Daily Papers

Gradient-based data selection offers a principled framework for estimating sample utility in large language model (LLM) fine-tuning, but existing methods are mostly designed for offline settings. They are therefore less suited to online fine-tuning, where data arrives sequentially, sample utility is step-dependent, and the effective update geometry is shaped by adaptive optimizers. We propose an optimizer-aware framework for gradient-based online data selection and reweighting in LLM fine-tuning. Our key idea is to view online selection not as static sample ranking, but as shaping the next target-oriented update under the optimizer state. We formulate this as an optimizer-aware update-matching problem, establish its connection to second-order target utility, and show why subset-level construction must account for interactions and redundancy among selected samples. Based on this view, we develop a two-stage Filter-then-Weight algorithm that first filters geometrically useful candidates and then optimizes their coefficients. To make the framework practical for LLMs, we introduce a factorized outer-product gradient representation and optimized matrix computations for long-context data. Experiments show that our method consistently improves convergence and downstream performance over existing online data selection baselines under the same data budget.

Self-evolution offers a scalable path to stronger reasoning: a pretrained language model improves itself with only minimal external supervision. Yet existing methods either depend on extensively curated or teacher-generated training data, or, when the generator runs unsupervised, reward it by a difficulty heuristic that need not improve the solver. We introduce INFUSER, an iterative co-training framework with two co-evolving roles: a Generator that drafts questions and reference golden answers from a pool of unstructured, automatically collected documents, and a Solver that improves by training on them. The solver is trained with standard correctness rewards against the generator-provided answers, while the generator is rewarded by an optimizer-aware influence score that measures whether each proposed question would actually improve the solver on the target distribution. Because this continuous, noisy influence score is poorly served by standard GRPO, we propose DuGRPO, a dual-normalized variant of GRPO, for generator training. Together, these turn the document pool into an adaptive curriculum that favors questions useful to the current solver, not just hard ones. On Qwen3-8B-Base, INFUSER outperforms strong self-evolution baselines with over 20% relative improvement on Olympiad and SuperGPQA benchmarks, and an 8B INFUSER co-evolving generator outperforms a frozen 32B thinking generator on math and coding. Ablations confirm each design choice is necessary, and two extensions, applying INFUSER to an instruction-finetuned anchor and augmenting it with rule-verifiable RLVR data, further demonstrate the flexibility and generalizability of the framework. Code is available at https://github.com/FFishy-git/INFUSER.

Federated Learning with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) faces three critical challenges under client heterogeneity: (1) Initialization-Induced Instability due to random initialization misaligning client subspaces; (2) Rank Incompatibility and Aggregation Error when averaging LoRA parameters of different ranks, which biases the global model; and (3) exacerbated Client Drift under Non-IID Data, impairing generalization. To address these challenges, we propose ILoRA, a unified framework that integrates three core innovations: a QR-based orthonormal initialization to ensure all clients start in a coherent subspace; a Concatenated QR Aggregation mechanism that fuses heterogeneous-rank updates via concatenation and decomposition, preserving information while maintaining dimension alignment; and an AdamW optimizer with rank-aware control variates to correct local updates and mitigate client drift. Supported by theoretical convergence guarantees, extensive experiments on vision and NLP benchmarks demonstrate that ILoRA consistently achieves superior accuracy and convergence stability compared to existing federated LoRA methods.

The Muon optimizer has recently offered a promising alternative to AdamW for large language model training, leveraging matrix orthogonalization to produce geometry-aware updates. However, like all first-order methods, Muon can become trapped in sharp local minima. In this work, we present MONA, an optimizer that bridges Muon's orthogonalization framework with curvature-aware acceleration. MONA adds an acceleration term directly into Muon's gradient processing pipeline. This term is calculated from the exponential moving average of gradient differences. We provide a detailed convergence analysis for MONA, showing that the acceleration term enables escape from sharp minima while preserving Muon's spectral-norm regularization. Empirically, MONA achieves better convergence and downstream task performance compared to both Muon and AdamW across three scales of Mixture-of-Experts pretraining, spanning from 1B to 68B parameters, with the largest model trained on 1 trillion tokens. Furthermore, we conduct supervised fine-tuning on the MOE-68B-A3B model and evaluate it on general capability, mathematical reasoning, and code generation benchmarks, where MONA achieves SOTA performance.

Generating high-performance CUDA kernels remains challenging due to the need to navigate a combinatorial space of low-level transformations under noisy and expensive hardware feedback. Although large language models can synthesize functionally correct CUDA code, achieving competitive performance requires systematic exploration and verification of optimization choices. We present OptiML, an end-to-end framework that maps either natural-language intent or input CUDA code to performance-optimized CUDA kernels by formulating kernel optimization as search under verification. OptiML consists of two decoupled stages. When the input is natural language, a Mixture-of-Thoughts generator (OptiML-G) acts as a proposal policy over kernel implementation strategies, producing an initial executable program. A search-based optimizer (OptiML-X) then refines either synthesized or user-provided kernels using Monte Carlo Tree Search over LLM-driven edits, guided by a hardware-aware reward derived from profiler feedback. Each candidate transformation is compiled, verified, and profiled with Nsight Compute, and evaluated by a composite objective that combines runtime with hardware bottleneck proxies and guardrails against regressions. We evaluate OptiML in both synthesis-and-optimize and optimization-only settings on a diverse suite of CUDA kernels. Results show that OptiML consistently discovers verified performance improvements over strong LLM baselines and produces interpretable optimization trajectories grounded in profiler evidence.

The ``You Only Look Once'' (YOLO) framework has long served as a standard for real-time object detection, though traditional iterations have utilized Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) post-processing, which introduces specific latency and hyperparameter variables. This paper presents a comprehensive architectural analysis of YOLO26, a model that shifts toward a native end-to-end learning strategy by eliminating NMS. This study examines the core mechanisms driving this framework: the MuSGD optimizer for backbone stabilization, Small-Target-Aware Label Assignment (STAL), and ProgLoss for dynamic supervision. To contextualize its performance, this article reviews exhaustive benchmark data from the COCO val2017 leaderboard. This evaluation provides an objective comparison of YOLO26 across various model scales (Nano to Extra-Large) against both prior CNN lineages and contemporary Transformer-based architectures (e.g., RT-DETR, DEIM, RF-DETR), detailing the observed speed-accuracy trade-offs and parameter requirements without asserting a singular optimal model. Additionally, the analysis covers the framework's unified multi-task capabilities, including the YOLOE-26 open-vocabulary module for promptable detection. Ultimately, this paper serves to document how decoupling representation learning from heuristic post-processing impacts the "Export Gap" and deterministic latency in modern edge-based computer vision deployments.

Modern vision-language models (VLMs) are expected to have abilities of spatial reasoning with diverse scene complexities, but evaluating such abilities is difficult due to the lack of benchmarks that are not only diverse and scalable but also fully customizable. Existing benchmarks offer limited customizability over the scene complexity and are incapable of isolating and analyzing specific VLM failure modes under distinct spatial conditions. To address this gap, instead of individually presenting benchmarks for different scene complexities, in this paper we present InfiniBench, a fully automated, customizable and user-friendly benchmark generator that can synthesize a theoretically infinite variety of 3D scenes with parameterized control on scene complexity. InfiniBench uniquely translates scene descriptions in natural language into photo-realistic videos with complex and physically plausible 3D layouts. This is achieved through three key innovations: 1) a LLM-based agentic framework that iteratively refines procedural scene constraints from scene descriptions; 2) a flexible cluster-based layout optimizer that generates dense and cluttered scenes previously intractable for procedural methods; and 3) a task-aware camera trajectory optimization method that renders scenes into videos with full object coverage as VLM input. Experiments demonstrate that InfiniBench outperforms state-of-the-art procedural and LLM-based 3D generation methods in prompt fidelity and physical plausibility, especially in high-complexity scenarios. We further showcased the usefulness of InfiniBench, by generating benchmarks for representative spatial reasoning tasks including measurement, perspective-taking and spatiotemporal tracking.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models exhibit remarkable action generation for embodied intelligence, but their heavy compute make deployment on edge platforms impractical. Aggressive, sub-4-bit weight quantization is the natural solution, yet existing post-training quantization (PTQ) methods suffer severe performance degradation in this regime. To address this, we introduce ActQuant, an action-guided mixed-precision PTQ framework that operates in two stages: (1) an inter-tensor bit allocator that assigns each weight matrix a single bit-width based on how much it contributes to predicting the agent's actions; (2) an intra-tensor scale optimizer tunes per-block quantization scales using action-aware curvature, so that dynamic range is concentrated on the weights most influential for control. To deliver the on-device benefits of our aggressive quantization, we further introduce OmniModel.cpp, an agentic conversion pipeline that ports architectures into a native C/C++ runtime with efficient low-bit kernels. We evaluate ActQuant both in simulation and on a real-world 6-DoF UR3 arm, with all models deployed through OmniModel.cpp. On the LIBERO benchmark, ActQuant is the only method that operates at or below 3 bits-per-weight, retaining 95.0% on OpenVLA-OFT and 94.8% on π_{0.5}. Pushed further, ActQuant reaches 2.5 bpw at 90.1% on OpenVLA-OFT, compressing the backbone from 14.3 GB to 2.7 GB (5.3times). On the physical UR3 arm, π_{0.5} quantized with ActQuant retains the baseline's success rate while reducing the memory footprint by 2.5times.

Cortical visual prostheses aim to restore sight by electrically stimulating neurons in early visual cortex (V1). With the emergence of high-density and flexible neural interfaces, electrode placement within three-dimensional cortex has become a critical surgical planning problem. Existing strategies emphasize visual field coverage and anatomical heuristics but do not directly optimize predicted perceptual outcomes under safety constraints. We present a percept-aware framework for surgical planning of cortical visual prostheses that formulates electrode placement as a constrained optimization problem in anatomical space. Electrode coordinates are treated as learnable parameters and optimized end-to-end using a differentiable forward model of prosthetic vision. The objective minimizes task-level perceptual error while incorporating vascular avoidance and gray matter feasibility constraints. Evaluated on simulated reading and natural image tasks using realistic folded cortical geometry (FreeSurfer fsaverage), percept-aware optimization consistently improves reconstruction fidelity relative to coverage-based placement strategies. Importantly, vascular safety constraints eliminate margin violations while preserving perceptual performance. The framework further enables co-optimization of multi-electrode thread configurations under fixed insertion budgets. These results demonstrate how differentiable percept models can inform anatomically grounded, safety-aware computer-assisted planning for cortical neural interfaces and provide a foundation for optimizing next-generation visual prostheses.

Recent advances in Neural Architecture Search (NAS) such as one-shot NAS offer the ability to extract specialized hardware-aware sub-network configurations from a task-specific super-network. While considerable effort has been employed towards improving the first stage, namely, the training of the super-network, the search for derivative high-performing sub-networks is still under-explored. Popular methods decouple the super-network training from the sub-network search and use performance predictors to reduce the computational burden of searching on different hardware platforms. We propose a flexible search framework that automatically and efficiently finds optimal sub-networks that are optimized for different performance metrics and hardware configurations. Specifically, we show how evolutionary algorithms can be paired with lightly trained objective predictors in an iterative cycle to accelerate architecture search in a multi-objective setting for various modalities including machine translation and image classification.

Deploying large language models (LLMs) for long-context inference remains challenging due to their substantial memory and computational demands. While techniques such as Key-Value (KV) cache compression are designed to reduce memory usage, they often neglect the structured sparsity inherent in the relationship between hidden states and their corresponding KV cache. In this work, we explore the role of uncertainty as a potential indicator of sparsity within LLMs. We propose UNComp, an uncertainty-aware framework that leverages truncated matrix entropy to identify areas of low information content, thereby revealing sparsity patterns that can be used for adaptive compression. Unlike traditional methods that apply uniform compression, UNComp dynamically adjusts its approach to compression, guided by uncertainty measures that reflect the importance of various model components. Our analysis shows that sparsity patterns, when derived from uncertainty estimates, can be exploited to reveal special long-range dependencies, such as retrieval heads and retrieval layers. This perspective not only enhances our understanding of how compression can be optimized but also provides new insights into the inherent sparsity of LLMs during long-context inference. By focusing on uncertainty to analyze the sparsity pattern in detail, UNComp reduces the KV cache size to 4.74% of the original, achieves a 6% prefill speedup, and improves throughput by 6.4x - not only delivering strong lossless compression performance, but also validating the effectiveness of the underlying theoretical tool. We release the code at https://github.com/menik1126/UNComp.

The quadratic computational complexity of standard attention mechanisms presents a severe scalability bottleneck for LLMs in long-context scenarios. While hybrid attention mechanisms combining Full Attention (FA) and Sparse Attention (SA) offer a potential solution, existing methods typically rely on static allocation ratios that fail to accommodate the variable retrieval demands of different tasks. Furthermore, head-level dynamic sparsity often introduces severe computational load imbalance and synchronization long-tails, which hinder hardware acceleration during autoregressive decoding. To bridge this gap, we introduce Flux Attention, a context-aware framework that dynamically optimizes attention computation at the layer level. By integrating a lightweight Layer Router into frozen pretrained LLMs, the proposed method adaptively routes each layer to FA or SA based on the input context. This layer-wise routing preserves high-fidelity information retrieval while ensuring contiguous memory access, translating theoretical computational reductions into practical wall-clock speedups. As a parameter-efficient approach, our framework requires only 12 hours of training on 8timesA800 GPUs. Extensive experiments across multiple long-context and mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that Flux Attention achieves a superior trade-off between performance and inference speed compared with baseline models, with speed improvements of up to 2.8times and 2.0times in the prefill and decode stages.

Tree-based speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by verifying a branching tree of draft tokens in a single target-model forward pass. However, existing methods prioritize maximizing token-level likelihood or the number of accepted tokens while ignoring a critical ``efficiency paradox'': the computational overhead of drafting and verifying big trees can grow super-linearly, particularly at scale. This often leads to negative wall-clock speedup when batch sizes increase or hardware saturation limits are reached. To address this, we propose SMART, a system-aware marginal analysis framework for runtime tree construction. SMART reformulates tree expansion as a hardware-aware optimization problem that directly maximizes end-to-end speedup. By applying a principled marginal benefit--cost rule at inference time, SMART expands a node only when its marginal benefit--cost ratio exceeds the tree-level speedup. SMART is training-free and serves as a plug-and-play controller for existing frameworks like MSD and EAGLE. Extensive evaluations across three MLLMs (e.g., LLaVA, Qwen2-VL) and four LLMs (e.g., Llama-3.1, DeepSeek-R1) demonstrate that SMART consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. It delivers an average additional speedup of 20.0\% for MLLMs and 15.4\% for LLMs across compute-bound batching regimes and diverse GPU architectures without performance loss.

In long-context question answering (LCQA), determining the optimal amount of context for a given query is a significant challenge. Including too few passages may omit critical information, while including too many can introduce noise and reduce the quality of the answer. Traditional approaches, such as fixed Top-K retrieval and single-stage reranking, face the dilemma of selecting the right number of passages. This problem is particularly pronounced for factoid questions, which often require only a few specific pieces of evidence. To address this issue, we introduce Context-Picker, a reasoning-aware framework that shifts the paradigm from similarity-based ranking to minimal sufficient subset selection. Context-Picker treats context selection as a decision-making process optimized via a human-inspired, two-stage reinforcement learning schedule: a recall-oriented stage that prioritizes the coverage of reasoning chains, followed by a precision-oriented stage that aggressively prunes redundancy to distill a compact evidence set. To resolve reward sparsity, we propose an offline evidence distillation pipeline that mines "minimal sufficient sets" via a Leave-One-Out (LOO) procedure, providing dense, task-aligned supervision. Experiments on five long-context and multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that Context-Picker significantly outperforms strong RAG baselines, achieving superior answer accuracy with comparable or reduced context lengths. Ablation studies indicate that the coarse-to-fine optimization schedule, the redundancy-aware reward shaping, and the rationale-guided format all contribute substantially to these gains.

