io/.

Recent research has increasingly focused on reconciling the reasoning capabilities of System 2 with the efficiency of System 1. While existing training-based and prompt-based approaches face significant challenges in terms of efficiency and stability, model merging emerges as a promising strategy to integrate the diverse capabilities of different Large Language Models (LLMs) into a unified model. However, conventional model merging methods often assume uniform importance across layers, overlooking the functional heterogeneity inherent in neural components. To address this limitation, we propose Activation-Guided Consensus Merging (ACM), a plug-and-play merging framework that determines layer-specific merging coefficients based on mutual information between activations of pre-trained and fine-tuned models. ACM effectively preserves task-specific capabilities without requiring gradient computations or additional training. Extensive experiments on Long-to-Short (L2S) and general merging tasks demonstrate that ACM consistently outperforms all baseline methods. For instance, in the case of Qwen-7B models, TIES-Merging equipped with ACM achieves a 55.3\% reduction in response length while simultaneously improving reasoning accuracy by 1.3 points.

Dyna-style model-based reinforcement learning contains two phases: model rollouts to generate sample for policy learning and real environment exploration using current policy for dynamics model learning. However, due to the complex real-world environment, it is inevitable to learn an imperfect dynamics model with model prediction error, which can further mislead policy learning and result in sub-optimal solutions. In this paper, we propose COPlanner, a planning-driven framework for model-based methods to address the inaccurately learned dynamics model problem with conservative model rollouts and optimistic environment exploration. COPlanner leverages an uncertainty-aware policy-guided model predictive control (UP-MPC) component to plan for multi-step uncertainty estimation. This estimated uncertainty then serves as a penalty during model rollouts and as a bonus during real environment exploration respectively, to choose actions. Consequently, COPlanner can avoid model uncertain regions through conservative model rollouts, thereby alleviating the influence of model error. Simultaneously, it explores high-reward model uncertain regions to reduce model error actively through optimistic real environment exploration. COPlanner is a plug-and-play framework that can be applied to any dyna-style model-based methods. Experimental results on a series of proprioceptive and visual continuous control tasks demonstrate that both sample efficiency and asymptotic performance of strong model-based methods are significantly improved combined with COPlanner.

Large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent natural language texts when given relevant documents as background context. This ability has attracted considerable interest in developing industry applications of LLMs. However, LLMs are prone to generate hallucinations that are not supported by the provided sources. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical framework to detect and mitigate such ungrounded hallucination. Our framework uses Chain of Natural Language Inference (CoNLI) for hallucination detection and hallucination reduction via post-editing. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on hallucination detection and enhances text quality through rewrite, using LLMs without any fine-tuning or domain-specific prompt engineering. We show that this simple plug-and-play framework can serve as an effective choice for hallucination detection and reduction, achieving competitive performance across various contexts.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are emerging as versatile foundations for mixed-modality retrieval. Yet, they often require heavy post-hoc training to convert them into contrastive encoders for retrieval. This work asks: Can off-the-shelf MLLMs serve as powerful retrievers without additional training? We present FreeRet, a plug-and-play framework that turns any MLLM into a two-stage retriever. FreeRet first derives semantically grounded embeddings directly from the model for fast candidate search, and then exploits its reasoning ability for precise reranking. The framework contributes three advances: bypassing lexical alignment layers to obtain semantically faithful embeddings, conditioning representation generation with explicit priors, and mitigating framing effect in reranking via neutral choice framing. On the MMEB and MMEB-V2 benchmarks spanning 46 datasets, FreeRet substantially outperforms models trained on millions of pairs. Beyond benchmarks, FreeRet is model-agnostic and scales seamlessly across MLLM families and sizes, preserves their generative abilities, supports arbitrary modality combinations, and unifies retrieval, reranking, and generation into end-to-end RAG within a single model. Our findings demonstrate that pretrained MLLMs, when carefully harnessed, can serve as strong retrieval engines without training, closing a critical gap in their role as generalists.

Video generation with controllable camera viewpoints is essential for applications such as interactive content creation, gaming, and simulation. Existing methods typically adapt pre-trained video models using camera poses relative to a fixed reference, e.g., the first frame. However, these encodings lack shift-invariance, often leading to poor generalization and accumulated drift. While relative camera pose embeddings defined between arbitrary view pairs offer a more robust alternative, integrating them into pre-trained video diffusion models without prohibitive training costs or architectural changes remains challenging. We introduce ReRoPE, a plug-and-play framework that incorporates relative camera information into pre-trained video diffusion models without compromising their generation capability. Our approach is based on the insight that Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE) in existing models underutilize their full spectral bandwidth, particularly in the low-frequency components. By seamlessly injecting relative camera pose information into these underutilized bands, ReRoPE achieves precise control while preserving strong pre-trained generative priors. We evaluate our method on both image-to-video (I2V) and video-to-video (V2V) tasks in terms of camera control accuracy and visual fidelity. Our results demonstrate that ReRoPE offers a training-efficient path toward controllable, high-fidelity video generation. See project page for more results: https://sisyphe-lee.github.io/ReRoPE/

Large language models (LLMs) often produce incorrect or outdated information, necessitating efficient and precise knowledge updates. Current model editing methods, however, struggle with long-form knowledge in diverse formats, such as poetry, code snippets, and mathematical derivations. These limitations arise from their reliance on editing a single token's hidden state, a limitation we term "efficacy barrier". To solve this, we propose AnyEdit, a new autoregressive editing paradigm. It decomposes long-form knowledge into sequential chunks and iteratively edits the key token in each chunk, ensuring consistent and accurate outputs. Theoretically, we ground AnyEdit in the Chain Rule of Mutual Information, showing its ability to update any knowledge within LLMs. Empirically, it outperforms strong baselines by 21.5% on benchmarks including UnKEBench, AKEW, and our new EditEverything dataset for long-form diverse-formatted knowledge. Additionally, AnyEdit serves as a plug-and-play framework, enabling current editing methods to update knowledge with arbitrary length and format, significantly advancing the scope and practicality of LLM knowledge editing.

Neural networks unintentionally memorize training data, creating privacy risks in federated learning (FL) systems, such as inference and reconstruction attacks on sensitive data. To mitigate these risks and to comply with privacy regulations, Federated Unlearning (FU) has been introduced to enable participants in FL systems to remove their data's influence from the global model. However, current FU methods primarily act post-hoc, struggling to efficiently erase information deeply memorized by neural networks. We argue that effective unlearning necessitates a paradigm shift: designing FL systems inherently amenable to forgetting. To this end, we propose a learning-to-unlearn Transformation-guided Federated Unlearning (ToFU) framework that incorporates transformations during the learning process to reduce memorization of specific instances. Our theoretical analysis reveals how transformation composition provably bounds instance-specific information, directly simplifying subsequent unlearning. Crucially, ToFU can work as a plug-and-play framework that improves the performance of existing FU methods. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and the MUFAC benchmark show that ToFU outperforms existing FU baselines, enhances performance when integrated with current methods, and reduces unlearning time.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse natural language processing tasks. However, their extensive memory requirements, particularly due to KV cache growth during long-text understanding and generation, present significant challenges for deployment in resource-constrained environments. Quantization has emerged as a promising solution to reduce memory consumption while preserving historical information. We propose XQuant, a training-free and plug-and-play framework that achieves ultra-low equivalent bit-width KV cache quantization. XQuant introduces two key innovations: a computationally negligible data-free calibration method and cross-layer KV cache compression, enabling quantization to sub-1.4 bits. Extensive experiments on TruthfulQA and LongBench demonstrate that XQuant outperforms state-of-the-art methods (e.g., KIVI-2bit and AsymKV-1.5bit) by achieving lower bit-width while maintaining superior performance, establishing a better trade-off between memory efficiency and model accuracy.

Video depth estimation aims to infer temporally consistent depth. Some methods achieve temporal consistency by finetuning a single-image depth model during test time using geometry and re-projection constraints, which is inefficient and not robust. An alternative approach is to learn how to enforce temporal consistency from data, but this requires well-designed models and sufficient video depth data. To address these challenges, we propose a plug-and-play framework called Neural Video Depth Stabilizer (NVDS) that stabilizes inconsistent depth estimations and can be applied to different single-image depth models without extra effort. We also introduce a large-scale dataset, Video Depth in the Wild (VDW), which consists of 14,203 videos with over two million frames, making it the largest natural-scene video depth dataset to our knowledge. We evaluate our method on the VDW dataset as well as two public benchmarks and demonstrate significant improvements in consistency, accuracy, and efficiency compared to previous approaches. Our work serves as a solid baseline and provides a data foundation for learning-based video depth models. We will release our dataset and code for future research.

Large language models (LLMs) equipped with retrieval--the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) paradigm--should combine their parametric knowledge with external evidence, yet in practice they often hallucinate, over-trust noisy snippets, or ignore vital context. We introduce TCR (Transparent Conflict Resolution), a plug-and-play framework that makes this decision process observable and controllable. TCR (i) disentangles semantic match and factual consistency via dual contrastive encoders, (ii) estimates self-answerability to gauge confidence in internal memory, and (iii) feeds the three scalar signals to the generator through a lightweight soft-prompt with SNR-based weighting. Across seven benchmarks TCR improves conflict detection (+5-18 F1), raises knowledge-gap recovery by +21.4 pp and cuts misleading-context overrides by -29.3 pp, while adding only 0.3% parameters. The signals align with human judgements and expose temporal decision patterns.

Current interactive LLM agents rely on goal-conditioned stepwise planning, where environmental understanding is acquired reactively during execution rather than established beforehand. This temporal inversion leads to Delayed Environmental Perception: agents must infer environmental constraints through trial-and-error, resulting in an Epistemic Bottleneck that traps them in inefficient failure cycles. Inspired by human affordance perception and cognitive map theory, we propose the Map-then-Act Paradigm (MAP), a plug-and-play framework that shifts environment understanding before execution. MAP consists of three stages: (1) Global Exploration, acquiring environment-general priors; (2) Task-Specific Mapping, constructing a structured cognitive map; and (3) Knowledge-Augmented Execution, solving tasks grounded on the map. Experiments show consistent gains across benchmarks and LLMs. On ARC-AGI-3, MAP enables frontier models to surpass near-zero baseline performance in 22 of 25 game environments. We further introduce MAP-2K, a dataset of map-then-act trajectories, and show that training on it outperforms expert execution traces, suggesting that understanding environments is more fundamental than imitation.

While Multimodal Large Language Models demonstrate impressive semantic capabilities, they often suffer from spatial blindness, struggling with fine-grained geometric reasoning and physical dynamics. Existing solutions typically rely on explicit 3D modalities or complex geometric scaffolding, which are limited by data scarcity and generalization challenges. In this work, we propose a paradigm shift by leveraging the implicit spatial prior within large-scale video generation models. We posit that to synthesize temporally coherent videos, these models inherently learn robust 3D structural priors and physical laws. We introduce VEGA-3D (Video Extracted Generative Awareness), a plug-and-play framework that repurposes a pre-trained video diffusion model as a Latent World Simulator. By extracting spatiotemporal features from intermediate noise levels and integrating them with semantic representations via a token-level adaptive gated fusion mechanism, we enrich MLLMs with dense geometric cues without explicit 3D supervision. Extensive experiments across 3D scene understanding, spatial reasoning, and embodied manipulation benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, validating that generative priors provide a scalable foundation for physical-world understanding. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/H-EmbodVis/VEGA-3D.