The rapid growth of large language model (LLM) inference services has increased the demand for efficient multi-tenant GPU scheduling. While modern inference runtimes such as vLLM improve throughput through continuous batching and optimized memory management, accurately estimating the runtime cost of heterogeneous inference requests remains challenging. In practice, admission-time workload estimates may deviate from observed execution behavior, leading to workload misclassification, queue imbalance, increased tail latency, and degraded Quality-of-Service (QoS). This paper presents DriftSched, a QoS-aware scheduling framework for multi-tenant LLM inference serving on NVIDIA L4 GPUs. DriftSched combines workload classification, token-budget estimation, tenant-aware queue management, and an online feedback mechanism to refine workload estimates using runtime observations. The framework evaluates FIFO, Priority, Weighted, Shortest-Job-First (SJF), and Aging Priority scheduling policies under heterogeneous multi-tenant workloads. Experimental results show that adaptive calibration reduces workload estimation error by an average of 38.8% (MAE) and 40.5% (RMSE), improving workload classification stability. Among all evaluated schedulers, SJF achieves the best overall performance, reducing median end-to-end latency by approximately 42% and P99 latency by approximately 16% relative to FIFO under sustained GPU contention. The results further indicate that scheduler selection has a greater impact on latency behavior than runtime calibration alone, while accurate workload characterization largely eliminates systematic estimation drift. This work contributes a reproducible framework for studying workload-estimation fidelity and QoS-aware scheduling in multi-tenant GPU inference systems.

Image captioning is one of the most fundamental tasks in computer vision. Owing to its open-ended nature, it has received significant attention in the era of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). In pursuit of ever more detailed and accurate captions, recent work has increasingly turned to reinforcement learning (RL). However, existing captioning-RL methods and evaluation metrics often emphasize a narrow notion of caption quality, inducing trade-offs across core dimensions of captioning. For example, utility-oriented objectives can encourage noisy, hallucinated, or overlong captions that improve downstream question answering while harming fluency, whereas arena-style objectives can favor fluent but generic descriptions with limited usefulness. To address this, we propose a more balanced RL framework that jointly optimizes utility-aware correctness, reference coverage, and linguistic quality. In order to effectively optimize the resulting continuous multi-objective reward formulation, we apply GDPO-style reward-decoupled normalization to continuous-valued captioning rewards and show that it improves performance over vanilla GRPO. Additionally, we introduce length-conditional reward masking, yielding a more suitable length penalty for captioning. Across LLaVA-1.5-7B and Qwen2.5-VL 3B and 7B base models, our method consistently improves caption quality, with peak gains of +13.6 DCScore, +9.0 CaptionQA, and +29.0 CapArena across different models.

Sparsity-aware training is an effective approach for transforming large language models (LLMs) into hardware-friendly sparse patterns, thereby reducing latency and memory consumption during inference. In this paper, we propose Continuous Adaptive Sparse Trainer (CAST), a fully continuous and differentiable sparsity-aware training framework for semi-structured (or "N:M") sparse models. Unlike previous approaches that optimize sparsity patterns and weights separately, CAST enables seamless joint optimization during training, while progressively transforming the model into the desired sparsity format. Specifically, CAST introduces three key components: 1) AdamS, a sparsity-aware optimizer that leverages adaptive L1 decay to promote uniform sparsification across all parameters; 2) Weight Scaling, a module designed to mitigate the magnitude reduction caused by decay while preserving desired sparsity patterns; 3) Knowledge Distillation, which employs the dense model as a self-teacher to enhance training efficiency. We evaluate CAST under 2:4 sparsity patterns across multiple model families, ranging from 125M to 13B parameters. Our results demonstrate significant improvements over previous state-of-the-art methods in both perplexity and zero-shot accuracy with minimal training resources. Notably, on LLaMA2-7B, our 2:4 sparse model achieves a negligible perplexity increase of 0.09 and a 0.36% gain in zero-shot accuracy compared to the dense model using only 2% of the original pretraining tokens. Additionally, we establish an accurate and robust empirical scaling law to predict sparse model performance given adequate training resources. Finally, we demonstrate the practical applicability of our sparse models by evaluating them under quantization and fine-tuning scenarios.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities, but their broad deployment is limited by significant computational resource demands, particularly energy consumption during inference. Static, one-model-fits-all inference strategies are often inefficient, as they do not exploit the diverse range of available models or adapt to varying query requirements. This paper presents GreenServ, a dynamic, context-aware routing framework that optimizes the trade-off between inference accuracy and energy efficiency. GreenServ extracts lightweight contextual features from each query, including task type, semantic cluster, and text complexity, and routes queries to the most suitable model from a heterogeneous pool, based on observed accuracy and energy usage. We employ a multi-armed bandit approach to learn adaptive routing policies online. This approach operates under partial feedback, eliminates the need for extensive offline calibration, and streamlines the integration of new models into the inference pipeline. We evaluated GreenServ across five benchmark tasks and a pool of 16 contemporary open-access LLMs. Experimental results show that GreenServ consistently outperforms static (single-model) and random baselines. In particular, compared to random routing, GreenServ achieved a 22% increase in accuracy while reducing cumulative energy consumption by 31%. Finally, we evaluated GreenServ with RouterBench, achieving an average accuracy of 71.7% with a peak accuracy of 75.7%. All artifacts are open-source and available here: https://github.com/TZData1/llm-inference-router{GitHub}

Visual object tracking is essential to intelligent robots. Most existing approaches have ignored the online latency that can cause severe performance degradation during real-world processing. Especially for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), where robust tracking is more challenging and onboard computation is limited, the latency issue can be fatal. In this work, we present a simple framework for end-to-end latency-aware tracking, i.e., end-to-end predictive visual tracking (PVT++). Unlike existing solutions that naively append Kalman Filters after trackers, PVT++ can be jointly optimized, so that it takes not only motion information but can also leverage the rich visual knowledge in most pre-trained tracker models for robust prediction. Besides, to bridge the training-evaluation domain gap, we propose a relative motion factor, empowering PVT++ to generalize to the challenging and complex UAV tracking scenes. These careful designs have made the small-capacity lightweight PVT++ a widely effective solution. Additionally, this work presents an extended latency-aware evaluation benchmark for assessing an any-speed tracker in the online setting. Empirical results on a robotic platform from the aerial perspective show that PVT++ can achieve significant performance gain on various trackers and exhibit higher accuracy than prior solutions, largely mitigating the degradation brought by latency.

Current vision-language pre-training (VLP) paradigms excel at global scene understanding but struggle with instance-level reasoning due to global-only supervision. We introduce InstAP, an Instance-Aware Pre-training framework that jointly optimizes global vision-text alignment and fine-grained, instance-level contrastive alignment by grounding textual mentions to specific spatial-temporal regions. To support this, we present InstVL, a large-scale dataset (2 million images, 50,000 videos) with dual-granularity annotations: holistic scene captions and dense, grounded instance descriptions. On the InstVL benchmark, InstAP substantially outperforms existing VLP models on instance-level retrieval, and also surpasses a strong VLP baseline trained on the exact same data corpus, isolating the benefit of our instance-aware objective. Moreover, instance-centric pre-training improves global understanding: InstAP achieves competitive zero-shot performance on multiple video benchmarks, including MSR-VTT and DiDeMo. Qualitative visualizations further show that InstAP localizes textual mentions to the correct instances, while global-only models exhibit more diffuse, scene-level attention.

Gaussian processes (GPs) stand as crucial tools in machine learning and signal processing, with their effectiveness hinging on kernel design and hyper-parameter optimization. This paper presents a novel GP linear multiple kernel (LMK) and a generic sparsity-aware distributed learning framework to optimize the hyper-parameters. The newly proposed grid spectral mixture product (GSMP) kernel is tailored for multi-dimensional data, effectively reducing the number of hyper-parameters while maintaining good approximation capability. We further demonstrate that the associated hyper-parameter optimization of this kernel yields sparse solutions. To exploit the inherent sparsity of the solutions, we introduce the Sparse LInear Multiple Kernel Learning (SLIM-KL) framework. The framework incorporates a quantized alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) scheme for collaborative learning among multiple agents, where the local optimization problem is solved using a distributed successive convex approximation (DSCA) algorithm. SLIM-KL effectively manages large-scale hyper-parameter optimization for the proposed kernel, simultaneously ensuring data privacy and minimizing communication costs. Theoretical analysis establishes convergence guarantees for the learning framework, while experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate the superior prediction performance and efficiency of our proposed methods.

We introduce PaddleOCR-VL-1.6, an upgraded compact document parsing model built upon PaddleOCR-VL-1.5. Although PaddleOCR-VL-1.5 establishes a strong 0.9B baseline, its remaining errors concentrate in under-optimized regions where model behavior is unstable, data coverage is sparse, or supervision is unreliable. Rather than expanding the training corpus indiscriminately, PaddleOCR-VL-1.6 introduces a region-aware data optimization framework that identifies weak regions from the previous model, applies targeted enhancement to these regions, and improves the reliability of supervision signals. It further adopts a progressive post-training recipe based on curated data selection and reinforcement learning, pushing model performance to a higher level through staged optimization. PaddleOCR-VL-1.6 achieves a new state-of-the-art score of 96.33% on OmniDocBench v1.6, demonstrates strong competitiveness against top-tier VLMs, and provides a practical post-training recipe for the PaddleOCR-VL series.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved near-human performance across diverse reasoning tasks, yet their deployment on resource-constrained Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices remains impractical due to massive parameter footprints and memory-intensive autoregressive decoding. While split computing offers a promising solution by partitioning model execution between edge devices and cloud servers, existing approaches fail to address the unique challenges of autoregressive inference, particularly the iterative token generation process and expanding key-value (KV) cache requirements. This work introduces the first autoregressive-aware split computing framework designed explicitly for LLM deployment on edge devices. Our approach makes three key contributions. First, we develop one-point split compression (OPSC), a mixed-precision quantization scheme that prevents out-of-memory failures by strategically partitioning models into front-end and back-end segments with different precision levels. Second, we propose a two-stage intermediate compression pipeline that combines threshold splitting (TS) and token-wise adaptive bit quantization (TAB-Q) to preserve accuracy-critical activations while dramatically reducing communication overhead. Third, we formulate a unified optimization framework that jointly selects optimal split points, quantization settings, and sequence lengths to satisfy strict memory and latency constraints. Extensive evaluations across diverse LLMs and hardware platforms demonstrate superior performance compared to state-of-the-art quantization methods, including SmoothQuant, OmniQuant, and Atom. The framework achieves a 1.49 inference speedup and significant communication overhead reduction while maintaining or improving model accuracy.

Contemporary image rescaling aims at embedding a high-resolution (HR) image into a low-resolution (LR) thumbnail image that contains embedded information for HR image reconstruction. Unlike traditional image super-resolution, this enables high-fidelity HR image restoration faithful to the original one, given the embedded information in the LR thumbnail. However, state-of-the-art image rescaling methods do not optimize the LR image file size for efficient sharing and fall short of real-time performance for ultra-high-resolution (e.g., 6K) image reconstruction. To address these two challenges, we propose a novel framework (HyperThumbnail) for real-time 6K rate-distortion-aware image rescaling. Our framework first embeds an HR image into a JPEG LR thumbnail by an encoder with our proposed quantization prediction module, which minimizes the file size of the embedding LR JPEG thumbnail while maximizing HR reconstruction quality. Then, an efficient frequency-aware decoder reconstructs a high-fidelity HR image from the LR one in real time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms previous image rescaling baselines in rate-distortion performance and can perform 6K image reconstruction in real time.

Automated resume information extraction is critical for scaling talent acquisition, yet its real-world deployment faces three major challenges: the extreme heterogeneity of resume layouts and content, the high cost and latency of large language models (LLMs), and the lack of standardized datasets and evaluation tools. In this work, we present a layout-aware and efficiency-optimized framework for automated extraction and evaluation that addresses all three challenges. Our system combines a fine-tuned layout parser to normalize diverse document formats, an inference-efficient LLM extractor based on parallel prompting and instruction tuning, and a robust two-stage automated evaluation framework supported by new benchmark datasets. Extensive experiments show that our framework significantly outperforms strong baselines in both accuracy and efficiency. In particular, we demonstrate that a fine-tuned compact 0.6B LLM achieves top-tier accuracy while significantly reducing inference latency and computational cost. The system is fully deployed in Alibaba's intelligent HR platform, supporting real-time applications across its business units.

Quantization-aware training (QAT) schemes have been shown to achieve near-full precision accuracy. They accomplish this by training a quantized model for multiple epochs. This is computationally expensive, mainly because of the full precision backward pass. On the other hand, post-training quantization (PTQ) schemes do not involve training and are therefore computationally cheap, but they usually result in a significant accuracy drop. We address these challenges by proposing EfQAT, which generalizes both schemes by optimizing only a subset of the parameters of a quantized model. EfQAT starts by applying a PTQ scheme to a pre-trained model and only updates the most critical network parameters while freezing the rest, accelerating the backward pass. We demonstrate the effectiveness of EfQAT on various CNNs and Transformer-based models using different GPUs. Specifically, we show that EfQAT is significantly more accurate than PTQ with little extra compute. Furthermore, EfQAT can accelerate the QAT backward pass between 1.44-1.64x while retaining most accuracy.

The phonological discrepancies between a speaker's native (L1) and the non-native language (L2) serves as a major factor for mispronunciation. This paper introduces a novel multilingual MDD architecture, L1-MultiMDD, enriched with L1-aware speech representation. An end-to-end speech encoder is trained on the input signal and its corresponding reference phoneme sequence. First, an attention mechanism is deployed to align the input audio with the reference phoneme sequence. Afterwards, the L1-L2-speech embedding are extracted from an auxiliary model, pretrained in a multi-task setup identifying L1 and L2 language, and are infused with the primary network. Finally, the L1-MultiMDD is then optimized for a unified multilingual phoneme recognition task using connectionist temporal classification (CTC) loss for the target languages: English, Arabic, and Mandarin. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed L1-MultiMDD framework on both seen -- L2-ARTIC, LATIC, and AraVoiceL2v2; and unseen -- EpaDB and Speechocean762 datasets. The consistent gains in PER, and false rejection rate (FRR) across all target languages confirm our approach's robustness, efficacy, and generalizability.

Respiratory sound classification is hindered by the limited size, high noise levels, and severe class imbalance of benchmark datasets like ICBHI 2017. While Transformer-based models offer powerful feature extraction capabilities, they are prone to overfitting and often converge to sharp minima in the loss landscape when trained on such constrained medical data. To address this, we introduce a framework that enhances the Audio Spectrogram Transformer (AST) using Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM). Instead of merely minimizing the training loss, our approach optimizes the geometry of the loss surface, guiding the model toward flatter minima that generalize better to unseen patients. We also implement a weighted sampling strategy to handle class imbalance effectively. Our method achieves a state-of-the-art score of 68.10% on the ICBHI 2017 dataset, outperforming existing CNN and hybrid baselines. More importantly, it reaches a sensitivity of 68.31%, a crucial improvement for reliable clinical screening. Further analysis using t-SNE and attention maps confirms that the model learns robust, discriminative features rather than memorizing background noise.

Disaggregated inference has become an essential framework that separates the prefill (P) and decode (D) stages in large language model inference to improve throughput. However, the KV cache transfer faces significant delays between prefill and decode nodes. The block-wise calling method and discontinuous KV cache memory allocation increase the number of calls to the transmission kernel. Additionally, existing frameworks often fix the roles of P and D nodes, leading to computational imbalances. In this paper, we propose FlowKV, a novel disaggregated inference framework, which reduces the average transmission latency of KV cache by 96%, from 0.944s to 0.053s, almost eliminating the transfer time relative to the total request latency by optimizing the KV cache transfer. FlowKV introduces the Load-Aware Scheduler for balanced request scheduling and flexible PD node allocation. This design maximizes hardware resource utilization, achieving peak system throughput across various scenarios, including normal, computational imbalance, and extreme overload conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that FlowKV significantly accelerates inference by 15.2%-48.9% on LongBench dataset compared to the baseline and supports applications with heterogeneous GPUs.