The push for efficient text to image synthesis has moved the field toward one step sampling, yet existing methods still face a three way tradeoff among fidelity, inference speed, and training efficiency. Approaches that rely on external discriminators can sharpen one step performance, but they often introduce training instability, high GPU memory overhead, and slow convergence, which complicates scaling and parameter efficient tuning. In contrast, regression based distillation and consistency objectives are easier to optimize, but they typically lose fine details when constrained to a single step. We present APEX, built on a key theoretical insight: adversarial correction signals can be extracted endogenously from a flow model through condition shifting. Using a transformation creates a shifted condition branch whose velocity field serves as an independent estimator of the model's current generation distribution, yielding a gradient that is provably GAN aligned, replacing the sample dependent discriminator terms that cause gradient vanishing. This discriminator free design is architecture preserving, making APEX a plug and play framework compatible with both full parameter and LoRA based tuning. Empirically, our 0.6B model surpasses FLUX-Schnell 12B (20times more parameters) in one step quality. With LoRA tuning on Qwen-Image 20B, APEX reaches a GenEval score of 0.89 at NFE=1 in 6 hours, surpassing the original 50-step teacher (0.87) and providing a 15.33times inference speedup. Code is available https://github.com/LINs-lab/APEX.

Developing foundation models in medical imaging requires continuous monitoring of downstream performance. Researchers are burdened with tracking numerous experiments, design choices, and their effects on performance, often relying on ad-hoc, manual workflows that are inherently slow and error-prone. We introduce EvalBlocks, a modular, plug-and-play framework for efficient evaluation of foundation models during development. Built on Snakemake, EvalBlocks supports seamless integration of new datasets, foundation models, aggregation methods, and evaluation strategies. All experiments and results are tracked centrally and are reproducible with a single command, while efficient caching and parallel execution enable scalable use on shared compute infrastructure. Demonstrated on five state-of-the-art foundation models and three medical imaging classification tasks, EvalBlocks streamlines model evaluation, enabling researchers to iterate faster and focus on model innovation rather than evaluation logistics. The framework is released as open source software at https://github.com/DIAGNijmegen/eval-blocks.

Customized image generation, which seeks to synthesize images with consistent characters, holds significant relevance for applications such as storytelling, portrait generation, and character design. However, previous approaches have encountered challenges in preserving characters with high-fidelity consistency due to inadequate feature extraction and concept confusion of reference characters. Therefore, we propose Character-Adapter, a plug-and-play framework designed to generate images that preserve the details of reference characters, ensuring high-fidelity consistency. Character-Adapter employs prompt-guided segmentation to ensure fine-grained regional features of reference characters and dynamic region-level adapters to mitigate concept confusion. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of Character-Adapter. Both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that Character-Adapter achieves the state-of-the-art performance of consistent character generation, with an improvement of 24.8% compared with other methods. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Character-Adapter/Character-Adapte

Long-Context Transformer Models (LCTMs) are vital for real-world applications but suffer high computational costs due to attention's quadratic complexity. Block-sparse attention mitigates this by focusing computation on critical regions, yet existing methods struggle with balancing accuracy and efficiency due to costly block importance measurements. In this paper, we introduce XAttention, a plug-and-play framework that dramatically accelerates long-context inference in Transformers models using sparse attention. XAttention's key innovation is the insight that the sum of antidiagonal values (i.e., from the lower-left to upper-right) in the attention matrix provides a powerful proxy for block importance. This allows for precise identification and pruning of non-essential blocks, resulting in high sparsity and dramatically accelerated inference. Across comprehensive evaluations on demanding long-context benchmarks-including RULER and LongBench for language, VideoMME for video understanding, and VBench for video generation. XAttention achieves accuracy comparable to full attention while delivering substantial computational gains. We demonstrate up to 13.5x acceleration in attention computation. These results underscore XAttention's ability to unlock the practical potential of block sparse attention, paving the way for scalable and efficient deployment of LCTMs in real-world applications. Code is available at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/x-attention.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP struggle to understand negation, often embedding affirmatives and negatives similarly (e.g., matching "no dog" with dog images). Existing methods refine negation understanding via fine-tuning CLIP's text encoder, risking overfitting. In this work, we propose CLIPGlasses, a plug-and-play framework that enhances CLIP's ability to comprehend negated visual descriptions. CLIPGlasses adopts a dual-stage design: a Lens module disentangles negated semantics from text embeddings, and a Frame module predicts context-aware repulsion strength, which is integrated into a modified similarity computation to penalize alignment with negated semantics, thereby reducing false positive matches. Experiments show that CLIP equipped with CLIPGlasses achieves competitive in-domain performance and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in cross-domain generalization. Its superiority is especially evident under low-resource conditions, indicating stronger robustness across domains.

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have revolutionized signal processing and computer vision by modeling signals as continuous, differentiable functions parameterized by neural networks. However, their inherent formulation as a regression problem makes them prone to regression to the mean, limiting their ability to capture fine details, retain high-frequency information, and handle noise effectively. To address these challenges, we propose Iterative Implicit Neural Representations (I-INRs) a novel plug-and-play framework that enhances signal reconstruction through an iterative refinement process. I-INRs effectively recover high-frequency details, improve robustness to noise, and achieve superior reconstruction quality. Our framework seamlessly integrates with existing INR architectures, delivering substantial performance gains across various tasks. Extensive experiments show that I-INRs outperform baseline methods, including WIRE, SIREN, and Gauss, in diverse computer vision applications such as image restoration, image denoising, and object occupancy prediction.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve strong performance by generating long chains of thought (CoT), but often overthink, continuing to reason after a solution has already stabilized and thereby wasting tokens and increasing latency. Existing inference-time early-exit methods rely primarily on answer-level signals, such as confidence or trial-answer consistency, to decide when to stop. However, these signals mainly reflect answer readiness rather than reasoning convergence: they may trigger before the model has finished exploring or self-correcting, causing premature exits that can degrade final-answer accuracy and leave the retained reasoning chain semantically incomplete. We identify reasoning-level semantic redundancy as a complementary signal for semantic-preserving early exit: when successive steps no longer add novel progress and instead revisit established conclusions, the reasoning trajectory has likely converged. Building on this insight, we propose PUMA, a plug-and-play framework that combines a lightweight Redundancy Detector with answer-level verification. The detector flags semantically redundant candidate exits, while verification confirms whether stopping is safe, allowing PUMA to remove redundant continuation while preserving both answer accuracy and a coherent reasoning prefix. Across five LRMs and five challenging reasoning benchmarks, PUMA achieves 26.2% average token reduction while preserving accuracy and retained CoT quality. Additional experiments on code generation, zero-shot vision-language reasoning, and learned stopping-policy internalization further demonstrate that reasoning-level redundancy is a robust, transferable, and learnable signal for efficient reasoning. Our code is available at https://github.com/giovanni-vaccarino/PUMA.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited exceptional performance across a spectrum of natural language processing tasks. However, their substantial sizes pose considerable challenges, particularly in computational demands and inference speed, due to their quadratic complexity. In this work, we have identified a key pattern: certain seemingly meaningless special tokens (i.e., separators) contribute disproportionately to attention scores compared to semantically meaningful tokens. This observation suggests that information of the segments between these separator tokens can be effectively condensed into the separator tokens themselves without significant information loss. Guided by this insight, we introduce SepLLM, a plug-and-play framework that accelerates inference by compressing these segments and eliminating redundant tokens. Additionally, we implement efficient kernels for training acceleration. Experimental results across training-free, training-from-scratch, and post-training settings demonstrate SepLLM's effectiveness. Notably, using the Llama-3-8B backbone, SepLLM achieves over 50% reduction in KV cache on the GSM8K-CoT benchmark while maintaining comparable performance. Furthermore, in streaming settings, SepLLM effectively processes sequences of up to 4 million tokens or more while maintaining consistent language modeling capabilities.

Smartphone agents are increasingly important for helping users control devices efficiently, with (Multimodal) Large Language Model (MLLM)-based approaches emerging as key contenders. Fairly comparing these agents is essential but challenging, requiring a varied task scope, the integration of agents with different implementations, and a generalisable evaluation pipeline to assess their strengths and weaknesses. In this paper, we present SPA-Bench, a comprehensive SmartPhone Agent Benchmark designed to evaluate (M)LLM-based agents in an interactive environment that simulates real-world conditions. SPA-Bench offers three key contributions: (1) A diverse set of tasks covering system and third-party apps in both English and Chinese, focusing on features commonly used in daily routines; (2) A plug-and-play framework enabling real-time agent interaction with Android devices, integrating over ten agents with the flexibility to add more; (3) A novel evaluation pipeline that automatically assesses agent performance across multiple dimensions, encompassing seven metrics related to task completion and resource consumption. Our extensive experiments across tasks and agents reveal challenges like interpreting mobile user interfaces, action grounding, memory retention, and execution costs. We propose future research directions to ease these difficulties, moving closer to real-world smartphone agent applications. SPA-Bench is available at https://ai-agents-2030.github.io/SPA-Bench/.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved impressive performance on multimodal reasoning tasks such as visual question answering (VQA), but their inference cost remains a significant challenge due to the large number of vision tokens processed during the prefill stage. Existing pruning methods often rely on directly using the attention patterns or static text prompt guidance, failing to exploit the dynamic internal signals generated during inference. To address these issues, we propose AdaptInfer, a plug-and-play framework for adaptive vision token pruning in VLMs. First, we introduce a fine-grained, dynamic text-guided pruning mechanism that reuses layer-wise text-to-text attention maps to construct soft priors over text-token importance, allowing more informed scoring of vision tokens at each stage. Second, we perform an offline analysis of cross-modal attention shifts and identify consistent inflection locations in inference, which inspire us to propose a more principled and efficient pruning schedule. Our method is lightweight and plug-and-play, also generalizable across multi-modal tasks. Experimental results have verified the effectiveness of the proposed method. For example, it reduces CUDA latency by 61.3\% while maintaining an average accuracy of 92.9\% on vanilla LLaVA-1.5-7B. Under the same token budget, AdaptInfer surpasses SOTA in accuracy.

Recent breakthroughs in text-to-image diffusion models have significantly enhanced both the visual fidelity and semantic controllability of generated images. However, fine-grained control over aesthetic attributes remains challenging, especially when users require continuous and intensity-specific adjustments. Existing approaches often rely on vague textual prompts, which are inherently ambiguous in expressing both the aesthetic semantics and the desired intensity, or depend on costly human preference data for alignment, limiting their scalability and practicality. To address these limitations, we propose AttriCtrl, a plug-and-play framework for precise and continuous control of aesthetic attributes. Specifically, we quantify abstract aesthetics by leveraging semantic similarity from pre-trained vision-language models, and employ a lightweight value encoder that maps scalar intensities in [0,1] to learnable embeddings within diffusion-based generation. This design enables intuitive and customizable aesthetic manipulation, with minimal training overhead and seamless integration into existing generation pipelines. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AttriCtrl achieves accurate control over individual attributes as well as flexible multi-attribute composition. Moreover, it is fully compatible with popular open-source controllable generation frameworks, showcasing strong integration capability and practical utility across diverse generation scenarios.

Existing segmentation models based on multimodal large language models (MLLMs), such as LISA, often struggle with novel or emerging entities due to their inability to incorporate up-to-date knowledge. To address this challenge, we introduce the Novel Emerging Segmentation Task (NEST), which focuses on segmenting (i) novel entities that MLLMs fail to recognize due to their absence from training data, and (ii) emerging entities that exist within the model's knowledge but demand up-to-date external information for accurate recognition. To support the study of NEST, we construct a NEST benchmark using an automated pipeline that generates news-related data samples for comprehensive evaluation. Additionally, we propose ROSE: Retrieval-Oriented Segmentation Enhancement, a plug-and-play framework designed to augment any MLLM-based segmentation model. ROSE comprises four key components. First, an Internet Retrieval-Augmented Generation module is introduced to employ user-provided multimodal inputs to retrieve real-time web information. Then, a Textual Prompt Enhancer enriches the model with up-to-date information and rich background knowledge, improving the model's perception ability for emerging entities. Furthermore, a Visual Prompt Enhancer is proposed to compensate for MLLMs' lack of exposure to novel entities by leveraging internet-sourced images. To maintain efficiency, a WebSense module is introduced to intelligently decide when to invoke retrieval mechanisms based on user input. Experimental results demonstrate that ROSE significantly boosts performance on the NEST benchmark, outperforming a strong Gemini-2.0 Flash-based retrieval baseline by 19.2 in gIoU.