Machine unlearning (MU) seeks to eliminate the influence of specific training examples from deployed models. As large language models (LLMs) become widely used, managing risks arising from insufficient forgetting or utility loss is increasingly crucial. Current MU techniques lack effective mechanisms for evaluating and controlling these risks, hindering the selection of strategies that appropriately balance safety and utility, and raising trust concerns surrounding the "right to be forgotten." To address these issues, we propose FROC, a unified framework with Risk-Optimized Control for machine unlearning in LLMs. FROC is built around a conformal-style risk-control formulation that expresses a user-specified risk budget on unlearning behavior. This probability-based constraint enables FROC to compare MU strategies, identify feasible operating regions, and guide hyperparameter selection according to desired trade-offs between forgetting sufficiency and utility preservation. To operationalize this constraint, FROC introduces a smoothly varying continuous risk model that aggregates forgetting deficiency and utility degradation into a single configuration-level score. Building on conformal risk analysis, FROC computes (1) the Conformal Unlearning Risk (CUR), a data-driven estimated value on the probability that forgotten samples continue to influence model predictions, and (2) risk-controlled configuration sets, which identify unlearning hyperparameters that are valid under the specified risk budget. Experiments across multiple LLM MU methods demonstrate that FROC produces stable, interpretable risk landscapes and reveals consistent relationships between unlearning configurations, semantic shift, and utility impact. FROC reframes MU as a controllable, risk-aware process and offers a practical foundation for managing unlearning behavior in large-scale LLM deployments.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a foundational paradigm for knowledge-grounded text generation. However, existing RAG pipelines often fail to ensure that the reasoning trajectories align with the evidential constraints imposed by retrieved content. In this paper, we reframe RAG as a problem of retrieval-aware reasoning and identify a core challenge: reasoning misalignment-the mismatch between a model's reasoning trajectory and the retrieved evidence. To address this challenge, we propose AlignRAG, a novel test-time framework that mitigates reasoning misalignment through iterative Critique-Driven Alignment (CDA) steps. In contrast to prior approaches that rely on static training or post-hoc selection, AlignRAG actively refines reasoning trajectories during inference by enforcing fine-grained alignment with evidence. Our framework introduces a new paradigm for retrieval-aware reasoning by: (1) constructing context-rich training corpora; (2) generating contrastive critiques from preference-aware reasoning trajectories; (3) training a dedicated Critic Language Model (CLM) to identify reasoning misalignments; and (4) applying CDA steps to optimize reasoning trajectories iteratively. Empirical results demonstrate that AlignRAG consistently outperforms all baselines and could integrate as a plug-and-play module into existing RAG pipelines without further changes. By reconceptualizing RAG as a structured reasoning trajectory and establishing the test-time framework for correcting reasoning misalignments in RAG, AlignRAG provides practical advancements for retrieval-aware generation.

The proliferation of cloud-native architectures, characterized by microservices and dynamic orchestration, has rendered modern IT infrastructures exceedingly complex and volatile. This complexity generates overwhelming volumes of operational data, leading to critical bottlenecks in conventional systems: inefficient information processing, poor task coordination, and loss of contextual continuity during fault diagnosis and remediation. To address these challenges, we propose AOI (AI-Oriented Operations), a novel multi-agent collaborative framework that integrates three specialized agents with an LLM-based Context Compressor. Its core innovations include: (1) a dynamic task scheduling strategy that adaptively prioritizes operations based on real-time system states, and (2) a three-layer memory architecture comprising Working, Episodic, and Semantic layers that optimizes context retention and retrieval. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that AOI effectively mitigates information overload, achieving a 72.4% context compression ratio while preserving 92.8% of critical information and significantly enhances operational efficiency, attaining a 94.2% task success rate and reducing the Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) by 34.4% compared to the best baseline. This work presents a paradigm shift towards scalable, adaptive, and context-aware autonomous operations, enabling robust management of next-generation IT infrastructures with minimal human intervention.

Time series forecasting plays a vital role in supporting decision-making across a wide range of critical applications, including energy, healthcare, and finance. Despite recent advances, forecasting accuracy remains limited due to the challenge of integrating historical numerical sequences with contextual features, which often comprise unstructured textual data. To address this challenge, we propose TokenCast, an LLM-driven framework that leverages language-based symbolic representations as a unified intermediary for context-aware time series forecasting. Specifically, TokenCast employs a discrete tokenizer to transform continuous numerical sequences into temporal tokens, enabling structural alignment with language-based inputs. To bridge the semantic gap between modalities, both temporal and contextual tokens are embedded into a shared representation space via a pre-trained large language model (LLM), further optimized with autoregressive generative objectives. Building upon this unified semantic space, the aligned LLM is subsequently fine-tuned in a supervised manner to predict future temporal tokens, which are then decoded back into the original numerical space. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world datasets enriched with contextual features demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of TokenCast.

Voice activity detection (VAD) is essential for speech-driven applications, but remains far from perfect in noisy and resource-limited environments. Existing methods often lack robustness to noise, and their frame-wise classification losses are only loosely coupled with the evaluation metric of VAD. To address these challenges, we propose SincQDR-VAD, a compact and robust framework that combines a Sinc-extractor front-end with a novel quadratic disparity ranking loss. The Sinc-extractor uses learnable bandpass filters to capture noise-resistant spectral features, while the ranking loss optimizes the pairwise score order between speech and non-speech frames to improve the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC). A series of experiments conducted on representative benchmark datasets show that our framework considerably improves both AUROC and F2-Score, while using only 69% of the parameters compared to prior arts, confirming its efficiency and practical viability.

Edge AI applications increasingly require ultra-low-power, low-latency inference. Neuromorphic computing based on event-driven spiking neural networks (SNNs) offers an attractive path, but practical deployment on resource-constrained devices is limited by training difficulty, hardware-mapping overheads, and sensitivity to temporal dynamics. We present NeuEdge, a framework that combines adaptive SNN models with hardware-aware optimization for edge deployment. NeuEdge uses a temporal coding scheme that blends rate and spike-timing patterns to reduce spike activity while preserving accuracy, and a hardware-aware training procedure that co-optimizes network structure and on-chip placement to improve utilization on neuromorphic processors. An adaptive threshold mechanism adjusts neuron excitability from input statistics, reducing energy consumption without degrading performance. Across standard vision and audio benchmarks, NeuEdge achieves 91-96% accuracy with up to 2.3 ms inference latency on edge hardware and an estimated 847 GOp/s/W energy efficiency. A case study on an autonomous-drone workload shows up to 312x energy savings relative to conventional deep neural networks while maintaining real-time operation.

Self-evolving frameworks usually optimize task solutions while treating the surrounding harness as fixed. We introduce Harness-Aware Self-Evolving (HASE), an agentic reinforcement-learning framework in which a single model can generate task solutions or edit selected harness components in a multi-turn action space. HASE enables a single Qwen3-8B model to match the text-classification performance of a GPT-OSS-120B model that uses Claude Code as the harness proposer. In alpha factor mining, HASE outperforms the reported GPT-OSS-120B baseline. HASE also repairs imperfect evaluation components and converges to state-of-the-art performance in circle-packing algorithm discovery. These results show that HASE improves the harness and the solution through one unified agentic process.

KV cache quantization can improve Large Language Models (LLMs) inference throughput and latency in long contexts and large batch-size scenarios while preserving LLMs effectiveness. However, current methods have three unsolved issues: overlooking layer-wise sensitivity to KV cache quantization, high overhead of online fine-grained decision-making, and low flexibility to different LLMs and constraints. Therefore, we theoretically analyze the inherent correlation of layer-wise transformer attention patterns to KV cache quantization errors and study why key cache is generally more important than value cache for quantization error reduction. We further propose a simple yet effective framework KVTuner to adaptively search for the optimal hardware-friendly layer-wise KV quantization precision pairs for coarse-grained KV cache with multi-objective optimization and directly utilize the offline searched configurations during online inference. To reduce the computational cost of offline calibration, we utilize the intra-layer KV precision pair pruning and inter-layer clustering to reduce the search space. Experimental results show that we can achieve nearly lossless 3.25-bit mixed precision KV cache quantization for LLMs like Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and 4.0-bit for sensitive models like Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct on mathematical reasoning tasks. The maximum inference throughput can be improved by 21.25\% compared with KIVI-KV8 quantization over various context lengths. Our code and searched configurations are available at https://github.com/cmd2001/KVTuner.

We propose 3D Congealing, a novel problem of 3D-aware alignment for 2D images capturing semantically similar objects. Given a collection of unlabeled Internet images, our goal is to associate the shared semantic parts from the inputs and aggregate the knowledge from 2D images to a shared 3D canonical space. We introduce a general framework that tackles the task without assuming shape templates, poses, or any camera parameters. At its core is a canonical 3D representation that encapsulates geometric and semantic information. The framework optimizes for the canonical representation together with the pose for each input image, and a per-image coordinate map that warps 2D pixel coordinates to the 3D canonical frame to account for the shape matching. The optimization procedure fuses prior knowledge from a pre-trained image generative model and semantic information from input images. The former provides strong knowledge guidance for this under-constraint task, while the latter provides the necessary information to mitigate the training data bias from the pre-trained model. Our framework can be used for various tasks such as correspondence matching, pose estimation, and image editing, achieving strong results on real-world image datasets under challenging illumination conditions and on in-the-wild online image collections.

Designing accurate and efficient ConvNets for mobile devices is challenging because the design space is combinatorially large. Due to this, previous neural architecture search (NAS) methods are computationally expensive. ConvNet architecture optimality depends on factors such as input resolution and target devices. However, existing approaches are too expensive for case-by-case redesigns. Also, previous work focuses primarily on reducing FLOPs, but FLOP count does not always reflect actual latency. To address these, we propose a differentiable neural architecture search (DNAS) framework that uses gradient-based methods to optimize ConvNet architectures, avoiding enumerating and training individual architectures separately as in previous methods. FBNets, a family of models discovered by DNAS surpass state-of-the-art models both designed manually and generated automatically. FBNet-B achieves 74.1% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with 295M FLOPs and 23.1 ms latency on a Samsung S8 phone, 2.4x smaller and 1.5x faster than MobileNetV2-1.3 with similar accuracy. Despite higher accuracy and lower latency than MnasNet, we estimate FBNet-B's search cost is 420x smaller than MnasNet's, at only 216 GPU-hours. Searched for different resolutions and channel sizes, FBNets achieve 1.5% to 6.4% higher accuracy than MobileNetV2. The smallest FBNet achieves 50.2% accuracy and 2.9 ms latency (345 frames per second) on a Samsung S8. Over a Samsung-optimized FBNet, the iPhone-X-optimized model achieves a 1.4x speedup on an iPhone X.

Optimizing GPU kernels presents a significantly greater challenge for large language models (LLMs) than standard code generation tasks, as it requires understanding hardware architecture, parallel optimization strategies, and performance profiling outputs. Most existing LLM-based approaches to kernel generation rely on simple prompting and feedback loops, incorporating hardware awareness only indirectly through profiling feedback. We introduce KernelFoundry, an evolutionary framework that efficiently explores the GPU kernel design space through three key mechanisms: (1) MAP-Elites quality-diversity search with kernel-specific behavioral dimensions to sustain exploration across diverse optimization strategies; (2) meta-prompt evolution, which co-evolves prompts with kernels to uncover task-specific optimization strategies, and (3) template-based parameter optimization to tune kernels to inputs and hardware. We evaluate this framework on KernelBench, robust-kbench, and custom tasks, generating SYCL kernels as a cross-platform GPU programming model and CUDA kernels for comparison to prior work. Our approach consistently outperforms the baseline methods, achieving an average speedup of 2.3x on KernelBench for SYCL. Moreover, KernelFoundry is implemented as a distributed framework with remote access to diverse hardware, enabling rapid benchmarking and featuring a flexible user input layer that supports kernel generation for a wide range of real-world use cases beyond benchmarking.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) enable complex reasoning by coordinating multiple agents, but often incur high inference latency due to multi-step execution and repeated model invocations, severely limiting their scalability and usability in time-sensitive scenarios. Most existing approaches primarily optimize task performance and inference cost, and explicitly or implicitly assume sequential execution, making them less optimal for controlling latency under parallel execution. In this work, we investigate learning-based orchestration of multi-agent systems with explicit latency supervision under parallel execution. We propose Latency-Aware Multi-agent System (LAMaS), a latency-aware multi-agent orchestration framework that enables parallel execution and explicitly optimizes the critical execution path, allowing the controller to construct execution topology graphs with lower latency under parallel execution. Our experiments show that our approach reduces critical path length by 38-46% compared to the state-of-the-art baseline for multi-agent architecture search across multiple benchmarks, while maintaining or even improving task performance. These results highlight the importance of explicitly optimizing latency under parallel execution when designing efficient multi-agent systems. The code is available at https://github.com/xishi404/LAMaS

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is a highly deployable real-time method for novel view synthesis. In practice, it requires a universal, consistent control mechanism that adjusts the trade-off between rendering quality and model compression without scene-specific tuning, enabling automated deployment across different device performances and communication bandwidths. In this work, we present ControlGS, a control-oriented optimization framework that maps the trade-off between Gaussian count and rendering quality to a continuous, scene-agnostic, and highly responsive control axis. Extensive experiments across a wide range of scene scales and types (from small objects to large outdoor scenes) demonstrate that, by adjusting a globally unified control hyperparameter, ControlGS can flexibly generate models biased toward either structural compactness or high fidelity, regardless of the specific scene scale or complexity, while achieving markedly higher rendering quality with the same or fewer Gaussians compared to potential competing methods. Project page: https://zhang-fengdi.github.io/ControlGS/

The computational demands of Vision Transformers (ViTs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) remain a significant challenge due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. While token pruning offers a promising solution, existing methods often introduce training overhead or fail to adapt dynamically across layers. We present SAINT, a training-free token pruning framework that leverages token similarity and a graph-based formulation to dynamically optimize pruning rates and redundancy thresholds. Through systematic analysis, we identify a universal three-stage token evolution process (aligner-explorer-aggregator) in transformers, enabling aggressive pruning in early stages without sacrificing critical information. For ViTs, SAINT doubles the throughput of ViT-H/14 at 224px with only 0.6% accuracy loss on ImageNet-1K, surpassing the closest competitor by 0.8%. For VLMs, we apply SAINT in three modes: ViT-only, LLM-only, and hybrid. SAINT reduces LLaVA-13B's tokens by 75%, achieving latency comparable to LLaVA-7B with less than 1% performance loss across benchmarks. Our work establishes a unified, practical framework for efficient inference in ViTs and VLMs.

Keypoint-based matching is a fundamental component of modern 3D vision systems, such as Structure-from-Motion (SfM) and SLAM. Most existing learning-based methods are trained on image pairs, a paradigm that fails to explicitly optimize for the long-term trackability of keypoints across sequences under challenging viewpoint and illumination changes. In this paper, we reframe keypoint detection as a sequential decision-making problem. We introduce TraqPoint, a novel, end-to-end Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework designed to optimize the Track-quality (Traq) of keypoints directly on image sequences. Our core innovation is a track-aware reward mechanism that jointly encourages the consistency and distinctiveness of keypoints across multiple views, guided by a policy gradient method. Extensive evaluations on sparse matching benchmarks, including relative pose estimation and 3D reconstruction, demonstrate that TraqPoint significantly outperforms some state-of-the-art (SOTA) keypoint detection and description methods.The code will be available at https://github.com/xiaomi-research/traqpoint.

Achieving natural full-duplex interaction in spoken dialogue systems (SDS) remains a challenge due to the difficulty of accurately detecting user interruptions. Current solutions are polarized between "trigger-happy" VAD-based methods that misinterpret backchannels and robust end-to-end models that exhibit unacceptable response delays. Moreover, the absence of real-world benchmarks and holistic metrics hinders progress in the field. This paper presents a comprehensive frame-work to overcome these limitations. We first introduce SID-Bench, the first benchmark for semantic-aware interruption detection built entirely from real-world human dialogues. To provide a rigorous assessment of the responsiveness-robustness trade-off, we propose the Average Penalty Time (APT) metric, which assigns a temporal cost to both false alarms and late responses. Building on this framework, we design an LLM-based detection model optimized through a novel training paradigm to capture subtle semantic cues of intent. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms mainstream baselines, achieving a nearly threefold reduction in APT. By successfully resolving the long-standing tension between speed and stability, our work establishes a new state-of-the-art for intelligent interruption handling in SDS. To facilitate future research, SID-Bench and the associated code are available at: https://github.com/xkx-hub/SID-bench.

Adapting large-scale pre-trained generative models in a parameter-efficient manner is gaining traction. Traditional methods like low rank adaptation achieve parameter efficiency by imposing constraints but may not be optimal for tasks requiring high representation capacity. We propose a novel spectrum-aware adaptation framework for generative models. Our method adjusts both singular values and their basis vectors of pretrained weights. Using the Kronecker product and efficient Stiefel optimizers, we achieve parameter-efficient adaptation of orthogonal matrices. We introduce Spectral Orthogonal Decomposition Adaptation (SODA), which balances computational efficiency and representation capacity. Extensive evaluations on text-to-image diffusion models demonstrate SODA's effectiveness, offering a spectrum-aware alternative to existing fine-tuning methods.

Memory is increasingly central to Large Language Model (LLM) agents operating beyond a single context window, yet most existing systems rely on offline, query-agnostic memory construction that can be inefficient and may discard query-critical information. Although runtime memory utilization is a natural alternative, prior work often incurs substantial overhead and offers limited explicit control over the performance-cost trade-off. In this work, we present BudgetMem, a runtime agent memory framework for explicit, query-aware performance-cost control. BudgetMem structures memory processing as a set of memory modules, each offered in three budget tiers (i.e., Low/Mid/High). A lightweight router performs budget-tier routing across modules to balance task performance and memory construction cost, which is implemented as a compact neural policy trained with reinforcement learning. Using BudgetMem as a unified testbed, we study three complementary strategies for realizing budget tiers: implementation (method complexity), reasoning (inference behavior), and capacity (module model size). Across LoCoMo, LongMemEval, and HotpotQA, BudgetMem surpasses strong baselines when performance is prioritized (i.e., high-budget setting), and delivers better accuracy-cost frontiers under tighter budgets. Moreover, our analysis disentangles the strengths and weaknesses of different tiering strategies, clarifying when each axis delivers the most favorable trade-offs under varying budget regimes.

LLM-based agents depend on effective tool-use policies to solve complex tasks, yet optimizing these policies remains challenging due to delayed supervision and the difficulty of credit assignment in long-horizon trajectories. Existing optimization approaches tend to be either monolithic, which are prone to entangling behaviors, or single-aspect, which ignore cross-module error propagation. To address these limitations, we propose EvoTool, a self-evolving framework that optimizes a modular tool-use policy via a gradient-free evolutionary paradigm. EvoTool decomposes agent's tool-use policy into four modules, including Planner, Selector, Caller, and Synthesizer, and iteratively improves them in a self-improving loop through three novel mechanisms. Trajectory-Grounded Blame Attribution uses diagnostic traces to localize failures to a specific module. Feedback-Guided Targeted Mutation then edits only that module via natural-language critique. Diversity-Aware Population Selection preserves complementary candidates to ensure solution diversity. Across four benchmarks, EvoTool outperforms strong baselines by over 5 points on both GPT-4.1 and Qwen3-8B, while achieving superior efficiency and transferability. The code will be released once paper is accepted.

Reinforcement learning with stochastic optimal control offers a promising framework for diffusion fine-tuning, where a pre-trained diffusion model is optimized to generate paths that lead to a reward-tilted distribution. While these approaches enable optimization without access to explicit samples from the optimal distribution, they require training on rollouts under the current fine-tuned model, making them susceptible to reinforcing sub-optimal trajectories that yield poor rewards. To overcome this challenge, we introduce TRee Search Guided TRajectory-Aware Fine-Tuning for Discrete Diffusion (TR2-D2), a novel framework that optimizes reward-guided discrete diffusion trajectories with tree search to construct replay buffers for trajectory-aware fine-tuning. These buffers are generated using Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and subsequently used to fine-tune a pre-trained discrete diffusion model under a stochastic optimal control objective. We validate our framework on single- and multi-objective fine-tuning of biological sequence diffusion models, highlighting the overall effectiveness of TR2-D2 for reliable reward-guided fine-tuning in discrete sequence generation.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have greatly improved their capabilities on complex reasoning tasks through Long Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, this approach often results in substantial redundancy, impairing computational efficiency and causing significant delays in real-time applications. To improve the efficiency, current methods often rely on human-defined difficulty priors, which do not align with the LLM's self-awared difficulty, leading to inefficiencies. In this paper, we introduce the Dynamic Reasoning-Boundary Self-Awareness Framework (DR. SAF), which enables models to dynamically assess and adjust their reasoning depth in response to problem complexity. DR. SAF integrates three key components: Boundary Self-Awareness Alignment, Adaptive Reward Management, and a Boundary Preservation Mechanism. These components allow models to optimize their reasoning processes, balancing efficiency and accuracy without compromising performance. Our experimental results demonstrate that DR. SAF achieves a 49.27% reduction in total response tokens with minimal loss in accuracy. The framework also delivers a 6.59x gain in token efficiency and a 5x reduction in training time, making it well-suited to resource-limited settings. During extreme training, DR. SAF can even surpass traditional instruction-based models in token efficiency with more than 16% accuracy improvement.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in natural language processing by encoding extensive human knowledge, but their utility relies on timely updates as knowledge evolves. Updating LLMs involves two key tasks simultaneously: unlearning to remove unwanted knowledge and editing to incorporate new information. Existing methods face two major challenges: ineffective knowledge storage (either too sparse or too dense) and task conflicts between editing and unlearning, as validated through our theoretical and experimental results. To address these issues, we propose LOKA, a conflict-free framework for LLM updating based on a knowledge codebook. During training, updated knowledge is stored in multiple codebook memories. To optimize knowledge storage, a similarity-aware knowledge mapping ensures that related knowledge pieces are clustered and allocated to the same memory. Additionally, LOKA resolves task conflicts by employing task-specific and multi-task memories guided by a conflict score. In the inference stage, LOKA retrieves the most relevant memory from the codebook and plugs it into the original LLM to apply the updated knowledge. A learning-based router controls codebook activation to further improve knowledge utilization. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of LOKA in LLM knowledge updating tasks.

Long-horizon agents often compress interaction histories into write-time summaries. This creates a fundamental write-before-query barrier: compression decisions are made before the system knows what a future query will hinge on. As a result, summaries can cause unverifiable omissions -- decisive constraints (e.g., allergies) may be dropped, leaving the agent unable to justify an answer with traceable evidence. Retaining raw logs restores an authoritative source of truth, but grounding on raw logs by default is expensive: many queries are answerable from summaries, yet raw grounding still requires processing far longer contexts, inflating token consumption and latency. We propose TierMem, a provenance-linked framework that casts retrieval as an inference-time evidence allocation problem. TierMem uses a two-tier memory hierarchy to answer with the cheapest sufficient evidence: it queries a fast summary index by default, and a runtime sufficiency router Escalates to an immutable raw-log store only when summary evidence is insufficient. TierMem then writes back verified findings as new summary units linked to their raw sources. On LoCoMo, TierMem achieves 0.851 accuracy (vs.0.873 raw-only) while reducing input tokens by 54.1\% and latency by 60.7%.

The advancement of Large Language Model (LLM)-powered agents has enabled automated task processing through reasoning and tool invocation capabilities. However, existing frameworks often operate under the idealized assumption that tool executions are invariably successful, relying solely on textual descriptions that fail to distinguish precise performance boundaries and cannot adapt to iterative tool updates. This gap introduces uncertainty in planning and execution, particularly in domains like visual content generation (AIGC), where nuanced tool performance significantly impacts outcomes. To address this, we propose PerfGuard, a performance-aware agent framework for visual content generation that systematically models tool performance boundaries and integrates them into task planning and scheduling. Our framework introduces three core mechanisms: (1) Performance-Aware Selection Modeling (PASM), which replaces generic tool descriptions with a multi-dimensional scoring system based on fine-grained performance evaluations; (2) Adaptive Preference Update (APU), which dynamically optimizes tool selection by comparing theoretical rankings with actual execution rankings; and (3) Capability-Aligned Planning Optimization (CAPO), which guides the planner to generate subtasks aligned with performance-aware strategies. Experimental comparisons against state-of-the-art methods demonstrate PerfGuard's advantages in tool selection accuracy, execution reliability, and alignment with user intent, validating its robustness and practical utility for complex AIGC tasks. The project code is available at https://github.com/FelixChan9527/PerfGuard.

Although data-driven methods have achieved success in 3D human pose estimation, they often suffer from domain gaps and exhibit limited generalization. In contrast, optimization-based methods excel in fine-tuning for specific cases but are generally inferior to data-driven methods in overall performance. We observe that previous optimization-based methods commonly rely on a projection constraint, which only ensures alignment in 2D space, potentially leading to the overfitting problem. To address this, we propose an Uncertainty-Aware testing-time Optimization (UAO) framework, which keeps the prior information of the pre-trained model and alleviates the overfitting problem using the uncertainty of joints. Specifically, during the training phase, we design an effective 2D-to-3D network for estimating the corresponding 3D pose while quantifying the uncertainty of each 3D joint. For optimization during testing, the proposed optimization framework freezes the pre-trained model and optimizes only a latent state. Projection loss is then employed to ensure the generated poses are well aligned in 2D space for high-quality optimization. Furthermore, we utilize the uncertainty of each joint to determine how much each joint is allowed for optimization. The effectiveness and superiority of the proposed framework are validated through extensive experiments on challenging datasets: Human3.6M, MPI-INF-3DHP, and 3DPW. Notably, our approach outperforms the previous best result by a large margin of 5.5\% on Human3.6M. Code is available at https://github.com/xiu-cs/UAO-Pose3D{https://github.com/xiu-cs/UAO-Pose3D}.

Video large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in video understanding tasks. However, the redundancy of video tokens introduces significant computational overhead during inference, limiting their practical deployment. Many compression algorithms are proposed to prioritize retaining features with the highest attention scores to minimize perturbations in attention computations. However, the correlation between attention scores and their actual contribution to correct answers remains ambiguous. To address the above limitation, we propose a novel Contribution-aware token Compression algorithm for VIDeo understanding (CaCoVID) that explicitly optimizes the token selection policy based on the contribution of tokens to correct predictions. First, we introduce a reinforcement learning-based framework that optimizes a policy network to select video token combinations with the greatest contribution to correct predictions. This paradigm shifts the focus from passive token preservation to active discovery of optimal compressed token combinations. Secondly, we propose a combinatorial policy optimization algorithm with online combination space sampling, which dramatically reduces the exploration space for video token combinations and accelerates the convergence speed of policy optimization. Extensive experiments on diverse video understanding benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of CaCoVID. Codes will be released.

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in complex reasoning tasks like mathematical problem-solving. However, existing research predominantly relies on reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks while overlooking supervised fine-tuning (SFT) methods. This paper proposes a new two-stage training framework that enhances models' self-correction capabilities through self-generated long chain-of-thought (CoT) data. During the first stage, a multi-turn dialogue strategy guides the model to generate CoT data incorporating verification, backtracking, subgoal decomposition, and backward reasoning, with predefined rules filtering high-quality samples for supervised fine-tuning. The second stage employs a difficulty-aware rejection sampling mechanism to dynamically optimize data distribution, strengthening the model's ability to handle complex problems. The approach generates reasoning chains extended over 4 times longer while maintaining strong scalability, proving that SFT effectively activates models' intrinsic reasoning capabilities and provides a resource-efficient pathway for complex task optimization. Experimental results demonstrate performance improvements on mathematical benchmarks including GSM8K and MATH500, with the fine-tuned model achieving a substantial improvement on competition-level problems like AIME24. Code will be open-sourced.

Industrial advertising question answering (QA) is a high-stakes task in which hallucinated content, particularly fabricated URLs, can lead to financial loss, compliance violations, and legal risk. Although Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely adopted, deploying it in production remains challenging because industrial knowledge is inherently relational, frequently updated, and insufficiently aligned with generation objectives. We propose a reinforced co-adaptation framework that jointly optimizes retrieval and generation through two components: (1) Graph-aware Retrieval (GraphRAG), which models entity-relation structure over a high-citation knowledge subgraph for multi-hop, domain-specific evidence selection; and (2) evidence-constrained reinforcement learning via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with multi-dimensional rewards covering faithfulness, style compliance, safety, and URL validity. Experiments on an internal advertising QA dataset show consistent gains across expert-judged dimensions including accuracy, completeness, and safety, while reducing the hallucination rate by 72\%. A two-week online A/B test demonstrates a 28.6\% increase in like rate, a 46.2\% decrease in dislike rate, and a 92.7\% reduction in URL hallucination. The system has been running in production for over half a year and has served millions of QA interactions.

Learning unified text embeddings that excel across diverse downstream tasks is a central goal in representation learning, yet negative transfer remains a persistent obstacle. This challenge is particularly pronounced when jointly training a single encoder for Information Retrieval (IR) and Semantic Textual Similarity (STS), two essential but fundamentally disparate tasks for which naive co-training typically yields steep performance trade-offs. We argue that resolving this conflict requires systematically decoupling task-specific learning signals throughout the training pipeline. To this end, we introduce CoDiEmb, a unified framework that reconciles the divergent requirements of IR and STS in a collaborative yet distinct manner. CoDiEmb integrates three key innovations for effective joint optimization: (1) Task-specialized objectives paired with a dynamic sampler that forms single-task batches and balances per-task updates, thereby preventing gradient interference. For IR, we employ a contrastive loss with multiple positives and hard negatives, augmented by cross-device sampling. For STS, we adopt order-aware objectives that directly optimize correlation and ranking consistency. (2) A delta-guided model fusion strategy that computes fine-grained merging weights for checkpoints by analyzing each parameter's deviation from its pre-trained initialization, proving more effective than traditional Model Soups. (3) An efficient, single-stage training pipeline that is simple to implement and converges stably. Extensive experiments on 15 standard IR and STS benchmarks across three base encoders validate CoDiEmb. Our results and analysis demonstrate that the framework not only mitigates cross-task trade-offs but also measurably improves the geometric properties of the embedding space.

Existing mobile devices are constrained by compact optical designs, such as small apertures, which make it difficult to produce natural, optically realistic bokeh effects. Although recent learning-based methods have shown promising results, they still struggle with photos captured under high digital zoom levels, which often suffer from reduced resolution and loss of fine details. A naive solution is to enhance image quality before applying bokeh rendering, yet this two-stage pipeline reduces efficiency and introduces unnecessary error accumulation. To overcome these limitations, we propose MagicBokeh, a unified diffusion-based framework designed for high-quality and efficient bokeh rendering. Through an alternative training strategy and a focus-aware masked attention mechanism, our method jointly optimizes bokeh rendering and super-resolution, substantially improving both controllability and visual fidelity. Furthermore, we introduce degradation-aware depth module to enable more accurate depth estimation from low-quality inputs. Experimental results demonstrate that MagicBokeh efficiently produces photorealistic bokeh effects, particularly on real-world low-resolution images, paving the way for future advancements in bokeh rendering. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/vivoCameraResearch/MagicBokeh.

Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs) have achieved great success in image generation but suffer from high inference latency due to their iterative denoising nature. Motivated by the evolving feature dynamics across the denoising trajectory, we propose a novel framework to optimize the computational graph of pre-trained DPMs on a per-timestep basis. By learning timestep-specific masks, our method dynamically determines which blocks to execute or bypass through feature reuse at each inference stage. Unlike global optimization methods that incur prohibitive memory costs via full-chain backpropagation, our method optimizes masks for each timestep independently, ensuring a memory-efficient training process. To guide this process, we introduce a timestep-aware loss scaling mechanism that prioritizes feature fidelity during sensitive denoising phases, complemented by a knowledge-guided mask rectification strategy to prune redundant spatial-temporal dependencies. Our approach is architecture-agnostic and demonstrates significant efficiency gains across a broad spectrum of models, including DDPM, LDM, DiT, and PixArt. Experimental results show that by treating the denoising process as a sequence of optimized computational paths, our method achieves a superior balance between sampling speed and generative quality. Our code will be released.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in performing multiple tasks in multimedia applications, ranging from content generation to interactive entertainment, and artistic creation. However, the diversity of downstream tasks in multitask scenarios presents substantial adaptation challenges for LLMs. While traditional methods often succumb to knowledge confusion on their monolithic dense models, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has been emerged as a promising solution with its sparse architecture for effective task decoupling. Inspired by the principles of human cognitive neuroscience, we design a novel framework Intuition-MoR1E that leverages the inherent semantic clustering of instances to mimic the human brain to deal with multitask, offering implicit guidance to router for optimized feature allocation. Moreover, we introduce cutting-edge Rank-1 Experts formulation designed to manage a spectrum of intuitions, demonstrating enhanced parameter efficiency and effectiveness in multitask LLM finetuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Intuition-MoR1E achieves superior efficiency and 2.15\% overall accuracy improvement across 14 public datasets against other state-of-the-art baselines.