We study the problem of building a visual concept library for visual recognition. Building effective visual concept libraries is challenging, as manual definition is labor-intensive, while relying solely on LLMs for concept generation can result in concepts that lack discriminative power or fail to account for the complex interactions between them. Our approach, ESCHER, takes a library learning perspective to iteratively discover and improve visual concepts. ESCHER uses a vision-language model (VLM) as a critic to iteratively refine the concept library, including accounting for interactions between concepts and how they affect downstream classifiers. By leveraging the in-context learning abilities of LLMs and the history of performance using various concepts, ESCHER dynamically improves its concept generation strategy based on the VLM critic's feedback. Finally, ESCHER does not require any human annotations, and is thus an automated plug-and-play framework. We empirically demonstrate the ability of ESCHER to learn a concept library for zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning visual classification tasks. This work represents, to our knowledge, the first application of concept library learning to real-world visual tasks.

Diffusion models are widely used for image editing tasks. Existing editing methods often design a representation manipulation procedure by curating an edit direction in the text embedding or score space. However, such a procedure faces a key challenge: overestimating the edit strength harms visual consistency while underestimating it fails the editing task. Notably, each source image may require a different editing strength, and it is costly to search for an appropriate strength via trial-and-error. To address this challenge, we propose Concept Lancet (CoLan), a zero-shot plug-and-play framework for principled representation manipulation in diffusion-based image editing. At inference time, we decompose the source input in the latent (text embedding or diffusion score) space as a sparse linear combination of the representations of the collected visual concepts. This allows us to accurately estimate the presence of concepts in each image, which informs the edit. Based on the editing task (replace/add/remove), we perform a customized concept transplant process to impose the corresponding editing direction. To sufficiently model the concept space, we curate a conceptual representation dataset, CoLan-150K, which contains diverse descriptions and scenarios of visual terms and phrases for the latent dictionary. Experiments on multiple diffusion-based image editing baselines show that methods equipped with CoLan achieve state-of-the-art performance in editing effectiveness and consistency preservation.

Diffusion models excel at generating high-dimensional data but fall short in training efficiency and representation quality compared to self-supervised methods. We identify a key bottleneck: the underutilization of high-quality, semantically rich representations during training notably slows down convergence. Our systematic analysis reveals a critical representation processing region -- primarily in the early layers -- where semantic and structural pattern learning takes place before generation can occur. To address this, we propose Embedded Representation Warmup (ERW), a plug-and-play framework where in the first stage we get the ERW module serves as a warmup that initializes the early layers of the diffusion model with high-quality, pretrained representations. This warmup minimizes the burden of learning representations from scratch, thereby accelerating convergence and boosting performance. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that ERW's efficacy depends on its precise integration into specific neural network layers -- termed the representation processing region -- where the model primarily processes and transforms feature representations for later generation. We further establish that ERW not only accelerates training convergence but also enhances representation quality: empirically, our method achieves a 40times acceleration in training speed compared to REPA, the current state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/LINs-lab/ERW.

Recent multimodal LLMs have shown promise in chart-based visual question answering, but their performance declines sharply on unannotated charts, those requiring precise visual interpretation rather than relying on textual shortcuts. To address this, we introduce ChartAgent, a novel agentic framework that explicitly performs visual reasoning directly within the chart's spatial domain. Unlike textual chain-of-thought reasoning, ChartAgent iteratively decomposes queries into visual subtasks and actively manipulates and interacts with chart images through specialized actions such as drawing annotations, cropping regions (e.g., segmenting pie slices, isolating bars), and localizing axes, using a library of chart-specific vision tools to fulfill each subtask. This iterative reasoning process closely mirrors human cognitive strategies for chart comprehension. ChartAgent achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the ChartBench and ChartX benchmarks, surpassing prior methods by up to 16.07% absolute gain overall and 17.31% on unannotated, numerically intensive queries. Furthermore, our analyses show that ChartAgent is (a) effective across diverse chart types, (b) achieve the highest scores across varying visual and reasoning complexity levels, and (c) serves as a plug-and-play framework that boosts performance across diverse underlying LLMs. Our work is among the first to demonstrate visually grounded reasoning for chart understanding using tool-augmented multimodal agents.

Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) aims to maintain model performance under evolving target domains by adapting online without labeled data. However, practical deployments often cannot retain the source dataset due to privacy or licensing constraints, and purely source-free CTTA methods tend to become unstable under long-term distribution shift, suffering from compounding self-training errors and catastrophic forgetting. We introduce DO-ALL (Distill Once, Adapt Life-Long), a plug-and-play framework that revisits source information in a compact and privacy-conscious form via Dataset Distillation (DD). Before deployment, DO-ALL performs DD to produce a small set of synthetic distilled anchors that summarize the source distribution. During adaptation, each target sample is matched with its most semantically aligned anchor, which provides a stable reference for various CTTA via source replay, representation alignment, and manifold-smoothing regularization. DO-ALL can be seamlessly integrated into existing CTTA algorithms, consistently improving long-term robustness across CIFAR100-C, ImageNet-C, and the CCC benchmark. This demonstrates the potential of leveraging DD to enable stable and continuous adaptation without retaining raw source data. The code is available at https://github.com/blue-531/DOALL.

Recent advances in autoregressive (AR) models have demonstrated their potential to rival diffusion models in image synthesis. However, for complex spatially-conditioned generation, current AR approaches rely on fine-tuning the pre-trained model, leading to significant training costs. In this paper, we propose the Efficient Control Model (ECM), a plug-and-play framework featuring a lightweight control module that introduces control signals via a distributed architecture. This architecture consists of context-aware attention layers that refine conditional features using real-time generated tokens, and a shared gated feed-forward network (FFN) designed to maximize the utilization of its limited capacity and ensure coherent control feature learning. Furthermore, recognizing the critical role of early-stage generation in determining semantic structure, we introduce an early-centric sampling strategy that prioritizes learning early control sequences. This approach reduces computational cost by lowering the number of training tokens per iteration, while a complementary temperature scheduling during inference compensates for the resulting insufficient training of late-stage tokens. Extensive experiments on scale-based AR models validate that our method achieves high-fidelity and diverse control over image generation, surpassing existing baselines while significantly improving both training and inference efficiency.

Extrinsic rewards can effectively guide reinforcement learning (RL) agents in specific tasks. However, extrinsic rewards frequently fall short in complex environments due to the significant human effort needed for their design and annotation. This limitation underscores the necessity for intrinsic rewards, which offer auxiliary and dense signals and can enable agents to learn in an unsupervised manner. Although various intrinsic reward formulations have been proposed, their implementation and optimization details are insufficiently explored and lack standardization, thereby hindering research progress. To address this gap, we introduce RLeXplore, a unified, highly modularized, and plug-and-play framework offering reliable implementations of eight state-of-the-art intrinsic reward methods. Furthermore, we conduct an in-depth study that identifies critical implementation details and establishes well-justified standard practices in intrinsically-motivated RL. Our documentation, examples, and source code are available at https://github.com/RLE-Foundation/RLeXplore.

Visual-language action (VLA) models enable robots to predict actions directly from observations and language instructions, but their performance depends on large-scale, high-quality data and is limited by the scarcity of real-world robot action datasets. To facilitate VLA model learning with abundant unlabeled human videos, Latent Action Models (LAM) learn latent action representations from visual dynamics to provide additional supervision for VLA learning. However, LAM and VLA are typically trained separately, leaving LAM ungrounded during VLA training and VLA models constrained by frozen LAM representations. To address these issues, we propose Latent Action Representation Alignment (LARA), a plug-and-play framework that jointly optimizes LAM and VLA via representation alignment. This enables reciprocal benefits where LAMs learn with action trajectories to avoid spurious visual changes, while VLAs are regularized by forward dynamics learned within LAMs to reduce hallucinations of functionally ineffective trajectories. We demonstrate LARA versatility and effectiveness for pre-training, post-training enhancement of pre-trained VLA models, and LAM refinement, achieving an average of ~10%, ~5%, and ~15% improvement over 3 simulation and 1 meticulously designed real-world robotic manipulation benchmarks.

In large language model (LLM)-based recommendation systems, direct preference optimization (DPO) effectively aligns recommendations with user preferences, requiring multi-negative objective functions to leverage abundant implicit-feedback negatives and sharpen preference boundaries. However, our empirical analyses reveal a counterintuitive phenomenon, preference optimization collapse, where increasing the number of negative samples can lead to performance degradation despite a continuously decreasing training loss. We further theoretically demonstrate that this collapse arises from gradient suppression, caused by the dominance of easily discriminable negatives over boundary-critical negatives that truly define user preference boundaries. As a result, boundary-relevant signals are under-optimized, weakening the model's decision boundary. Motivated by these observations, we propose DynamicPO (Dynamic Preference Optimization), a lightweight and plug-and-play framework comprising two adaptive mechanisms: Dynamic Boundary Negative Selection, which identifies and prioritizes informative negatives near the model's decision boundary, and Dual-Margin Dynamic beta Adjustment, which calibrates optimization strength per sample according to boundary ambiguity. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that DynamicPO effectively prevents optimization collapse and improves recommendation accuracy on multi-negative preference optimization methods, with negligible computational overhead. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/xingyuHuxingyu/DynamicPO.

Inference-time scaling offers a versatile paradigm for aligning visual generative models with downstream objectives without parameter updates. However, existing approaches that optimize the high-dimensional initial noise suffer from severe inefficiency, as many search directions exert negligible influence on the final generation. We show that this inefficiency is closely related to a spectral bias in generative dynamics: model sensitivity to initial perturbations diminishes rapidly as frequency increases. Building on this insight, we propose Spectral Evolution Search (SES), a plug-and-play framework for initial noise optimization that executes gradient-free evolutionary search within a low-frequency subspace. Theoretically, we derive the Spectral Scaling Prediction from perturbation propagation dynamics, which explains the systematic differences in the impact of perturbations across frequencies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SES significantly advances the Pareto frontier of generation quality versus computational cost, consistently outperforming strong baselines under equivalent budgets.

Recent advancements in large-scale generative models have enabled the creation of high-quality images and videos, but have also raised significant safety concerns regarding the generation of unsafe content. To mitigate this, concept erasure methods have been developed to remove undesirable concepts from pre-trained models. However, existing methods remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that can regenerate the erased content. Moreover, achieving robust erasure often degrades the model's generative quality for safe, unrelated concepts, creating a difficult trade-off between safety and performance. To address this challenge, we introduce Classifier-Guided Concept Erasure (CGCE), an efficient plug-and-play framework that provides robust concept erasure for diverse generative models without altering their original weights. CGCE uses a lightweight classifier operating on text embeddings to first detect and then refine prompts containing undesired concepts. This approach is highly scalable, allowing for multi-concept erasure by aggregating guidance from several classifiers. By modifying only unsafe embeddings at inference time, our method prevents harmful content generation while preserving the model's original quality on benign prompts. Extensive experiments show that CGCE achieves state-of-the-art robustness against a wide range of red-teaming attacks. Our approach also maintains high generative utility, demonstrating a superior balance between safety and performance. We showcase the versatility of CGCE through its successful application to various modern T2I and T2V models, establishing it as a practical and effective solution for safe generative AI.