Structural topology optimization (TO) is central to engineering design but remains computationally intensive due to complex physics and hard constraints. Existing deep-learning methods are limited to fixed square grids, a few hand-coded boundary conditions, and post-hoc optimization, preventing general deployment. We introduce Optimize Any Topology (OAT), a foundation-model framework that directly predicts minimum-compliance layouts for arbitrary aspect ratios, resolutions, volume fractions, loads, and fixtures. OAT combines a resolution- and shape-agnostic autoencoder with an implicit neural-field decoder and a conditional latent-diffusion model trained on OpenTO, a new corpus of 2.2 million optimized structures covering 2 million unique boundary-condition configurations. On four public benchmarks and two challenging unseen tests, OAT lowers mean compliance up to 90% relative to the best prior models and delivers sub-1 second inference on a single GPU across resolutions from 64 x 64 to 256 x 256 and aspect ratios as high as 10:1. These results establish OAT as a general, fast, and resolution-free framework for physics-aware topology optimization and provide a large-scale dataset to spur further research in generative modeling for inverse design. Code & data can be found at https://github.com/ahnobari/OptimizeAnyTopology.

The ever-growing scale of deep learning models and training data underscores the critical importance of efficient optimization methods. While preconditioned gradient methods such as Adam and AdamW are the de facto optimizers for training neural networks and large language models, structure-aware preconditioned optimizers like Shampoo and Muon, which utilize the matrix structure of gradients, have demonstrated promising evidence of faster convergence. In this paper, we introduce a unifying framework for analyzing "matrix-aware" preconditioned methods, which not only sheds light on the effectiveness of Muon and related optimizers but also leads to a class of new structure-aware preconditioned methods. A key contribution of this framework is its precise distinction between preconditioning strategies that treat neural network weights as vectors (addressing curvature anisotropy) versus those that consider their matrix structure (addressing gradient anisotropy). This perspective provides new insights into several empirical phenomena in language model pre-training, including Adam's training instabilities, Muon's accelerated convergence, and the necessity of learning rate warmup for Adam. Building upon this framework, we introduce PolarGrad, a new class of preconditioned optimization methods based on the polar decomposition of matrix-valued gradients. As a special instance, PolarGrad includes Muon with updates scaled by the nuclear norm of the gradients. We provide numerical implementations of these methods, leveraging efficient numerical polar decomposition algorithms for enhanced convergence. Our extensive evaluations across diverse matrix optimization problems and language model pre-training tasks demonstrate that PolarGrad outperforms both Adam and Muon.

Multiple object tracking (MOT) technology has made significant progress in terrestrial applications, but underwater tracking scenarios remain underexplored despite their importance to marine ecology and aquaculture. We present Multiple Fish Tracking Dataset 2025 (MFT25), the first comprehensive dataset specifically designed for underwater multiple fish tracking, featuring 15 diverse video sequences with 408,578 meticulously annotated bounding boxes across 48,066 frames. Our dataset captures various underwater environments, fish species, and challenging conditions including occlusions, similar appearances, and erratic motion patterns. Additionally, we introduce Scale-aware and Unscented Tracker (SU-T), a specialized tracking framework featuring an Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) optimized for non-linear fish swimming patterns and a novel Fish-Intersection-over-Union (FishIoU) matching that accounts for the unique morphological characteristics of aquatic species. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our SU-T baseline achieves state-of-the-art performance on MFT25, with 34.1 HOTA and 44.6 IDF1, while revealing fundamental differences between fish tracking and terrestrial object tracking scenarios. MFT25 establishes a robust foundation for advancing research in underwater tracking systems with important applications in marine biology, aquaculture monitoring, and ecological conservation. The dataset and codes are released at https://vranlee.github.io/SU-T/.

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLM) such as ChatGPT, CoPilot, and Gemini have been widely adopted in different areas. As the use of LLMs continues to grow, many efforts have focused on reducing the massive training overheads of these models. But it is the environmental impact of handling user requests to LLMs that is increasingly becoming a concern. Recent studies estimate that the costs of operating LLMs in their inference phase can exceed training costs by 25x per year. As LLMs are queried incessantly, the cumulative carbon footprint for the operational phase has been shown to far exceed the footprint during the training phase. Further, estimates indicate that 500 ml of fresh water is expended for every 20-50 requests to LLMs during inference. To address these important sustainability issues with LLMs, we propose a novel framework called SLIT to co-optimize LLM quality of service (time-to-first token), carbon emissions, water usage, and energy costs. The framework utilizes a machine learning (ML) based metaheuristic to enhance the sustainability of LLM hosting across geo-distributed cloud datacenters. Such a framework will become increasingly vital as LLMs proliferate.

While diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in style transfer tasks, existing methods typically rely on fine-tuning or optimizing pre-trained models during inference, leading to high computational costs and challenges in balancing content preservation with style integration. To address these limitations, we introduce AttenST, a training-free attention-driven style transfer framework. Specifically, we propose a style-guided self-attention mechanism that conditions self-attention on the reference style by retaining the query of the content image while substituting its key and value with those from the style image, enabling effective style feature integration. To mitigate style information loss during inversion, we introduce a style-preserving inversion strategy that refines inversion accuracy through multiple resampling steps. Additionally, we propose a content-aware adaptive instance normalization, which integrates content statistics into the normalization process to optimize style fusion while mitigating the content degradation. Furthermore, we introduce a dual-feature cross-attention mechanism to fuse content and style features, ensuring a harmonious synthesis of structural fidelity and stylistic expression. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AttenST outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance in style transfer dataset.

Autoregressive (AR) visual generation relies on tokenizers to map images to and from discrete sequences. However, tokenizers are trained to reconstruct clean images from ground-truth tokens, while AR generators are optimized only for token likelihood. This misalignment leads to generated token sequences that may decode into low-quality images, without direct supervision from the pixel space. We propose VA-π, a lightweight post-training framework that directly optimizes AR models with a principled pixel-space objective. VA-π formulates the generator-tokenizer alignment as a variational optimization, deriving an evidence lower bound (ELBO) that unifies pixel reconstruction and autoregressive modeling. To optimize under the discrete token space, VA-π introduces a reinforcement-based alignment strategy that treats the AR generator as a policy, uses pixel-space reconstruction quality as its intrinsic reward. The reward is measured by how well the predicted token sequences can reconstruct the original image under teacher forcing, giving the model direct pixel-level guidance without expensive free-running sampling. The regularization term of the ELBO serves as a natural regularizer, maintaining distributional consistency of tokens. VA-π enables rapid adaptation of existing AR generators, without neither tokenizer retraining nor external reward models. With only 1% ImageNet-1K data and 25 minutes of tuning, it reduces FID from 14.36 to 7.65 and improves IS from 86.55 to 116.70 on LlamaGen-XXL, while also yielding notable gains in the text-to-image task on GenEval for both visual generation model (LlamaGen: from 0.306 to 0.339) and unified multi-modal model (Janus-Pro: from 0.725 to 0.744). Code is available at https://github.com/Lil-Shake/VA-Pi.

Existing dialog state tracking (DST) models are trained with dialog data in a random order, neglecting rich structural information in a dataset. In this paper, we propose to use curriculum learning (CL) to better leverage both the curriculum structure and schema structure for task-oriented dialogs. Specifically, we propose a model-agnostic framework called Schema-aware Curriculum Learning for Dialog State Tracking (SaCLog), which consists of a preview module that pre-trains a DST model with schema information, a curriculum module that optimizes the model with CL, and a review module that augments mispredicted data to reinforce the CL training. We show that our proposed approach improves DST performance over both a transformer-based and RNN-based DST model (TripPy and TRADE) and achieves new state-of-the-art results on WOZ2.0 and MultiWOZ2.1.

Generating aesthetic posters is more challenging than simple design images: it requires not only precise text rendering but also the seamless integration of abstract artistic content, striking layouts, and overall stylistic harmony. To address this, we propose PosterCraft, a unified framework that abandons prior modular pipelines and rigid, predefined layouts, allowing the model to freely explore coherent, visually compelling compositions. PosterCraft employs a carefully designed, cascaded workflow to optimize the generation of high-aesthetic posters: (i) large-scale text-rendering optimization on our newly introduced Text-Render-2M dataset; (ii) region-aware supervised fine-tuning on HQ-Poster100K; (iii) aesthetic-text-reinforcement learning via best-of-n preference optimization; and (iv) joint vision-language feedback refinement. Each stage is supported by a fully automated data-construction pipeline tailored to its specific needs, enabling robust training without complex architectural modifications. Evaluated on multiple experiments, PosterCraft significantly outperforms open-source baselines in rendering accuracy, layout coherence, and overall visual appeal-approaching the quality of SOTA commercial systems. Our code, models, and datasets can be found in the Project page: https://ephemeral182.github.io/PosterCraft

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has attracted significant attention due to its ability to combine the generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with knowledge obtained through efficient retrieval mechanisms over large-scale data collections. Currently, the majority of existing approaches overlook the risks associated with exposing sensitive or access-controlled information directly to the generation model. Only a few approaches propose techniques to instruct the generative model to refrain from disclosing sensitive information; however, recent studies have also demonstrated that LLMs remain vulnerable to prompt injection attacks that can override intended behavioral constraints. For these reasons, we propose a novel approach to Selective Disclosure in Retrieval-Augmented Generation, called SD-RAG, which decouples the enforcement of security and privacy constraints from the generation process itself. Rather than relying on prompt-level safeguards, SD-RAG applies sanitization and disclosure controls during the retrieval phase, prior to augmenting the language model's input. Moreover, we introduce a semantic mechanism to allow the ingestion of human-readable dynamic security and privacy constraints together with an optimized graph-based data model that supports fine-grained, policy-aware retrieval. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates the superiority of SD-RAG over baseline existing approaches, achieving up to a 58% improvement in the privacy score, while also showing a strong resilience to prompt injection attacks targeting the generative model.

Document parsing from scanned images into structured formats remains a significant challenge due to its complexly intertwined elements such as text paragraphs, figures, formulas, and tables. Existing supervised fine-tuning methods often struggle to generalize across diverse document types, leading to poor performance, particularly on out-of-distribution data. This issue is further exacerbated by the limited availability of high-quality training data for layout-aware parsing tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce LayoutRL, a reinforcement learning framework that optimizes layout understanding through composite rewards integrating normalized edit distance, paragraph count accuracy, and reading order preservation. To support this training, we construct the Infinity-Doc-400K dataset, which we use to train Infinity-Parser, a vision-language model demonstrating robust generalization across various domains. Extensive evaluations on benchmarks including OmniDocBench, olmOCR-Bench, PubTabNet, and FinTabNet show that Infinity-Parser consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across a broad range of document types, languages, and structural complexities, substantially outperforming both specialized document parsing systems and general-purpose vision-language models. We will release our code, dataset, and model to facilitate reproducible research in document parsing.

Alignment methodologies have emerged as a critical pathway for enhancing language model alignment capabilities. While SFT (supervised fine-tuning) accelerates convergence through direct token-level loss intervention, its efficacy is constrained by offline policy trajectory. In contrast, RL(reinforcement learning) facilitates exploratory policy optimization, but suffers from low sample efficiency and stringent dependency on high-quality base models. To address these dual challenges, we propose GRAO (Group Relative Alignment Optimization), a unified framework that synergizes the respective strengths of SFT and RL through three key innovations: 1) A multi-sample generation strategy enabling comparative quality assessment via reward feedback; 2) A novel Group Direct Alignment Loss formulation leveraging intra-group relative advantage weighting; 3) Reference-aware parameter updates guided by pairwise preference dynamics. Our theoretical analysis establishes GRAO's convergence guarantees and sample efficiency advantages over conventional approaches. Comprehensive evaluations across complex human alignment tasks demonstrate GRAO's superior performance, achieving 57.70\%,17.65\% 7.95\% and 5.18\% relative improvements over SFT, DPO, PPO and GRPO baselines respectively. This work provides both a theoretically grounded alignment framework and empirical evidence for efficient capability evolution in language models.

Electrocardiograms (ECGs) are among the most widely used diagnostic tools for cardiovascular diseases, and a large amount of ECG data worldwide appears only in image form. However, most existing automated ECG analysis methods rely on access to raw signal recordings, limiting their applicability in real-world and resource-constrained settings. In this paper, we present ECG-Scan, a self-supervised framework for learning clinically generalized representations from ECG images through dual physiological-aware alignments: 1) Our approach optimizes image representation learning using multimodal contrastive alignment between image and gold-standard signal-text modalities. 2) We further integrate domain knowledge via soft-lead constraints, regularizing the reconstruction process and improving signal lead inter-consistency. Extensive benchmarking across multiple datasets and downstream tasks demonstrates that our image-based model achieves superior performance compared to existing image baselines and notably narrows the gap between ECG image and signal analysis. These results highlight the potential of self-supervised image modeling to unlock large-scale legacy ECG data and broaden access to automated cardiovascular diagnostics.

Large Language Model (LLM)-powered multi-agent systems (MAS) have rapidly advanced collaborative reasoning, tool use, and role-specialized coordination in complex tasks. However, reliability-critical deployment remains hindered by a systemic failure mode: hierarchical compliance under instruction conflicts (system-user, peer-peer), where agents misprioritize system-level rules in the presence of competing demands. Moreover, widely used macro-level metrics (e.g., pass@k) obscure these micro-level violations and offer little actionable guidance for remedy. In this work, we present a full-stack, three-stage framework: (1) Diagnose - Contextualized Role Adherence Score (CRAS), a query-wise, context-aware scoring metric that decomposes role adherence into four measurable dimensions; (2) Localize - attention drift analysis revealing that instruction conflicts are resolved by attention heads that are largely concentrated in middle layers; (3) Align - Surgical Alignment of Instruction Layers (SAIL), which installs LoRA only on the localized focal layers and optimizes a token-weighted DPO-style preference objective that credits tokens by their focal attentional contribution. Across standard benchmarks and MAS frameworks, our surgical approach improves instruction hierarchy compliance (e.g., +5.60% with AutoGen on MedQA) without full-model finetuning.

Code Language Models have been trained to generate accurate solutions, typically with no regard for runtime. On the other hand, previous works that explored execution optimisation have observed corresponding drops in functional correctness. To that end, we introduce Code-Optimise, a framework that incorporates both correctness (passed, failed) and runtime (quick, slow) as learning signals via self-generated preference data. Our framework is both lightweight and robust as it dynamically selects solutions to reduce overfitting while avoiding a reliance on larger models for learning signals. Code-Optimise achieves significant improvements in pass@k while decreasing the competitive baseline runtimes by an additional 6% for in-domain data and up to 3% for out-of-domain data. As a byproduct, the average length of the generated solutions is reduced by up to 48% on MBPP and 23% on HumanEval, resulting in faster and cheaper inference. The generated data and codebase will be open-sourced at www.open-source.link.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems face significant performance gaps when applied to technical domains requiring precise information extraction from complex documents. Current evaluation methodologies relying on document-level metrics inadequately capture token-resolution retrieval accuracy that is critical for domain-related documents. We propose a framework combining granular evaluation metrics with synthetic data generation to optimize domain-specific RAG performance. First, we introduce token-aware metrics Precision Omega and Intersection-over-Union (IoU) that quantify context preservation versus information density trade-offs inherent in technical texts. Second, we develop a reasoning model-driven pipeline using instruction-tuned LLMs (DeepSeek-R1, DeepSeek-R1 distilled variants, and Phi-4) to generate context-anchored QA pairs with discontinuous reference spans across three specialized corpora: SEC 10-K filings (finance), biomedical abstracts (PubMed), and APT threat reports (cybersecurity). Our empirical analysis reveals critical insights: smaller chunks (less than 10 tokens) improve precision by 31-42% (IoU = 0.071 vs. baseline 0.053) at recall costs (-18%), while domain-specific embedding strategies yield 22% variance in optimal chunk sizing (5-20 tokens). The DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B model demonstrates superior concept alignment (+14% mean IoU over alternatives), though no configuration universally dominates. Financial texts favor larger chunks for risk factor coverage (Recall = 0.81 at size = 20), whereas cybersecurity content benefits from atomic segmentation, Precision Omega = 0.28 at size = 5. Our code is available on https://github.com/aryan-jadon/Synthetic-Data-Generation-and-Evaluation-using-Reasoning-Model

Large language model (LLM) based agentic workflows have become a popular paradigm for coordinating multiple specialized agents to solve complex tasks. To improve serving efficiency, existing LLM systems employ prefix caching to reuse key-value (KV) tensors corresponding to agents' fixed prompts, thereby avoiding redundant computation across repeated invocations. However, current systems typically evict KV caches using a Least Recently Used (LRU) policy, which fails to anticipate future agent usage and often discards KV caches shortly before their reuse. This leads to frequent cache misses and substantial recomputation or swapping overhead. We present KVFlow, a workflow-aware KV cache management framework tailored for agentic workloads. KVFlow abstracts the agent execution schedule as an Agent Step Graph and assigns each agent a steps-to-execution value that estimates its temporal proximity to future activation. These values guide a fine-grained eviction policy at the KV node level, allowing KVFlow to preserve entries likely to be reused and efficiently manage shared prefixes in tree-structured caches. Moreover, KVFlow introduces a fully overlapped KV prefetching mechanism, which proactively loads required tensors from CPU to GPU in background threads for agents scheduled in the next step, thereby avoiding cache miss stalls during generation. Compared to SGLang with hierarchical radix cache, KVFlow achieves up to 1.83times speedup for single workflows with large prompts, and up to 2.19times speedup for scenarios with many concurrent workflows.

Multi-agent large language model (LLM) and vision-language model (VLM) debate systems employ specialized roles for complex problem-solving, yet model specializations are not leveraged to decide which model should fill which role. We propose dynamic role assignment, a framework that runs a Meta-Debate to select suitable agents before the actual debate. The meta-debate has two stages: (1) proposal, where candidates provide role-tailored arguments, and (2) peer review, where proposals are scored with data and role-specific criteria to choose the best agent for each position. We evaluate our method on LLM problem solving benchmarks. Applied on top of existing debate systems, our approach consistently outperforms uniform assignments (filling all roles with the same model) by up to 74.8% and random assignments (assigning models to roles without considering their suitability) by up to 29.7%, depending on the task and the specific assignment. This work establishes a new paradigm for multi-agent system design, shifting from static agent deployment to dynamic and capability-aware selection.

Realistic 3D human generation from text prompts is a desirable yet challenging task. Existing methods optimize 3D representations like mesh or neural fields via score distillation sampling (SDS), which suffers from inadequate fine details or excessive training time. In this paper, we propose an efficient yet effective framework, HumanGaussian, that generates high-quality 3D humans with fine-grained geometry and realistic appearance. Our key insight is that 3D Gaussian Splatting is an efficient renderer with periodic Gaussian shrinkage or growing, where such adaptive density control can be naturally guided by intrinsic human structures. Specifically, 1) we first propose a Structure-Aware SDS that simultaneously optimizes human appearance and geometry. The multi-modal score function from both RGB and depth space is leveraged to distill the Gaussian densification and pruning process. 2) Moreover, we devise an Annealed Negative Prompt Guidance by decomposing SDS into a noisier generative score and a cleaner classifier score, which well addresses the over-saturation issue. The floating artifacts are further eliminated based on Gaussian size in a prune-only phase to enhance generation smoothness. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior efficiency and competitive quality of our framework, rendering vivid 3D humans under diverse scenarios. Project Page: https://alvinliu0.github.io/projects/HumanGaussian

Recent methods for arbitrary-skeleton motion capture from monocular video follow a factorized pipeline, where a Video-to-Pose network predicts joint positions and an analytical inverse-kinematics (IK) stage recovers joint rotations. While effective, this design is inherently limited, since joint positions do not fully determine rotations and leave degrees of freedom such as bone-axis twist ambiguous, and the non-differentiable IK stage prevents the system from adapting to noisy predictions or optimizing for the final animation objective. In this work, we present the first fully end-to-end framework in which both Video-to-Pose and Pose-to-Rotation are learnable and jointly optimized. We observe that the ambiguity in pose-to-rotation mapping arises from missing coordinate system information: the same joint positions can correspond to different rotations under different rest poses and local axis conventions. To resolve this, we introduce a reference pose-rotation pair from the target asset, which, together with the rest pose, not only anchors the mapping but also defines the underlying rotation coordinate system. This formulation turns rotation prediction into a well-constrained conditional problem and enables effective learning. In addition, our model predicts joint positions directly from video without relying on mesh intermediates, improving both robustness and efficiency. Both stages share a skeleton-aware Global-Local Graph-guided Multi-Head Attention (GL-GMHA) module for joint-level local reasoning and global coordination. Experiments on Truebones Zoo and Objaverse show that our method reduces rotation error from ~17 degrees to ~10 degrees, and to 6.54 degrees on unseen skeletons, while achieving ~20x faster inference than mesh-based pipelines. Project page: https://animotionlab.github.io/MoCapAnythingV2/

Post-training of Large Language Models (LMs) often prioritizes accuracy and helpfulness at the expense of diversity. This creates a tension: while post-training improves response quality, it also sharpens output distributions and reduces the range of ideas, limiting the usefulness of LMs in creative and exploratory tasks such as brainstorming, storytelling, or problem solving. We address this challenge with Diversity-Aware Reinforcement Learning (DARLING), a framework that jointly optimizes for response quality and semantic diversity. At its core, DARLING introduces a learned partition function to measure diversity beyond surface-level lexical variations. This diversity signal is then combined with a quality reward during online reinforcement learning, encouraging models to generate outputs that are both high-quality and distinct. Experiments across multiple model families and sizes show that DARLING generalizes to two regimes: non-verifiable tasks (instruction following and creative writing) and verifiable tasks (competition math). On five benchmarks in the first setting, DARLING consistently outperforms quality-only RL baselines, producing outputs that are simultaneously of higher quality and novelty. In the second setting, DARLING achieves higher pass@1 (solution quality) and pass@k (solution variety). Most strikingly, explicitly optimizing for diversity catalyzes exploration in online RL, which manifests itself as higher-quality responses.

Aerial vision-language navigation (VLN) requires agents to follow natural-language instructions through closed-loop perception and action in 3D environments. We argue that aerial VLN can be formulated as a prediction-driven world-action problem: the agent should anticipate latent world evolution and act according to the predicted consequences. To this end, we propose WorldVLN, the first autoregressive world action model for aerial VLN. Unlike full-sequence video-generation world models that generate an entire visual clip, WorldVLN adapts a latent autoregressive video backbone to predict short-horizon world-state transitions and directly decodes them into executable waypoint actions. After each action segment is executed, newly received observations are encoded back into the autoregressive context, enabling closed-loop world-action prediction. We further introduce a two-stage training framework that first grounds the video prior in instruction-conditioned navigation dynamics and then develops Action-aware GRPO, the first reinforcement learning method tailored to autoregressive WAMs, to optimize waypoint decisions through their downstream rollout consequences. On public outdoor and indoor benchmarks, WorldVLN consistently outperforms existing Vision-Language-Action baselines with 12\%+ success-rate gains and larger advantages on challenging cases. It further transfers zero-shot to real drone deployment, suggesting that the proposed WorldVLN offers a promising route for spatial action tasks. Demos and code are available at https://embodiedcity.github.io/WorldVLN/.

Large Language Models have achieved strong performance on reasoning tasks, solving competition-level coding and math problems. However, their scalability is limited by human-labeled datasets and the lack of large-scale, challenging coding problem training data. Existing competitive coding datasets contain only thousands to tens of thousands of problems. Previous synthetic data generation methods rely on either augmenting existing instruction datasets or selecting challenging problems from human-labeled data. In this paper, we propose QueST, a novel framework which combines difficulty-aware graph sampling and difficulty-aware rejection fine-tuning that directly optimizes specialized generators to create challenging coding problems. Our trained generators demonstrate superior capability compared to even GPT-4o at creating challenging problems that benefit downstream performance. We leverage QueST to generate large-scale synthetic coding problems, which we then use to distill from strong teacher models with long chain-of-thought or to conduct reinforcement learning for smaller models, proving effective in both scenarios. Our distillation experiments demonstrate significant performance gains. Specifically, after fine-tuning Qwen3-8B-base on 100K difficult problems generated by QueST, we surpass the performance of the original Qwen3-8B on LiveCodeBench. With an additional 112K examples (i.e., 28K human-written problems paired with multiple synthetic solutions), our 8B model matches the performance of the much larger DeepSeek-R1-671B. These findings indicate that generating complex problems via QueST offers an effective and scalable approach to advancing the frontiers of competitive coding and reasoning for large language models.

We present MagicSelector, a joint optimization framework integrating Counterfactual task decomposition, Progressive reranking, and Dynamic Top-K, designed to address the fundamental challenges of tool retrieval in agents. MagicSelector is a specialized framework capable of translating ambiguous user instructions into executable atomic subtasks and guiding high-precision tool retrieval, effectively mitigating redundant noise and severe context distraction in out-of-domain (OOD) scenarios.We empower MagicSelector with these capabilities through three key contributions: (1) a preferenceguided counterfactual task decomposition mechanism that utilizes a counterfactual reward to quantify the marginal causal gain of decomposition on retrieval ranking, effectively imposing fine-grained structural supervision on logical coherence; (2) a progressive tool reranking method driven by self-distillation hard negative mining, which optimizes both point-wise and list-wise relevance to enhance fine-grained discrimination among highly similar tools; and (3) a dual semantic boundary-aware dynamic Top-K strategy that adaptively monitors reranking score cliffs and inter-tool semantic shifts to dynamically truncate the candidate list, maximizing relevant tool recall while filtering long-tail noise. Evaluated on MTDTool, the first task decomposition benchmark we constructed tailored for mobile multi-turn interactions with process-level annotations, MagicSelector yields promising performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MagicSelector significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of tool retrieval accuracy, OOD generalization capability, and overall token efficiency, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

Leveraging the vast open-world knowledge and understanding capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to develop general-purpose, semantically-aware recommender systems has emerged as a pivotal research direction in generative recommendation. However, existing methods face bottlenecks in constructing item identifiers. Text-based methods introduce LLMs' vast output space, leading to hallucination, while methods based on Semantic IDs (SIDs) encounter a semantic gap between SIDs and LLMs' native vocabulary, requiring costly vocabulary expansion and alignment training. To address this, this paper introduces Term IDs (TIDs), defined as a set of semantically rich and standardized textual keywords, to serve as robust item identifiers. We propose GRLM, a novel framework centered on TIDs, employs Context-aware Term Generation to convert item's metadata into standardized TIDs and utilizes Integrative Instruction Fine-tuning to collaboratively optimize term internalization and sequential recommendation. Additionally, Elastic Identifier Grounding is designed for robust item mapping. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that GRLM significantly outperforms baselines across multiple scenarios, pointing a promising direction for generalizable and high-performance generative recommendation systems.

Image degradation from blur, noise, compression, and poor illumination severely undermines multimodal understanding in real-world settings. Unified multimodal models that combine understanding and generation within a single architecture are a natural fit for this challenge, as their generative pathway can model the fine-grained visual structure that degradation destroys. Yet these models fail to leverage their own generative capacity on degraded inputs. We trace this disconnect to two compounding factors: existing training regimes never ask the model to invoke generation during reasoning, and the standard decode-reencode pathway does not support effective joint optimization. We present CLEAR, a framework that connects the two capabilities through three progressive steps: (1) supervised fine-tuning on a degradation-aware dataset to establish the generate-then-answer reasoning pattern; (2) a Latent Representation Bridge that replaces the decode-reencode detour with a direct, optimizable connection between generation and reasoning; (3) Interleaved GRPO, a reinforcement learning method that jointly optimizes text reasoning and visual generation under answer-correctness rewards. We construct MMD-Bench, covering three degradation severity levels across six standard multimodal benchmarks. Experiments show that CLEAR substantially improves robustness on degraded inputs while preserving clean-image performance. Our analysis further reveals that removing pixel-level reconstruction supervision leads to intermediate visual states with higher perceptual quality, suggesting that task-driven optimization and visual quality are naturally aligned.

The discovery of extremal structures in mathematics requires navigating vast and nonconvex landscapes where analytical methods offer little guidance and brute-force search becomes intractable. We introduce FlowBoost, a closed-loop generative framework that learns to discover rare and extremal geometric structures by combining three components: (i) a geometry-aware conditional flow-matching model that learns to sample high-quality configurations, (ii) reward-guided policy optimization with action exploration that directly optimizes the generation process toward the objective while maintaining diversity, and (iii) stochastic local search for both training-data generation and final refinement. Unlike prior open-loop approaches, such as PatternBoost that retrains on filtered discrete samples, or AlphaEvolve which relies on frozen Large Language Models (LLMs) as evolutionary mutation operators, FlowBoost enforces geometric feasibility during sampling, and propagates reward signal directly into the generative model, closing the optimization loop and requiring much smaller training sets and shorter training times, and reducing the required outer-loop iterations by orders of magnitude, while eliminating dependence on LLMs. We demonstrate the framework on four geometric optimization problems: sphere packing in hypercubes, circle packing maximizing sum of radii, the Heilbronn triangle problem, and star discrepancy minimization. In several cases, FlowBoost discovers configurations that match or exceed the best known results. For circle packings, we improve the best known lower bounds, surpassing the LLM-based system AlphaEvolve while using substantially fewer computational resources.

The past two decades have witnessed significant success in applying columnar storage to data warehousing and analytics. However, the rapid growth of machine learning poses new challenges. This paper presents Bullion, a columnar storage system tailored for machine learning workloads. Bullion addresses the complexities of data compliance, optimizes the encoding of long sequence sparse features, efficiently manages wide-table projections, introduces feature quantization in storage, enables quality-aware sequential reads for multimodal training data, and provides a comprehensive cascading encoding framework that unifies diverse encoding schemes through modular, composable interfaces. By aligning with the evolving requirements of ML applications, Bullion facilitates the application of columnar storage and processing to modern application scenarios such as those within advertising, recommendation systems, and Generative AI. Preliminary experimental results and theoretical analysis demonstrate Bullion's improved ability to deliver strong performance in the face of the unique demands of machine learning workloads compared to existing columnar storage solutions. Bullion significantly reduces I/O costs for deletion compliance, achieves substantial storage savings with its optimized encoding scheme for sparse features, and improves metadata parsing speed for wide-table projections. These advancements enable Bullion to become an important component in the future of machine learning infrastructure, enabling organizations to efficiently manage and process the massive volumes of data required for training and inference in modern AI applications.

Model merging has attracted attention as an effective path toward multi-task adaptation by integrating knowledge from multiple task-specific models. Among existing approaches, dynamic merging mitigates performance degradation caused by conflicting parameter updates across tasks by flexibly combining task-specific parameters at inference time, thereby maintaining high performance. However, these methods require storing independent parameters for each task, resulting in prohibitive storage overhead. To address this issue, we first experimentally demonstrate that the fine-tuned weight increments (referred to as task vectors) exhibit an impulse-like activation pattern and high robustness to low-bit representations. Driven by this insight, we propose T-Switch, which decomposes task vectors into three compact components: a binary sparse mask, a sign vector, and a scalar scaling factor, achieving high-fidelity approximation at high compression ratios. We then introduce Auto-Switch, a training-free merging scheme that automatically composes task vectors via feature similarity retrieval. Building on this, we develop Auto-Switch, a training-free merging scheme that automatically assembles task vectors through feature similarity retrieval. Furthermore, to transform task vector sparsification and quantization from static rules to adaptive learning, we propose FlexSwitch, a learnable framework which jointly optimizes the compression strategy for each model unit via Learnable Gating Sparsification (LGS) and Bit-width Adaptive Selection (BAS), while employing the Sparsity-Aware Storage Strategy (SASS) to select the optimal storage encoding structure. Finally, by incorporating a K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) inference scheme with a learnable low-rank metric, we present Auto-FlexSwitch, a dynamic model merging approach that supports highly efficient task vector compression.

Visual document retrieval requires rapidly locating relevant pages from large multi-modal corpora in response to user queries. While recent methods powered by Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show competitive accuracy, they suffer from prohibitive computational costs by applying intensive MLLM encoding to every single page. Meanwhile, we observe that user queries are typically keyword-anchored, containing semantically rich words that are expected to appear directly in the visible text of relevant pages, offering an efficient cue for quickly narrowing down candidate pages. Building on this insight, we propose LightSTAR, an efficient framework that decomposes visual document retrieval into: 1) LLM-free Visual Selection, which utilizes content-grounded query encoding to focus on informative words and employs LLM-free visual embeddings to produce a high-recall candidate set; and 2) Vision-adaptive Semantic Refinement, which further performs fine-grained semantic matching exclusively on these top candidates via adaptive region-wise feature fusion to effectively combine textual and layout cues, optimized through a hardness-aware contrastive objective. Experimental results demonstrate that LightSTAR achieves state-of-the-art retrieval accuracy while reducing end-to-end latency by several-fold, offering a highly practical solution to the accuracy-efficiency trade-off in visual document retrieval. Code is available at https://github.com/bokufa/LightSTAR.