Effective decision-making in Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential for handling intricate tasks. However, existing approaches prioritize performance but often overlook the balance between effectiveness and computational cost. To address this, we first introduce the 3E Criteria to systematically assess the cost-effectiveness of search strategies, revealing that existing methods often trade significant efficiency for marginal performance gains. To improve LLM decision-making while maintaining efficiency, we propose the Speculative Reward Model (SRM), a plug-and-play framework that seamlessly integrates with existing search strategies. Specifically, SRM employs an external reward assigner to predict optimal actions, reducing reliance on LLMs' internal self-evaluation. And a speculative verification mechanism is used to prune suboptimal choices and guide the search toward more promising steps. We evaluate SRM on several complex decision-making tasks including mathematical reasoning, planning and numerical reasoning in specialized domains. Experimental results show that SRM reduces costs to 1/10 of the original search framework on average while maintaining effectiveness.

Although large vision-language models (LVLMs) leverage rich visual token representations to achieve strong performance on multimodal tasks, these tokens also introduce significant computational overhead during inference. Existing training-free token pruning methods typically adopt a single-stage strategy, focusing either on visual self-attention or visual-textual cross-attention. However, such localized perspectives often overlook the broader information flow across the model, leading to substantial performance degradation, especially under high pruning ratios. In this work, we propose STAR (Stage-wise Attention-guided token Reduction), a training-free, plug-and-play framework that approaches token pruning from a global perspective. Instead of pruning at a single point, STAR performs attention-guided reduction in two complementary stages: an early-stage pruning based on visual self-attention to remove redundant low-level features, and a later-stage pruning guided by cross-modal attention to discard task-irrelevant tokens. This holistic approach allows STAR to significantly reduce computational cost while better preserving task-critical information. Extensive experiments across multiple LVLM architectures and benchmarks show that STAR achieves strong acceleration while maintaining comparable, and in some cases even improved performance.

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems are experiencing a revolution driven by Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the evaluation methodologies for these systems remain insufficient for their growing sophistication. While traditional automatic metrics effectively assessed earlier modular systems, they focus solely on the dialogue level and cannot detect critical intermediate errors that can arise during user-agent interactions. In this paper, we introduce TD-EVAL (Turn and Dialogue-level Evaluation), a two-step evaluation framework that unifies fine-grained turn-level analysis with holistic dialogue-level comparisons. At turn level, we evaluate each response along three TOD-specific dimensions: conversation cohesion, backend knowledge consistency, and policy compliance. Meanwhile, we design TOD Agent Arena that uses pairwise comparisons to provide a measure of dialogue-level quality. Through experiments on MultiWOZ 2.4 and {\tau}-Bench, we demonstrate that TD-EVAL effectively identifies the conversational errors that conventional metrics miss. Furthermore, TD-EVAL exhibits better alignment with human judgments than traditional and LLM-based metrics. These findings demonstrate that TD-EVAL introduces a new paradigm for TOD system evaluation, efficiently assessing both turn and system levels with a plug-and-play framework for future research.

The growing scale of evaluation tasks has led to the widespread adoption of automated evaluation using LLMs, a paradigm known as "LLM-as-a-judge". However, improving its alignment with human preferences without complex prompts or fine-tuning remains challenging. Previous studies mainly optimize based on shallow outputs, overlooking rich cross-layer representations. In this work, motivated by preliminary findings that middle-to-upper layers encode semantically and task-relevant representations that are often more aligned with human judgments than the final layer, we propose LAGER, a post-hoc, plug-and-play framework for improving the alignment of LLM-as-a-Judge point-wise evaluations with human scores by leveraging internal representations. LAGER produces fine-grained judgment scores by aggregating cross-layer score-token logits and computing the expected score from a softmax-based distribution, while keeping the LLM backbone frozen and ensuring no impact on the inference process. LAGER fully leverages the complementary information across different layers, overcoming the limitations of relying solely on the final layer. We evaluate our method on the standard alignment benchmarks Flask, HelpSteer, and BIGGen using Spearman correlation, and find that LAGER achieves improvements of up to 7.5% over the best baseline across these benchmarks. Without reasoning steps, LAGER matches or outperforms reasoning-based methods. Experiments on downstream applications, such as data selection and emotional understanding, further show the generalization of LAGER.

The rapid progress of large multimodal models has inspired efforts toward unified frameworks that couple understanding and generation. While such paradigms have shown remarkable success in 2D, extending them to 3D remains largely underexplored. Existing attempts to unify 3D tasks under a single autoregressive (AR) paradigm lead to significant performance degradation due to forced signal quantization and prohibitive training cost. Our key insight is that the essential challenge lies not in enforcing a unified autoregressive paradigm, but in enabling effective information interaction between generation and understanding while minimally compromising their inherent capabilities and leveraging pretrained models to reduce training cost. Guided by this perspective, we present the first unified framework for 3D understanding and generation that combines autoregression with diffusion. Specifically, we adopt an autoregressive next-token prediction paradigm for 3D understanding, and a continuous diffusion paradigm for 3D generation. A lightweight transformer bridges the feature space of large language models and the conditional space of 3D diffusion models, enabling effective cross-modal information exchange while preserving the priors learned by standalone models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse 3D understanding and generation benchmarks, while also excelling in 3D editing tasks. These results highlight the potential of unified AR+diffusion models as a promising direction for building more general-purpose 3D intelligence.

The development of emotion recognition in dialogue (ERC) has been consistently hindered by the complexity of pipeline designs, leading to ERC models that often overfit to specific datasets and dialogue patterns. In this study, we propose a novel approach, namely InstructERC, to reformulates the ERC task from a discriminative framework to a generative framework based on Large Language Models (LLMs) . InstructERC has two significant contributions: Firstly, InstructERC introduces a simple yet effective retrieval template module, which helps the model explicitly integrate multi-granularity dialogue supervision information by concatenating the historical dialog content, label statement, and emotional domain demonstrations with high semantic similarity. Furthermore, we introduce two additional emotion alignment tasks, namely speaker identification and emotion prediction tasks, to implicitly model the dialogue role relationships and future emotional tendencies in conversations. Our LLM-based plug-and-play plugin framework significantly outperforms all previous models and achieves comprehensive SOTA on three commonly used ERC datasets. Extensive analysis of parameter-efficient and data-scaling experiments provide empirical guidance for applying InstructERC in practical scenarios. Our code will be released after blind review.

Despite their remarkable achievement, gigantic transformers encounter significant drawbacks, including exorbitant computational and memory footprints during training, as well as severe collapse evidenced by a high degree of parameter redundancy. Sparsely-activated Mixture-of-Experts (SMoEs) have shown promise to mitigate the issue of training efficiency, yet they are prone to (1) redundant experts due to representational collapse; and (2) poor expert scalability for inference and downstream fine-tuning, primarily due to overfitting of the learned routing policy to the number of activated experts during training. As recent research efforts are predominantly focused on improving routing policies to encourage expert specializations, this work focuses on exploring the overlooked scalability bottleneck of SMoEs and leveraging it to effectively scale dense transformers. To this end, we propose a new plug-and-play training framework, SMoE-Dropout, to enable scaling transformers to better accuracy in their full capacity without collapse. Specifically, SMoE-Dropout consists of a randomly initialized and fixed router network to activate experts and gradually increases the activated expert number as training progresses over time. Transformers trained by SMoE-Dropout naturally exhibit a self-slimmable property subject to resource availability, offering smooth and consistent performance boosts with an increase in activated experts during inference or fine-tuning. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance and substantial computation savings of SMoE-Dropout, compared to dense training baselines with equivalent parameter counts. In particular, our trained BERT outperforms its densely trained counterpart with consistent improvements of {1.03%, 0.78%, 1.09%} on challenging reasoning tasks {ASDiv-A, MAWPS, SVAMP}, respectively.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for general-purpose robot control through natural language instructions. However, their high inference cost-stemming from large-scale token computation and autoregressive decoding-poses significant challenges for real-time deployment and edge applications. While prior work has primarily focused on architectural optimization, we take a different perspective by identifying a dual form of redundancy in VLA models: (i) high similarity across consecutive action steps, and (ii) substantial redundancy in visual tokens. Motivated by these observations, we propose FlashVLA, the first training-free and plug-and-play acceleration framework that enables action reuse in VLA models. FlashVLA improves inference efficiency through a token-aware action reuse mechanism that avoids redundant decoding across stable action steps, and an information-guided visual token selection strategy that prunes low-contribution tokens. Extensive experiments on the LIBERO benchmark show that FlashVLA reduces FLOPs by 55.7% and latency by 36.0%, with only a 0.7% drop in task success rate. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of FlashVLA in enabling lightweight, low-latency VLA inference without retraining.

While Diffusion Models excel in text-to-image synthesis, they often suffer from concept omission when synthesizing complex multi-instance scenes. Existing training-free methods attempt to resolve this by rescaling attention maps, which merely exacerbates unstructured noise without establishing coherent semantic representations. To address this, we propose Delta-K, a backbone-agnostic and plug-and-play inference framework that tackles omission by operating directly in the shared cross-attention Key space. Specifically, with Vision-language model, we extract a differential key ΔK that encodes the semantic signature of missing concepts. This signal is then injected during the early semantic planning stage of the diffusion process. Governed by a dynamically optimized scheduling mechanism, Delta-K grounds diffuse noise into stable structural anchors while preserving existing concepts. Extensive experiments demonstrate the generality of our approach: Delta-K consistently improves compositional alignment across both modern DiT models and classical U-Net architectures, without requiring spatial masks, additional training, or architectural modifications.

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating high-quality samples and enhancing performance across diverse domains through Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG). However, the quality of generated samples is highly sensitive to the selection of the guidance weight. In this work, we identify a critical ``training-inference gap'' and we argue that it is the presence of this gap that undermines the performance of conditional generation and renders outputs highly sensitive to the guidance weight. We quantify this gap by measuring the accumulated error during the inference stage and establish a correlation between the selection of guidance weight and minimizing this gap. Furthermore, to mitigate this gap, we propose DiffIER, an optimization-based method for high-quality generation. We demonstrate that the accumulated error can be effectively reduced by an iterative error minimization at each step during inference. By introducing this novel plug-and-play optimization framework, we enable the optimization of errors at every single inference step and enhance generation quality. Empirical results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms baseline approaches in conditional generation tasks. Furthermore, the method achieves consistent success in text-to-image generation, image super-resolution, and text-to-speech generation, underscoring its versatility and potential for broad applications in future research.

Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) are bottlenecked by sequential decoding, where each new token typically requires executing all transformer layers. Existing dynamic-depth and layer-skipping methods reduce this cost, but often rely on auxiliary routing mechanisms or incur accuracy degradation when bypassed layers are left uncompensated. We present LoRA-Drop, a plug-and-play inference framework that accelerates decoding by applying a temporal compute schedule to a fixed subset of intermediate layers: on most decoding steps, selected layers reuse the previous-token hidden state and apply a low-rank LoRA correction, while periodic refresh steps execute the full model to prevent drift. LoRA-Drop requires no routing network, is compatible with standard KV caching, and can reduce KV-cache footprint by skipping KV updates in droppable layers during LoRA steps and refreshing periodically. Across LLaMA2-7B, LLaMA3-8B, Qwen2.5-7B, and Qwen2.5-14B, LoRA-Drop achieves up to 2.6times faster decoding and 45--55\% KV-cache reduction while staying within 0.5 percentage points (pp) of baseline accuracy. Evaluations on reasoning (GSM8K, MATH, BBH), code generation (HumanEval, MBPP), and long-context/multilingual benchmarks (LongBench, XNLI, XCOPA) identify a consistent safe zone of scheduling configurations that preserves quality while delivering substantial efficiency gains, providing a simple path toward adaptive-capacity inference in LLMs. Codes are available at https://github.com/hosseinbv/LoRA-Drop.git.