This paper introduces FALCON, a novel Fast Autonomous expLoration framework using COverage path guidaNce, which aims at setting a new performance benchmark in the field of autonomous aerial exploration. Despite recent advancements in the domain, existing exploration planners often suffer from inefficiencies such as frequent revisitations of previously explored regions.FALCON effectively harnesses the full potential of online generated coverage paths in enhancing exploration efficiency.The framework begins with an incremental connectivity-aware space decomposition and connectivity graph construction, which facilitate efficient coverage path planning.Subsequently, a hierarchical planner generates a coverage path spanning the entire unexplored space, serving as a global guidance.Then, a local planner optimizes the frontier visitation order, minimizing traversal time while consciously incorporating the intention of the global guidance.Finally, minimum-time smooth and safe trajectories are produced to visit the frontier viewpoints.For fair and comprehensive benchmark experiments, we introduce a lightweight exploration planner evaluation environment that allows for comparing exploration planners across a variety of testing scenarios using an identical quadrotor simulator.Additionally, an in-depth analysis and evaluation is conducted to highlight the significant performance advantages of FALCON in comparison with the state-of-the-art exploration planners based on objective criteria.Extensive ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of each component in the proposed framework.Real-world experiments conducted fully onboard further validate FALCON's practical capability in complex and challenging environments.The source code of both the exploration planner FALCON and the exploration planner evaluation environment has been released to benefit the community.

Vehicle-to-Everything communications-assisted Autonomous Driving (V2X-AD) has witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years, with pragmatic communications (PragComm) emerging as a promising paradigm for real-time collaboration among vehicles and other agents.Simultaneously, extensive research has explored the interplay between collaborative perception and decision-making in end-to-end driving frameworks.In this work, we revisit the collaborative driving problem and propose the Select2Drive framework to optimize the utilization of limited computational and communication resources.Particularly, to mitigate cumulative latency in perception and decision-making, Select2Drive introduces Distributed Predictive Perception (DPP) by formulating an active prediction paradigm and simplifies high-dimensional semantic feature prediction into computation cost-efficient, motion-aware reconstruction. Given the "less is more" principle that a broadened perceptual horizon possibly confuses the decision module rather than contributing to it, Select2Drive utilizes Area-of-Importance-based PragComm (APC) to prioritize the communications of critical regions, thus boosting both communication efficiency and decision-making efficacy. Empirical evaluations on the V2Xverse dataset and CARLA driving simulator demonstrate that Select2Drive achieves a 11.31% (resp. 7.69%) improvement in offline perception tasks under limited bandwidth (resp. pose error conditions). Moreover, it delivers at most 14.68% and 31.76% enhancement in closed-loop driving scores and route completion rates, particularly in scenarios characterized by dense traffic and high-speed dynamics.

Open-Vocabulary Camouflaged Object Segmentation (OVCOS) seeks to segment and classify camouflaged objects from arbitrary categories, presenting unique challenges due to visual ambiguity and unseen categories.Recent approaches typically adopt a two-stage paradigm: first segmenting objects, then classifying the segmented regions using Vision Language Models (VLMs).However, these methods (1) suffer from a domain gap caused by the mismatch between VLMs' full-image training and cropped-region inference, and (2) depend on generic segmentation models optimized for well-delineated objects, making them less effective for camouflaged objects.Without explicit guidance, generic segmentation models often overlook subtle boundaries, leading to imprecise segmentation.In this paper,we introduce a novel VLM-guided cascaded framework to address these issues in OVCOS.For segmentation, we leverage the Segment Anything Model (SAM), guided by the VLM.Our framework uses VLM-derived features as explicit prompts to SAM, effectively directing attention to camouflaged regions and significantly improving localization accuracy.For classification, we avoid the domain gap introduced by hard cropping.Instead, we treat the segmentation output as a soft spatial prior via the alpha channel, which retains the full image context while providing precise spatial guidance, leading to more accurate and context-aware classification of camouflaged objects.The same VLM is shared across both segmentation and classification to ensure efficiency and semantic consistency.Extensive experiments on both OVCOS and conventional camouflaged object segmentation benchmarks demonstrate the clear superiority of our method, highlighting the effectiveness of leveraging rich VLM semantics for both segmentation and classification of camouflaged objects.

Code optimization is a daunting task that requires a significant level of expertise from experienced programmers. This level of expertise is not sufficient when compared to the rapid development of new hardware architectures. Towards advancing the whole code optimization process, recent approaches rely on machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques. This paper introduces a new framework to decrease the complexity of code optimization. The proposed framework builds on large language models (LLMs) and reinforcement learning (RL) and enables LLMs to receive feedback from their environment (i.e., unit tests) during the fine-tuning process. We compare our framework with existing state-of-the-art models and show that it is more efficient with respect to speed and computational usage, as a result of the decrement in training steps and its applicability to models with fewer parameters. Additionally, our framework reduces the possibility of logical and syntactical errors. Toward evaluating our approach, we run several experiments on the PIE dataset using a CodeT5 language model and RRHF, a new reinforcement learning algorithm. We adopt a variety of evaluation metrics with regards to optimization quality, and speedup. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed framework has similar results in comparison with existing models using shorter training times and smaller pre-trained models. In particular, we accomplish an increase of 5.6% and 2.2 over the baseline models concerning the %OP T and SP metrics.

Code efficiency is a fundamental aspect of software quality, yet how to harness large language models (LLMs) to optimize programs remains challenging. Prior approaches have sought for one-shot rewriting, retrieved exemplars, or prompt-based search, but they do not explicitly distill reusable optimization knowledge, which limits generalization beyond individual instances. In this paper, we present EffiSkill, a framework for code-efficiency optimization that builds a portable optimization toolbox for LLM-based agents. The key idea is to model recurring slow-to-fast transformations as reusable agent skills that capture both concrete transformation mechanisms and higher-level optimization strategies. EffiSkill adopts a two-stage design: Stage I mines Operator and Meta Skills from large-scale slow/fast program pairs to build a skill library; Stage II applies this library to unseen programs through execution-free diagnosis, skill retrieval, plan composition, and candidate generation, without runtime feedback. Results on EffiBench-X show that EffiSkill achieves higher optimization success rates, improving over the strongest baseline by 3.69 to 12.52 percentage points across model and language settings. These findings suggest that mechanism-level skill reuse provides a useful foundation for execution-free code optimization, and that the resulting skill library can serve as a reusable resource for broader agent workflows.

Optimization plays a costly and crucial role in developing machine learning systems. In learned optimizers, the few hyperparameters of commonly used hand-designed optimizers, e.g. Adam or SGD, are replaced with flexible parametric functions. The parameters of these functions are then optimized so that the resulting learned optimizer minimizes a target loss on a chosen class of models. Learned optimizers can both reduce the number of required training steps and improve the final test loss. However, they can be expensive to train, and once trained can be expensive to use due to computational and memory overhead for the optimizer itself. In this work, we identify and quantify the design features governing the memory, compute, and performance trade-offs for many learned and hand-designed optimizers. We further leverage our analysis to construct a learned optimizer that is both faster and more memory efficient than previous work. Our model and training code are open source.

Optimization plays a vital role in scientific research and practical applications. However, formulating a concrete optimization problem described in natural language into a mathematical form and selecting a suitable solver to solve the problem requires substantial domain expertise. We introduce OptimAI, a framework for solving Optimization problems described in natural language by leveraging LLM-powered AI agents, and achieve superior performance over current state-of-the-art methods. Our framework is built upon the following key roles: (1) a formulator that translates natural language problem descriptions into precise mathematical formulations; (2) a planner that constructs a high-level solution strategy prior to execution; and (3) a coder and a code critic capable of interacting with the environment and reflecting on outcomes to refine future actions. Ablation studies confirm that all roles are essential; removing the planner or code critic results in 5.8times and 3.1times drops in productivity, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce UCB-based debug scheduling to dynamically switch between alternative plans, yielding an additional 3.3times productivity gain. Our design emphasizes multi-agent collaboration, and our experiments confirm that combining diverse models leads to performance gains. Our approach attains 88.1% accuracy on the NLP4LP dataset and 82.3% on the Optibench dataset, reducing error rates by 58% and 52%, respectively, over prior best results.

We study a class of optimization problems motivated by automating the design and update of AI systems like coding assistants, robots, and copilots. We propose an end-to-end optimization framework, Trace, which treats the computational workflow of an AI system as a graph akin to neural networks, based on a generalization of back-propagation. Optimization of computational workflows often involves rich feedback (e.g. console output or user's responses), heterogeneous parameters (e.g. prompts, hyper-parameters, codes), and intricate objectives (beyond maximizing a score). Moreover, its computation graph can change dynamically with the inputs and parameters. We frame a new mathematical setup of iterative optimization, Optimization with Trace Oracle (OPTO), to capture and abstract these properties so as to design optimizers that work across many domains. In OPTO, an optimizer receives an execution trace along with feedback on the computed output and updates parameters iteratively. Trace is the tool to implement OPTO in practice. Trace has a Python interface that efficiently converts a computational workflow into an OPTO instance using a PyTorch-like interface. Using Trace, we develop a general-purpose LLM-based optimizer called OptoPrime that can effectively solve OPTO problems. In empirical studies, we find that OptoPrime is capable of first-order numerical optimization, prompt optimization, hyper-parameter tuning, robot controller design, code debugging, etc., and is often competitive with specialized optimizers for each domain. We believe that Trace, OptoPrime and the OPTO framework will enable the next generation of interactive agents that automatically adapt using various kinds of feedback. Website: https://microsoft.github.io/Trace

Learning to optimize has emerged as a powerful framework for various optimization and machine learning tasks. Current such "meta-optimizers" often learn in the space of continuous optimization algorithms that are point-based and uncertainty-unaware. To overcome the limitations, we propose a meta-optimizer that learns in the algorithmic space of both point-based and population-based optimization algorithms. The meta-optimizer targets at a meta-loss function consisting of both cumulative regret and entropy. Specifically, we learn and interpret the update formula through a population of LSTMs embedded with sample- and feature-level attentions. Meanwhile, we estimate the posterior directly over the global optimum and use an uncertainty measure to help guide the learning process. Empirical results over non-convex test functions and the protein-docking application demonstrate that this new meta-optimizer outperforms existing competitors.

Learned optimization has emerged as a promising alternative to hand-crafted optimizers, with the potential to discover stronger learned update rules that enable faster, hyperparameter-free training of neural networks. A critical element for practically useful learned optimizers, that can be used off-the-shelf after meta-training, is strong meta-generalization: the ability to apply the optimizers to new tasks. Recent state-of-the-art work in learned optimizers, VeLO (Metz et al., 2022), requires a large number of highly diverse meta-training tasks along with massive computational resources, 4000 TPU months, to achieve meta-generalization. This makes further improvements to such learned optimizers impractical. In this work, we identify several key elements in learned optimizer architectures and meta-training procedures that can lead to strong meta-generalization. We also propose evaluation metrics to reliably assess quantitative performance of an optimizer at scale on a set of evaluation tasks. Our proposed approach, Celo, makes a significant leap in improving the meta-generalization performance of learned optimizers and also outperforms tuned state-of-the-art optimizers on a diverse set of out-of-distribution tasks, despite being meta-trained for just 24 GPU hours.

We present a feasibility-seeking approach to neural network training. This mathematical optimization framework is distinct from conventional gradient-based loss minimization and uses projection operators and iterative projection algorithms. We reformulate training as a large-scale feasibility problem: finding network parameters and states that satisfy local constraints derived from its elementary operations. Training then involves projecting onto these constraints, a local operation that can be parallelized across the network. We introduce PJAX, a JAX-based software framework that enables this paradigm. PJAX composes projection operators for elementary operations, automatically deriving the solution operators for the feasibility problems (akin to autodiff for derivatives). It inherently supports GPU/TPU acceleration, provides a familiar NumPy-like API, and is extensible. We train diverse architectures (MLPs, CNNs, RNNs) on standard benchmarks using PJAX, demonstrating its functionality and generality. Our results show that this approach is as a compelling alternative to gradient-based training, with clear advantages in parallelism and the ability to handle non-differentiable operations.

Enterprise LLM deployment faces a critical scalability challenge: organizations must optimize models systematically to scale AI initiatives within constrained compute budgets, yet the specialized expertise required for manual optimization remains a niche and scarce skillset. This challenge is particularly evident in managing GPU utilization across heterogeneous infrastructure while enabling teams with diverse workloads and limited LLM optimization experience to deploy models efficiently. We present OptiKIT, a distributed LLM optimization framework that democratizes model compression and tuning by automating complex optimization workflows for non-expert teams. OptiKIT provides dynamic resource allocation, staged pipeline execution with automatic cleanup, and seamless enterprise integration. In production, it delivers more than 2x GPU throughput improvement while empowering application teams to achieve consistent performance improvements without deep LLM optimization expertise. We share both the platform design and key engineering insights into resource allocation algorithms, pipeline orchestration, and integration patterns that enable large-scale, production-grade democratization of model optimization. Finally, we open-source the system to enable external contributions and broader reproducibility.

Learned optimizers have been an active research topic over the past decade, with increasing progress toward practical, general-purpose optimizers that can serve as drop-in replacements for widely used methods like Adam. However, recent advances -- such as VeLO, which was meta-trained for 4000 TPU-months -- remain largely inaccessible to the broader community, in part due to their reliance on JAX and the absence of user-friendly packages for applying the optimizers after meta-training. To address this gap, we introduce PyLO, a PyTorch-based library that brings learned optimizers to the broader machine learning community through familiar, widely adopted workflows. Unlike prior work focused on synthetic or convex tasks, our emphasis is on applying learned optimization to real-world large-scale pre-training tasks. Our release includes a CUDA-accelerated version of the small_fc_lopt learned optimizer architecture from (Metz et al., 2022a), delivering substantial speedups -- from 39.36 to 205.59 samples/sec throughput for training ViT B/16 with batch size 32. PyLO also allows us to easily combine learned optimizers with existing optimization tools such as learning rate schedules and weight decay. When doing so, we find that learned optimizers can substantially benefit. Our code is available at https://github.com/Belilovsky-Lab/pylo

The increasing complexity of machine learning models and the proliferation of diverse hardware architectures (CPUs, GPUs, accelerators) make achieving optimal performance a significant challenge. Heterogeneity in instruction sets, specialized kernel requirements for different data types and model features (e.g., sparsity, quantization), and architecture-specific optimizations complicate performance tuning. Manual optimization is resource-intensive, while existing automatic approaches often rely on complex hardware-specific heuristics and uninterpretable intermediate representations, hindering performance portability. We introduce PerfLLM, a novel automatic optimization methodology leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL). Central to this is PerfDojo, an environment framing optimization as an RL game using a human-readable, mathematically-inspired code representation that guarantees semantic validity through transformations. This allows effective optimization without prior hardware knowledge, facilitating both human analysis and RL agent training. We demonstrate PerfLLM's ability to achieve significant performance gains across diverse CPU (x86, Arm, RISC-V) and GPU architectures.