Low-rank training has emerged as a promising approach for reducing memory usage in training Large Language Models (LLMs). Previous methods either rely on decomposing weight matrices (e.g., LoRA), or seek to decompose gradient matrices (e.g., GaLore) to ensure reduced memory consumption. However, both of them constrain the training in a low-rank subspace, thus inevitably leading to sub-optimal performance. This raises a question: whether it is possible to consistently preserve the low-rank constraint for memory efficiency, while achieving full-rank training (i.e., training with full-rank gradients of full-rank weights) to avoid inferior outcomes? In this paper, we propose a new plug-and-play training framework for LLMs called Fira, as the first attempt to achieve this goal. First, we observe an interesting phenomenon during LLM training: the scaling impact of adaptive optimizers (e.g., Adam) on the gradient norm remains similar from low-rank to full-rank training. Based on this observation, we propose a norm-based scaling method, which utilizes the scaling impact of low-rank optimizers as substitutes for that of original full-rank optimizers to enable full-rank training. In this way, we can preserve the low-rank constraint in the optimizer while achieving full-rank training for better performance. Moreover, we find that there are sudden gradient rises during the optimization process, potentially causing loss spikes. To address this, we further put forward a norm-growth limiter to smooth the gradient via regulating the relative increase of gradient norms. Extensive experiments on the pre-training and fine-tuning of LLMs show that Fira outperforms both LoRA and GaLore, achieving performance that is comparable to or even better than full-rank training.

Large foundation models are integrated into Computer Use Agents (CUAs), enabling autonomous interaction with operating systems through graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to perform complex tasks. This autonomy introduces serious security risks: malicious instructions or visual prompt injections can trigger unsafe reasoning and cause harmful system-level actions. Existing defenses, such as detection-based blocking, prevent damage but often abort tasks prematurely, reducing agent utility. In this paper, we present MirrorGuard, a plug-and-play defense framework that uses simulation-based training to improve CUA security in the real world. To reduce the cost of large-scale training in operating systems, we propose a novel neural-symbolic simulation pipeline, which generates realistic, high-risk GUI interaction trajectories entirely in a text-based simulated environment, which captures unsafe reasoning patterns and potential system hazards without executing real operations. In the simulation environment, MirrorGuard learns to intercept and rectify insecure reasoning chains of CUAs before they produce and execute unsafe actions. In real-world testing, extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks and CUA architectures show that MirrorGuard significantly mitigates security risks. For instance, on the ByteDance UI-TARS system, it reduces the unsafe rate from 66.5% to 13.0% while maintaining a marginal false refusal rate (FRR). In contrast, the state-of-the-art GuardAgent only achieves a reduction to 53.9% and suffers from a 15.4% higher FRR. Our work proves that simulation-derived defenses can provide robust, real-world protection while maintaining the fundamental utility of the agent. Our code and model are publicly available at https://bmz-q-q.github.io/MirrorGuard/.

Despite rapid progress in large-scale language and vision models, AI agents still suffer from a fundamental limitation: they cannot remember. Without reliable memory, agents catastrophically forget past experiences, struggle with long-horizon reasoning, and fail to operate coherently in multimodal or interactive environments. We introduce MemVerse, a model-agnostic, plug-and-play memory framework that bridges fast parametric recall with hierarchical retrieval-based memory, enabling scalable and adaptive multimodal intelligence. MemVerse maintains short-term memory for recent context while transforming raw multimodal experiences into structured long-term memories organized as hierarchical knowledge graphs. This design supports continual consolidation, adaptive forgetting, and bounded memory growth. To handle real-time demands, MemVerse introduces a periodic distillation mechanism that compresses essential knowledge from long-term memory into the parametric model, allowing fast, differentiable recall while preserving interpretability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MemVerse significantly improves multimodal reasoning and continual learning efficiency, empowering agents to remember, adapt, and reason coherently across extended interactions.

Vision-language models (VLMs) often generate massive visual tokens that greatly increase inference latency and memory footprint; while training-free token pruning offers a practical remedy, existing methods still struggle to balance local evidence and global context under aggressive compression. We propose Focus-Scan-Refine (FSR), a human-inspired, plug-and-play pruning framework that mimics how humans answer visual questions: focus on key evidence, then scan globally if needed, and refine the scanned context by aggregating relevant details. FSR first focuses on key evidence by combining visual importance with instruction relevance, avoiding the bias toward visually salient but query-irrelevant regions. It then scans for complementary context conditioned on the focused set, selecting tokens that are most different from the focused evidence. Finally, FSR refines the scanned context by aggregating nearby informative tokens into the scan anchors via similarity-based assignment and score-weighted merging, without increasing the token budget. Extensive experiments across multiple VLM backbones and vision-language benchmarks show that FSR consistently improves the accuracy-efficiency trade-off over existing state-of-the-art pruning methods. The source codes can be found at https://github.com/ILOT-code/FSR.

Streaming Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across various video understanding tasks, but they face significant challenges in real-time deployment due to the high computational cost of processing dense visual tokens from continuous video streams. In streaming video scenarios, the primary bottleneck lies in the Vision Transformer (ViT) encoding stage, where redundant processing of temporally similar frames leads to inefficiency. Additionally, inflated token sequences during LLM pre-filling further exacerbate latency and memory overhead. To address these challenges, we propose Streaming Token Compression (STC), a plug-and-play hierarchical framework that seamlessly integrates into existing streaming VideoLLMs, optimizing both ViT encoding and LLM pre-filling stages to accelerate processing. STC introduces two token-level accelerators: STC-Cacher, which reduces ViT encoding overhead by caching and reusing features from temporally similar frames, and STC-Pruner, which compresses the visual token sequence before it enters the LLM, preserving only the most salient tokens based on both spatial and temporal relevance. Extensive experiments on four baseline streaming VideoLLMs across five benchmarks demonstrate that STC outperforms other compression methods. Notably, STC retains up to 99\% of accuracy on the ReKV framework while reducing ViT encoding latency and LLM pre-filling latency by 24.5\% and 45.3\%.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve remarkable inference-time improvements through parallel thinking. However, existing methods rely on redundant sampling of reasoning trajectories, failing to effectively explore the reasoning space to uncover high-quality solutions. To address these limitations, we propose Decoding Tree Sketching (DTS), a plug-and-play decoding framework for structural multi-trajectory exploration and reasoning selection. For reasoning exploration, DTS sketches a backbone tree of the reasoning space by selectively branching at decision tokens. For reasoning selection, guided by length-accuracy anti-correlation, DTS designs an early termination to prioritize short and reliable trajectories during decoding. Experimental results across four LRMs and datasets demonstrate that DTS significantly enhances accuracy by 14% and reduces repetitive generation by 8% on average. Notably, DTS enables smaller models to outperform larger models with 10times the size, highlighting its potential to strengthen reasoning capabilities.

The deployment of Industrial Anomaly Detection (IAD) in real-world manufacturing frequently encounters a challenging cold-start bottleneck, in which limited normal samples fail to represent the full normal distribution and only a few anomalies are available. Under such a regime, existing methods struggle to form compact normal boundaries and fail to effectively exploit supervised signals from rare defects. To address this challenge, we propose Anomaly-Rectified Cold-start AD (ArcAD), a plug-and-play calibration framework for reconstruction-based IAD baselines. ArcAD follows a push-pull learning paradigm to construct a compact and discriminative normal boundary under data scarcity. On the one hand, ArcAD projects limited normal samples onto a hypersphere and pulls them into multiple compact clusters to maximize coverage of the normal manifold. On the other hand, it synthesizes pseudo-anomalies on the hypersphere and leverages real anomalies to push the boundary inward and sharpen anomaly discrimination. Extensive experiments on MVTec-AD, VisA, Real-IAD, and MANTA demonstrate that ArcAD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised methods in both single-class and multi-class settings under cold-start conditions. Code is available at: https://github.com/LGC-AD/ArcAD.

Existing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems are primarily designed under the assumption that each query has a single correct answer. This overlooks common information-seeking scenarios with multiple plausible answers, where diversity is essential to avoid collapsing to a single dominant response, thereby constraining creativity and compromising fair and inclusive information access. Our analysis reveals a commonly overlooked limitation of standard RAG systems: they underutilize retrieved context diversity, such that increasing retrieval diversity alone does not yield diverse generations. To address this limitation, we propose DIVERGE, a plug-and-play agentic RAG framework with novel reflection-guided generation and memory-augmented iterative refinement, which promotes diverse viewpoints while preserving answer quality. We introduce novel metrics tailored to evaluating the diversity-quality trade-off in open-ended questions, and show that they correlate well with human judgments. We demonstrate that DIVERGE achieves the best diversity-quality trade-off compared to competitive baselines and previous state-of-the-art methods on the real-world Infinity-Chat dataset, substantially improving diversity while maintaining quality. More broadly, our results reveal a systematic limitation of current LLM-based systems for open-ended information-seeking and show that explicitly modeling diversity can mitigate it. Our code is available at: https://github.com/au-clan/Diverge

The dominance of denoising generative models (e.g., diffusion, flow-matching) in visual synthesis is tempered by their substantial training costs and inefficiencies in representation learning. While injecting discriminative representations via auxiliary alignment has proven effective, this approach still faces key limitations: the reliance on external, pre-trained encoders introduces overhead and domain shift. A dispersed-based strategy that encourages strong separation among in-batch latent representations alleviates this specific dependency. To assess the effect of the number of negative samples in generative modeling, we propose {\mname}, a plug-and-play training framework that requires no external encoders. Our method integrates a memory bank mechanism that maintains a large, dynamically updated queue of negative samples across training iterations. This decouples the number of negatives from the mini-batch size, providing abundant and high-quality negatives for a contrastive objective without a multiplicative increase in computational cost. A low-dimensional projection head is used to further minimize memory and bandwidth overhead. {\mname} offers three principal advantages: (1) it is self-contained, eliminating dependency on pretrained vision foundation models and their associated forward-pass overhead; (2) it introduces no additional parameters or computational cost during inference; and (3) it enables substantially faster convergence, achieving superior generative quality more efficiently. On ImageNet-256, {\mname} achieves a state-of-the-art FID of 2.40 within 400k steps, significantly outperforming comparable methods.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models pre-trained on large, diverse datasets show remarkable potential for general-purpose robotic manipulation. However, a primary bottleneck remains in adapting these models to downstream tasks, especially when the robot's embodiment or the task itself differs from the pre-training data. This discrepancy leads to a significant mismatch in action distributions, demanding extensive data and compute for effective fine-tuning. To address this challenge, we introduce Align-Then-stEer (\texttt{ATE)}, a novel, data-efficient, and plug-and-play adaptation framework. ATE first aligns disparate action spaces by constructing a unified latent space, where a variational autoencoder constrained by reverse KL divergence embeds adaptation actions into modes of the pre-training action latent distribution. Subsequently, it steers the diffusion- or flow-based VLA's generation process during fine-tuning via a guidance mechanism that pushes the model's output distribution towards the target domain. We conduct extensive experiments on cross-embodiment and cross-task manipulation in both simulation and real world. Compared to direct fine-tuning of representative VLAs, our method improves the average multi-task success rate by up to 9.8\% in simulation and achieves a striking 32\% success rate gain in a real-world cross-embodiment setting. Our work presents a general and lightweight solution that greatly enhances the practicality of deploying VLA models to new robotic platforms and tasks.