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) Large Language Models (LLM) fundamentally rely on high-quality training data. While data selection and data synthesis are two common strategies to improve data quality, existing approaches often face limitations in static dataset curation that fail to adapt to evolving model capabilities. In this paper, we introduce Middo, a self-evolving Model-informed dynamic data optimization framework that uses model-aware data selection and context-preserving data refinement. Unlike conventional one-off filtering/synthesis methods, our framework establishes a closed-loop optimization system: (1) A self-referential diagnostic module proactively identifies suboptimal samples through tri-axial model signals - loss patterns (complexity), embedding cluster dynamics (diversity), and self-alignment scores (quality); (2) An adaptive optimization engine then transforms suboptimal samples into pedagogically valuable training points while preserving semantic integrity; (3) This optimization process continuously evolves with model capability through dynamic learning principles. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our \method consistently enhances the quality of seed data and boosts LLM's performance with improving accuracy by 7.15% on average while maintaining the original dataset scale. This work establishes a new paradigm for sustainable LLM training through dynamic human-AI co-evolution of data and models. Our datasets, models, and code are coming soon.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in solving various programming tasks, such as code generation. However, their potential for code optimization, particularly in performance enhancement, remains largely unexplored. This paper investigates the capabilities of LLMs in optimizing code for minimal execution time, addressing a critical gap in current research. The recently proposed code optimization methods construct program optimization pairs based on iterative submissions from the same programmer for the same problem. However, this approach confines LLMs to local performance improvements, neglecting global algorithmic innovation. To overcome this limitation, we adopt a completely different perspective by reconstructing the optimization pairs into a problem-oriented approach. This allows for the integration of various ideas from multiple programmers tackling the same problem. Furthermore, we observe that code optimization presents greater challenges compared to code generation, often accompanied by "optimization tax". Recognizing the inherent trade-offs in correctness and efficiency, we introduce a novel anchor verification framework to mitigate this "optimization tax". Ultimately, the problem oriented perspective combined with the anchor verification framework significantly enhances both the correct optimization ratio and speedup to new levels.

Optimizer selection for large-scale model training has become a system-level design decision constrained jointly by compute, memory, tuning budget, and task diversity, yet the landscape of over one hundred methods remains fragmented. We therefore present OmniOpt, a unified survey and benchmark cookbook of optimizers for the research community. OmniOpt rests on four coupled components. First, we treat every optimizer update as a structured transformation through a five-stage meta-pipeline, and show that most methods engage only one or two of these stages. Second, we use norm-constrained linear minimization oracles (LMOs) to unify different optimizers. Third, these two views ground a dual-dimension taxonomy, one dimension assigning each method to a mechanism family and the other recording the measurable training objectives it aims to improve. Fourth, and at the core of this paper, we instantiate the full taxonomy in a unified cross-domain benchmark spanning representative optimizers, model scales, and training regimes from language model pretraining to image classification, systematically analyzing each method family across multiple effect objectives and laying out their trade-offs. OmniOpt thus supplies the research community with an operational coordinate system for selecting optimizers under explicit mechanism and objective assumptions, and charts a direction for the future development of the optimizer community.

Optimizing complex systems, ranging from LLM prompts to multi-turn agents, traditionally requires labor-intensive manual iteration. We formalize this challenge as a stochastic generative optimization problem where a generative language model acts as the optimizer, guided by numerical rewards and text feedback to discover the best system. We introduce Prioritized Optimization with Local Contextual Aggregation (POLCA), a scalable framework designed to handle stochasticity in optimization -- such as noisy feedback, sampling minibatches, and stochastic system behaviors -- while effectively managing the unconstrained expansion of solution space. POLCA maintains a priority queue to manage the exploration-exploitation tradeoff, systematically tracking candidate solutions and their evaluation histories. To enhance efficiency, we integrate an varepsilon-Net mechanism to maintain parameter diversity and an LLM Summarizer to perform meta-learning across historical trials. We theoretically prove that POLCA converges to near-optimal candidate solutions under stochasticity. We evaluate our framework on diverse benchmarks, including τ-bench, HotpotQA (agent optimization), VeriBench (code translation) and KernelBench (CUDA kernel generation). Experimental results demonstrate that POLCA achieves robust, sample and time-efficient performance, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art algorithms in both deterministic and stochastic problems. The codebase for this work is publicly available at https://github.com/rlx-lab/POLCA.

Designing neural networks typically relies on manual trial and error or a neural architecture search (NAS) followed by weight training. The former is time-consuming and labor-intensive, while the latter often discretizes architecture search and weight optimization. In this paper, we propose a fundamentally different approach that simultaneously optimizes both the architecture and the weights of a neural network. Our framework first trains a universal multi-scale autoencoder that embeds both architectural and parametric information into a continuous latent space, where functionally similar neural networks are mapped closer together. Given a dataset, we then randomly initialize a point in the embedding space and update it via gradient descent to obtain the optimal neural network, jointly optimizing its structure and weights. The optimization process incorporates sparsity and compactness penalties to promote efficient models. Experiments on synthetic regression tasks demonstrate that our method effectively discovers sparse and compact neural networks with strong performance.

We present a method to formulate algorithm discovery as program search, and apply it to discover optimization algorithms for deep neural network training. We leverage efficient search techniques to explore an infinite and sparse program space. To bridge the large generalization gap between proxy and target tasks, we also introduce program selection and simplification strategies. Our method discovers a simple and effective optimization algorithm, Lion (Evo\textbf{Lved Sign Momentum}). It is more memory-efficient than Adam as it only keeps track of the momentum. Different from adaptive optimizers, its update has the same magnitude for each parameter calculated through the sign operation. We compare Lion with widely used optimizers, such as Adam and Adafactor, for training a variety of models on different tasks. On image classification, Lion boosts the accuracy of ViT by up to 2% on ImageNet and saves up to 5x the pre-training compute on JFT. On vision-language contrastive learning, we achieve 88.3% zero-shot and 91.1% fine-tuning accuracy on ImageNet, surpassing the previous best results by 2% and 0.1%, respectively. On diffusion models, Lion outperforms Adam by achieving a better FID score and reducing the training compute by up to 2.3x. For autoregressive, masked language modeling, and fine-tuning, Lion exhibits a similar or better performance compared to Adam. Our analysis of Lion reveals that its performance gain grows with the training batch size. It also requires a smaller learning rate than Adam due to the larger norm of the update produced by the sign function. Additionally, we examine the limitations of Lion and identify scenarios where its improvements are small or not statistically significant. The implementation of Lion is publicly available.

Optimization modeling underpins real-world decision-making in logistics, manufacturing, energy, and public services, but reliably solving such problems from natural-language requirements remains challenging for current large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we propose Agora-Opt, a modular agentic framework for optimization modeling that combines decentralized debate with a read-write memory bank. Agora-Opt allows multiple agent teams to independently produce end-to-end solutions and reconcile them through an outcome-grounded debate protocol, while memory stores solver-verified artifacts and past disagreement resolutions to support training-free improvement over time. This design is flexible across both backbones and methods: it reduces base-model lock-in, transfers across different LLM families, and can be layered onto existing pipelines with minimal coupling. Across public benchmarks, Agora-Opt achieves the strongest overall performance among all compared methods, outperforming strong zero-shot LLMs, training-centric approaches, and prior agentic baselines. Further analyses show robust gains across backbone choices and component variants, and demonstrate that decentralized debate offers a structural advantage over centralized selection by enabling agents to refine candidate solutions through interaction and even recover correct formulations when all initial candidates are flawed. These results suggest that reliable optimization modeling benefits from combining collaborative cross-checking with reusable experience, and position Agora-Opt as a practical and extensible foundation for trustworthy optimization modeling assistance. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/CHIANGEL/Agora-Opt.

Automatic software system optimization can improve software speed, reduce operating costs, and save energy. Traditional approaches to optimization rely on manual tuning and compiler heuristics, limiting their ability to generalize across diverse codebases and system contexts. Recent methods using Large Language Models (LLMs) offer automation to address these limitations, but often fail to scale to the complexity of real-world software systems and applications. We present SysLLMatic, a system that integrates LLMs with profiling-guided feedback and system performance insights to automatically optimize software code. We evaluate it on three benchmark suites: HumanEval_CPP (competitive programming in C++), SciMark2 (scientific kernels in Java), and DaCapoBench (large-scale software systems in Java). Results show that SysLLMatic can improve system performance, including latency, throughput, energy efficiency, memory usage, and CPU utilization. It consistently outperforms state-of-the-art LLM baselines on microbenchmarks. On large-scale application codes, it surpasses traditional compiler optimizations, achieving average relative improvements of 1.85x in latency and 2.24x in throughput. Our findings demonstrate that LLMs, guided by principled systems thinking and appropriate performance diagnostics, can serve as viable software system optimizers. We further identify limitations of our approach and the challenges involved in handling complex applications. This work provides a foundation for generating optimized code across various languages, benchmarks, and program sizes in a principled manner.

Discrete text-trigger optimization -- searching for text sequences that, when ingested by a model, steer it toward a specified objective -- underpins model red-teaming (e.g., LLM jailbreaks), as well as auditing and interpretability. However, the current state of discrete optimizers hinders their adoption and progress. First, existing optimizers, when open-sourced at all, are scattered across research codebases tied to specific models, objectives, and problem domains. Second, optimizer variants proliferate, each requiring engineering overhead to use or extend, and remaining hard to compare head-to-head. Together, these raise the bar for adopting optimizers in existing or new domains, and for advancing them via new strategies. We address these gaps with TROPT, the first open-source framework that unifies discrete optimizers' execution and standardizes their development under a single interface. TROPT makes it easy to customize end-to-end optimization recipes by swapping any component -- models, objectives, and optimizers -- extending its reach across domains and new applications. TROPT currently ships with 30+ optimization recipes -- covering applications such as jailbreaking and probing model internals -- built from 15+ optimizers (spanning white-box to black-box access) and 15+ losses, from foundational to state-of-the-art methods. Demonstrating its utility, we leverage TROPT in several studies: (i) controlled, large-scale experiments comparing and enhancing optimization strategies for LLM jailbreaks, revealing potent-yet-underadopted techniques; and (ii) porting optimizers from one domain (e.g., LLM jailbreak) to new domains (e.g., corpus-poisoning embedding model). In all, TROPT significantly lowers the barrier to adopting and advancing discrete text optimization.

In large-scale AI training, Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (s-MoE) layers enable scaling by activating only a small subset of experts per token. An operational challenge in this design is load balancing: routing tokens to minimize the number of idle experts, which is important for the efficient utilization of (costly) GPUs. We provide a theoretical framework for analyzing the Auxiliary-Loss-Free Load Balancing (ALF-LB) procedure -- proposed by DeepSeek's Wang et al. (2024) -- by casting it as a one-step-per-iteration primal-dual method for an assignment problem. First, in a stylized deterministic setting, our framework yields several insightful structural properties: (i) a monotonic improvement of a Lagrangian objective, (ii) a preference rule that moves tokens from overloaded to underloaded experts, and (iii) an approximate-balancing guarantee. Then, we incorporate the stochastic and dynamic nature of AI training using a generalized online optimization formulation. In the online setting, we derive a strong convexity property of the objective that leads to a logarithmic expected regret bound under certain step-size choices. Additionally, we present real experiments on 1B-parameter DeepSeekMoE models to complement our theoretical findings. Together, these results build a principled framework for analyzing the Auxiliary-Loss-Free Load Balancing of s-MoE in AI models.

The performance of many machine learning models depends on their hyper-parameter settings. Bayesian Optimization has become a successful tool for hyper-parameter optimization of machine learning algorithms, which aims to identify optimal hyper-parameters during an iterative sequential process. However, most of the Bayesian Optimization algorithms are designed to select models for effectiveness only and ignore the important issue of model training efficiency. Given that both model effectiveness and training time are important for real-world applications, models selected for effectiveness may not meet the strict training time requirements necessary to deploy in a production environment. In this work, we present a unified Bayesian Optimization framework for jointly optimizing models for both prediction effectiveness and training efficiency. We propose an objective that captures the tradeoff between these two metrics and demonstrate how we can jointly optimize them in a principled Bayesian Optimization framework. Experiments on model selection for recommendation tasks indicate models selected this way significantly improves model training efficiency while maintaining strong effectiveness as compared to state-of-the-art Bayesian Optimization algorithms.

Despite the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), a fundamental challenge persists: the lack of high-quality optimization modeling datasets hampers LLMs' robust modeling of practical optimization problems from natural language descriptions (NL). This data scarcity also contributes to the generalization difficulties experienced by learning-based methods. To address these challenges, we propose a scalable framework for synthesizing a high-quality dataset, named OptMATH. Starting from curated seed data with mathematical formulations (MF), this framework automatically generates problem data (PD) with controllable complexity. Then, a back-translation step is employed to obtain NL. To verify the correspondence between the NL and the PD, a forward modeling step followed by rejection sampling is used. The accepted pairs constitute the training part of OptMATH. Then a collection of rejected pairs is identified and further filtered. This collection serves as a new benchmark for optimization modeling, containing difficult instances whose lengths are much longer than these of NL4OPT and MAMO. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that models of various sizes (0.5B-32B parameters) trained on OptMATH achieve superior results on multiple modeling benchmarks, thereby validating the effectiveness and scalability of our approach. Our dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/AuroraLHL/OptMATH.

Combinatorial optimization problems are ubiquitous in science and engineering. Still, learning-based approaches to accelerate combinatorial optimization often require solving a large number of difficult instances to collect training data, incurring significant computational cost. Existing learning-based methods require training dedicated models for each problem distribution, for each downstream task, severely limiting their scalability and generalization. We introduce Forge: Foundational Optimization Representations from Graph Embeddings, a framework that pre-trains a vector-quantized graph autoencoder on a large, diverse collection of mixed-integer programming (MIP) instances in an unsupervised manner, without relying on optimization solvers or optimal solutions. Vector quantization produces discrete code assignments that serve as a vocabulary for representing optimization instances. We evaluate Forge in both unsupervised and supervised settings. In the unsupervised setting, Forge embeddings effectively cluster unseen instances across problem domains and sizes. In the supervised setting, we fine-tune Forge embeddings and show that a single pre-trained model helps predicting both the integrality gap for cut-generation and variable hints for search guidance across multiple problem and size distributions. In both tasks, we improve the performance of a commercial optimization solver and outperform state-of-the-art learning-based methods. Finally, we open-source our training code, pre-trained Forge weights, and embeddings for multiple MIP distributions to foster further research in representation learning for optimization problems.

The scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) drives interest in matrix-based optimizers (e.g., Shampoo, Muon, SOAP) for their convergence efficiency; yet their requirement for holistic updates conflicts with the tensor fragmentation in distributed frameworks like Megatron. Existing solutions are suboptimal: synchronous approaches suffer from computational redundancy, while layer-wise partitioning fails to reconcile this conflict without violating the geometric constraints of efficient communication primitives. To bridge this gap, we propose Canzona, a Unified, Asynchronous, and Load-Balanced framework that decouples logical optimizer assignment from physical parameter distribution. For Data Parallelism, we introduce an alpha-Balanced Static Partitioning strategy that respects atomicity while neutralizing the load imbalance. For Tensor Parallelism, we design an Asynchronous Compute pipeline utilizing Micro-Group Scheduling to batch fragmented updates and hide reconstruction overhead. Extensive evaluations on the Qwen3 model family (up to 32B parameters) on 256 GPUs demonstrate that our approach preserves the efficiency of established parallel architectures, achieving a 1.57x speedup in end-to-end iteration time and reducing optimizer step latency by 5.8x compared to the baseline.

First-order optimization (FOO) algorithms are pivotal in numerous computational domains such as machine learning and signal denoising. However, their application to complex tasks like neural network training often entails significant inefficiencies due to the need for many sequential iterations for convergence. In response, we introduce first-order optimization expedited with approximately parallelized iterations (OptEx), the first framework that enhances the efficiency of FOO by leveraging parallel computing to mitigate its iterative bottleneck. OptEx employs kernelized gradient estimation to make use of gradient history for future gradient prediction, enabling parallelization of iterations -- a strategy once considered impractical because of the inherent iterative dependency in FOO. We provide theoretical guarantees for the reliability of our kernelized gradient estimation and the iteration complexity of SGD-based OptEx, confirming that estimation errors diminish to zero as historical gradients accumulate and that SGD-based OptEx enjoys an effective acceleration rate of Omega(N) over standard SGD given parallelism of N. We also use extensive empirical studies, including synthetic functions, reinforcement learning tasks, and neural network training across various datasets, to underscore the substantial efficiency improvements achieved by OptEx.

The prevalence of multi-modal content on social media complicates automated moderation strategies. This calls for an enhancement in multi-modal classification and a deeper understanding of understated meanings in images and memes. Although previous efforts have aimed at improving model performance through fine-tuning, few have explored an end-to-end optimization pipeline that accounts for modalities, prompting, labeling, and fine-tuning. In this study, we propose an end-to-end conceptual framework for model optimization in complex tasks. Experiments support the efficacy of this traditional yet novel framework, achieving the highest accuracy and AUROC. Ablation experiments demonstrate that isolated optimizations are not ineffective on their own.