Video large language models (VideoLLM) excel at video understanding, but face efficiency challenges due to the quadratic complexity of abundant visual tokens. Our systematic analysis of token compression methods for VideoLLMs reveals two critical issues: (i) overlooking distinctive visual signals across frames, leading to information loss; (ii) suffering from implementation constraints, causing incompatibility with modern architectures or efficient operators. To address these challenges, we distill three design principles for VideoLLM token compression and propose a plug-and-play inference acceleration framework "Video Compression Commander" (VidCom2). By quantifying each frame's uniqueness, VidCom2 adaptively adjusts compression intensity across frames, effectively preserving essential information while reducing redundancy in video sequences. Extensive experiments across various VideoLLMs and benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance and efficiency of our VidCom2. With only 25% visual tokens, VidCom2 achieves 99.6% of the original performance on LLaVA-OV while reducing 70.8% of the LLM generation latency. Notably, our Frame Compression Adjustment strategy is compatible with other token compression methods to further improve their performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/xuyang-liu16/VidCom2.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) suffer from substantial computational overhead due to the high redundancy in visual token sequences. Existing approaches typically address this issue using single-layer Vision Transformer (ViT) features and static pruning strategies. However, such fixed configurations are often brittle under diverse instructions. To overcome these limitations, we propose CLASP, a plug-and-play token reduction framework based on class-adaptive layer fusion and dual-stage pruning. Specifically, CLASP first constructs category-specific visual representations through multi-layer vision feature fusion. It then performs dual-stage pruning, allocating the token budget between attention-salient pivot tokens for relevance and redundancy-aware completion tokens for coverage. Through class-adaptive pruning, CLASP enables prompt-conditioned feature fusion and budget allocation, allowing aggressive yet robust visual token reduction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CLASP consistently outperforms existing methods across a wide range of benchmarks, pruning ratios, and MLLM architectures. Code will be available at https://github.com/Yunkaidang/CLASP.

Memory-augmented LLM agents maintain external memory banks to support long-horizon interaction, yet most existing systems treat construction, retrieval, and utilization as isolated subroutines. This creates two coupled challenges: strategic blindness on the forward path of the memory cycle, where construction and retrieval are driven by local heuristics rather than explicit strategic reasoning, and sparse, delayed supervision on the backward path, where downstream failures rarely translate into direct repairs of the memory bank. To address these challenges, we propose MemMA, a plug-and-play multi-agent framework that coordinates the memory cycle along both the forward and backward paths. On the forward path, a Meta-Thinker produces structured guidance that steers a Memory Manager during construction and directs a Query Reasoner during iterative retrieval. On the backward path, MemMA introduces in-situ self-evolving memory construction, which synthesizes probe QA pairs, verifies the current memory, and converts failures into repair actions before the memory is finalized. Extensive experiments on LoCoMo show that MemMA consistently outperforms existing baselines across multiple LLM backbones and improves three different storage backends in a plug-and-play manner. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ventr1c/memma.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable multimodal understanding and reasoning capabilities, yet remain computationally expensive due to dense visual tokenization. Existing efficiency approaches either merge redundant visual tokens or drop them progressively in language backbone, often trading accuracy for speed. In this work, we propose DUET-VLM, a versatile plug-and-play dual compression framework that consists of (a) vision-only redundancy aware compression of vision encoder's output into information-preserving tokens, followed by (b) layer-wise, salient text-guided dropping of visual tokens within the language backbone to progressively prune less informative tokens. This coordinated token management enables aggressive compression while retaining critical semantics. On LLaVA-1.5-7B, our approach maintains over 99% of baseline accuracy with 67% fewer tokens, and still retains >97% even at 89% reduction. With this dual-stage compression during training, it achieves 99.7% accuracy at 67% and 97.6% at 89%, surpassing prior SoTA visual token reduction methods across multiple benchmarks. When integrated into Video-LLaVA-7B, it even surpasses the baseline -- achieving >100% accuracy with a substantial 53.1% token reduction and retaining 97.6% accuracy under an extreme 93.4% setting. These results highlight end-to-end training with DUET-VLM, enabling robust adaptation to reduced visual (image/video) input without sacrificing accuracy, producing compact yet semantically rich representations within the same computational budget. Our code is available at https://github.com/AMD-AGI/DUET-VLM.

One-Shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) algorithms often rely on training a hardware agnostic super-network for a domain specific task. Optimal sub-networks are then extracted from the trained super-network for different hardware platforms. However, training super-networks from scratch can be extremely time consuming and compute intensive especially for large models that rely on a two-stage training process of pre-training and fine-tuning. State of the art pre-trained models are available for a wide range of tasks, but their large sizes significantly limits their applicability on various hardware platforms. We propose InstaTune, a method that leverages off-the-shelf pre-trained weights for large models and generates a super-network during the fine-tuning stage. InstaTune has multiple benefits. Firstly, since the process happens during fine-tuning, it minimizes the overall time and compute resources required for NAS. Secondly, the sub-networks extracted are optimized for the target task, unlike prior work that optimizes on the pre-training objective. Finally, InstaTune is easy to "plug and play" in existing frameworks. By using multi-objective evolutionary search algorithms along with lightly trained predictors, we find Pareto-optimal sub-networks that outperform their respective baselines across different performance objectives such as accuracy and MACs. Specifically, we demonstrate that our approach performs well across both unimodal (ViT and BERT) and multi-modal (BEiT-3) transformer based architectures.

Code generation under long contexts is becoming increasingly critical as Large Language Models (LLMs) are required to reason over extensive information in the codebase. While recent advances enable code LLMs to process long inputs, high API costs and generation latency remain substantial bottlenecks. Existing context pruning techniques, such as LLMLingua, achieve promising results for general text but overlook code-specific structures and dependencies, leading to suboptimal performance in programming tasks. In this paper, we propose LongCodeZip, a novel plug-and-play code compression framework designed specifically for code LLMs. LongCodeZip employs a dual-stage strategy: (1) coarse-grained compression, which identifies and ranks function-level chunks using conditional perplexity with respect to the instruction, retaining only the most relevant functions; and (2) fine-grained compression, which segments retained functions into blocks based on perplexity and selects an optimal subset under an adaptive token budget to maximize relevance. Evaluations across multiple tasks, including code completion, summarization, and question answering, show that LongCodeZip consistently outperforms baseline methods, achieving up to a 5.6x compression ratio without degrading task performance. By effectively reducing context size while preserving essential information, LongCodeZip enables LLMs to better scale to real-world, large-scale code scenarios, advancing the efficiency and capability of code intelligence applications.

In this paper, we propose ZipAR, a training-free, plug-and-play parallel decoding framework for accelerating auto-regressive (AR) visual generation. The motivation stems from the observation that images exhibit local structures, and spatially distant regions tend to have minimal interdependence. Given a partially decoded set of visual tokens, in addition to the original next-token prediction scheme in the row dimension, the tokens corresponding to spatially adjacent regions in the column dimension can be decoded in parallel, enabling the ``next-set prediction'' paradigm. By decoding multiple tokens simultaneously in a single forward pass, the number of forward passes required to generate an image is significantly reduced, resulting in a substantial improvement in generation efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that ZipAR can reduce the number of model forward passes by up to 91% on the Emu3-Gen model without requiring any additional retraining.

Following the success of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) in foundation LLMs, an increasing number of works have sought to adapt GRPO to Visual Large Language Models (VLLMs) for visual perception tasks (e.g., detection and segmentation). However, much of this line of research rests on a long-standing yet unexamined assumption: training paradigms developed for language reasoning can be transferred seamlessly to visual perception. Our experiments show that this assumption is not valid, revealing intrinsic differences between reasoning-oriented and perception-oriented settings. Using reasoning segmentation as a representative case, we surface two overlooked factors: (i) the need for a broader output space, and (ii) the importance of fine-grained, stable rewards. Building on these observations, we propose Dr.~Seg, a simple, plug-and-play GRPO-based framework consisting of a Look-to-Confirm mechanism and a Distribution-Ranked Reward module, requiring no architectural modifications and integrating seamlessly with existing GRPO-based VLLMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Dr.~Seg improves performance in complex visual scenarios while maintaining strong generalization. Code, models, and datasets are available at https://github.com/eVI-group-SCU/Dr-Seg.

Large language models with long context windows can answer complex questions directly from full-length academic, technical, and policy documents, but passing entire documents is often costly, slow, and can degrade answer quality while increasing the risk of unnecessary data leakage. This paper targets the common setting of answering many heterogeneous questions over long document(s), where fixed position heuristics and standard retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can fail due to document structure variability and weak query-chunk semantic similarity, which often requires task- and domain-specific tuning of embedding retrievers. We propose {Selective Attention-Guided Extraction} (\ourmethod), a training-free, plug-and-play context reduction framework that uses a lightweight local LLM to perform a single prefilling pass and convert language model attention signals into a query-specific relevance heatmap at configurable granularities. \ourmethod\ further introduces differential attention strategies to better isolate question-relevant evidence, then selects the top-scoring units under a user-defined token budget and forwards only this reduced context to a downstream LLM for answer generation. \ourmethod\ surpasses traditional reduction techniques across multiple long-document QA benchmarks, notably securing a top-4 rank on QuALITY-hard while constrained to a 10\% context budget. This enables a 90\% reduction in tokens with competitive accuracy, without the need for model fine-tuning or complex calibration.

Conditional generative models typically demand large annotated training sets to achieve high-quality synthesis. As a result, there has been significant interest in designing models that perform plug-and-play generation, i.e., to use a predefined or pretrained model, which is not explicitly trained on the generative task, to guide the generative process (e.g., using language). However, such guidance is typically useful only towards synthesizing high-level semantics rather than editing fine-grained details as in image-to-image translation tasks. To this end, and capitalizing on the powerful fine-grained generative control offered by the recent diffusion-based generative models, we introduce Steered Diffusion, a generalized framework for photorealistic zero-shot conditional image generation using a diffusion model trained for unconditional generation. The key idea is to steer the image generation of the diffusion model at inference time via designing a loss using a pre-trained inverse model that characterizes the conditional task. This loss modulates the sampling trajectory of the diffusion process. Our framework allows for easy incorporation of multiple conditions during inference. We present experiments using steered diffusion on several tasks including inpainting, colorization, text-guided semantic editing, and image super-resolution. Our results demonstrate clear qualitative and quantitative improvements over state-of-the-art diffusion-based plug-and-play models while adding negligible additional computational cost.

Large language models excel at basic reasoning but struggle with tasks that require interaction with external tools. We present RLFactory, a plug-and-play reinforcement learning post-training framework for multi-round tool use. RLFactory tackles (i) tool-call stability and adaptability amid tool heterogeneity and interface issues via an asyncio-based asynchronous caller and a decoupled tool/training architecture, and (ii) diverse evaluation needs via a reward layer supporting rule-based, model-judgment, and tool-verification signals. It reconstructs the MDP by introducing observation markers from tool feedback, closing the loop among model, tools, and environment, and implements a generate-parse-invoke-update workflow for dynamic policy optimization. On Search-R1 with Qwen3-4B, RLFactory achieves a 0.486 test score on the Natural Questions (NQ) dataset, surpassing larger models trained with similar techniques (e.g., Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct-GRPO at 0.473), and increases training throughput by 6.8x. RLFactory provides a low-barrier, highly adaptable framework for strengthening multi-round tool use of LLMs in real-world scenarios. Code: https://github.com/Simple-Efficient/RL-Factory.

Large-scale text-to-image generative models have been a revolutionary breakthrough in the evolution of generative AI, allowing us to synthesize diverse images that convey highly complex visual concepts. However, a pivotal challenge in leveraging such models for real-world content creation tasks is providing users with control over the generated content. In this paper, we present a new framework that takes text-to-image synthesis to the realm of image-to-image translation -- given a guidance image and a target text prompt, our method harnesses the power of a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model to generate a new image that complies with the target text, while preserving the semantic layout of the source image. Specifically, we observe and empirically demonstrate that fine-grained control over the generated structure can be achieved by manipulating spatial features and their self-attention inside the model. This results in a simple and effective approach, where features extracted from the guidance image are directly injected into the generation process of the target image, requiring no training or fine-tuning and applicable for both real or generated guidance images. We demonstrate high-quality results on versatile text-guided image translation tasks, including translating sketches, rough drawings and animations into realistic images, changing of the class and appearance of objects in a given image, and modifications of global qualities such as lighting and color.

Near-field radar imaging systems are recently used in a wide range of applications, such as medical diagnosis, through-wall imaging, concealed weapon detection, and nondestructive evaluation. In this paper, we consider the problem of reconstructing the three-dimensional (3D) complex-valued reflectivity distribution of the near-field scene from sparse multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) array measurements. Using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) framework, we solve this inverse problem by enforcing regularization on the magnitude of the complex-valued reflectivity distribution. For this, we provide a general expression for the proximal mapping associated with such regularization functionals. This equivalently corresponds to the solution of a complex-valued denoising problem which involves regularization on the magnitude. By utilizing this expression, we develop a novel and efficient plug-and-play (PnP) reconstruction method that consists of simple update steps. Due to the success of data-adaptive deep priors in various imaging problems, we also train a 3D deep denoiser to exploit within the developed PnP framework for MIMO imaging. The effectiveness of the developed learning-based PnP approach is illustrated under various compressive and noisy observation scenarios using both simulated data and experimental measurements. The performance is also compared with sparsity priors and the commonly used analytical approaches such as back-projection and Kirchhoff migration. The results demonstrate that the developed technique not only provides state-of-the-art reconstruction performance for 3D real-world targets, but also enables fast computation. Our approach provides a unified general framework to effectively handle arbitrary regularization on the magnitude of a complex-valued unknown and is equally applicable to other radar image formation problems (including SAR).

Masked generative models (MGMs) have emerged as a powerful framework for image synthesis, combining parallel decoding with strong bidirectional context modeling. However, generating high-quality samples typically requires many iterative decoding steps, resulting in high inference costs. A straightforward way to speed up generation is by decoding more tokens in each step, thereby reducing the total number of steps. However, when many tokens are decoded simultaneously, the model can only estimate the univariate marginal distributions independently, failing to capture the dependency among them. As a result, reducing the number of steps significantly compromises generation fidelity. In this work, we introduce ReCAP (Reused Context-Aware Prediction), a plug-and-play module that accelerates inference in MGMs by constructing low-cost steps via reusing feature embeddings from previously decoded context tokens. ReCAP interleaves standard full evaluations with lightweight steps that cache and reuse context features, substantially reducing computation while preserving the benefits of fine-grained, iterative generation. We demonstrate its effectiveness on top of three representative MGMs (MaskGIT, MAGE, and MAR), including both discrete and continuous token spaces and covering diverse architectural designs. In particular, on ImageNet256 class-conditional generation, ReCAP achieves up to 2.4x faster inference than the base model with minimal performance drop, and consistently delivers better efficiency-fidelity trade-offs under various generation settings.

The surge of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), given their prominent emergent capabilities in instruction following and reasoning, has greatly advanced the field of visual reasoning. However, constrained by their non-lossless image tokenization, most MLLMs fall short of comprehensively capturing details of text and objects, especially in high-resolution images. To address this, we propose P2G, a novel framework for plug-and-play grounding of reasoning in MLLMs. Specifically, P2G exploits the tool-usage potential of MLLMs to employ expert agents to achieve on-the-fly grounding to critical visual and textual objects of image, thus achieving deliberate reasoning via multimodal prompting. We further create P2GB, a benchmark aimed at assessing MLLMs' ability to understand inter-object relationships and text in challenging high-resolution images. Comprehensive experiments on visual reasoning tasks demonstrate the superiority of P2G. Noteworthy, P2G achieved comparable performance with GPT-4V on P2GB, with a 7B backbone. Our work highlights the potential of plug-and-play grounding of reasoning and opens up a promising alternative beyond model scaling.

We present Spacerini, a modular framework for seamless building and deployment of interactive search applications, designed to facilitate the qualitative analysis of large scale research datasets. Spacerini integrates features from both the Pyserini toolkit and the Hugging Face ecosystem to ease the indexing text collections and deploy them as search engines for ad-hoc exploration and to make the retrieval of relevant data points quick and efficient. The user-friendly interface enables searching through massive datasets in a no-code fashion, making Spacerini broadly accessible to anyone looking to qualitatively audit their text collections. This is useful both to IR~researchers aiming to demonstrate the capabilities of their indexes in a simple and interactive way, and to NLP~researchers looking to better understand and audit the failure modes of large language models. The framework is open source and available on GitHub: https://github.com/castorini/hf-spacerini, and includes utilities to load, pre-process, index, and deploy local and web search applications. A portfolio of applications created with Spacerini for a multitude of use cases can be found by visiting https://hf.co/spacerini.

Proactive dialogues serve as a practical yet challenging dialogue problem in the era of large language models (LLMs), where the dialogue policy planning is the key to improving the proactivity of LLMs. Most existing studies enable the dialogue policy planning of LLMs using various prompting schemes or iteratively enhance this capability in handling the given case with verbal AI feedback. However, these approaches are either bounded by the policy planning capability of the frozen LLMs or hard to be transferred to new cases. In this work, we introduce a new dialogue policy planning paradigm to strategize LLMs for proactive dialogue problems with a tunable language model plug-in as a plug-and-play dialogue policy planner, named PPDPP. Specifically, we develop a novel training framework to facilitate supervised fine-tuning over available human-annotated data as well as reinforcement learning from goal-oriented AI feedback with dynamic interaction data collected by the LLM-based self-play simulation. In this manner, the LLM-powered dialogue agent can not only be generalized to different cases after the training, but also be applicable to different applications by just substituting the learned plug-in. In addition, we propose to evaluate the policy planning capability of dialogue systems under the interactive setting. Experimental results demonstrate that PPDPP consistently and substantially outperforms existing approaches on three different proactive dialogue applications, including negotiation, emotional support, and tutoring dialogues.

Human-object interactions (HOI) detection aims at capturing human-object pairs in images and corresponding actions. It is an important step toward high-level visual reasoning and scene understanding. However, due to the natural bias from the real world, existing methods mostly struggle with rare human-object pairs and lead to sub-optimal results. Recently, with the development of the generative model, a straightforward approach is to construct a more balanced dataset based on a group of supplementary samples. Unfortunately, there is a significant domain gap between the generated data and the original data, and simply merging the generated images into the original dataset cannot significantly boost the performance. To alleviate the above problem, we present a novel model-agnostic framework called Context-Enhanced Feature Alignment (CEFA) module, which can effectively align the generated data with the original data at the feature level and bridge the domain gap. Specifically, CEFA consists of a feature alignment module and a context enhancement module. On one hand, considering the crucial role of human-object pairs information in HOI tasks, the feature alignment module aligns the human-object pairs by aggregating instance information. On the other hand, to mitigate the issue of losing important context information caused by the traditional discriminator-style alignment method, we employ a context-enhanced image reconstruction module to improve the model's learning ability of contextual cues. Extensive experiments have shown that our method can serve as a plug-and-play module to improve the detection performance of HOI models on rare categorieshttps://github.com/LijunZhang01/CEFA.

Diffusion-based generative models have achieved remarkable success in image generation. Their guidance formulation allows an external model to plug-and-play control the generation process for various tasks without finetuning the diffusion model. However, the direct use of publicly available off-the-shelf models for guidance fails due to their poor performance on noisy inputs. For that, the existing practice is to fine-tune the guidance models with labeled data corrupted with noises. In this paper, we argue that this practice has limitations in two aspects: (1) performing on inputs with extremely various noises is too hard for a single guidance model; (2) collecting labeled datasets hinders scaling up for various tasks. To tackle the limitations, we propose a novel strategy that leverages multiple experts where each expert is specialized in a particular noise range and guides the reverse process of the diffusion at its corresponding timesteps. However, as it is infeasible to manage multiple networks and utilize labeled data, we present a practical guidance framework termed Practical Plug-And-Play (PPAP), which leverages parameter-efficient fine-tuning and data-free knowledge transfer. We exhaustively conduct ImageNet class conditional generation experiments to show that our method can successfully guide diffusion with small trainable parameters and no labeled data. Finally, we show that image classifiers, depth estimators, and semantic segmentation models can guide publicly available GLIDE through our framework in a plug-and-play manner. Our code is available at https://github.com/riiid/PPAP.

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) and Terahertz (THz)-band communications hold great promise in meeting the growing data-rate demands of next-generation wireless networks, offering abundant bandwidth. To mitigate the severe path loss inherent to these high frequencies and reduce hardware costs, ultra-massive multiple-input multiple-output (UM-MIMO) systems with hybrid beamforming architectures can deliver substantial beamforming gains and enhanced spectral efficiency. However, accurate channel estimation (CE) in mmWave and THz UM-MIMO systems is challenging due to high channel dimensionality and compressed observations from a limited number of RF chains, while the hybrid near- and far-field radiation patterns, arising from large array apertures and high carrier frequencies, further complicate CE. Conventional compressive sensing based frameworks rely on predefined sparsifying matrices, which cannot faithfully capture the hybrid near-field and far-field channel structures, leading to degraded estimation performance. This paper introduces DiffPace, a diffusion-based plug-and-play method for channel estimation. DiffPace uses a diffusion model (DM) to capture the channel distribution based on the hybrid spherical and planar-wave (HPSM) model. By applying the plug-and-play approach, it leverages the DM as prior knowledge, improving CE accuracy. Moreover, DM performs inference by solving an ordinary differential equation, minimizing the number of required inference steps compared with stochastic sampling method. Experimental results show that DiffPace achieves competitive CE performance, attaining -15 dB normalized mean square error (NMSE) at a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 10 dB, with 90\% fewer inference steps compared to state-of-the-art schemes, simultaneously providing high estimation precision and enhanced computational efficiency.

Exploiting fine-grained correspondence and visual-semantic alignments has shown great potential in image-text matching. Generally, recent approaches first employ a cross-modal attention unit to capture latent region-word interactions, and then integrate all the alignments to obtain the final similarity. However, most of them adopt one-time forward association or aggregation strategies with complex architectures or additional information, while ignoring the regulation ability of network feedback. In this paper, we develop two simple but quite effective regulators which efficiently encode the message output to automatically contextualize and aggregate cross-modal representations. Specifically, we propose (i) a Recurrent Correspondence Regulator (RCR) which facilitates the cross-modal attention unit progressively with adaptive attention factors to capture more flexible correspondence, and (ii) a Recurrent Aggregation Regulator (RAR) which adjusts the aggregation weights repeatedly to increasingly emphasize important alignments and dilute unimportant ones. Besides, it is interesting that RCR and RAR are plug-and-play: both of them can be incorporated into many frameworks based on cross-modal interaction to obtain significant benefits, and their cooperation achieves further improvements. Extensive experiments on MSCOCO and Flickr30K datasets validate that they can bring an impressive and consistent R@1 gain on multiple models, confirming the general effectiveness and generalization ability of the proposed methods. Code and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/Paranioar/RCAR.

Engineering efficient implementations of compact and succinct structures is a time-consuming and challenging task, since there is no standard library of easy-to- use, highly optimized, and composable components. One consequence is that measuring the practical impact of new theoretical proposals is a difficult task, since older base- line implementations may not rely on the same basic components, and reimplementing from scratch can be very time-consuming. In this paper we present a framework for experimentation with succinct data structures, providing a large set of configurable components, together with tests, benchmarks, and tools to analyze resource requirements. We demonstrate the functionality of the framework by recomposing succinct solutions for document retrieval.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems face a fundamental challenge in aligning independently developed retrievers and large language models (LLMs). Existing approaches typically involve modifying either component or introducing simple intermediate modules, resulting in practical limitations and sub-optimal performance. Inspired by human search behavior -- typically involving a back-and-forth process of proposing search queries and reviewing documents, we propose C-3PO, a proxy-centric framework that facilitates communication between retrievers and LLMs through a lightweight multi-agent system. Our framework implements three specialized agents that collaboratively optimize the entire RAG pipeline without altering the retriever and LLMs. These agents work together to assess the need for retrieval, generate effective queries, and select information suitable for the LLMs. To enable effective multi-agent coordination, we develop a tree-structured rollout approach for reward credit assignment in reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments in both in-domain and out-of-distribution scenarios demonstrate that C-3PO significantly enhances RAG performance while maintaining plug-and-play flexibility and superior generalization capabilities.

Fact-checking is an essential task in NLP that is commonly utilized for validating the factual accuracy of claims. Prior work has mainly focused on fine-tuning pre-trained languages models on specific datasets, which can be computationally intensive and time-consuming. With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT-3, researchers are now exploring their in-context learning capabilities for a wide range of tasks. In this paper, we aim to assess the capacity of LLMs for fact-checking by introducing Self-Checker, a framework comprising a set of plug-and-play modules that facilitate fact-checking by purely prompting LLMs in an almost zero-shot setting. This framework provides a fast and efficient way to construct fact-checking systems in low-resource environments. Empirical results demonstrate the potential of Self-Checker in utilizing LLMs for fact-checking. However, there is still significant room for improvement compared to SOTA fine-tuned models, which suggests that LLM adoption could be a promising approach for future fact-checking research.

Textual style transfer is the task of transforming stylistic properties of text while preserving meaning. Target "styles" can be defined in numerous ways, ranging from single attributes (e.g, formality) to authorship (e.g, Shakespeare). Previous unsupervised style-transfer approaches generally rely on significant amounts of labeled data for only a fixed set of styles or require large language models. In contrast, we introduce a novel diffusion-based framework for general-purpose style transfer that can be flexibly adapted to arbitrary target styles at inference time. Our parameter-efficient approach, ParaGuide, leverages paraphrase-conditioned diffusion models alongside gradient-based guidance from both off-the-shelf classifiers and strong existing style embedders to transform the style of text while preserving semantic information. We validate the method on the Enron Email Corpus, with both human and automatic evaluations, and find that it outperforms strong baselines on formality, sentiment, and even authorship style transfer.

Flow-based generative models have become a strong framework for high-quality generative modeling, yet pretrained models are rarely used in their vanilla conditional form: conditional samples without guidance often appear diffuse and lack fine-grained detail due to the smoothing effects of neural networks. Existing guidance techniques such as classifier-free guidance (CFG) improve fidelity but double the inference cost and typically reduce sample diversity. We introduce Momentum Guidance (MG), a new dimension of guidance that leverages the ODE trajectory itself. MG extrapolates the current velocity using an exponential moving average of past velocities and preserves the standard one-evaluation-per-step cost. It matches the effect of standard guidance without extra computation and can further improve quality when combined with CFG. Experiments demonstrate MG's effectiveness across benchmarks. Specifically, on ImageNet-256, MG achieves average improvements in FID of 36.68% without CFG and 25.52% with CFG across various sampling settings, attaining an FID of 1.597 at 64 sampling steps. Evaluations on large flow-based models like Stable Diffusion 3 and FLUX.1-dev further confirm consistent quality enhancements across standard metrics.

Recent advances in implicit neural representation have demonstrated the ability to recover detailed geometry and material from multi-view images. However, the use of simplified lighting models such as environment maps to represent non-distant illumination, or using a network to fit indirect light modeling without a solid basis, can lead to an undesirable decomposition between lighting and material. To address this, we propose a fully differentiable framework named neural ambient illumination (NeAI) that uses Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) as a lighting model to handle complex lighting in a physically based way. Together with integral lobe encoding for roughness-adaptive specular lobe and leveraging the pre-convoluted background for accurate decomposition, the proposed method represents a significant step towards integrating physically based rendering into the NeRF representation. The experiments demonstrate the superior performance of novel-view rendering compared to previous works, and the capability to re-render objects under arbitrary NeRF-style environments opens up exciting possibilities for bridging the gap between virtual and real-world scenes. The project and supplementary materials are available at https://yiyuzhuang.github.io/NeAI/.

Latent diffusion models have enabled high-quality video synthesis, yet their inference remains costly and time-consuming. As diffusion transformers become increasingly efficient, the latency bottleneck inevitably shifts to VAE decoders. To reduce their latency while maintaining quality, we propose a universal acceleration framework for VAE decoders that preserves full alignment with the original latent distribution. Specifically, we propose (1) an independence-aware channel pruning method to effectively mitigate severe channel redundancy, and (2) a stage-wise dominant operator optimization strategy to address the high inference cost of the widely used causal 3D convolutions in VAE decoders. Based on these innovations, we construct a Flash-VAED family. Moreover, we design a three-phase dynamic distillation framework that efficiently transfers the capabilities of the original VAE decoder to Flash-VAED. Extensive experiments on Wan and LTX-Video VAE decoders demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines in both quality and speed, achieving approximately a 6times speedup while maintaining the reconstruction performance up to 96.9%. Notably, Flash-VAED accelerates the end-to-end generation pipeline by up to 36% with negligible quality drops on VBench-2.0.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced rapidly and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, especially with the rise of agent-based systems. However, their safety has received relatively limited attention. Even the latest proprietary and open-weight VLMs remain highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, leaving downstream applications exposed to significant risks. In this work, we propose a novel and lightweight adversarial attack detection framework based on sparse autoencoders (SAEs), termed SAEgis. By inserting an SAE module into a pretrained VLM and training it with standard reconstruction objectives, we find that the learned sparse latent features naturally capture attack-relevant signals. These features enable reliable classification of whether an input image has been adversarially perturbed, even for previously unseen samples. Extensive experiments show that SAEgis achieves strong performance across in-domain, cross-domain, and cross-attack settings, with particularly large improvements in cross-domain generalization compared to existing baselines. In addition, combining signals from multiple layers further improves robustness and stability. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explore SAE as a plug-and-play mechanism for adversarial attack detection in VLMs. Our method requires no additional adversarial training, introduces minimal overhead, and provides a practical approach for improving the safety of real-world VLM systems.

We propose TR0N, a highly general framework to turn pre-trained unconditional generative models, such as GANs and VAEs, into conditional models. The conditioning can be highly arbitrary, and requires only a pre-trained auxiliary model. For example, we show how to turn unconditional models into class-conditional ones with the help of a classifier, and also into text-to-image models by leveraging CLIP. TR0N learns a lightweight stochastic mapping which "translates" between the space of conditions and the latent space of the generative model, in such a way that the generated latent corresponds to a data sample satisfying the desired condition. The translated latent samples are then further improved upon through Langevin dynamics, enabling us to obtain higher-quality data samples. TR0N requires no training data nor fine-tuning, yet can achieve a zero-shot FID of 10.9 on MS-COCO, outperforming competing alternatives not only on this metric, but also in sampling speed -- all while retaining a much higher level of generality. Our code is available at https://github.com/layer6ai-labs/tr0n.

While diffusion models have made remarkable progress in image generation, their outputs can still appear unrealistic and lack fine details, especially when using fewer number of neural function evaluations (NFEs) or lower guidance scales. To address this issue, we propose a novel momentum-based sampling technique, termed history-guided sampling (HiGS), which enhances quality and efficiency of diffusion sampling by integrating recent model predictions into each inference step. Specifically, HiGS leverages the difference between the current prediction and a weighted average of past predictions to steer the sampling process toward more realistic outputs with better details and structure. Our approach introduces practically no additional computation and integrates seamlessly into existing diffusion frameworks, requiring neither extra training nor fine-tuning. Extensive experiments show that HiGS consistently improves image quality across diverse models and architectures and under varying sampling budgets and guidance scales. Moreover, using a pretrained SiT model, HiGS achieves a new state-of-the-art FID of 1.61 for unguided ImageNet generation at 256times256 with only 30 sampling steps (instead of the standard 250). We thus present HiGS as a plug-and-play enhancement to standard diffusion sampling that enables faster generation with higher fidelity.

Time-domain simulations are crucial for ensuring power system stability and avoiding critical scenarios that could lead to blackouts. The next-generation power systems require a significant increase in the computational cost and complexity of these simulations due to additional degrees of uncertainty, non-linearity and states. Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINN) have been shown to accelerate single-component simulations by several orders of magnitude. However, their application to current time-domain simulation solvers has been particularly challenging since the system's dynamics depend on multiple components. Using a new training formulation, this paper introduces the first natural step to integrate PINNs into multi-component time-domain simulations. We propose PINNs as an alternative to other classical numerical methods for individual components. Once trained, these neural networks approximate component dynamics more accurately for longer time steps. Formulated as an implicit and consistent method with the transient simulation workflow, PINNs speed up simulation time by significantly increasing the time steps used. For explanation clarity, we demonstrate the training, integration, and simulation framework for several combinations of PINNs and numerical solution methods using the IEEE 9-bus system, although the method applies equally well to any power system size.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promise for robotic manipulation, yet most existing policies operate reactively by directly regressing actions from current observations, without explicitly modeling future dynamics. This limits their ability to generalize under out-of-distribution perturbations. To address this issue, we propose ELAN4D, an embodiment-centric, 4D-aware training framework that enhances VLA policies with future robot keypoint tracks as predictive spatio-temporal supervision. Using only forward kinematics from proprioceptive states, we derive 3D displacement tracks of robot keypoints, such as joints and the end-effector, with negligible preprocess cost. These tracks provide metric and compact supervision without requiring external trackers or reconstruction. A plug-and-play auxiliary branch with a lightweight track decoder injects this 4D signal into the action expert while preserving the pretrained vision-language backbone through gradient isolation. The track decoder is discarded during inference, leaving the base policy interface unchanged. Extensive experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, RoboTwin2.0 and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that ELAN4D consistently improves over strong VLA baselines, achieving the best overall performance and substantial gains under out-of-distribution perturbations, including camera, background, and layout shifts. These results highlight the effectiveness of embodiment-centric 4D supervision for building more robust and generalizable manipulation policies.

Audio-Visual Question Answering (AVQA) is a challenging multimodal reasoning task requiring intelligent systems to answer natural language queries based on paired audio-video inputs accurately. However, existing AVQA approaches often suffer from overfitting to dataset biases, leading to poor robustness. Moreover, current datasets may not effectively diagnose these methods. To address these challenges, we first introduce a novel dataset, FortisAVQA, constructed in two stages: (1) rephrasing questions in the test split of the public MUSIC-AVQA dataset and (2) introducing distribution shifts across questions. The first stage expands the test space with greater diversity, while the second enables a refined robustness evaluation across rare, frequent, and overall question distributions. Second, we introduce a robust Multimodal Audio-Visual Epistemic Network (MAVEN) that leverages a multifaceted cycle collaborative debiasing strategy to mitigate bias learning. Experimental results demonstrate that our architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance on FortisAVQA, with a notable improvement of 7.81\%. Extensive ablation studies on both datasets validate the effectiveness of our debiasing components. Additionally, our evaluation reveals the limited robustness of existing multimodal QA methods. We also verify the plug-and-play capability of our strategy by integrating it with various baseline models across both datasets. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/reml-group/fortisavqa.